The album Geddy Lee called Rush’s turning point: “He had to figure out a way in”
There are a lot of instruments used in modern music which we take for granted, but the process of integrating them into music was very difficult, and synthesisers are one such great example of this.
In the modern age, you’ll struggle to hear music that doesn’t in some way incorporate the synthesiser. It’s a versatile instrument, which means it can be used just to add some layering to a song, or it can be front and centre of the instrumentation, and while we now appreciate its multifaceted nature, it took a long time for us to end up here.
One of the first albums that highlighted the potential of the synthesiser was Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach, which she released in 1968. The album used the synth to rewrite original compositions by Bach and really highlighted just how much it could do, even if people had written it off as a useless instrument.
However, Carlos struggled with making the album at the time because of how limited she found the synth, and when discussing the making of the record, she elucidated just how difficult it was to play what were originally romantic compositions on an instrument that didn’t allow for much emotion.
“It was such a limited device,” she said, “It wasn’t much of a musical instrument. It was very lacking in any form of expression, and the proof of this is that there were very few people who used the instrument who did anything interesting with it. The reason being, it was damn hard to do.”
Once the instrument was developed and could be used more effectively, bands still struggled with working out how to include it in their music. Playing the guitar and adding other instruments into songs that were relying on a synth was hard, where even the best outfits struggled to do it effectively, and among such instances was Rush, as despite them being such a great display of musical talent, they wrestled deeply with trying to incorporate a synth into their sound while still allowing the best qualities of their band members to come through.
“I don’t think I was pissed off, I just saw that there was a shift in my role,” said Alex Lifeson when he spoke about Rush beginning to use the musical device more in their work. He was one of the members of the band who had to change his sound the most throughout the incorporation of synths, to the point that he started to resent the instrument. “At first, I was totally into it,” he said, “I even played some keyboards, and I thought it was a really important and unique part of what Rush was becoming.”
Geddy Lee has now said that he recognises how much Lifeson had to change his sound, and that some of these albums were a real turning point for the group because of how they changed the way they used the synth in some of these songs. “Alex had to rethink everything,” he said, “and that’s something I never really appreciated”.
He said that one album that sealed Lifeson’s disdain for the instrument was Power Windows. “The turning point was Power Windows,” Lee recalled, “That was the first album where we actually put all these keyboard parts all over the tapes before Alex had the chance to put his parts down. So he had to figure out a way in, and I think that’s when he first started resenting the keyboards.”
