The Rush album Geddy Lee said was impossible to like
Of all the biggest prog bands of all time, Rush remain one of the few bands that could confidently say that they never sold out.
Not every one of their albums hit with the public like their classics did, but it was much more interesting for them to take a risk whenever they made one of their records than worry about whether kids were going to like the catchy singles from their records. But even if they played by their own rules, that didn’t mean Geddy Lee had to necessarily love every direction they were going in.
If you look at the band’s track record, though, they seemed to live by the credence of trying everything they could at least once. Epic prog journeys? Absolutely. The odd acoustic song? Sure why not? A song that reads like one long JRR Tolkien pastiche like ‘The Necromancer’? God, just stop talking and get it down on tape.
There was no idea that didn’t suit Rush, and even if it was a terrible mistake, they would at least own up to it rather than pretend it didn’t exist. But somewhere around the late 1970s, the band reached an era of their career where they could do no wrong. Permanent Waves was the first time their music started to cross over into the mainstream since ‘Closer to the Heart’, but when Moving Pictures came out, almost everything they touched turned to gold.
And that’s not an easy feat, either. Do you know how hard it is to get millions of people singing along to an INSTRUMENTAL like ‘YYZ’? That’s the kind of talent that most prog bands strive for, and yet the Canadian icons made the whole thing look easy. But even if they balanced both sides of their sound, the 1980s were always going to be a tricky beast for those that loved their hard rock stuff.
The keyboards may have been Lee’s idea when working on their singles, but by the time of Grace Under Pressure, he felt that he was caught between a rock and a hard place half the time, saying, “I wasn’t happy with Grace Under Pressure. But it was a no-win situation in that case because that album was extremely difficult to make. We went through tremendous turmoil and pressure making it, and I don’t think I could have liked it given the circumstances. As soon as the record was done, I wanted to get away from it-and I’ve rarely listened to it since.”
Which is a real shame, because out of all their keyboard-focused albums, Grace Under Pressure is the closest thing to a masterpiece that they have in that era. The sound of blaring synthesisers was bound to turn a few people off, but listening to how the songs are constructed, ‘Distant Early Warning’ is a fantastic track, and Alex Lifeson does have his few chances to shine as a lead guitarist as well.
After being known as the “band for nerds” for so long, this is the closest thing to an emotional album that the band made at the time. A lot of their biggest records from around that time were more focused on the grand spectacle, but hearing them pay tribute to their fallen friend on ‘Afterimage’ and eventually making one of the most heartbreaking songs of their career on ‘Red Sector A’ were the kind of tracks that some people questioned whether they were even capable of pulling off.
Both through each phase of their career, the band was going to make music on their own terms, and while Lee did have a bit of a sour taste towards the album, that shouldn’t dissuade anyone from the genius that they had on these songs. The prog fans may have been pissed, but if anyone sincerely had a problem with a band that dared to change up their sound, they might have wanted to take a closer look at what the word ‘progressive’ actually meant.
