Melody Maker ad, June 18, 1977. Author collection
Looking back, Neil reflected, “The first time the three of us got together there seemed to be an understanding. We wanted to achieve the same goals. Up until that time, there wasn’t that seriousness. We realized that there are a lot of issues contingent to being a musician, a lot of choices to be made. That was when everything became professional. There was money in five figures involved. Most of the material on the first album had existed for five years—the band had played it around bars and high schools in Ontario. But with the second album, we wrote the material specifically for the album. All of us are admirers of the English progressive wave. We looked at the roots we had, which was hard rock music. But we decided that there was a lot more we could do with it. We decided that what we wanted to do was a combination of progressive music and hard rock. I think we finally achieved that with the last album. The softer things and the harder things seem to have more continuity. Caress of Steel and Fly by Night were more experimental. So now it’s time for us to set new goals.”
Neil closed with an affirmation of the band’s belief in their art, a belief that had translated into a record philosophically and stylistically similar to Caress of Steel but somehow better, a palpable difference that had taken 2112 to sales of about 250,000 by the September 1976 release of the live album, which, of course, further invigorated sales of 2112, not to mention those of the band’s previous three albums. In fact, All the World’s a Stage would be certified gold in not much more than a year. “I just re-read Ayn Rand’s novel The Fountainhead for the first time in years,” he said, “and I’m relating it to the music business. It deals with corruption of the spirit. A lot of people outside music have no idea how much corruption there is under the shell. I like to feel that we’re doing our part to change that through our music. And so far, we’ve managed to justify our ideals to the people in the music business—and they’re the ones that count, because they’re the ones in a position to hurt us.”
All the World’s a Stage tour, Expo Square Pavilion, Tulsa, Oklahoma, January 16, 1977. © Rich Galbraith
Print ads, 1976. Both John T. Comerford III collection/Frank White Photo Agency
1977–1980
TIDE POOLS & HYPERSPACE
“Individualism, concepts of thought and morality are causes that we believe in. We all know that boogie is definitely the philosophy of the ’70s. Everybody is out there for a fast buck. The Aerosmiths give birth to groups like Starz. It has become OK to say that you’re only in rock ’n’ roll for the money. We’ve tried to transcend that by having something for everyone. We don’t ask that everyone believe in what we do. Let them take our stuff on any level they want.”
—Geddy Lee, quoted by Darcy Diamond, Creem, 1977
ONE BOX RUSH WOULD NEVER TICK, unlike bands like Deep Purple or Iron Maiden, was “Band of the World”—surprising, given the rich and inquisitive world travel the guys have pursued in their time away from rock. While some exotic countries would get to see their heroes in later years (there’s a great fondness for the South American swing), in the early days one trip to Japan was the extent of their non-Western explorations.
Tighter to home, this, incredibly, was a proudly Canadian band that until recently had never toured much of Canada outside of their home province of Ontario, resulting in a fair bit of patriotic resentment from spurned Canucks. Prescient and wise this strategy turned out to be, however, given that most observers pretty much agree that what made the band successful was their incessant and unflagging hitting and re-hitting of B markets across the United States, while not neglecting bigger cities either.
Recording Permanent Waves, Le Studio, Morin Heights, Quebec, October 1979. Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images
Print ad, Philadelphia, March 11, 1977. John T. Comerford III collection/Frank White Photo Agency.
All the World’s a Stage tour, Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Author collection
“The strategy was, ‘There’s a gig. We’ll go play it,’” said Geddy. “If you look at our routing plans for those first four years, it was totally nonsensical. One time we went from Gainesville, Florida, straight up to Allentown, Pennsylvania.”
Added Ray Danniels, “We went everywhere we could. I was always more concerned with the cities we hadn’t played than the ones we had. My philosophy was, if you can drive to it, do it. It was the drive-’til-you-die philosophy.”
