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  “Caress of Steel was a bit of a different story,” understated producer Terry Brown. “That’s going back right to [the] beginning of their career, when we were still developing where we were going and how we wanted to do things. We went out on a limb with that record, for sure—and it almost cost me my career. But I think since then it’s proven to be a substantial record that a lot of fans liked. It was the stepping stone to 2112. And after we’d finished it, we’d actually worked on a bunch of really good ideas which we incorporated into 2112.”

  “I had a great time making that record,” continued Terry, “and I was extremely disappointed when it got the bad reviews and everyone was really down. It was a tough period, but looking back it was a tough time for the band just getting their feet planted on the ground. And it was a little too ambitious. In the record business, what we should have done was done a couple of covers, and made a really commercial record so we sort of grabbed a bigger market. But that’s not what the boys wanted to do, and me neither. We had this crazy, cockamamie scheme that we could do original material and everyone would just flock to the stores and buy it. Well, it kinda backfired a bit there. But we made up for it with 2112 and never looked back after that.”

  Billboard ad issued by Mercury to congratulate its Juno Award Winners, April 12, 1975.

  Trade ad celebrating Canadian Polydor acts, 1975.

  “Fly by Night” and “In the Mood” b/w “Something for Nothing,” U.S. promo, 1976. Ray Wawrzyniak collection

  July 1976. Tulsa-area photographer Rich Galbraith recalls that a “small riot” broke out when Mott the Hoople, who was scheduled to go on last despite their opener status, never took the stage.

  Both © Rich Galbraith

  Not only did “Lakeside Park” fizzle as a single, but “I Think I’m Going Bald” and fully all of the epic material—three-quarters of the album—sunk without a trace. And really, after all these years, only the flash of the blade “Bastille Day” has survived above the radar. Remarked Geddy: “Caress of Steel was a big experiment for us and we were very much in love with it when we finished up. But again, the forces that be, the people who promote our music, didn’t believe in that album.

  “It’s kind of absurd; I mean, it’s just where we were at,” added Geddy. “We were a young band, a little pretentious, full of ambitions, full of grand ideas, and we wanted to see if we could make some of those grand ideas happen. And ‘Fountain of Lamneth’ was the first attempt at that. I think there are some beautiful moments, but a lot of it is ponderous and off the mark. It’s also the most time we ever had to make a record. I think we had a full three weeks to make that record [laughs]. And we were just languishing, indulging ourselves, oodles of time. You know, Fly by Night was made in ten days. Now we had three weeks and there were a lot of funny aromas in the control room too [laughs].”

  “Those were the growing years,” Neil explained, asked about crazy songs like “Necromancer.” “I often equate that to children’s drawings on the refrigerator that hang around too long, you know? I really wish that they would just go away. I think we really started … wow, given my druthers, I would make our first album Moving Pictures. I can’t think of a single reason not to do that!”

  Ray Danniels figured that the instantly likeable first album had chalked up sales of around 100,000 units, and Fly by Night, 150,000, with Caress of Steel dropping back to the numbers of the debut. The tour receipts were even worse, with the band burning more cash to keep the show on the road, but getting smaller crowds. What started as a hopeful, proselytizing Caress of Steel campaign began to be known as the Down the Tubes tour.

  One of Geddy’s most telling remarks about the grind of the road (here at its nadir) was that it takes a little chunk out of your soul. Still, even if ordeals like the Down the Tubes tour can’t help but harden a person, they can also be instructive and exciting.

  “When you’re a musician you don’t have to choose from all of life’s options, like what the hell am I going to do now?” Geddy explained to Canadian Musician’s Perry Stern in 1996. “You always know what you’re going to do, so that takes care of the big questions. You’re driven by your obsession. The first few years are difficult but you believe. You have ambition. Your physical makeup is different. Your recovery time is faster. You can sit in a car for four hundred miles, play a gig for twenty minutes opening for Sha Na Na or whatever, get back in the car and drive another four hundred miles. In the morning, you don’t feel great but you don’t feel that bad. You’re just happy to be there. You’re genuinely excited because you don’t really believe you’ll ever be ‘there’ again.”

  And that was a real possibility. Mercury was none too pleased with the career arc of the band and now was working Caress of Steel less enthusiastically on top of asking for hits if they were going to do this all over again. Money was tight, with Alex taking a job back home pumping gas and helping out his dad on plumbing jobs. Still, Rush’s steadfast belief in their exploratory, proggy take on power trio hard rock meant that they weren’t going to bend. And if that meant they lost their deal, so be it. The result was the band’s surprise breakthrough album, 2112, issued on April Fool’s Day 1976, a record about as conceptual as Caress of Steel and arguably more so, given that the full concept side of it infected the cover, title, and blurb text as well, maybe even the band’s wardrobe choice on the back cover. Additionally, this album’s side-long title track was positioned as side one, whereas “The Fountain of Lamneth” had been sequenced on side two.

