“The songs were great”: The track Geddy Lee could play for days at a time
All hail Rush. A band so utterly proud of their inherent (and spectacular) nerdiness that it gives them not only a strange sense of cool that their furrow-browed brothers in prog so dramatically lack, but also a sense of fun, too. The Toronto power trio weren’t a band desperately trying to show off their incredible musical ability to be taken seriously as artists. Instead, Geddy Lee, Alex Lifesona and Neil Peart put their incredibly musical ability to work creating amazing songs instead.
Which is not to say that those songs aren’t absurdly technical either. No band that makes ten-minute songs called ‘Cygnus X-1 Book I: The Voyage’ that contain a five-minute prologue are in any way concerned with boring us, lest they do not get to the chorus in a timely manner. It’s more that they use their dazzling ability to play the song, rather than playing the song for the excuse of showing us all the dazzling ability.
One can see this if they look into the band’s influences as well. During the mid-1970s heyday of prog rock the influences that most of Rush’s generation of bands had were more or less the same. Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Frank Zappa is they were feeling really sassy. All variations of the same basic theme, psychedlic rock through a guitar based, hard rock filter with some classically trained keyboardists noodling over the top of it with a cape on.
Rush, on the other hand, were pop fans as well. The Beatles were a name on many a prog-band’s list of influences. However, others would rhapsodise about the studio techniques that brought the likes of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and ‘Revolution #9’ to life. Rush were just as likely to talk about ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ or any other of The Fabs’ early pop gems as a key influence. There was another British band of the mid-1960s that Geddy Lee credited as the band’s key influence, though.
Who did Geddy Lee say Rush “fashioned themselves after”?
Of all the bands that influenced Rush, Geddy Lee credited Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker and Jack Bruce’s blues-rock supergroup Cream as their north star in an interview with Classic Rock magazine. Not only in an influential sense, but on a more practical level too, as the early sets of Rush in Toronto bars and clubs saw them learn to jam by covering Cream tracks.
In the interview, Lee described Cream as “the first band of extraordinary musicians that came together. In our early days, playing in the coffee houses and drop-in centres, we would feast on Cream songs for days because of the playing; it was all about that. The songs were great, but they always had moments of jamming. A song like Spoonful, you could jam on that for days. There wouldn’t be a Working Man without Spoonful.”
Lee goes even further laterin the interview, where he says that Rush “kind of fashioned ourselves after Cream.” This makes perfect sense. After all, both bands are power trios consisting of three of the great instrumentalists of their day. Crucially though, they simultaneously want to show their skills off while also playing ecstatic, accsesible versions of their chosen style of rock ‘n’ roll.
In the end though, it could be argued that Rush did a lot better than Cream, who soured after less than three years. Lee, Lifeson and Peart however were together for over ten times that many years and ended on their own terms in 2015. More reason, if any was needed, that we should all hail Rush.
