Cutting Both Ways
‘Fly By Night’ peaked at 113 in the US charts on 15 March 1975, as if to confirm that Rush were not going to be a ‘classic’, radio-friendly, mainstream success. These weren’t pop songs after all; the sun was setting on the heavy rock acts that Rush had counted as their influences, and the table was already being cleared to make way for disco and punk. AM stations saw nothing they wanted to play, and the band had little more than a foothold on the AOR stations of FM radio, despite Cliff Burnstein’s best efforts. “Two thirds or three quarters of the radio stations had never wanted to play Rush at the beginning,” says Cliff. “They said this is too jarring, his voice will just turn people off if you play it. I told them how the band was doing and how the following was growing and how various people had success with it, and gradually we started to wear them down.”
The only option for a band that wanted its music to reach the ears of the masses, was to tour. So, tour they did. On 19 April they opened for Kiss in front of 4,500 people at the Detroit Michigan Palace, and the tour saw the band play in support of Blue Öyster Cult and Aerosmith. Through the latter, the boys learned how a support band would normally be treated – by a hostile band of prima donnas, together with a hostile crew with the power (and inclination) to deny soundchecks. It was a major learning experience, and left no room for underperformance. “That was kind of an object lesson for us, and also an illustration of how good it is to rise slowly,” said Neil. “It’s enormously difficult to deal with.”
The boys hired a car to get themselves between dates, and clocked up 11,000 miles of self drive in the process. All effort was put into the live act, walking the walk, dressing the dress and talking the talk in an effort to be noticed by the punters. Geddy’s approach was to belt it out, as he explained, “The temperament was ‘I’ve got licks to play that I want people to hear.’ It was a cocky, strut-your- stuff attitude, and my singing was extreme too, because I had to cut through that.”
For Neil, it was like he’d always been there. The intense experience of tour, write, record, tour, had brought the three together: the drummer was in no doubt he belonged. Neil took a drum solo slot in the middle of ‘Working Man’, and even incorporated a couple of electronic effects into his act.
The tour passed like a whirlwind to the wide-eyed twenty-somethings, as one by one they ticked off the goals they’d set themselves. The number of headline bookings for the band started to outweigh the support slots, with one support act of their own being the esoteric, eccentric folk artist, Mendelson Joe. “I toured with Rush to help promote my records/career because we shared the same pimp,” says Joe. “I was lucky to have the opportunity! I guess I did enjoy using Rush’s monster amplification and inflicting my music on their acolytes.” Not the music however. “Rush has much the same effect on me as opera,” he sighs. “I get neither form. Rush’s music strikes me more as some sort of amalgam or experience in technique.” Not that the Rush fans got Joe, either. “Their fans hated my music!”
The touring strategy paid off: in April, the band discovered to their astonishment and delight that they had won a coveted Canadian Juno award as most promising new band – coveted in Canada, but frequently seen as a poison chalice by bands that had subsequently vanished. “It brought us a lot of attention from a lot of people who hadn’t heard of us or people who didn’t really take us seriously,” said Geddy. “But it didn’t really help us much anywhere else.” This was not strictly true – the first germs of growth were starting to appear across the Atlantic as well. Pete Makowski, a journalist at UK music rag Sounds had acquired a copy of ‘Fly By Night’, which he passed to fellow journalist Geoff Barton with the words, “This ain’t my cuppa tea but I think you might get a kick out of it.”
As Rush developed its own fan base, the fans detected the non-mainstream status and individuality of the band, and reflected it in subtle ways. Indeed, the fans’ anti- establishment feelings may have been the contributing factor to the practice of bootlegging: while bootleggers existed long before Rush, they had a disproportionate number of people miking up at their gigs. The different members of the band had differing views on bootlegging: having owned bootlegs of his favourite bands when he was younger, Geddy himself found it difficult to disagree with.
By the end of the tour, Rush were filling halls for up to 4,000 by themselves. On 25 June, as the band played the Massey Hall in Toronto with Max Webster in support, Neil realised how his initial list of objectives had been rather modest. “Ultimately, every city has the place that’s the ‘in’ spot where all the hip local bands play,” he said, “I used to think to play at the Massey Hall would be the ultimate. But then you get there and worry about other things.” Don Shafer remembers the gig well. “They were so loud, people were pressed up against the wall! Rush were doing what they do now – the paint was peeling off the ceiling. It was very exciting, very electric and very energised!”
As the Massey Hall gig came and went, the thought of what came next filled the hearts and minds of the trio. Writing had continued throughout the tour; when it came to an end on 29 June 1975, the band had already accumulated sufficient material to go back to the studio. There were some songs, but the boys had also decided to go with an ambitious pastiche of musical pieces that together, occupied nearly twenty minutes of music. The sounds they were developing were multi-layered, using all of Alex’s textural skills with the guitar, Geddy’s melodic capabilities and Neil’s percussion as a foundation. The ambition was to be “the world’s smallest symphony orchestra,” according to Geddy.
