‘2112’: the Rush album Geddy Lee was convinced would be their last
There are no guarantees for a band like Rush in rock history.
Prog rock may have been a mainstay when they started playing music, but the idea of getting the average music fan to listen to a 20-minute journey of a song was going to be a little bit more difficult than a pop-rock act like the Carpenters lighting up the charts. Although the Canadian icons always had their devoted fanbase to support them, that didn’t mean things didn’t look dire every now and again when they first started.
But before they even became one of the biggest names in prog, their beginnings were far from the likes of Yes or Genesis. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson always wanted to be in a band, but listening to their first album, it’s clear that they were getting a lot of their cues from bands like Led Zeppelin. Outside of a few songs descending into a bluesy jam, there’s not really many tunes that would give the biggest names in progressive music a run for their money by any stretch.
It was enough to get their foot in the door, but by the time Neil Peart joined for Fly By Night, there were bound to be a few shakeups. The title track was enough to get them on the radio, but their more epic pieces had started taking over a little bit more. There’s nothing wrong with that, but looking at where they would be going, it’s not like the biggest songs in their catalogue were going to get played on the radio.
For instance, a song like ‘Xanadu’ off of A Farewell to Kings is a fascinating adventure, but was anyone in their right mind going to play an 11-minute epic that has lines like “for I have dined on honeydew and drunk the milk of Paradise”? Probably not, but anyone interested in music that was a bit more cerebral than what traditional prog was doing was bound to get something out of it.
That’s the kind of music that Rush’s cult audience clamoured for, but before their music started spreading, they were bound to be one of the few bands that were far too weird to get anywhere near the album charts. Their epics had bombed, and while they eventually turned everything around once they released 2112, Lee was convinced that they would be packing their bags and going back to their day jobs when working on the record.
Despite it being one of the masterpieces of the time, the bassist knew there was a good chance that the whole thing could end if they didn’t make a profit from the record, saying, “We didn’t feel defiant making it, we just figured that it would be our last hurrah and we didn’t have any instinctive sense that it would do any better than Caress of Steel. I think we were proud that it was a good record, and we were going out on a good record. We had no idea that it was going to connect with people the way it did.”
And while it would have taken a long time for casual fans to get used to the 20-minute journey that opens the record, it’s not like the story is hard to internalise. No one in their right mind has had a firsthand experience of rediscovering the concept of music and going up against almighty priests that try to outlaw it like the protagonist does, but everyone knows what it feels like to be mistreated and stepped on, and that was more than enough to carry the album forward into iconic status.
While the world knew there was more gas left in the tank for Rush, the next few years of their career was where they fully embraced what it meant to be prog musicians. They didn’t need to worry about making the catchy single anymore, and the rest of their career involved them making whatever the hell they wanted to.
