Christopher Rush

Finding My Way: Rush and Fly By Night

Like so many of the prog rockers we have been examining, Rush started out as a would-be rhythm-and-blues band, as evidenced by the beats and lyrics of their eponymous debut, and the bandmates met at school.  That is about where the similarities end.  Unlike the boys of Genesis, who mostly grew up in well-to-do families, Geddy Lee’s father spent time in a concentration camp and died when Geddy was twelve.  His grieving process prevented from listening to music for almost a year.  After that year, Geddy was introduced to Alex Lifeson, whose Yugoslavian parents likewise moved to Toronto after World War II.  Perhaps because Rush is a Canadian band and not English like everyone else in the main wave undoubtedly labeled as “prog rock,” many critics and historians of prog ignore them altogether.

To be fair, they are also a little younger than Tull, Genesis, and the others, and their debut did not occur until the main era of prog was just about over in 1974.  Growing up listening to rock music in the late ’60s, they certainly had great musical role models to emulate as a bassist and guitarist, and they had the benefit of also listening to early Tull, Yes, Genesis, and the popular Van der Graaf Generator.  So they are somewhat on the “outside” of the core of prog rock, if such a thing exists.  That is in part to the temperament and musical affinities of their first drummer, John Rutsey, who was the de facto leader of early Rush.

Besides getting a manager, Ray Danniels (the only manager they ever had), and the acquisition of arguably the greatest drummer in rock history (a subject for another time), perhaps the most influential event that propelled Rush’s career came from an unlikely source: “In 1971, the government of Ontario made a decision that would alter the history of progressive rock.  The Canadian province dropped the drinking age from twenty-one to eighteen.”

Rush’s eponymous album, the only release with drummer John Rutsey and Lee and Lifeson composing most of the lyrics, much like Tull’s debut This Was and Genesis’s double debut albums, is enjoyable likely more for nostalgic reasons (one hesitates to say “quaint”) as the beginning point of a band that was one drummer away from becoming a whole new entity.  It is enjoyable but rather middling R&B/rock, and possibly even “Working Man” would have been forgotten had the band not kept it alive on most tours over the next forty years.

Like Tull and the Moody Blues and others, after getting R&B and cover songs mostly out of their system, Rush became a unique musical entity: a heavy/progressive rock power trio with a social conscience and literate drummer.  Gene Simmons says of Peart in those early days: “Neil is a self-professed and/or otherwise reading hound.  He likes to read.  Yeah, after the show he goes back … reads.  Anthem by Ayn Rand, Foundation trilogy by Isaac Asimov, all that stuff.”

As appropriate as the first song, “Finding My Way,” was for Rush, Fly By Night’s opening song, “Anthem,” perfectly captures the new direction musically and lyrically of Rush 2.0.  Much has been said – too much – of Neil Peart’s disproportionately short-lived interest in the objectivism of Ayn Rand (certainly disproportionate to the lasting recrimination Rush suffered), but here Peart’s belief in the need for hardwork and perseverance (and general optimism in mankind, if not individually: “Live for yourself / There’s no one else more worth living for”) is unabashedly on display.

Also on display is the almost mid-’70s requisite homage to JRR Tolkien, with “Rivendell.”  If Led Zeppelin can unashamedly sing of Tolkien’s creation, certainly Rush should be able to as well.  But those two widely disparate sources of inspiration (Rand and Tolkien) are likely only to be found in the same place on a Rush album – the fans of both radically different worldviews rarely commingle anywhere else.  Bradley J. Bizer says Peart’s Tolkienian influence is also heard in Rush’s first prog-like mini-epic, “By-Tor and the Snow Dog,” but it may just be more a sign of Peart’s diverse reading of fantasy and other speculative fiction.  Peart admits being fascinated with Chariots of the Gods around that time as well.  Regardless, for our purposes, it has taken very little time to find direct literary influences on this prog rock band.

