The prog masterpiece Neil Peart said made Rush superstars
Any prog band that reaches the masses has to be doing something right. It’s never easy to sell someone on the idea of sticking around for minutes on end and going on a musical journey, but if there’s a good idea at the centre of attention, fans are going to be willing to stick around for as long as they want to see how a tune ends. Rush definitely fit into the company of bands worth their salt, but it took them a while to convince the rest of the world to get on their hype train.
Even after their breakup following the death of Neil Peart, the Canadian icons have always maintained their status as one of the most popular cult-rock bands. There would be the occasional song that came on classic rock stations like ‘The Spirit of Radio’ or ‘Limelight’, but Peart always wrote songs for the outsiders of the world, so it was easy for people to find a companion in someone who also felt they didn’t belong.
When you start building your legacy off of fantasy tropes, though, you shouldn’t be surprised when the label gets pissed. In the 1970s, the mantra of sex, drugs and rock and roll was everything that most bands needed to get their foot in the door, and since Peart was writing grandiose concepts on songs like ‘The Fountain of Lamneth’, it’s not like they were going to be clicking with the same audiences Kiss were playing to.
But once the label started leaning on them to release something more in line with traditional rock and roll, that’s when Peart put his foot down. He was not going to be pushed around and be told what he could and couldn’t play for his band, so if a new album was going to be their last-ditch effort, they were going down swinging by making 2112. And against all odds, a song based on a 20-minute intergalactic dystopia actually managed to work.
While Peart knew that this was a big gamble, he felt that the story of the Solar Federation was what made people latch onto their music, saying, “The nature of the story itself that evolved in 2112 was the individual against the mass and that album did communicate and reach people on a level that blossomed outward by the classic form of word of mouth. Obviously, the 20-minute piece did not get played on the radio.”
Even broken into parts, though, the suite does work on many different levels. The overture does a great job at introducing the various ideas into the piece, and while Geddy Lee’s voice has continued to be grating to most people, hearing him shriek his guts out in the ‘Temples of Syrinx’ section is the closest that the band ever came to crafting a bite-sized version of what Zeppelin might have done.
Also, it’s worth noting how gutsy it was for Peart to write something like this. Everyone loves a good story to go with a prog epic, but the fact that Peart got away with writing a song about high priests looking to put a protagonist in his place while being told to do that by the label is still one of the most badass moves that any prog-rock band has ever done.
The record was a success, and it helped Rush sustain a career that lasted for decades longer than their contemporaries, but it was always about more than the money and the fame. 2112 was the album that helped buy them their freedom, and by the time they started working on their own music, no one at the label could tell them what worked and what didn’t anymore. The tables had turned, and Rush knew that their fans would always be there whenever one of their albums dropped.
