The complete Rush album of lyrics the band threw out: “I didn’t like them”
Throughout their glory years, Rush was always known as the thinking man’s progressive rock act. They already had the distinction of being one of the wildest progressive outfits alive, but when you just sat down and listened to Neil Peart’s lyrics, you were in for another head trip as he talked about the human condition or the search for hope in a science-fiction world. There was a time before Peart was in the fold, and when it came time for the band to debut to the world, they had to completely improvise half of their material.
Make no mistake, it’s not like the group didn’t have chops without Peart. Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee were absolute monsters on their instruments, and John Rutsey was certainly no slouch behind the drumkit. While it would have been a crime for Rutsey not to leave the door open for Peart after their debut, he was still the one serving as the leader of the group.
Because if you listen to the first album, it’s like you walked into a time warp from the age before prog rock existed. The band clearly have a taste for longer songs, but their sound is a lot closer to a decent Led Zeppelin ripoff than anything technical. Even the longer songs like ‘Here Again’ and ‘Working Man’ serve more as decent jams than anything too complex.
The lyrics also are a bit of a downslide, making the kind of mindless rock and roll tropes that wouldn’t feel out of place on one of the run-of-the-mill bluesy butt rock bands that came out of that same era. Put these words on a Grand Funk Railroad project, and no one would have batted an eye, but Lee admitted that getting those were made out of desperation.
Instead of putting a decent set of words behind the songs, Lee said that most of the lyrics were finished before Rutsey torched them at the last minute, telling AV Club, “John was going through something where he was unhappy with what he was writing, and my memory of it is that we kept asking, ‘Where are the lyrics? Where are the lyrics?’ and basically, he didn’t show up to the studio that night and said, ‘I tore them up and threw them away. I didn’t like them.’”
Now, with a bunch of kickass instrumentals and not words, Lee took it upon himself to write almost every line on the album, which made for some decent spots like ‘Working Man’ but also a few clunkers. Led Zeppelin may have been known for their sexual angle, but a track like ‘In the Mood’ doesn’t give ‘Whole Lotta Love’ a run for its money.
Even when Peart joined the band on Fly By Night, Lee’s lyrics on a handful of songs like ‘Best I Can’ stick out like a sore thumb when paired next to a track like ‘By-Tor and the Snow Dog’ or ‘Fly By Night’. Rush always worked best when they had something more grandiose to work with, but there’s nothing wrong with having a few dopey lyrics between the complicated stuff.