We Have Assumed Control: Caress of Steel and 2112

Caress of Steel may be more the black sheep of the Rush canon than Rush, oddly enough, though it does begin Rush’s rest-of-career-long relationship with cover artist Hugh Syme, another important component of prog rock music.  The first side is an eclectic mix of song styles and subject matter, from the humorous “I Think I’m Going Bald” (prog rock’s sense of humor is, like our present exploration of literary influence, another underexplored component of the genre), to the grand and personal histories of “Bastille Day” and “Lakeside Park” and the next progression in prog epics, “The Necromancer,” another song with clear influences from Tolkien.  The liner notes at the end of the lyrics for “Necromancer” include the Latin tag to Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus as well (admittedly somewhat hard to read in my CD version of the album).  Perhaps it is this diversity (what critics call “lack of unity”) that has led to the album’s general disfavor.

The second side of the album is the first of Rush’s three album-side-long prog epics, “The Fountain of Lamneth,” but unlike Genesis’s “Fountain of Salmacis,” this fountain is not based on any mythological or literary inspiration directly.  Birzer suggests the protagonist of the song sloughs of his conformity after drinking the draft from “the cask of ’43,” which the protagonist says “give[s] me back my wonder,” could be a reference to The Fountainhead, published in that year. At the end of the journey, which Birzer in his zeal likens to most journeys in “the western tradition of Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Tolkien,” Popoff says “the journey has not resolved itself, that now there are more questions than answers, that the birthing at the beginning merely put the hero into a cycle of perpetual motion.”  This interpretation would likely make more sense than Birzer’s desire to cast “Lamneth” in a more traditional light, since it foreshadows much of Rush’s seeming preference for the searching itself more than the resolution.

From hindsight, of course, “Lamneth” is easily overshadowed by what comes next, though it does us well to remember there would have been no 2112 without the early experimentations of “Necromancer” and “Lamneth.”  Lee and Lifeson both highlight how important it was for them to experiment with longer forms of composition, though Lee says in retrospect it was “kind of absurd. … And I think there are some beautiful moments, but a lot of it is ponderous and off the mark.”  Says Lifeson, “You smile and shake your head and you go, ‘What was I thinking?’”

2112 is many things to many people.  For Rush, it was a last-ditch effort to create the kind of music they wanted to create, flying in the face of the critical, financial, and touring disappointments from Caress of Steel.  For many critics, it was a justification of the disdain for the atypical music from the late-to-the-prog-party Canadian trio.  ’60s British counterculture insider Barry Miles was one of several vocal antagonists to Peart’s tribute to Rand.  As Weigel puts it, “he (Miles) had read up on Ayn Rand and was utterly offended that Rush had written a paean to her with 2112.”  For many (if not most) fans, the opening synthesized outer-space sounds of the Overture leading into the syncopated hits and the driving full intro are the very reason they love music.

Lee says, “2112 was part of a progression to us. … And we had this concept in our minds that we love progressive music, but we also love to rock.  We like The Who as much as we liked Genesis and Yes, and to us, The Who were still a progressive band even though they were more of a hard rock band. … We wanted to be the world’s most complicated thee-piece band.”  Lee continues in that section of Popoff’s work to describe their evolution beyond an R&B band and even beyond the by-then fairly static conception of prog rock, which they clearly loved, into the heavy rock band most evident by Counterparts.  Peart seems to have spent much of the next thirty years downplaying the significance of Randian philosophy on himself and his lyrics, and he certainly disavows the entire spectrum of political labels foisted upon him following 2112: “I like noble virtues, the difference between right and wrong.  I also don’t like people telling me what to do. … You have to make your own decisions if you want your ideals to come across. … I’m against socialism because again it stifles the individual.  It tries to wrap him up not letting him think for himself.”

Most see the story of 2112 influenced by Anthem, and Birzer adds Zamyatin’s We.  For Peart, the story of individuality and freedom triumphing over repressive government (especially religious oppression) is represented by what Popoff calls “the lurid red pentagram,” which “had nothing to do with Satan, representing instead the creativity-suffocating authorities of the tension-filled tale,” with the naked fellow representing man at his most basic, most needy, ready for something new.  2112’s ending is usually interpreted optimistically, which is fitting for how successful the band came following the album’s reception among the people who actually paid to listen to the album, the fans.