Sure, it would be an experiment, but there was nothing wrong with experimenting. Was there?
With barely a pause for breath, the band retreated to a Toronto rehearsal room for a week to complete the tracks for what would become ‘Caress of Steel’. By mid-July, they were back at Toronto Sound, having once again recruited Terry Brown (by now, nicknamed “Broon”). Once again, time was tight – only 12 days of studio time had been booked – but the pressure did not dampen the feeling of utter creativity in the studio that everyone felt, the flow of ideas in the control room eased by the occasional smoke.
The second side of the album was devoted to the epic ‘The Fountain of Lamneth’, a “soul searching quest” according to UK journalist Geoff Barton. Indeed it was for its collaborators, who had underestimated how long it would take to turn the musical compositions into a flowing, coherent whole. Terry and the band worked right up to the wire, and when the twelve days were up, all felt they had gone a long way towards achieving their ambitions. “I was very happy with it when we finished it,” confirms Terry. “It was a dark record, the whole concept and depth, it was something you could listen through repeatedly to and get something from, but it needed time to mature.” ‘Caress of Steel’ was the band’s alpha and omega, the sum of all three personalities. “We felt at the time that we had achieved something that was really our own sound, and hopefully established ourselves as a definite entity,” said Neil.
Towards the end of the studio sessions, the band started putting together some ideas that were too leftfield even for ‘Caress of Steel’. Some playing around with recording equipment led to recording Neil (who had already done the voiceovers for ‘The Necromancer’) saying “Attention all planets of the Solar Federation… We have assumed control…” But they hadn’t, not yet. “Even though the ideas had not been cemented there was a seed being planted, the whole sci-fi tech-y thing,” says Terry Brown. For now the ideas were noted, ready for whatever was to come next. Another of SRO’s signings, the Ian Thomas Band included a young keyboard player called Hugh Syme. Hugh was a bit of a graphic artist – he’d already volunteered a cover for one of the Ian Thomas albums, which Ray had seen. “He said, would you like to do a Rush cover,” says Hugh. “I said, I guess, yes!” The design was planned to be a “very simplistic pencil rendering,” but someone at the record company had the bright idea that a metallic surround would be appropriate. “They stomped on an overt sepia tone which I thought was a bit rough, and then they put this cloud of blue around it, it was done at the film stripping stage without my knowledge,” says Hugh, who was not the only one to be horrified. “This is probably the very threshold at which time the band became insistent that they control the outcome of their album, both musically and artistically. I think it came as a result of these kinds of surprise attacks, oh won’t they love this blue and this lettering form… and we all didn’t. We were taken aback by such presumption, a lesson learnt.”
For now, it was time to get the album out to a wider public, working through an increasingly dubious record label. “The record company would have liked more editorial say over what the band did,” says Cliff Burnstein. “But I always felt that the band was going to do what the band does and they would have a better idea than I ever could so I just said, you signed Rush to be Rush, let them be, they have good instincts and will get a best result by just going with it, don’t try to meddle.”
Despite Cliff’s best efforts Mercury didn’t know how to market the album, and they took the option of hardly bothering. Dedicated to Twilight Zone originator Rod Serling, the final album was released in September 1975, giving the trio a few weeks off in the summer to recuperate and to contemplate where they were heading. Down, mostly.
At the start of October the Rush touring machine ground into action again, starting with a number of headline dates. Things started well enough – the core team of Howard, Liam and Ian was joined by Skip Gildersleeve (who the band had met at Michigan Palace on the last tour), to replace Jimmy Johnson. Also, they had a proper bus to sleep in, rather than a hire car. Neil organised the driving rotas for the bus and the truck; everyone, including the band, took their turn to drive. The dates in support of the bigger players, Kiss and Mott The Hoople went well enough (after all, they had a captive audience), but the headliners became less and less well attended. Given the complex music and fantastic themes of ‘Caress of Steel’, radio stations had little clue what to do with the album. Whatever people had thought of ‘Fly By Night’, it was nonetheless quite musically straightforward and therefore comprehensible to commercial radio, whereas ‘Caress of Steel’ appeared inaccessible, if not downright indulgent.
Unsurprisingly, the album flopped. ‘Caress of Steel’ charted at 148th position in the US Billboard album charts on 18 October, an even lower position than the first album, ‘Rush’. There was less and less forward play on the radio, which was an essential element of drumming up audiences. As the impact was felt at the box office, the threesome hit their first hurdle – far from continuing to grow, as hoped and even expected, it looked like their popularity was already starting to wane. Indeed, on more than one occasion, Ray had to break the news he couldn’t even pay the band’s salaries.
There was always just enough to keep things going – not least, the momentum of the tour drove things forward and nobody wanted to be the one to throw in the towel first. Every day, every night Geddy, Neil and Alex were forced to confront the realities of the album they had produced – if making it was soul searching, now they were living the consequences on the live stage. “You do your growing up in public,” said Neil. As the band were accused of being musically incompetent (which they most certainly weren’t) and pretentious (which they… OK, it’s a fair cop), it is unsurprising that despondency set in. “It was so close to our hearts, but the public never shared our enthusiasm,” remarked Neil. Unfortunately, the band had yet to build up its protective shell against what Geddy described as the “negative and disappointing attitudes every step of the way.”
