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In this age of double screening and playlists designed for passive listening (Lofi Beats To Study To, anyone?), it’s hard to imagine people ever sitting down and deep-listening to an entire album, not to mention one where the opening track is a 20-minute conceptual piece featuring seven distinct movements. But that is exactly what rock music fans did in 1976 when 2112, the fourth studio album by Canadian rock band Rush, was released. Over the next twelve months, the buzz around the album grew so loud that it changed the lives of the band members forever, cementing their place alongside the all-time greats of rock music. And to think it almost never came to be.
In the winter of 1975, the band, comprised of bassist/singer Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson, and drummer Neil Peart, was finishing up a grueling tour to promote their third album, Caress Of Steel, which, by all accounts, had performed badly. As Lee put it in his book ‘My Effin Life’, “We couldn’t shake the feeling that we were working our way down the ladder of success.” Tensions had been running high between the three young musicians and the suits at the label who, like most suits at most labels, wanted more commercial output from their artist. The message was clear: if things didn’t change, the label would drop them.
As Lifeson said in an interview with NPR, "I remember thinking, I had eight years of playing rock in a band, and it's awesome, I love it, and I don't want to compromise. If this will be the end, I dunno, I'll go back to working with my dad plumbing, or go back to school, or something else. To me, it was impossible to take a step backwards and do something we'd already done just to please a record company."
Whether it was the confidence of youth (all three were in their early twenties at the time) or sheer defiance in the face of pressure from a corporation, a decision was made to go out on their own terms. They’d go all in on their chosen creative path, even if that meant ending up on the outside.
The trio retreated to their old haunt, Toronto Sound Studios, and, with British producer Terry Brown at the helm, hunkered down for four weeks, emerging with an album that sounded exactly like one they wanted to make: a 38-minute, 42-second magnum opus titled 2112.
The kick-off point for the record came from a sci-fi story by Peart. Set in a dystopian future, people are ruled with an iron fist by the Priests of the Temples of Syrinx, a totalitarian cabal that is staunchly against displays of individuality, creativity, and artistic expression. The hero, an idealistic young man, chances upon an ancient guitar inside a cave. Enamored of the device, he learns how to make music, by then a lost art, and is soon convinced that the world needs to hear of this discovery. The evil priests will not allow it, and they destroy the guitar, sending the young man into a spiral of despair from which he never recovers. The ending is ambiguous, with one interpretation implying that the young hero’s efforts were not entirely in vain.
Lee told Classic Rock magazine that the story was inspired by two works by Ayn Rand: Anthem (“an anti-totalitarian science fiction story”) and the book The Fountainhead, “a story about an architect who was determined not to compromise his aesthetic, his vision, and he would do just about anything, even radical things, to stand up for his art and his right to be an individual. That spoke volumes to us while we were making 2112. It gave us confidence, in a way. We felt we were being pressured to compromise our art. People don’t like it when you term hard rock or prog rock as art, but to us, as creators of that music, it is our art.”
The ambitious 2112 came together in such a short amount of time for a number of reasons, the main one being that all the songs had already been written by the band while touring, “in arenas, dressing rooms, in the car,” Lifeson recalled to NPR. “We were playing between 220 and 250 shows a year. We didn't have the luxury we would have later on, where we would go somewhere for a month and just concentrate on writing. It was all written on the fly. So it had quite a different feel to it in its construction and in the way we developed it. We already had all the pieces written, we'd rehearsed them at sound checks… we knew all the material.”
Once the tour was wrapped, they went straight into the studio. Nobody at the label had any idea what the band was up to; no demos had been played for anyone else, and the only person present during the studio sessions, other than the band, was producer Terry Brown.
The layout of the album had already been planned: one long piece for side one, and several shorter songs for side two. Writer Bill Banasiewicz outlines the thought process that guided the album in his book ‘Rush Visions: the Official Biography’: “Since Rush were above all a touring band, they wanted to be able to reproduce the new songs live. At the same time, they wanted to explore the full range of possibilities available to them in the studio.” This meant they used as few overdubs as possible in the studio, while still leaving room for creative experimentation.