All the Same We Take Our Chances: A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres

As the ’70s and prog rock were (semi-)officially ending, Rush took the lessons and successes of recent albums and, in a sense, doubled-down with effectively a double album spread out over a couple of years.  Continuing the pervasive Rush themes of anti-authoritarianism found in “Bastille Day,” “Anthem,” and many more (and after), the title track of A Farewell to Kings clears up any doubt listeners may have whether “2112” was about exchanging one oppressive government for another.  As good as the opening track is, and Rush was always good at setting the tone of their albums with the opening tracks, the real treat of the album is “Xanadu,” the longest non-side-length song in their canon except “Necromancer,” and it is undoubtedly a much better song than “Necromancer.”  This is not to say the source material, Coleridge’s “Kublai Khan” is better than Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, of course; rather, the band has simply matured in all facets of their musical craft.

“Closer to the Heart,” fan-favorite and the closest Rush gets to a traditional pop-rock radio-friendly hit, echoes lyrics and sentiment from the opening track; “Cinderella Man,” another optimistic anthropological song from Lee, is based on the Frank Capra movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town; and “Madrigal” is effectively Rush’s last “medieval prog rock” song, with their own twist.  The close of the album is, of course, the first half of Cygnus X-1, “The Voyage.”  The music of this half is likely more memorable than the lyrics, the opposite being true of book two kicking off Hemispheres.

Cygnus X-1 together is the longest Rush story except for Clockwork Angels, their grand finale, with the diverse four-part “Fear Trilogy” a close second.  As with the odd pairing of Rand and Tolkien on Fly By Night, Cygnus X-1 pairs Cervantes and Nietzsche.  The vehicle the traveler uses to embark his mission is the Rocinante, like Don Quixote’s steed; and the gods at war in book two are Apollo and Dionysus.  Birzer quotes Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy at length, as well as interviews from Peart indicating his affinity and lifelong commitment to a Nietzschean philosophy.  The conclusion of the epic is that logic and love must join together in a “perfect sphere” to unite both heart and mind (as well as god and man) in perfect balance.

The second half of the album (it is difficult for me to think of it as the “second side,” considering I first heard most Rush albums on compact disc) is another disparate collection of quintessential Rush: Peart autobiography in “Circumstances,” tongue-in-cheek political satire in “The Trees,” and virtuoso playing in the band’s first instrumental, “La Villa Strangiato.”  Surely most Rush fans wished the boys had indulged in more “exercises in self-indulgence,” as its subtitle jokingly calls it.

Everybody Got to Elevate From the Norm: Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures

If 2023 has taught us anything in the music world, it is that fans should “never say ‘never’”; a year that saw new releases from the Rolling Stones and Beatles should show us that even though Neil Peart is no longer with us and Rush officially disbanded five years ago, one should never give up hope.  I say that mainly for myself, as I was originally planning on opening this final section with “Now that the Rush corpus is completed” – but “never say ‘never.’”  With the Rush corpus (temporarily) completed, fans tend to categorize their output in different ways, often by year, by major sound style, or by subject matter.  Birzer, like most, posits Rush as its own entity, then collates the remaining ’70s albums together, most of the ’80s albums together except for Presto, joining it to Roll the Bones and Counterparts, leaves Test for Echo as its own era, and, understandably, unites the remaining Rush albums following Peart’s hiatus and personal rebirth into one final group.  Though it is not a matter worth much debate, I disagree mildly concerning the ’80s albums: I posit Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures should go with the earlier albums as the culmination of the band’s mainline prog era (as I did here for this paper), and Signals through Hold Your Fire is the band’s “second wave style” of prog, much like Tull’s folk trilogy is still prog rock but of a different kind than the more obvious concept albums from Thick as a Brick through Too Old.  I agree that these ’80s albums are united in their clever multi-layered album titles, but musically the first two seem different (maybe it is just the synthesizer that defines the era for me).  Rush’s Presto does feel like it is cut from a different cloth than the rest of the decade’s material, indeed.

