Rush's Early Years: Exclusive Interview with Geddy Lee & Alex Lifeson

Classic Rock Magazine has just posted a new, exclusive interview with both Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson on their TeamRock+ section of their website.

Titled Rush's Early Years, the interview discusses the 50+ year friendship of Geddy and Alex and "...the story of the band’s formative years: their school days and early adventures in music, the struggle to make it, the difficult birth of the first Rush album, the tough decision to fire original drummer John Rutsey, and how the subsequent arrival of Neil Peart – drummer and lyricist – completed the classic Rush line-up that survives to this day..."

From the article:

1973
Alex Lifeson: We made a single, a cover of Not Fade Away – based more on the Stones’ version than the Buddy Holly original. It was a song that people knew and could identify with, rather than an original Rush song. The feeling from management was: let’s do something that people will get as an introduction. I think that was bad advice. Playing that song live was great. We played it quite heavy. It sounded really good. But the recorded version was terrible.

Geddy Lee: I was so excited about doing a record and having our name on the disc, the whole deal. But to be honest, I was embarrassed by how it came out. It was so… dinky.

Alex Lifeson: It just didn’t sound like us. We were a hard rock band. We had some powerful songs – Working Man, What You’re Doing. But that record sounded so tame.

Geddy Lee: It was so disappointing. But our manager Ray Danniels put up the money for us to make an album. We had to do it cheap, recording late at night, after hours. The problem was that our producer, David Stock, was just not that great. So we had to record that album twice. The first version had Not Fade Away on it, and the whole thing sounded as tinny and shitty as the single did. So we had to redo the entire album, and that’s when Terry Brown came in as producer.

You can read the entire article via this LINK.

Thanks to Ryan Arledge for the news.

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