The parts that had been crafted in sections on the road were now put together; music and lyrics layered to form a cohesive whole. However, for all the structural complexity of 2112, the recording process itself was minimalistic according to Brown, right from the gear used to the production techniques. Lifeson’s expressive solos, dramatic riffs, and driving power chords came to life on guitars he already owned at the time, including a Gibson ES-335 and a Gibson Les Paul Standard. He also used a friend’s Fender Stratocaster on tracks like “Discovery” (Part III of the 20-minute title track), which he told Guitar World magazine he borrowed for the session because he couldn’t afford one at the time. “I had those electrics in the studio with me, and then for the acoustic parts, I had a Gibson Hummingbird that I borrowed from that same friend. For amps, I had a Fender Twin and a Marshall 50-watt and 100-watt. I may have had a Hiwatt in the studio at that time, too, but I think it came a little later.”
In terms of effects, it was slim pickings, not just for budget reasons but because there were a limited number of effects available overall. Lifeson’s setup included a Maestro Phase Shifter, Echoplex tape delay, and a Cry Baby wah pedal, which were staples at the time.
Lee, on bass duties, played his Rickenbacker 4001 Jetglo bass, and, according to Lifeson, “Probably Sunn amps, or else Ampeg SVTs. But that was it. The gear was pretty streamlined, because we couldn’t afford a lot. We had the tools that worked, and we took care of them.”
Peart used the same drum kit he’d used on the previous two albums: a chrome, double bass drum Slingerland set he had bought in 1974 from Long & McQuade music store in Toronto.
Tracking was done on a Studer 24-track machine, and when everything was laid down, you would imagine they would have run out of channels, but it turns out they had “four tracks left over”, according to Lifeson and Brown, who realised this as they looked at their track sheets during a 40th anniversary Q&A. Some of the nitty-grittys of the 2112 recording sessions are lost to memory, which seems unimaginable in this day and age of detailed gear breakdowns and behind-the-scenes documentation, but as Brown wryly points out in the documentary, “We never took pictures back then. Nowadays, we take so many pictures, it's crazy.”
The scarcity of gear details doesn’t matter anyway, because the true force behind the sound of 2112 was the creative thought process that each band member brought to the sessions. For all the talk of Peart’s use of complex time signatures, polyrhythms, and technical precision, his focus was on how best to make the drums play with the vocal phrasing. He explains in the documentary ‘Classic Albums: 2112/Moving Pictures’, “[My hero] Keith Moon had a wonderful way of framing the vocals, and you can hear that it's apparent chaos, but it's not at all. It's a very carefully designed chaos that frames the essence of the song. That's something that I learned early on, to frame the vocals and occasionally come in and punch up the rhythmic basis of a vocal phrasing. I know bands that go in and record a song before the lyrics are even written, and the poor drummer has to just stay out of the way of everything in case there's some singing there. [Laughs]” Peart was always listening to the phrasing of Lee’s singing to tell if he had the tempo right so that he could play his part around it, either to frame the vocals or complement the lyrical phrasing.
Lifeson approached his guitar parts as if he were a character in the story, which is most apparent in the track “Discovery”, where the hero stumbles upon an old, abandoned guitar and begins to learn how to play it. To convey the experience, the band and Brown sonically built the world of the hero in the studio. Lifeson explains, "We wanted it to feel like we were in a cave. It's not a rock delivery. Sonically, there's lots of reverb, there's the water trickling down the creek that's inside the cave. It became more visual, cinematic in a way, and that stuck with us for a long time."
Lee’s vocal takes us into the head of the protagonist, as he sings: "What can this strange device be? / When I touch it, it gives forth a sound." Lifeson, as the protagonist, plays the guitar like a novice; no easy feat, according to him and Brown, because the effect was achieved in real time. Lifeson recalls in a documentary, “To recreate the whole idea that this was a long-forgotten instrument, we needed to detune it and then tune it up. I detuned the guitar ever so slightly and played each individual string at the beginning, and then just kind of tuned it. We didn't do any fancy editing. It was just a question of figuring out how long it should take, how much it should be detuned, and then just playing the whole piece all the way through.” For all its themes of futurism, there was a lot of reality in the mix.
