“Favourite piece of music”: The song Geddy Lee always wanted to write
There’s no mistaking any member of Rush for being one of the greatest in the world of progressive rock music. Pink Floyd may have popularised the genre in the mainstream, and Yes may have had intricate sections, but no one managed to put together tunes that took listeners through the wringer like the Canadian icons, with every single member playing the most insane runs that anyone had ever heard. For someone with that kind of pedigree, though, Geddy Lee said that one of his all-time favourite songs came from someone taking the piss out of their genre.
Then again, it’s not like there’s a lot of meat to pick at when it comes to prog rock. There are still some great moments on albums by King Crimson or Genesis, but there’s also a good chance that any fairweather fan of rock music would take one listen to an album by Emerson Lake and Palmer and think that every one of them is spending more time being pretentious than writing songs.
It’s not like prog didn’t get its just due when the punk revolution started. The whole process of bands trying to become masters of their instruments was considered terminally uncool by the time that Joe Strummer and John Lydon took to the stage, but Rush was never a band that thought about being that kind of pretentious.
They were influenced by everything around them, and if that meant incorporating the sounds of new wave into their music, that hardly mattered. So, really, they may have been one of the few prog bands to survive the punk years intact, even making some of their best material when learning from acts like the Police on albums like Permanent Waves.
Even within the prog rock sphere, many people were starting to see things getting a bit too overindulgent. As much as Jethro Tull was considered one of the biggest names in the genre, Thick as a Brick was something that was intended to mock the more grandiose prog-rock statements, featuring one song that lasted for two sides of the record and telling a fictitious story that had Monty Python levels of humour.
Despite the whole thing being a bit of a farce, Lee felt that he was still trying to write something that manages to equal it after all these years, saying, “I know this betrays me as the progger I am, but it was such a favourite piece of music for so many, many years. It was just pure prog magic. To me, it was the ultimate thing to aspire to.”
Given how much time and thought was put into everything, though, there was no point in Lee feeling ashamed. Some of the best moments on the record feature the kind of off-the-wall insanity that any good prog epic is built off of, and some pieces aren’t that dissimilar from what Lee and Co were doing when they began work on songs like ‘La Villa Strangiato’ off of Hemispheres.
But if there’s one thing that Thick as a Brick teaches everyone, it’s the ability to laugh at one’s self. After all, prog can be known as a fairly stoic genre, so having the time to actually have some fun is half the reason why people get into this music in the first place.
