Hey, Rush: It’s Time to Deal With ‘Caress of Steel’
When I was a wee lad, Rush was the first band to catch my ear and send me down the rabbit hole. At that time, the Canadian trio’s new album, Moving Pictures, with its lead-off single “Tom Sawyer,” was a captivating listen from stem to stern, and made me want to delve further into their catalogue to see if all of their albums were equally as good. (Here’s where the Ron Howard voiceover could say, “They weren’t” — but a good number of them were close!) My older brother had a tape of their 1976 live set, All the World’s a Stage, recorded at a triumphant set of shows at Toronto’s Massey Hall in the wake of the band’s breakthrough commercial success with its 2112 album. It was a heavier sound than I knew from Moving Pictures, and singer Geddy Lee’s voice was a lot scarier to my 10-year-old ears. But I was taken with the sound, and in particular with the bombastic set opener, “Bastille Day,” celebrating the spirit and the spark of revolution that, a little less than 200 years before, brought down the curtain on centuries of monarchism. You know, stuff that a 10-year-old suburban kid could really relate to.
As neato as that recording was to hear, I wondered what album had that song in its original, studio form. Soon I found out that it was 1975’s Caress of Steel. Cool. I scraped together a fiver, probably from doing a crummy job at mowing and weeding the lawn, and some change, and rode my Schwinn Varsity bike to the nearest place where you could buy stuff like that — a Kohl’s department store. Taking the tape home after dutifully counting my change like my parents had always taught me to do, I had that unique feeling that loads of young people had when buying their first albums. It seemed like I was carrying some sort of weird talisman that had secrets to bequeath to me, and that after hearing it, I might not be the same again. (I’ll bet this feeling was a bit more intense still for those who first came home with Black Sabbath records.) I wasn’t wrong.
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Caress of Steel was a weird ride that dovetailed perfectly with where my head was at the time. “Bastille Day” was as thrilling as I had hoped, or more so, but things really got bananas when it came to songs like the 13-minute epic “The Necromancer,” and the even more esoteric sidelong suite, “The Fountain of Lamneth.” I had started reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fellowship of the Ring not long before this time, so lyrically and thematically, I was in familiar terrain. It was a perfect geek-out record — menacing Dungeons & Dragons fury pumped through Marshall stacks with vocals that sounded like they could pierce armor, and drums that waged medieval-style warfare. Yeah — it was like that. And I was there for it … well, even if I was a bunch of years too late, and didn’t yet know that Led Zeppelin had gotten there first. But that’s another story. Still, I thought Rush was the coolest. Caress of Steel proved it. How could I believe otherwise?
“Rush SUCKS.”
I heard this a lot. It was the overwhelming opinion of many kids in my class at the time, and they made sure I knew it. But what I didn’t know, and wouldn’t find out for decades to come, was that for Rush, Caress of Steel had almost killed them as a band. As the legend and lore emerged through the years, both through interviews with the band and through the rabid fanbase that disseminated such tidbits of information when the Internet finally made it possible for all of us Rush geeks to geek out together, it seems the whole Caress of Steel album had been recorded when the band members allegedly had been smoking too much hash. Even though the members of Rush were proud of their achievement, they couldn’t figure out why no one else was as into it. Touring with KISS at the time, they played the album in their van for Paul Stanley, who allegedly listened all the way through and … crickets. He didn’t get it.
And he wasn’t the only one. Fans at the time didn’t seem to know how to connect with the new material, and the band’s touring circuit began to suffer. Instead of playing good-sized theaters in bigger cities like Chicago, late drummer Neil Peart recalled in one interview, they might be playing a smaller venue in Niles, Illinois, for a much smaller crowd. Dismal night after dismal night began to take its toll on the band’s morale. They began to refer to the whole experience among themselves as the “Down the Tubes” tour, after which, they feared, their dreams of pursuing a lifelong career in music might be over.
Rush fans know very well the denouement of this scenario — faced with a less-than-successful album and tour, they knew they probably only had one more shot to deliver the goods and make their record company happy. The pressure was on, but instead of producing a bunch of Bad Company-ish ditties in hopes of a hit, like their corporate overseers wanted them to do, they went into Toronto Sound Studio with producer Terry Brown and recorded one of the most audacious hard rock statements up to that time — the blazing, dystopian, intergalactic, Ayn Rand-influenced, haughtily pretentious sidelong epic, “2112.” Clocking in at a little over 20 minutes, there was no way this track was going to get any radio play. But the band stuck to its guns, and with the help of one or two more radio-friendly tracks on the B-side, and strong word of mouth, the band had its first hit, in the process winning its freedom from the tyranny of their record company. (And, yes, there was much rejoicing.)
Remind But what of Caress of Steel? What happened to that hash dream of an album that sounded so good to me as a kid, and still does? To this day, the band members say they can’t even listen to it, because it reminds them so much of bad times and how they almost blew it, and they’re embarrassed by how much of a “drug” record it is.
It’s now 2024. Next year, 2025, will see the album’s 50th anniversary. I don’t know if the surviving band members know it or not, but there’s a huge cult following that has sprung up around that particular Rush album in the intervening decades. Rabid CoS fans have been trading illicitly recorded live shows for many years, hoping that someone, somewhere, has more recorded evidence of Caress of Steel material being played live than the two songs that are available on the All the World’s a Stage live set. And once in a while, a vein of gold is struck. Many years back, a rather rough-sounding tape surfaced of a 1975 show that had been recorded at a venue called the Armory in Rockford, Illinois, which featured “The Necromancer” in its full, 13-minute entirety. Much more recently, another recording appeared with a live version of one of the most odd entries in the Rush canon — that most-peculiar song from Caress of Steel, “I Think I’m Going Bald.”
Are there any more recordings of this era to be had in the Rush vaults? Since the passing of drummer Neil Peart in 2020, the idea of Rush recording new material or touring again is pretty much out the window for good. The band does, however, periodically release anniversary editions of its albums, remastered, with bonus discs full of rare, contemporary live recordings and other oddities. With the 50th anniversary of Caress of Steel coming up next year, I think the time has come to ask the Rush camp directly: How ’bout it, gentlemen? A deluxe reissue of Caress of Steel with the works for 2025? You could make Terry Brown assemble and remaster it so you wouldn’t have to listen to it yourselves. Instead of having Hugh Syme create new cover art, you could finally get the black-and-silver cover that was intended the first time round. Just think — you could include a new, “hash-free” mix if you wanted, whatever that might sound like. Are there any outtake recordings of “Didacts and Narpets” or live versions of “No One at the Bridge”? Any tapes with even a few sections of “The Fountain of Lamneth” live? Just one, maybe?
I can’t be the only one who’s all in for this … am I?
The only known recording of Rush performing “The Necromancer,” live at the Armory, Rockford, Ill., 1975.
Rush playing “I Think I’m Going Bald” from Randhurst Arena, Mount Prospect, Ill., 1976.
1974 (50 Years Ago)
January 2024
In this time capsule issue of ReMIND Magazine we look back 50 years ago to 1974!
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