This meant that despite the high-flown concepts of the band’s side-long epics, Rush was seen as a people’s band, built by fan word of mouth in opposition to critics, who were, in the main, unfavorable, sometimes reasonably so (“pretentious,” “vocals that could strip paint”), but more likely just annoyingly off-base (“just a boogie band,” “You’ve heard it all before,” “derivative,” “Led Zeppelin clone”).
While half the world could only listen to the records, Europe got regular visits from Rush, with the U.K., in particular, becoming somewhat of a friendly home away. Perhaps the most significant indication of this was the decision to record the band’s follow-up to 2112 there, at the venerable Rockfield Studios in Wales.
“The next album will be recorded in England,” Geddy told Circus’ Deb Frost in early 1977. “It will be a natural progression, though not a major concept like 2112. We’ve always looked up to the English progressive bands and it’s gonna be a good opportunity to go over there and try to capture the same sort of atmosphere. We’re also expanding what we can play. We’re getting into more instruments, there will be more texture. We would never forsake our hard rock framework, though! We’ll just update it. A lot of bands underestimate their audience. But if you look at the very big bands with longevity, they’ve grown and progressed and their audiences have grown and progressed with them. We’re not looking for immediate results; we’re hoping to be around for years and years.”
Instrumentation also would expand. “I’m just now learning to play keyboard percussion, which involves the whole field of tubular and orchestra bells,” Neil noted. “I’ve been practicing and working at them for the past few months. I’m hoping soon to acquire new drums with a whole set of keyboard percussion. I use sets of tube cowbells, melodic tom-toms, and sets of chimes to get a different sound.
“We don’t want to stop at any particular plateau,” continued Peart. “We were faced with the choice of adding a band member or else getting really ambitious and doing it ourselves. We want more textures, new sounds. Constantly, new sounds and new textures have to be brought into our music to make it grow.”
Implicit in this was that Mercury was no longer sending its want list through to Danniels, who would filter label directives onto the cabal of three, or perhaps first through Terry Brown, during one of their prerecording lunches. The success of 2112 had quelled any notions that anybody was going to influence the creative decisions made by Neil, Geddy, and Alex.
All the World’s a Stage tour, Aragon Ballroom, Chicago, May 20, 1977. Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images
A Farewell to Kings tour, Public Auditorium, Cleveland, Ohio, December 17, 1977.
Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images
“Closer to the Heart” b/w “Madrigal,” U.S., 1977. Ray Wawrzyniak collection
“For us, the most frustrating thing in the world is being told what to do,” noted Lee in a chat with Scott Cohen from Circus. “We feel we know what we’re doing. We know our music and how it should be presented to the world. We know who we’re trying to appeal to and we know us—and there’s no one who knows us better than us. That’s why we have an excellent manager—because he understands us and exactly what we’re trying to do. He doesn’t touch us. He just lets us do what we want to do. He takes what we’ve done and tries to present it to the world in a way that he believes we would want it presented.”
A Farewell to Kings, released on September 1, 1977, was a crazy, complex album of electrified power trio prog. From all of side one, namely the title track and eleven minutes of “Xanadu,”
through “Cinderella Man” and “Cygnus X-1,” Rush proposed a Mensa metal future, Alex stacking riff upon riff on top of odd time signatures barely contained by complex bass and drums in precision unison. The subtle shift versus the past catalog (in addition to the plush instrumentation) was that there were fewer heavy songs and light songs recognizable as somewhat traditionally structured, with heavy and light battling it out throughout the many passages of each piece, with even shorter tracks such as “A Farewell to Kings” (mostly driving, heavy) and “Cinderella Man” (progressive folk rock?) unfolding as epics stuffed with angular art rock performances.
Geddy’s assessment of the Rush sound at this juncture was reductive, to say the least. “People invariably ask us why Rush is happening in the midst of all this talk about punk rock,” he mused. “And I tell them it’s because we’re bringing the rock audience something they desperately want to hear—good, loud, entertaining rock ’n’ roll. We don’t play down to our audiences. Our success is built on them. They are friends who helped us out when we needed it.”
