Rush's 2112 - The 33 1/3 Book That Wasn't/Wouldn't Be

I knew it was a long shot going in. I had not written a book of music criticism or history; my catalog is mostly fiction - romance and mystery...genres people don't always take seriously. I could tell you stories of the elite literati sniffing at my offerings at book events, but I'm already in a bad mood. 

When I saw the submissions call for the 33 1/3 book series during the lockdown, I figured why not try. It had been four years since I published a book-length work of any sort, and since my mother-in-law's sudden passing in 2016 I lost my drive. 2020 hadn't fared much better - COVID coupled with losing my father, and writing a proposal at least took my mind off the gloom.

I picked 2112 because A) uh, huge Rush fan, and B) an album such as this seemed ideal for a book. The album not only presents a story, but its place in the band's history is important in their story. 2112 was the make it or break it album, one that on paper should have ended the group, but instead elevated them. I learned recently, too, that somebody had pitched 2112 in 2014 and didn't make the cut, either. I won't speculate on why I wasn't offered a spot in the series - I don't really want to know. I've lived a brittle year, and the last thing I need is for some stranger with a music theory degree telling me that my writing sucks.

I do not intend to pitch another book, Rush or otherwise. I enjoyed the experience. I liked that I could still find pleasure in writing, even if it wasn't fiction. Who knows, I may write this book anyway. What's to stop me?

Anyway, I checked their website and there's nothing there that says I can't post my proposal. I won't, but I will share the beginning of the Introduction I had drafted. You tell me.

Actually, don't tell me. It's still brittle here.

~

The children of today will never know the pleasure of opening the Sunday newspaper to the comics section and finding an advertisement for the Columbia Record & Tape Club. Consequently, the parents of today are spared the frustration of getting rooked into a shady business model that relied heavily on a nation’s collective memory lapse to succeed.

From the late 1960s through the 1990s, Columbia Records operated the subsidiary Columbia House, a music by mail subscription program that enticed new customers through its introductory X-number of records/cassettes/CDs for a penny deal. One might find a gatefold ad in the Sunday paper, People Magazine or The National Enquirer, complete with a perforated sheet of album cover “stamps” from which one could select twelve titles to stick to a return postcard. Four to six weeks later your order arrived, along with a difficult-to-end obligation to purchase at least one new selection every month for the foreseeable future at (a severely marked-up) regular price.

So, as you whiled away the days spinning the latest releases from Queen and Aerosmith, the good folks at Columbia House had your information plugged into some algorithm that determined the next record to be sent to your house...if you didn’t place an order for something else beforehand. You’d get a postcard to warn you, but maybe it got tossed -- mistaken for junk mail -- or maybe you set it aside, thinking you had time to decide. That’s how you, the Queen and Aerosmith fan, would end up with a copy of Englebert Humperdinck’s Greatest Hits that would cost more in postage to return.

It came to pass, in the summer of 1976, that such a memory lapse helped introduce my future husband to Rush.

He was eleven years old and had had his fill of The Statler Brothers and similar crossover country-gospel acts his parents favored. He enrolled in the club to build a collection of artists he, as an aspiring rock/jazz pianist, hoped to emulate -- Elton John and The Bee Gees for two. Invariably, he missed a postcard warning and one day opened a package to reveal the default title selected for him: Rush’s 2112.

He’d never heard of Rush. He didn’t listen to the only album-oriented rock station in Jacksonville, Florida that might have played anything by this trio of long-haired, kimono-clad men from Canada. He almost slid the album onto the shelf with the albums he did want, content to write it off as an expensive reminder to be more vigilant about those postcards. One thing prevented this: the pentagram on the front cover.

Flaming red, as though forged from the fires of Hell. A branding guaranteed to chafe his strict Methodist mother’s eyes every time she entered his room. He figured that alone was worth a listen, and so he dropped the needle on side one and proceeded to fall into what we at home have coined the “Ratatouille moment.”

Now, this will make more sense if you’ve seen the Disney film Ratatouille. If you don’t want to invest the time, just go to YouTube and search Ratatouille flashback. In the scene, the antagonist food critic, Anton Ego, bites into that signature dish and is transported back in time to warm memories of Mama’s kitchen and comfort food. My future husband didn’t end up in a Pixar-ed French cottage, but rather a transcendent state of progressive rock bliss. Each note of Alex Lifeson’s guitar in the overture of the title track became a stepping stone toward a new awakening.

duh-DUH
duh-duh-duhhhh… DUH
duh-duh-duh
duh-DUH
DUH-duh

Hearing it now? Imagine scores of tweens and teens and young adults transfixed by the same interstellar march. How many of them, like this young boy growing up in a North Florida subdivision, experienced the same, then scraped up their allowances to purchase Rush’s backlist?

Quite a few, if you’ve heard the music that’s come out since. Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins claimed to have spent a year teaching himself to play the entire “2112” suite. Taylor Hawkins of the The Foo Fighters told NPR in 2016, “The overture grabbed me...It was as hard as Sabbath or Zeppelin, but the technicality was on a whole other level.” His bandmate Dave Grohl spoke of the album’s influence on him in Rolling Stone: “When I got 2112 when I was eight years old, it fucking changed the direction of my life. I heard the drums. It made me want to become a drummer.”

