“Always impressed”: The group Geddy Lee called the loudest he ever heard
Rock and roll has never been focused on being the most complex music in the world. The beginnings of the genre traced back to the blues, and since that was only based on three chords and the truth, it didn’t take long for the rock and rollers to take the basis of what Chuck Berry had done and start adding their own unique voice to that. If that was the beginning of rock and roll, though, there were bound to be people like Geddy Lee willing to push the boundaries of what his heroes were doing.
Although Lee was an avid fan of everyone from Led Zeppelin to The Rolling Stones, what really interested him was working with unconventional songwriting techniques in Rush. Most people were OK with listening to an improvised jam by a band of Zeppelin’s calibre, but Rush is where everyone went when they wanted something too cerebral to even conceive of, like the massive headtrip of the ‘Cygnus’ duo of songs or all 20 minutes of ‘2112’.
Lee knew that he wanted something complex, but the band never forgot how to be heavy. Throughout many of their classic albums, it was all about them making some of the sludgiest riffs possible, almost like Tony Iommi was born with the brain of Steve Hackett whenever he strapped on his guitar. But that heaviness went far beyond the era of Zeppelin.
Jimmy Page was far from the first person to discover what could be done with distortion and some loud amplifiers, and at the height of the British blues boom, everyone was trying to outplay each other. But while Jimi Hendrix showed everyone the beauty of being able to play loud for anyone within earshot, hearing Blue Cheer on the radio would have been enough to get many listeners’ younger relatives to run away screaming.
They may have been born out of the same streets that gave the world The Grateful Dead, but the California power trio was not interested in the kind of folk-rock angle most people were going for. They were after volume, and while ‘Summertime Blues’ was co-opted by The Who on Live At Leeds, Blue Cheer have the superior cover in many respects, to the point where the speakers sound like they’re about to explode every single time it comes on.
Despite being an avid fan and calling them one of the first true metal bands, Lee remembered that they were far from the most versatile band, either, saying, “Led Zeppelin was a huge influence when they first came out, as were other heavy three-piece bands, such as Blue Cheer-even though we could only stand two of their songs. There were only two songs they could actually play, but they sounded really good. We were always impressed that they were the loudest band we ever heard.”
But when playing that loud, it almost doesn’t matter how great the music was. This was the way forward for a lot of heavy bands, and while thousands of people took what Blue Cheer had done and turned it into garage rock and heavy metal later, the Canadian icons saw their approach to volume as another tool in their arsenal whenever they played.
That’s why Rush’s concerts always sounded louder than anything else until they took their final bows in the 2010s. There were many different ways for people to approach prog-rock, but whereas a band like King Crimson did end up falling into pretentious territory more than a few times, Rush made sure to make every single one of their songs feel like a smack in the mouth the minute they came on.
