The one show that made Geddy Lee want to quit: “Throw my guitar away”
There tends to be very little middle ground when it comes to the greatest prog rock bands of all time. People like Rush might be one of the most inventive artists to come out of the same era that Genesis and Yes came from, but at the same time, listening to Geddy Lee for more than a few minutes can get a little bit grating if you’re not ready for it. But if they are still an acquired taste these days, they practically sounded like they were musical martians when they were cutting their teeth.
But the beginnings of the Canadian icons were a lot closer to straight-ahead rock and roll than what they became. While it might seem like an insult to call their first album ‘dumb’, there’s really no other word for it, judging by where they would be going. Neil Peart hadn’t yet joined the band, and without his complex approach to lyrics, their blues-rock sound didn’t exactly feature the deepest lyrics in the world, especially with songs like ‘Take A Friend’ and ‘Working Man’.
Everything was fairly straightforward at the time, but the Zeppelinesque bent to their sound may have been happening at the wrong time. There was no doubt that people like Jimmy Page and Robert Plant were being treated like gods when they started making albums like Physical Graffiti, but when Rush first started to gain some traction, bands like The New York Dolls were already beginning to preview what punk would sound like.
Not all of their shows were the most competent performances by any stretch, but listening to Johnny Thunders play guitar felt like audio whiplash whenever Rush came on before them. They had the potential to demolish your speakers the same way that old Blue Cheer records could, and while that worked on its own, it was hard to see them going through Cream and Zeppelin riffs before listening to Thunders assault his guitar for the better part of an hour.
While Rush have managed to take criticism in stride half the time, Lee remembered that those handful of shows opening for Dolls were enough to make him think about throwing away his shot, saying, “It was exciting being around the Dolls. Watching them backstage was all you would expect. After that gig, I was hitch-hiking home with a friend of mine, and I had my guitar with me. This couple picked me up, and we were chatting, and they said they’d been to the Dolls show and said ‘They were great, but the opening act, God, they sucked.’ I felt so crestfallen. I got out of the car and wanted to throw my guitar away.”
But the fact that they were mislabelled was far from Lee’s fault. The Dolls had practically invented the idea of punk rock going up against prog rock musicians, and since prog was still being invented when Lee and the rest of his mates were making albums like 2112, it wasn’t shocking when the John Lydons took them to take for being a little bit too complicated for them.
It was complicated in one way, but if anyone was remotely interested in heavy music, Rush was the perfect band to get into. Yes, it had some of the complexity of bands like Genesis, but since Black Sabbath had some of the heaviest riffs possible around this time, it’s not that hard to hear that same influence on Lifeson when listening to the first movement of the song ‘2112’ or the Who-like grandeur of some of their episodic material like ‘A Farewell to Kings’.
The punk fans would have quickly run away from that sound once they started picking up guitars, but Lee would never apologise for wanting to dream bigger. He wanted to see where music could take him beyond the traditional pop single, and if that meant taking some ridicule from the biggest names in punk, he was going to plough through with all guns blazing.
