The Rush album that Neil Peart called “weird as hell”
Nothing Rush ever made was meant to be palatable to the masses. Throughout their history as progressive rock icons, every one of the band’s albums were supposed to be a new creative endeavour for everyone involved, usually centring around lofty concepts or expansive instrumentation on every single track. While Neil Peart may have had a particular affection for every project, even he could admit when one of their records didn’t quite hit the mark.
When Peart first joined the band, it was clear that no one else would come close to him behind the kit. Although Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson admitted that Peart seemed too dorky to be in the band, his drums did the talking for him, with Lee admitting that he was blown away at what he could do on just two bass drums.
Replacing original drummer John Rutsey, Peart would also become the group’s lyricist across the next album, Fly By Night, writing more sophisticated tracks than the usual rock songbook. As opposed to odes to sex and drugs, Peart sprinkled various literary references into nearly every song, whether paying homage to Ayn Rand’s work on ‘Anthem’ or diving into the world of JRR Tolkien on ‘Rivendell’.
As the band started to loosen up, though, they started to veer a bit too far in the experimental direction on the album Caress of Steel. While tracks from the album like ‘Bastille Day’ remain some of the most celebrated works in Rush’s catalogue, the sidelong epics would become a sticking point for their contemporaries, featuring lavish 20-minute exercises that hardly went anywhere.
When Peart looked back on the record in retrospect, it’s not like he didn’t see why the rest of the world didn’t have the same affection for it, telling Classic Albums, “There was a certain gelling that took place in 1976 between us. And Caress of Steel, I can say now was weird as hell, but we loved it so much.”
It wasn’t just Peart who fessed up to not understanding the concept. When talking about the making of the record in Beyond the Lighted Stage, Alex Lifeson remembered the bewilderment that Paul Stanley of Kiss had when they played it to him, explaining, “We were on the road, and we played it to Paul Stanley. And he just…he didn’t get it. A lot of people didn’t get it. We wondered if we even got it.”
While the band soldiered on playing the music they wanted to play, Peart would say that times were looking dire when they took to the road, stating, “We would be playing to smaller dates, and a lot of them were ill-attended and our road crew starting to call it the ‘Down the Tubes’ tour.” Although the band couldn’t get anyone to invest time in their material, they would only need one more record to prove everyone wrong.
Making another lavish concept, fans flocked to 2112, marvelling at the musicianship and relating to the story about fighting for freedom of expression. Peart may have been able to make striking works of art when he wanted to, but Caress of Steel was the moment where Rush could have broken up for good if not taken care of properly.