  Courtesy Wyco Vintage/www.wycovintage.com

  “We never went into either of those two records with any doubt that they were going to be fabulous,” recalled Terry Brown. “That was the way we did things there. It was like we were making a new record, great. So we’d start on it and we’d methodically work everything through, do all the preproduction, rehearsals and we would never over-rehearse anything. Most of the stuff was done in the studio.” This statement, along with similar ones made by the boys in the band, conveys the idea that Rush was happy to be beholden to their muse, cheerfully blind to outside arguments about what they should be doing with their forty minutes of black plastic. Underscoring the sense that Rush was going to stick to their artistic convictions, Alex said, “We don’t want to change what people think about rock ’n’ roll. We just want to show them what we think about it.”

  “2112 is a cycle of songs based on a development and progression of some things I see in society,” Neil noted on the record’s side-long Ayn Rand–inspired suite that nonetheless coughed up hitsy stand-alone rocker “The Temples of Syrinx.” “We come across a lot of weirdness on the road and it comes out in the music. The cycle begins with an ‘Overture,’ then the discovery of the guitar and music. Guitars don’t exist in the Solar Federation because the computers won’t allow music—it’s not logical. Then there’s the ‘Presentation,’ where the hero brings his guitar to the priests in the temples of Syrinx. But the acolytes smash it up and send him away. And he has a dream about a planet, established simultaneously with the Solar Federation, where all the creative people went. He’s never seen anything like it before, this alternative way of life; even the way they build their cities is totally different. And he gets more and more depressed because he realizes that his music is a part of that civilization and he can never be a part of it. But in the end he finds that the planet is real and things do change for him.”

  Peart’s tale, with the essential message of individualism and self-reliance in the face of an oppressive government, was rendered iconically by Hugh Syme for the memorable cover art. (Syme, to his delight, also got to add a spot of Mellotron and synthesizer to the album.) The red star, reasonably mistaken for a pentagram, represents the dastardly Solar Federation, while the naked man on the version within the gatefold (to live on as one of the band’s most used logo graphics) represented unadorned freedom, individuality, man without trappings.

  “It’s not like we’re suffering from the dreaded Led Zep stigma,” mus
ed Neil, defending his literary aspirations. “We’re essentially pursuing the same idea as them—playing rock ’n’ roll but saying something too.” Lightly complaining about rock crowds, Neil added, “We get frustrated when they’re just out for a good time and we’re not getting through. Our favorite audiences are the ones that sit and listen to the song and go wild afterward.”

  Yet the kids were indeed listening, with 2112 going gold a year and a half after issue, a huge kick up the establishment, an establishment that included their label, which would have wholeheartedly wanted something entirely not 2112, as well as the critics, who saw in this band everything they hated, namely heavy metal, progressive rock, concept records, and an annoying vocalist.

  Wrote Paul Nelson in Circus, “This star dreck is all about computers ruling the world and dictating our each and every joyless action—in other words, the same old science fiction shtick that has been done to death more times than 2001. Seems this kid finds an electric guitar, but the priests of the future just won’t sanction his musical ideas. Perhaps they’re right—maybe he’s a member of Rush. At any rate, surely they’ve heard it all before. So have you. 2112 would seem to be a product of the very computers it purports to want to destroy. Why wait when the future is already upon us? Here’s a hammer.”

  So why did 2112 take off? Well, one might argue that progressive rock was at its peak, having grown to adulthood from its inception in 1970, a year that also incidentally marks the birth of metal. As well, FM had entered a golden period. It was not uncommon for DJs to play all of the title track in one large and uninterrupted meal of escapist stoner rock. Manager Ray Danniels also attributes the album’s success to three other factors: (1) the steadfast belief the band had in their art, resulting in an album that even Mercury had to admit was objectively “good”; (2) the workable six-digit fan base built by the first three albums; and (3) the fact that Caress of Steel was toured unflaggingly, despite the blank stares from the few who showed up. Plus, once 2112 emerged, Rush hit the road just as hard, occasionally headlining and allowing for longer sets, all the more time for Rush to flex their musicianly muscles while simultaneously whisking their watchers away to lands fantastic.

  All of this emphasis on taking it to the people was made material through the decision to make Rush’s next record a double live album. All the World’s a Stage, released on September 29, 1976, in all its triple gatefold glory, was yet another addition to the golden age of such records, joining Humble Pie’s Performance: Rockin’ the Fillmore, Kiss’ Alive!, Blue Öyster Cult’s On Your Feet or on Your Knees, and Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive! as records that efficiently summarized catalogs, marked the end of an era, or otherwise helped careers thrive. A double live album meant a band had become part of the establishment. Adding flowery significance to the milestone, Rush recorded theirs at a music Mecca for any Toronto-raised musician—the venerable yet cozy Massey Hall—during the summer of ’76 (which also saw Geddy marrying Nancy after seven years together). Indeed, Geddy had promised to his mother that playing Massey Hall would be the marker that the band had truly arrived.

  Author collection

  2112 Andrew Earles

  Beginning around 1975, the continuing power shift from DJ to programmer and the influence of radio consulting teams defined a transitioning phase that soon created the dominating AOR format, which in turn became the ever-popular classic rock format during the ’80s (and remains so to this day). The format that preceded AOR was known as free-form, or progressive rock, radio, and it is not to be confused with the genre of rock music, though no shortage of prog rock found its way into progressive rock FM programming. Remember, this was the mid’70s; Rush’s style of progressive/hard rock had only two ways to find success… radio and the live arena.

