Watch Rush play ‘La Villa Strangiato’ in 1979
Hemispheres was the album that almost broke Rush. For half a decade, the Canadian prog-rock trio had been perfecting their sound and ramping up the complexity of their music. Anyone who had heard the band’s self-titled 1974 self-titled debut but hadn’t bothered to keep up with their evolution would have been shocked to hear ‘Circumstances’ or ‘The Trees’. In four short years, Rush went from Led Zeppelin wannabes to something completely their own.
With their rising ambitions came greater explorations, often in the form of song suites. The band’s first experiment in breaking up a song into distinct parts came from Fly By Night’s ‘By-Tor and the Snow Dog’. Caress of Steel had two different multi-part epics, ‘The Necromancer’ and ‘The Fountain of Lamneth’, but those were just warm-ups for what was to come.
The iconic first half of 2012 was an uninterrupted 20-minute piece with seven different sections. Rush were fighting for their lives while making the album, with pressure from their record label to simplify and streamline their sound. They opted to go in the other direction, retaining their artistic integrity and putting their band in jeopardy to prove that they were on the right path. The gamble worked, as 2112 became the band’s first true hit album.
The group’s follow-up release, A Farewell to Kings, built off the formula that 2112 established. By the time Hemispheres came around, Rush had packed in a full album’s worth of music into just four songs. Kicking off with ‘Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres’, a continuation of ‘Book I’ found on A Farewell to Kings, Rush were hitting their prog peak. The final song featured on Hemispheres was ‘La Villa Strangiato’, a nine-minute epic so complicated that the band subtitled it ‘An Exercise in Self-Indulgence’.
Although the band found the piece too complex to record in full (they wound up splicing in three different takes to the final mix), they mastered the song by the time they hit the road to support the album. The song became a showcase for all three members and the respective mastery of their instruments. Alex Lifeson’s guitar solo, in particular, became one of his most memorable and lauded.
After the group finished their tour behind Hemispheres, the trio agreed that they had taken their complexities as far as they could go. Wanting to pack more punch into shorter song structures, Rush returned to the studio with a newfound embrace of new wave, synthesisers, and more traditional rock hooks on 1980’s Permanent Waves. The initial prog-rock epicness of their first era was officially over, but songs like ‘La Villa Strangiato’ never left that band’s setlists as fans continued to call for their most intricate pieces.
Watch Rush play ‘La Villa Strangiato’ at the Pinkpop Festival in 1979 down below.
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