Rush frontman Geddy Lee was a party to everything the band’s career entailed, ranging from their most influential highlights to the misfires that all fans, let alone the trio themselves, would rather forget.
While being one of the most successful bands of their day, Rush navigated a path to the top littered with memorable disasters. Caress of Steel, from 1975, is perhaps the most heinous of the bunch. Although the band established what would become their trademark prog-rock formula on the record, the world wasn’t ready for it. Rush’s critical and commercial disaster was so severe that their label, Mercury, seriously contemplated dumping them.
Mercury, on the other hand, persisted, and the band’s follow-up, 2112. It was a fitting reply to the criticism and is today regarded as one of the group’s greatest efforts. Even though Caress of Steel ushers Rush into a prosperous new era, the band’s members remain realistic about the record’s nature. When he appeared on Classic Albums, late drummer Neil Peart called it as “weird as hell.” “There was a certain gelling that occurred between us in 1976,” he remarked. And Caress of Steel was strange as heck, but we liked it so much.”
Given their underlying prog ethos and their impulses to always challenge themselves as artists. Rush’s career would continue to throw forth strange moments. It ranged from the nine-minute instrumental ‘La Villa Strangiato’ to the cheesy Aimee-Mann starring ‘Time Stand Still’. ‘Double Agent’ from 1993’s Counterparts, is one of the group’s most bombastic and stadium-oriented compositions. It is one of the most colorful made by this side of Rush.
Although Rush’s 1991 album Roll the Bones is one of their greatest and brought them up to date, Counterparts feels trapped in rock’s hair-metal era at the close of the previous decade. Unfortunately, Geddy Lee considers it as one of the “goofiest songs” the band has ever written.
“‘Double Agent’ was a complete exercise in self-indulgence, and really, it was one of the last things we wrote on the record. He said,” he revealed at the Counterparts World Radio Premiere. We had meticulously structured and constructed many songs, focusing on individual notes. However, in this particular song, we wanted to let our yah-yahs fly and have a bit of a rave.
“It’s one of the goofiest songs I think we’ve ever written,” Lee continued, “but I’m quite happy with the result.” I think it’s an intriguing little bit of madness in its own right.”