  The failure of the lumbering Caress of Steel to produce any radio staples, combined with the aforementioned changes in the musical landscape, put Mercury Records in the position of pressuring the trio to forgo the side-long epics in favor of more succinct (i.e., radio-friendly) songs. But this was a band on a hell of a hot streak: 2112 would be their fourth full-length album in a space of two years, and the band was probably indifferent to label pressures, as they took a few months to write and record what is justifiably seen as their first masterpiece, complete with the side-one-spanning title track and an overall prog-rock heaviness that ranked alongside King Crimson’s Red (1974) and much of the prog-metal weirdness offered by Budgie during the same era.

  Now, it doesn’t hurt matters that 2112 turned out to be the first Rush album to perform commercially, landing in the Billboard Top 100 upon release. This proved that road-dogging it and releasing three solid-to-great albums within a year and a half had initiated a homegrown and very loyal fan base that had very little to do with airplay (barring the breakout success of “Working Man” in Cleveland, Ohio, that got the band off to their start outside of Canada).

  The title track featured dynamics and hooks that the more challenging Caress of Steel lacked in terms of stretched-out endeavors. This resulted in the first two movements of “2112,” “Overture” and “The Temples of Syrinx,” being released as a single. Additionally, side two’s opener (“A Passage to Bangkok”) was given the single treatment, and both releases gained some radio real estate. Despite their respective moments of quiet introspection (via acoustic guitar, mainly), these two songs are among Rush’s heaviest endeavors, yet each showcases an unprecedented catchiness in songwriting skill that attracted a slew of new fans while doing the rest of the album justice in keeping early metalheads happy.

  “2112,” the title track, taken as a whole, could be the thematic as well as sonic no in response to Mercury Records’ stylistic requests. Inspired by the writings of Ayn Rand (as per Neil Peart’s liner notes), this introductory half of the album paints a very 1984-ish future world complete with a tyrannical ruling presence that controls all forms of art. In the year 2062, an interplanetary war sets up the protagonist’s discovery of an “ancient” guitar and the self-taught creative feats that result. The powers-that-be destroy the guitar, and the protagonist goes into hiding and then commits suicide, but all of this somehow ends up launching further turmoil that topples the entities in power, thrusting the world back into its pre-Draconian state.

  2112, depending on which big-picture assessment one chooses, marked either the end of Rush’s first sonic and aesthetic incarnation or the initiation of phase two, which Rush would ride with increasing success for the remainder of the 1970s and until their next line of demarcation: 1981’s Moving Pictures. Most likely, both assessments are correct.

  All the World’s a Stage tour, Expo Square Pavilion, Tulsa, Oklahoma, January 16, 1977. © Rich Galbraith

  Author collection

  With respect to its track list, All the World’s a Stage delivers, unsurprisingly, a healthy chunk of 2112. Caress of Steel and Fly by Night get short shrift, with the beloved self-titled debut winning the day, allowing fans to hear these more conventional hard rock songs gussied up by Peart and his acutely tuned tom-toms. Down this tack, Rush presents a side four comprising the first album’s three heaviest metallers, including, of course, a swooping, dramatic version of “Working Man,” the song that got it all started back in Cleveland a short and action-packed two years earlier.

  “It was frustrating,” Lee explained on the press trail for the double live set, recapping the band’s struggle. “We were turned down by all the Canadian recording companies. We tried to hitch up on cross-Canada tours with major groups, but were always being told Rush had no commercial potential—that was their favorite phrase. Since then it’s been tour, tour, tour. We’ve played hundreds of American towns supporting whoever we could. We figured Canada would come naturally. It’s all starting to come together this year. 2112 was given good promotion by Mercury, and the USA tour was timed perfectly. All our past records are still selling. We don’t seem to be a singles band. Mercury first signed us, thinking we’d have a string of hits like Bachman-Turner O
verdrive. We had to fight for the thematic idea of 2112. But since 2112 was released, Mercury’s given us a great deal of support. We’ve shown that musicians from Toronto could go to the USA and make it—record companies are now aware of that. It’s possible to be successful outside of your own back yard.”

  “With 2112, we felt we had reached a first plateau,” figured Neil. “We had realized the goals we set for ourselves before the second album. Musically, it looked like a logical place to do a live album. We had four albums’ worth of material honed down to a live show. And the record company was hot for a live album. When we play a piece live, we add all our little quirks to it. It grows; our older material shows a remarkable progression. Some of the old songs have developed until they’re superior to the originals. This gives us a chance to bring them up to date. We always felt there was something happening live that didn’t come across on record. Now we have the opportunity to capture that essence of the band. Also, All the World’s a Stage presents our material to people who may have heard or liked a couple of our songs, but never got into all our albums. Now they can have those songs together on one album without our having to put out a Best of Rush package.”

  New Musical Express ad, December 12, 1976. Author collection