The Rush album Geddy Lee said they would never play live: “I’m not sure we’re up for that one”
Everything that Rush ever made was based on some sort of risk. As much as they may have loved playing music for themselves, the lion’s share of their material was all about testing where they could, whether that was making synth-heavy rock and roll in the 1980s or turning in the kind of prog masterpieces that left most people wondering how human hands could play that fast. Although the band were always proud of what they could do in the studio, it would never have worked for them if they didn’t know how to perform all of their tunes live.
From beginning to end, the band’s career involved them as a live entity before anything else. There were bound to be a few effects that didn’t translate whenever they met the stage, but seeing the sheer amount of equipment that was on Neil Peart’s drum kit, there was more than enough for them to work with when they got onstage, even if it meant Geddy Lee playing keyboards, bass, pedals, and vocals all at the same time.
Before they started expanding their musical palettes, though, the band was already working on new textures as a four-piece. 2112 had the kind of title track that most prog acts would have killed to have written, and outside of the first movement starting with a huge synth-heavy fanfare, they produced everything that’s being played over its 20-minute runtime. Once they started to see what they could do with conceptual work, though, they started to not care about the customary pop song format.
‘Closer to the Heart’ off of A Farewell to Kings may have had a knockout chorus, but by the time they started making Hemispheres, there was no reason to release any singles. The whole album was only four tracks long, and since the first side was taken up by one mammoth piece that continued on the story from the last record, it wasn’t exactly the first record that most fairweather fans should start with.
“If we were really out of our minds, we would attempt something like Hemispheres.”
geddy lee
But casual fans were far from the only ones confused. Despite having come up with the arrangements of every song, the band thought that this was the first album that defeated them musically, to the point where they had to chart out different parts of songs like ‘La Villa Strangiato’ in the studio to figure out where they were half the time they were playing.
Even if fans still have an undying love for the record, Lee said that there was a slim chance that the entire album would meet the live stage during their tenure, saying, “If we were really out of our minds, we would attempt something like Hemispheres. If Rush has a cult following, within that cult following, there’s a following for Hemispheres. I’m not sure we’re up for that one.”
It’s also worth mentioning that had the band decided to play this album in full live, they would have to leave a lot of good music on the table. The Rush nerds in the audience might be satisfied, but if a band is spending time playing a 20-minute song in front of people that want to hear ‘Limelight’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’, it would have made for one of the longest bathroom break songs in rock and roll history.
But maybe it’s for the best that Hemispheres never met the stage. Rush was never going to work themselves down to the bone that much every time they took the stage, but the studio versions of the songs remain a perfect testament to what they could do when they were at their musical peak.