Vocally, Lee was a shapeshifter, channeling the hopeful young hero and the villainous Priests of the Temples of Syrinx and switching between them with ease. Brown recalls, “It was effortless for him, and I'm sure he would disagree. He worked hard at it, but it wasn't something that we had to spend hours and hours [on], developing where the voice came from, in the chest or the head tone. That's what made it so exciting because he could just pop those notes out really easily.”
As a bassist, Lee’s contribution far exceeded just providing harmonic and rhythmic support for a song. He told Bass Player magazine, “Bass has always been a big part of the band, and I've always tried to use it as more than just the bottom of the audio spectrum. The other guys have always allowed me to be as musically pushy as I've wanted to be. I've sometimes wondered whether I should take more of a back-seat role on certain songs, but Neil, in particular, always pushes me forward. It's nice to have that kind of encouragement.”
In terms of production, both vocals and guitars were double-tracked to add weight to the sound and make stylistic choices that supported the album’s narrative. According to Brown, “Double tracking vocals was an important aspect of perspective changes, certainly in the overture and that whole side.”
Peart recounted their approach to constructing songs in a later interview with Classic Rock magazine, “There isn't any elaborate overdubbing of guitars and vocals, it's all very straightforward. For the most part, it's just two guitars, left and right, which is a typical approach and what we did back in the day. Consequently, you can turn it up, and it just sounds better and better. You hear all the instruments very clearly, and they're all loud at the same time. It really works great.”
The band’s distinctive style came about very much as a function of the fact that they were a three-piece. Lee has explained several times that in the early days of playing live, “there was no rhythm guitar, there was no synthesizer. So we developed a style of the rhythm section to be very active; we could be more active than in an average band because we had more space to fill out. And Alex developed a style where he slides right on top of all our busyness, and it kind of became our personality.”
While prog rock as a genre is known for its extensive use of synths, the band was only beginning their exploration with keyboards when they made 2112. The album opener, the now-iconic space sound, creating the atmosphere for the futuristic world in which it was set, was the result of experimentation by Lee and Hugh Syme, who did the artwork for 2112, but was also a keyboard player. Syme recalled to Classic Rock magazine, "I was in their studio in Toronto, my first ever visit to their legendarily private inner sanctum, and one thing led to another. Geddy and I were huddled on the floor with my ARP Odyssey synth, operating envelope filters and playing notes to produce the soundscape that opened the overture of 2112. It's still a very fond memory.” Brown picked the best take and then treated it with echo and reverb. According to Lee, “it was a one-off kind of combination of improvisation and playing with buttons and knobs.”
The vocal that took the longest to get right on 2112 was the now epic line ‘We Have Assumed Control’, that closes out the “Grand Finale”, which, for those still wondering, was delivered by Peart. Brown recalls, “That was Neil, live in the studio, and we were fiddling around with a delay line and a harmonizer.”
What is interesting about this part of the process is that even though 2112 was the album that became lauded for its cutting-edge technique, breadcrumbs had already been laid out in previous albums, including the unsuccessful Caress Of Steel. A good example is the line in “Grand Finale” and the effects used on it, which came directly from experimentation done during the previous album. Brown recalls in the official biography, "It was at the end of Caress Of Steel that we got a digital delay unit in the studio. We came up with a lot of good ideas, and also found out exactly how this thing worked, and what its potential was.” Those experimental sessions were saved and drawn from when it came time to work on the voice for the finale.
When 2112 was finally released on April 1, 1976, it quickly became apparent that the trio’s bold creative choice would pay off. The album became their first to break the US Top 100, peaking at #61 on the Billboard charts. It also sold faster than any of their previous albums, eventually selling over 3 million copies in the USA alone.
2112 not only changed the lives of three young musicians from Canada but also impacted music as a whole, with its blend of technical mastery, complex structures, symphonic compositions, prog rock themes, hard rock riffs, and memorable melodic hooks. Add to all that the subject matter that proudly stands up for the power of the individual, and you have a tour de force that continues to resonate with millions of listeners, even though our collective social and cultural experiences have changed so much over the last fifty years.
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