The one Rush song Geddy Lee said was “painful” to hear
Throughout every era of Rush, Geddy Lee is one of the few people who has seen it all.
Neil Peart was always heralded as the new guy even after being in the band for multiple decades, but even with the greatest drummer of all time behind them, the bond between Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson has always been front and centre in all of their music. Some of it can be too intricate for people to fully process, but that’s probably because Lee wants to avoid another embarrassing moment in the studio.
Because as much as their music was known as one of the most cerebral genres known to man, they weren’t afraid to get dumb every once in a while. But whereas a song like ‘A Passage to Bangkok’ is funny on purpose to some extent, the era before Peart joined the band often felt like a completely different band. Their glory years sounded like they were listening to too much Yes, but their debut is what happens when they listen to too much Led Zeppelin.
There’s nothing wrong with any band having a healthy diet of Zeppelin in their back catalogue, but this is one of the few times where it almost becomes too on-the-nose. Lee’s high register on tunes like ‘Working Man’ is almost like Robert Plant crossed with an opera singer, and while that made them stand out among the other Canadian acts at the time, it was going to be difficult for everyone to get back onboard the minute they started working on songs like ‘Anthem’ and ‘By-Tor and the Snow Dog’.
But if that was considered “dumb Rush”, then the pre-debut days were borderline Neanderthalic. John Rutsey was practically the frontman from behind the drum kit in many respects, and before they had even thought to copy Zeppelin, their covers of old rock and roll tunes like ‘Not Fade Away’ weren’t going to get them anywhere, especially with Lee’s higher register making the sound feel a lot more aggressive than it is.
It’s one thing not to do justice to a legend like Buddy Holly, but by the time the band started working on their first official original song, ‘You Can’t Fight It’, they were horrified by what they heard. The song itself was far from the most complicated tune in the world, but when the single was originally pressed, the whole thing ended up sounding so thin that Lee wanted absolutely nothing to do with it by the time it was finished.
Even to this day, Lee felt that going back to the tune was one of his least favourite memories of being in Rush, saying, “Even today it’s painful for me to listen to ‘You Can’t Fight It’. Even to say it sounds cool as a relic is a generous description. It takes me right back to the disappointment I felt in that studio the night it was first mixed. I was thinking, What is this? We’ve been neutered! It was shocking how much it missed the elements that gave us power and size. It didn’t sound like us at all.”
To the band’s credit, there are pieces that sound close to what they would do on the debut, but it’s not like Lee is necessarily wrong, either. The pieces of the song that work don’t really add much to the greater pantheon of Rush tunes, and given how many ambitious songs they would make afterwards, the tune only manages to sound worse when looking back on it.
If you want to look at it as a relic of the time, it’s certainly an interesting period piece, but Rush weren’t interested in making dopey rock and roll like that. They had higher aspirations, and the rest of their career would feature them going into every sonic avenue that they felt suited their material.
