The one band Geddy Lee picked over Jimi Hendrix: “This was heavy man”
It’s a fool’s errand trying to put Rush in any specific category.
As much as they have been identified as a prog rock act on every single album they made, there was an idea that was necessarily off the table whenever they started making one of their next projects. Everything was elastic to them, but when Geddy Lee was first growing up, his ears were attuned to music that was a little bit heavier than the standard pop songs coming over the radio at the time. He wanted something more, and he often knew where to find it.
But the definition of ‘heavy’ meant something a lot different around that time. There had been countless artists who had been considered too dark for the pop charts whenever they came on the radio, but when you listen to Elvis Presley today, it’s not like he’s in danger of being too dangerous for virgin ears. After Lee learned his first riff by copying Roy Orbison’s ‘Pretty Woman’, he started to develop a better vocabulary of what the biggest names in British blues were doing.
If you listen to Rush’s music, though, you’re not necessarily going to hear The Yardbirds in their sound by any stretch. They always wanted to switch things up, and while there are artists like The Who that are easy to parse out of their discography, there are times where they venture between sounding like Yes, Black Sabbath, and even The Police, oftentimes within the span of a single record.
But anyone wanting a different experience out of rock knew where they were when they heard Jimi Hendrix for the first time. If Bob Dylan opened up people’s minds whenever he sang, Hendrix did the same thing when he played guitar, practically announcing himself to the world the minute that the distorted opening guitar line of ‘Purple Haze’ began. It was a sound to behold, but Lee ended up getting an even stronger reaction when he heard the opening sounds of Led Zeppelin’s debut.
Jimmy Page had already been toying with what the traditional rock band setup could be, but with Robert Plant, John Paul Jones, and John Bonham, they had the kind of muscle that most bands would kill for. They were a supergroup in every sense of the word, but when listening to that first album, Lee understood that they were doing something with a lot more weight than what Hendrix had done.
There’s no doubt that Hendrix was in his own category, but he didn’t manage to stun Lee in the same way that Zeppelin did, saying, “Jimi was musical voodoo and flamboyance incarnate; but this? This was heavy man. Zep had reforged the blues in an explosive and very English style that would speak to our generation of players like no other. For us there was Rock before Zep came along, and then Rock after. This was our new paradigm.”
That’s not to say that Hendrix was inferior in any way. What he did was pure musical genius whenever he picked up a guitar, but even if some of his tunes could sound softer like ‘The Wind Cries Mary’, it’s almost impossible to find a subdued Zeppelin song in their first few years. Even when listening to a song like ‘Thank You’, Bonham’s drums behind everything help give the ballad a lot more muscle than what you’d expect from an acoustic-based tune.
And when you listen to Rush’s debut, Lee was certainly taking some cues from Zeppelin, from the way that they relied on blues licks to his Robert Plant-esque wails to the weaving basslines Jonesy would have recognised in a minute. It took a while for them to shake the Zeppelin comparisons, but who really cares when the music still manages to sound this heavy?
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