October 14–15, 1977. Rich Galbraith collection
Both author collection
A FAREWELL TO KINGS GARY Graff
It was a pivotal moment when Rush hit Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, Wales, in 1977 to begin work on its fifth studio album.
With 1976’s 2112, Rush had taken its tight guitar-bass-drums lineup—which the Rolling Stone Record Guide coined “British space rock without keyboards”—to its natural limit, and it put an enthusiastic cap on that era with the roaring live album All the World’s a Stage. It was time for some change—and it didn’t take much to achieve that.
The first sounds we hear on A Farewell to Kings’ title track is Alex Lifeson playing classical acoustic guitar, more crucially followed by Geddy Lee’s Minimoog, the aforementioned missing element that had kept Rush on the hard rock or heavy metal side of the dividing line from prog. But with a few flicks of synthesizer keys alongside Lifeson’s delicate pattern, Rush signaled the arrival of a fresh sensibility that took the band into a new space.
Produced by Rush and Terry Brown, the group’s cohort since Fly by Night, A Farewell to Kings was Rush’s first album to be certified gold in the United States (it subsequently went platinum), and it peaked at a then career high No. 33 on the Billboard 200. It also gave the group its first real hit in the States with “Closer to the Heart.”
Some of this, of course, was simply the result of building momentum; Rush was on a roll, particularly after 2112, and whatever the group did next was bound to score. But besides the sonic additions, A Farewell to Kings also housed some of Rush’s most ambitious and adventurous material, challenging tracks that showcased the trio’s individual and collective virtuosity but still had plenty of heart and compositional integrity.
Take, for instance, the title track, a six-minute thrill ride whose gentle introduction builds into a ringing, majestic melody that, in turn, shifts to a bare-bones instrumental breakdown with Lifeson, Lee, and Neal Peart jousting with spiraling intensity. “Cinderella Man,” a rare occasion when Lee wrote lyrics (based on the Frank Capra film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town) has many of the same virtues, while the brief interlude “Madrigal” lets Lifeson showcase his acoustic acumen. As does “Closer to the Heart,” which begins as gentle folk rock and builds into a soaring, anthemic rocker, covering a lot of ground in less than three minutes.
A Farewell to Kings’ centerpiece, however, is “Xanadu,” an eleven-minute suite inspired by Citizen Kane that makes extensive use of synthesizers and Peart’s expanded percussion arsenal, including tubular bells, wind chimes, and wood temple blocks. Lee adds a lower register to his typically high-pitched banshee vocals, and the song also gives Lifeson plenty of playing room, whether he’s providing ambient shimmer or stinging solos. Rush’s ability to pull the intricate piece off live made it an enduring concert favorite that’s among the most requested whenever the trio tours.
The album-closing “Cygnus X-1 Book I: The Voyage” is less successful, though. It certainly has the flash that Rush excels at, but it comes off as unfocused and incomplete, perhaps because the rest—and, really, the meat—of the story was waiting for the following year’s Hemispheres.
But that momentary disappointment hardly impacts on the importance of A Farewell to Kings. This was the beginning of the rest of Rush’s career, opening a musical vision that would only broaden and deepen as time moved on.
Alex swaps the bridge pickup on his Les Paul backstage at the Birmingham Odeon during the English leg of the A Farewell to Kings tour, February 12, 1978. Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images
Melody Maker ad, September 10, 1977. Author collection
Billboard ad touting Rush’s Juno Award for Group of the Year, April 29, 1978.
“The live album was a creative hiatus and I think the new album definitely demonstrates how important it was to us,” reflected Neil in conversation with Georgia Straight’s Tom Harrison. “We needed the time not to think about writing material but think about ourselves as musicians. We wanted to work on the instruments we played naturally and expand to play the new ones, to play two instruments at one time on stage. We needed to expand our sound because we felt constricted by the end of 2112. We knew we had to do something. The live album gave us that time to make the necessary changes without adding the obvious fourth man, which would’ve been taking the easy way out. We saw that we had to go for something really big.”
