By the time Rush released their seventh studio album, "Permanent Waves", they had all but secured their place in the pantheon of progressive rock deities. The three albums prior to it's release, 2112, A Farewell To Kings and Hemispheres had shown the music world that they were a band with exceptional abilities both in playing and writing and the prog rock faithful were finally coming around to Rush' way of thinking as they combined progressive writing with a heavier edge than had been heard before.
Rush was a guitar driven band as opposed to much of the material available at the time.
Bands like Genesis, Yes and King Crimson relied on heavy keyboard textures and lyrical content that bordered on "avant garde".
Rush, on the other hand, relied on scorching guitar from Alex Lifeson and the tag team of Geddy Lee on bass and Neil Peart on drums, both of whom could quite simply play their instruments better than any rhythm section out there.
They had pioneered a new segment of prog rock that could only be called "conceptual metal" for it's heavy use of distorted guitar and Geddy Lee's soaring vocals that defied understanding.
The album that immediately preceded "Permanent Waves" was "Hemispheres", an album of such technical virtuosity that even the members of the band thought their reach had finally exceeded their grasp during the recording process.
The recording of "Hemispheres" had been an exercise in futility once the music had been written and it came time to get it down on tape. The band found they couldn't actually play all the way through the song 'La Villa Strangiato' because it was just so damn hard to remember the whole thing. They wound up laying the song down in sections and then just splicing them together with producer Terry Brown playing the part of puzzle finisher.
Geddy struggled with the vocals on side one's epic opener, the Hemispheres suite because it was simply too high to do fluidly but managed to get it all down despite this fact.
He would later say that performing the song live took everything he had just to get through it.
The album wound up producing a hit for the band in the song 'The Trees' and 'La Villa Strangiato' became a perennial fan favorite and the benchmark by which all guitar players would be measured still to this day.
You weren't considered "worth your salt" as a guitarist unless you could play La Villa flawlessly which is no mean feat considering how technically demanding it is.
"Hemispheres" was a grueling experience for the band and the subsequent tour to support it left the band both physically and emotionally drained. It was that sense of exhaustion that prompted the band to take a short break before returning to the studio to record their next album.
When they finally did reconvene for writing sessions, they did so with a new goal in mind. They would leave the hyper extended epics behind in favor of songs that were more concise and focused. "Hemispheres" had taught them a valuable lesson about writing and they vowed to make the next record a bit less complicated but no less of a Rush album.
What the writing sessions produced was some of the most tightly packed prog rock that anyone had ever heard. They were Rush after all and they weren't about to start writing hit singles to appease the Gods of the record industry to whom they had given the musical equivalent of "the finger" many years ago. They were going to write Rush music but they would try to come up with something that wouldn't make them all crazy when it came time to put it on stage.
What they produced was an album of surpassing beauty but still filled with the technical brilliance they had become famous for.
The songs were more compact and concise than ever before but they still had two longer tracks that showed off their ability to write layered music that spoke of themes that were about more than just drinking, drugs and girls like so much of the music at the time.
From the opening song, 'Spirit Of Radio' it was clear that they had found a new way to present their music in a format that pleased not only themselves but also pleased radio stations as well. The mere fact that they could release a single that would rocket to the top of the charts almost immediately was proof that staying true to your principles and doing what you loved for long enough would bring the audience right to your door.
The song "The Spirit Of Radio' was actually a back handed compliment to a medium that had ignored them for years because they didn't fit a specific formula for radio play. The lyrics at the end of the song spoke right to the heart of what was wrong with radio as a business. Borrowing a snippet of the lyrical form of the Simon & Garfunkel hit 'The Sound Of Silence', Neil wrote of his frustrations with radio with the damming line. "For the words of the profits were written on the studio walls and concert halls and echo with the sound of salesman."
That was Neil pointing his finger right in the face of radio and saying essentially, "What is wrong with the music business is radio, not artists."
While on the surface, the song sounds like a love note to radio, the underlying message is one of disdain and condemnation for the greed and corruption that was still rampant in the radio business.
The next single released was "Freewill" featuring some of Neil Peart's best lyric writing and a bridge/solo section that starts with Lee playing an almost impossibly difficult riff as only he can while Peart lays down drumming that seems simple with a straight groove but gradually grows more complex as Lifeson plays one of his most blistering solos to date. Combining chord forms and his own particular brand of shredding, he once again sets the bar high for guitar solos.
The album contained two long pieces, 'Jacob's Ladder, a moody piece filled with dark imagery of storm clouds gathering and a resulting storm of intense ferocity reflected so well in the music that highlighted the lyrics and once again featured the bands sometimes bizarre but always captivating use of odd time signatures. The other extended piece, 'Natural Science', starts with a very compelling 12-string acoustic guitar intro that has Geddy singing wistfully about the tide pools one might see at the beach. It was a metaphor for how isolated we can all feel in life with the ocean of humanity just beyond our reach as we exist only in our own small tide pool. The song modulates rapidly as the band pounds into a blindingly fast 7/8 time signature. Two amazing guitar solos later and the band is coming to the climax of the tune, leaving the listener breathless. This was the net effect of more concise writing. They had managed to squeeze into one song what used to take the entire side of an album as they did on "2112" and "Hemispheres". It was the creation of what I like to call the "mini-epic", a process that had begun with 'Cygnus X-1' from "A Farewell To Kings" and had been perfected now on this new album.
There are other very high moments on an album that seemed to be all high moments.
This was a new Rush. A more compact but still virtually perfect Rush that appealed to radio stations everywhere as the first two singles blasted across the airwaves. It garnered both critical and commercial success and proved to be the way the band would approach all their future output. They could actually write singles for radio play and still remain true to their ideals of doing what they wanted to do the way they wanted to do it.
A casual conversation about what my favorite album was with my wife led me to realize that it was "Permanent Waves" despite my love of all the rest. It was the album where Rush became Rush to me. Although it was not a concept album, it's nevertheless one of only a few albums that requires me to listen to the whole thing every time because the songs just play so well against and with each other. It is an absolutely perfect album in every way for me containing so many different elements from scorching guitar to ethereal keyboard textures and as always, the wildest most precise drumming one could possibly hear. Geddy's voice, while still quite high, didn't have the screeching quality it did in his younger years. He had matured as a vocalist and found the "sweet spot" in his vocal range that allowed him to still be up high but with a much sweeter quality to his voice.
It was the best prog rock that has ever been produced as far as I am concerned, surpassing even the monster success of 2112.
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