Rush vocalist/bassist Geddy Lee has discussed the nature of fandom in a new interview, and shared his thoughts on why the Canadian band have managed to retain such a passionate, loyal and invested fanbase across their career.
Lee speaks about the subject in a new interview with YouTube personality Rick Beato.
In the interview, the 72-year-old Toronto-born musician reveals that he, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer Neil Peart wanted Rush to be "the world's smallest symphony orchestra".
"That was real, we used those words," he tells Beato. "We wanted to embrace symphonic rock, but we wanted the emphasis to be on the rock. Because we weren't happy just to be proggy, just to be running up and down stairs, we needed to feel that when we wrote something complex, it had either a visual cinematic purpose, or it still rocked. And so I think that served us well over the years, that never really alienated our hardcore rock fans.
"With every shift in style, we lost fans," Lee admits, "but we gained other fans. So it was always a bit of a trade-off.
"You have all kinds of different fans. You have fans that just love a song and they want you to play that song forever, and then you change and they go, 'I don't like that band anymore because I like the band who made this song.' And then you have other fans that have invested something else, there's a different kind of investment. They thought that the three of us were interesting, and they're curious to see where we're going to go.
"When I loved a band when I was young - I listened to Genesis, Yes, Led Zeppelin even, or Van der Graaf Generator, the Strawbs, all these various bands - I never discounted a new record. If it was weird to me. I just felt, Okay, now I have to be patient and try to understand what they're saying to me now. Those are the greatest fans you could hope for in any band, because they will forgive you if you veered off the road, and then found your way back. But if you keep exploiting their trust and failing, you're not going to last very long. They're investing in you. They're investing their time and their love in your band, so if you're doing it in the name of getting better, you better fucking get better. And so we took that very seriously."
Elsewhere in the interview, Lee reveals that, at one point, he wanted to leave Rush classic and fan favourite Tom Sawyer off the band's Moving Pictures album.
"When we finished that song in the studio, we were so frustrated," he admits. "It was a very difficult song to make, difficult song to mix, every step of the recording was beset with problems. And at the end, I was so sick of that song, I didn't want to put it on the record. Can you imagine how dumb that was? Like, let's not put our most popular song on the record!"