Traipsing from small to smaller venues, the band felt the real fear that all the good work of the previous tour was being undone. With reason, the tour earned the nickname the ‘Down The Tubes Tour’. After a break for Christmas, the last official date of the tour was back at Toronto’s Massey Hall, on 10 January 1976. Opening once again was esoteric Mendelson Joe, who understood exactly what the band was going through. “The road is a horrible life,” says Joe. “Hard, hard work!” Massey Hall, that symbol of ambition, was this time a symbol of despair. Almost incidentally, the band was getting better in everything it did, and perhaps uniquely, each member was getting better at the same pace.
From feeling despondent, the band started to get cross. ‘Caress of Steel’ was in no way a bad album: it wasn’t the first of the era to be musically indulgent, neither would it be the last to include a couple of duff songs. However, it was one hundred percent Rush, and there was the rub: it had made absolutely no allowance for commerciality, given the band’s relatively new profile. “We thought that music was such an honest form of self-expression,” said Neil. “Then we went through the disillusionment of growing up and finding out that it wasn’t that way at all – that it was big business and that these musicians were just playing the music they thought would make them the most money and they were writing songs that would appeal to the lowest common denominator.”
Which, of course, was the last thing that Rush wanted to do. The band had tasted success and now found itself at a crossroads – having honed its skills, its options were to cave in to commercial pressures, or to take the road less travelled and go head to head with the musical establishment? “We said, okay, everybody wants us to do nice short songs like we did on the first album. Do we do that, or do we pack it in, or do we say ‘Screw you! We’ll do whatever we want!’” To Geddy, Alex and Neil, there was only one answer.
In parallel with the soul searching, the band had continued to write. Neil showed the others some lyrical ideas he’d been having, and the irony was, they seemed to fit their own situation only too well. Indeed, said Neil, “We were talking about freedom from tyranny, and meant it!”
It’s not difficult to work out what went wrong with ‘Caress of Steel’. The world wasn’t ready for the grand designs being foisted on them by the newcomers, for sure, but also the material was more indulgent than the previous album, and perhaps not as finely honed as it could have been. The band wasn’t totally ready – they had gone into the third album feeling confident, but they weren’t necessarily competent enough to pull off their ambitious plans, and had taken a fall. Finally, the desire to experiment had removed some of the edge from Rush’s sound. The band wanted to be a hard rock band, and this was not, in retrospect, a hard rock album. Said Alex in 1992, “We’re kinda embarrassed by a couple of the songs. They’re tough to listen to now, but they were important at the time.”
All the while, and despite the fears of his record label, Cliff Burnstein was feeling more sanguine. Not least, though the sales of ‘Caress of Steel’ may have bombed, the overall value of Rush stock (based on back catalogue sales) was up. “I think if the catalogue sales hadn’t have been increasing on the first two albums, Mercury might have dumped Rush,” says Cliff. Most of all perhaps, he was conscious of the speed of album release. “After number two they were making albums every six months.” Not every album had to be as successful as the last: to Cliff, it was just a question of keeping at it, as the band continued to sell its older albums as they toured.
With the benefit of hindsight, the band also came to see ‘Caress of Steel’ as a turning point rather than a dead end. “For us, it was a very successful album in terms of our own sense of creativity,” said Alex five years later. “We tried doing a number of things differently – longer songs, different melodic things – and it was a stepping stone for us.” Rush might have over-egged the musical pudding with their third album, but it had all been in a good cause. “Being complicated for the sake of complication, doesn’t always make for good music,” admitted Geddy, years later. “But you have to be allowed to make mistakes!” Agreed Neil, “In the early days, you want to show off, and if you learn how to do something, you’ll stick it in the song, whether it fits there or not. To me, that’s cool. That’s youthful exuberance, and I don’t think that should be criticized in too serious a way.” For the time being, however, the band had to deal with certain realities, not least the lack of money that went with the lack of success. The trio once again found themselves having to look for work to keep the bills paid. “It was very difficult,” remembered Alex. “No money and living in a small apartment. Just barely paying rent. I worked in a gas station, played on the weekends, but through the week I pumped gas. And I also did some plumbing. My father had a plumbing business and I worked with him sometimes to make a few bucks.” Agreed Geddy, “It was a very difficult time for us.”
“It was dangerous from that point, but we know they came through with ‘2112’ right after it and set the record straight,” says Terry. As for the epic ‘Fountain of Lamneth’, the whole experiment was quietly shelved, never really to be played again. It was like something to work through, best left in the past once its purpose was served. A quarter of a century later, a journalist asked Alex about ‘Fountain’. “Did we record that? Wow… I honestly do not recall that song ever being played [live]. ‘Fountain’… I honestly can’t remember that song coming up in an interview.”