John Petrucci of Dream Theater would also credit 2112 as the album that changed his life. He wrote in Guitar World, “[2112] opened me up to this whole concept that rock music could be bigger than just a tune—that it could be used as a vehicle to tell a story or to transport you to some other world.”

My Ratatouille moment with Rush happened years later. Being an 80s teenager, I gravitated toward the artists who made MTV look good, and vice versa - Michael Jackson, Madonna, Prince, and the second wave British invasion of Duran Duran and Wham! I’d heard of Rush, and knew them mainly as the band my friends’ older siblings preferred.

Top 40 radio didn’t play them. Tiger Beat and 16 ignored them. I grudgingly kept MTV on through their concert-footage videos while waiting for the ones I wanted to watch. For me, Rush existed beyond the planes of the comfortable popular culture bubble in which I felt happy to live - visible and perhaps warranting an occasional glance. It wasn’t until the beginning of my relationship with the man I’d eventually marry in 1994 that Rush breached the membrane.

By then, my musical tastes had expanded into heavier bands. Yes and Led Zeppelin, for two, had replaced 80s pop on my Walkman. “You might appreciate this, then,” my fiance said one night at his home as he played side one of 2112 on his parents’ stereo.

And it happened. The shrill, sci-fi whistle and howl of the “Overture” sliding into Alex Lifeson’s guitar led me into a near 30-year admiration for Rush that has included ten live shows around the country, one pilgrimage to Toronto for RushCon, a brief co-ownership of a Rush fan message board, and one meet and greet with Alex and Geddy.

My passion for this band even eclipsed that of my husband’s, and passed along to our daughter - beginning in utero. I was six months pregnant at my first Rush show; the meet and greet photo shows me standing in between Geddy and Al, holding my rounded belly as though willing away premature labor. For the first year after she was born, a bootleg video clip of Neil Peart’s famed drum solo was the only thing that could calm her down from a crying jag.

She is a teenager now, with two Rush shows outside the womb under her belt, and learning bass guitar.

***

When Rush entered Toronto Sound Studios in February, 1976, it happened likely with feelings of bemusement mixed with impending doom. Their third album, Caress of Steel, was released in the fall of 1975 to negative reviews and sold dismally in their home country as well as in the United States (it would take nearly twenty years for the album to reach RIAA gold certification). The shows scheduled to support the album, plagued by low ticket sales, became known collectively among their inner circle as the “Down the Tubes” tour.

Their international label, Mercury Records, was also losing faith in them and determined not to lose money. It appeared that Rush, despite having avoided a sophomore slump with the modest success of Fly By Night, was eventually spiraling into oblivion. The reality of an approaching end was not lost on the band. Alex Lifeson told NPR in 2016, “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.'”

Nevertheless, Mercury conceded to offer the band one last grab for the brass ring. They allowed for one more album, provided Rush ditch the cerebral, Tolkienesque rock operettas found in the last two albums for catchy radio fare. They wanted songs that could bump Captain and Tennille off the charts.

Convinced they had nothing left to lose, Rush went into the 2112 sessions determined to deliver not a simple walk into Mordor, but the mother of all musical concepts: a futuristic suite of songs born of a new mythology, taking up an entire album side. Sure, they’d done it before on Side Two of Caress of Steel with “Fountain of Lamneth,” an epic two seconds short of twenty minutes, its sound reminiscent of early Genesis. Would Rush be so foolish as to use their last chip to pull the same stunt twice?

Narrator: They were.

While time has since softened criticism of “Fountain of Lamneth” and the rest of Caress of Steel, it wasn’t exactly what an A&R man in 1975 believed would top the Billboard 100. Follow that with another ambitious sci-fi/fantasy chronicle about a gloomy place called Megadon, where nobody knew of music and flowers and love, and one would surmise Rush intended career suicide.

They wrote and recorded this album knowing the high probability of failure.

They wrote and recorded this album knowing men in suits would blanch in despair, picturing good money circling the drain.

They released this album with the knowledge that the rest of their lives hinged on the initial public reception. They’d either bring the tragic tale of Megadon in the year 2112 to appreciative sold-out concert goers throughout the continent, or be resigned to share the classifieds, checking vacant positions against what other skills they possessed.

By all logic, the latter scenario should have occurred. 2112’s release date of April 1, 1976 - rather appropriate given their situation - would follow late March blockbusters like Led Zeppelin’s Presence, which shipped gold, and KISS’ Destroyer, which would attain gold in just over a month. How could Megadon compete with “Detroit Rock City” for listeners, much less succeed over Rush’s previous efforts?

2112 shouldn’t have worked. Instead, it peaked at the fifth spot on the Canadian Albums Charts and reached sixty-first on the U.S. Billboard LP chart - the first Rush album to enter the Top 100. A little over a year later, 2112 would outsell Rush’s three previous LPs and reach sales of half a million in the U.S. in late 1977 for RIAA Gold certification.

In 1995, 2112 was awarded Triple Platinum status, putting it second only to 1981’s Moving Pictures among the band’s top selling studio albums. In a 2012 reader’s poll conducted by Rolling Stone to rank favorite prog rock records, 2112 came in second behind Dream Theater’s Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From a Memory.

Neil Peart told Sound Magazine in 1976 that 2112 “would have to be the realization of all our hopes.” The album represented a huge gamble for the band, one that paid off handsomely.

Forty-five years later, 2112 continues to provide “all the gifts of life,” to aspiring rock musicians and fans.