After their third album, 1975’s LP Caress Of Steel, tanked commercially, Toronto trio Rush feared they were washed up. With nothing left to lose, the band - bassist Geddy Lee, drummer Neil Peart and guitarist/lyricist Alex Lifeson - decided to go out in a blaze of glory, with an album featuring a side-long dystopian concept piece based on controversial writer Ayn Rand’s novella Anthem.
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Far from being their swan song, however, 2112 proved to be Rush’s breakthrough, cracking the American charts and becoming the cornerstone of a career spanning 19 albums over four decades. Still beloved by the prog faithful, the album has sold over three million copies in the US alone to date.
49 years after 2112’s release, Geddy Lee speaks to MOJO about the album’s troubled background and the unexpected reactions to a ’70s rock classic…
Geddy Lee: “Our record company Mercury had told us in no uncertain terms that we were a huge disappointment to them. They had signed us on the basis of our first record (Rush, 1974), which was pretty straightforward hard rock. But we loved all those English progressive rock bands – Yes and Genesis – and on our third album Caress Of Steel we had a song that was twenty minutes, The Fountain Of Lamneth. Mercury was like, ‘What the fuck? Who are you guys?’ And even we thought that: who are we?
“Caress Of Steel had bombed. The gigs were half-empty. We named it the ‘Down The Tubes Tour’. We joked about Neil (Peart, drummer) going back into the farm equipment business, and Alex (Lifeson, guitar) and I going back to painting movie theatres. When we started on 2112, we thought this would probably be the last record we make. So we were like: fuck you, Mercury. If we’re going to go out, we’ll go out doing our crazy shit, not failing at what you want us to be.
“Neil wrote a story for the song 2112, which was based on Anthem by Ayn Rand. Neil’s story was set in a futuristic totalitarian state, controlled by the priests of the temples of Syrinx. One day our hero finds a device. He’s not sure what it is, but it has strings, and he figures out that he can make music with it. He goes back to present it to the priests. And of course, they shut him down because they want control over everything. In the end he contemplates ending it all, because he doesn’t want to live in a world that can’t embrace such a thing that he’s found…
“Neil showed us bits of lyric, and then we went to work at it. The whole thing came together very quickly – another twenty-minute song – but it was so much more powerful and focused than The Fountain Of Lamneth. It felt really fresh to us, like we had figured something out.
“That was side one. It was heavy. So with side two we wanted to show diversity, an alternative version of the band. We had Tears, the pretty side of Rush, and A Passage To Bangkok, our pot smoker song. We recorded the whole album in four weeks, at Toronto Sound Studios, which was owned by our producer Terry Brown. And it was fun – there was no desperation in the room. We were really proud of what we’d made.
“We didn’t know what kind of feedback we were going to get from the record company. We were pretty afraid of that. Our manager didn’t get it at all, and when he played for Mercury everyone in the room was puzzled by it – except for Cliff Burnstein, who went on to manage Def Leppard and Metallica. Cliff thought the album was awesome, and for us that was so heartening.
“Sales were slow at first. And then we had that terrible thing in England with the NME. 2112 was speaking out against totalitarianism, but the NME called us fascists. It made zero sense. Ayn Rand had a very controversial image as an anti-socialist and extreme right-wing capitalist, but that was a side of her work that was not of interest to us at all.
“My father Morris and my mother Mary were both in Auschwitz for a time, so I was really deeply hurt by that NME story. At that time in Britain, the press was hunting down anything that sniffed of fascism. I can’t blame them for that. But they got the wrong guys with us. I am not a violent type, but I wanted to punch the guy who wrote that. Definitely, I could have helped educate him a little bit.
“In the end, what the NME said didn’t matter. At first, 2112 was a slow seller, but when we went back on the road, we were getting better gigs, and even headlining some shows. It was a defining album. The artwork for the album by our friend Hugh Syme became a brand, it transcended the record and became very representational of us as a band. The album was a vindication. From that point, we were free to make our own mistakes.”
As told to Paul Elliott.
This article originally appeared in MOJO 268.