Rush: How They Took Off With ‘Fly By Night’
Rush recently announced a new career-spanning compilation, curiously titled Rush 50. I say that because the band’s debut single, a cover of Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away,” was released in 1973. Their self-titled debut was released in 1974. But – and sorry about the pun – the band really took off in 1975 with the release of their second album, Fly By Night.
Rush’s lineup on their debut album consisted of bassist/singer Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson, and drummer John Rutsey. They were a great heavy blues rock band, very much influenced by Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix. The original plan for the band was for Lee and Lifeson to compose the music and for Rutsey to write the lyrics. For better or worse, Rutsey was unable to come up with anything, so Lee and Lifeson penned the lyrics and composed the music for their debut album.
And let me be clear: as a long-time Rush fan, and a lover of garage rock, I consider Rush to be a classic. “Working Man” is a working-class anthem and unlike anything Rush has done in the years since. “In The Mood” is a good time party jam, which closed their shows for years. I love every song on the album. But it’s hard to imagine how the band would have progressed in that iteration.
RELATED: Rush: Their 50 Greatest Songs, Ranked
For a number of reasons relating both to health and musical differences, Rutsey left the band. As Alex Lifeson told Louder Sound, “We knew early on that John had problems with his health. He had diabetes, and he was very concerned about whether it would be manageable for him on the road. In 1974, John got ill and missed out a few months of gigs. Ged and I were listening to more progressive music – Yes and Pink Floyd. We wanted to work that into our music. John was more of a straight rocker.”
They auditioned five drummers, but Neil Peart was the obvious choice. As a bonus, Peart could take over lyric writing. As Geddy Lee told Louder Sound, “When we were on the road, we saw Neil reading books all the time. We thought, ‘This guy is pretty smart.’ And the bottom line was, Alex and I didn’t want to write lyrics. So we gently encouraged Neil to do it.”
The opening track, “Anthem,” was a holdover from Rush with new lyrics by Peart. (Rutsey apparently didn’t like the somewhat complex song.) It was the first of many examples of how he was influenced by writer Ayn Rand, who believed in reason over emotion and wrote a number of essays for a collection called The Virtue Of Selfishness. (She’s often cited as an influence by conservatives, but she also rejected all forms of religion.) Peart later disavowed Rand in a Rolling Stone interview.
Another writer with a big influence was J.R.R. Tolkien; “Rivendell,” like a few Led Zeppelin songs from the era, references Middle Earth. “Beneath, Between & Behind” and “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” were both inspired by Tolkien’s works. The latter was the first of many multi-part sci-fi Rush epics (and even continued, sort of, in “The Necromancer” from the following album, Caress Of Steel). The song was a product of their often-overlooked sense of humor: the lyrics were originally inspired by the band’s manager Ray Daniels’s two dogs, who a crew member nicknamed “Biter” and “Snow-dog.”
With two albums in their discography and one of the best drummers on earth in their lineup, Rush went on tour, first opening for KISS and also Aerosmith, and then began headlining. They’d go on to release 17 more albums — many of them absolute classics — and become one of the most successful rock bands of the past four decades. And while their discography starts with Rush, their ascent to greatness really began with Fly By Night. They were a very good band with John Rutsey behind the kit. But with Neil Peart, Rush became one of the best bands of all time.