Although up-tempo ballad “Closer to the Heart” would become the band’s biggest radio hit yet, the element of continuity from 2112 through the current and the following two albums would be represented by the fantasy worlds within “Xanadu” and the science/science fiction of “Cygnus X-1.” As Neil noted on the latter, basically a supposition upon black holes, “My favorite [explanation] is that it’s a crack in our dimension, our universe, our plane, and it leads to something different. I read a Scientific American article dealing with the same thing, but from another point of view. It’s black globules forming from dust and gas and particles that are eventually going to become a star. Science fiction is just an opening to our imagination. I think that’s science fiction at its best: it throws your imagination wide open. There’s no limit.”
Issued in April 1978, Archives was a straightforward repackaging of the first three Rush albums. The U.S. issue has a gray cover; the Canadian issues sport gray and black covers. All author collection
Skeptical as to the function of hit singles, Neil added, “We’re remaining philosophical about ‘Closer to the Heart.’ We’d all like to see it as a single and see it do well, but we’ve had ten hit singles already that didn’t go anywhere. That doesn’t hurt us. We’ve got everything we need, really. I remember my frustration as a young musician dealing with people who said you can’t do anything without a hit single, yet I knew all my life it wasn’t true. That’s the evil thing that’s always brought me down. I faced that kind of enmity, that negative thinking. But all you have to do is be prepared to work and work hard all the time. If you’re really into it, it’s not bad at all. We really enjoy it, and even though we really don’t need to now and can level off, we’re still going off on a seven-week tour.”
A Farewell to Kings would attain U.S. gold certification two months after its release, Rush also receiving its gold awards for 2112 and All the World’s a Stage on the same day. Against popular myth, prog continued to thrive and make real creative gains through the spit of punk, while the sleeping giant of metal simultaneously stirred, especially in the U.K., which would provide us with the New Wave of British Heavy Metal (NWOBHM) two years hence. Rush was an exotic cousin from far off that was welcome into both solitudes, A Farewell to Kings galvanizing the band’s fan base on British shores, a love affair furthered through the decision by the trio to return to Wales through June and July 1978 for the follow-up to Farewell.
Courtesy Wyco Vintage/www.wycovintage.com
German ad, 1978. Ray Wawrzyniak collection
A Farew
ell to Kings tour, Birmingham Odeon, Birmingham, England, February 12, 1978. Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images
Working the Minimoog at Shepperton Studios, Surrey, England, December 2, 1978. Fin Costello/Redferns/Getty Images
Hemispheres, issued October 28, 1978, would be the album that nearly killed the band. The workload at Rockfield was enormous, the arrangement, performance, and production standards daunting, all at enormous cost, exacerbated by having to mix at Advision and remix at Trident Studios in London, having run out of time at the first place. But the meter had been running long before mixing, given that the guys had chosen to write the album in England, setting up shop in a farmhouse down the road from Rockfield. To add to the stress, Geddy found out too late in the game to make changes that the songs were in registers that required him to sing higher and harder than ever before (also away from Rockfield, at Advision), which made constructing this labyrinth of a record difficult, and playing it live even more difficult.
Whereas five shorter songs were on 2112 and four on Farewell, Hemispheres offered a scant pair: “Circumstances,” a roiling hard rocker with nods to Canada’s bilingual reality, and “The Trees,” an amusing tale that results in union certification for the maples against the oaks, “definitely to be looked at with a smile cracked,” said Geddy. The latter would become a concert favorite, as would the ten-minute instrumental “La Villa Strangiato,” Rush’s most complex song to date. Similar to 2112, side one of Hemispheres (issued on red vinyl in Canada) was dominated by a massive epic so complicated of performance and storyline that the band couldn’t figure out what to call it, going with “Hemispheres” on the record’s center label and “Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres” on the back cover.
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