Forgive me if this leans into hyperbole, but the opening of Permanent Waves is possibly the most invigorating opening to any rock album of all time.  The audience reaction in every live album since 1980 should be proof enough.  Though many paeans to the radio are at times tongue-in-cheek, like “The Spirit of Radio” here, Queen’s “Radio Ga Ga” for another example, at the heart of them is an unconquerable optimism despite the growing commercialism that is often noted for ending Prog rock and the “glory days” of the ’60-’70s music scene.  Peart ends this with a clever, if not wistful, updating of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sounds of Silence,” itself a critique of the growing commercialism of society and the music industry fifteen-some years earlier (from Peart’s perspective).

The album continues Peart’s lifelong agon with religion in “Freewill,” which also incorporates Peart’s readings of Jung.  Oddly, though not so odd considering Peart’s penchant for unusual pairings, the album follows this with “Jacob’s Ladder,” which is clearly an Old Testament allusion (which Peart surely knows).  Lyrically, the song is ambiguous enough to forestall outright antagonism to religion, but it does lean toward a more humanistic solution to wisdom-seeking.  Perhaps “Babel” would have been a better title, but Peart likely knew that “story” ended in confusion.

“Entre Nous” may be influenced by The Fountainhead, or perhaps Peart’s love of reading in general, as the second line “Each one’s life a novel” may imply.  One could have wished Peart had taken this open-minded approach to religious ideas (and people) more, but such is life.  “Different Strings” continues the same theme of “Entre Nous,” though it ends with Peart’s standby atheism: “All there really is: the two of us.”  “Natural Science” began life as a musical adaptation of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” but Peart found it too out of place with the general theme of the album, and while that does not do this paper any good, it certainly served the album well to shift into the song’s eventual tripartite exploration of nature, science, and integrity.

Moving Pictures opens with perhaps Rush’s most beloved song, and another eventual encore staple that always brought cheers from the audience, in “Tom Sawyer,” whose literary influences should go without saying.  It is fitting for this song to be, if you will allow the expression, the real “anthem” for Rush, a band whose “mind is not for rent / To any god or government / Always hopeful yet discontent / [Who] knows changes aren’t permanent / But change is.”  Surely that encapsulates what Rush was about: literary-influenced individualism.

“Red Barchetta” was inspired “by a 1973 short story by Richard Foster” entitled “A Nice Morning Drive,” though Peart changed the type of car from the story.  Peart has discussed it in multiple interviews, even meeting the author toward the end of his (Peart’s) life.  “YYZ” is another masterful instrumental, and “Limelight” is another Peart autobiographical song, somewhat ironically making him and the band even more famous from the rousing success of this, perhaps their greatest album.  The song lyrically anticipates the next song, “The Camera Eye,” and reflects on the live album released after 2112, All the World’s a Stage and the Bard’s famous line from As You Like It.

Birzer describes “The Camera Eye” as “a John Dos Passosesque view of two cities, New York’s Manhattan and London,” which Peart mentions in bonus material on the 2112 blu-ray release.  It is certainly the last long song of Rush’s career (to date).  “Witch Hunt,” he says, was inspired by Clark’s The Ox-Bow Incident, which seems feasible enough.  “Vital Signs” is a preview of the more synthesizer/technological sounds coming in the heart of Rush’s ’80s output, which is likely why Birzer links Signals to these two albums.  Perhaps it is fitting to end our examination of Rush’s literary-influenced prog phase of their career with “Vital Signs,” as Peart says “Leave out the fiction.”  Coincidence, perhaps, but the band does shift into different directions, though they never stay away from Peart’s reading-inspired lyrics for long.

After quoting interviews in which Peart mentioned Dos Passos, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Dickens, Hardy, TS Eliot, and Frost, Birzer lists several other authors mentioned by Peart and others in interviews and other places throughout Rush’s career: Hawthorne, Melville, Henry James, Wilkie Collins, Wilde, Woolf, Sinclair Lewis, Dreiser, Cather, Edward Abbey, Fitzgerald, Lieber, CS Lewis, Pirsig, Stegner, Pynchon, Barth, Tom Robbins, and Kevin J. Anderson.  Surely this list is inexhaustive.  Though perhaps we could have wished he spent more time with authors before the nineteenth century, especially more Christian authors like Eliot and Lewis, Neil Peart, like Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel in Genesis, is a resplendent proof for our quest for literary influences on the lyrics of prog rock.  Surely much of the timeless quality of Rush’s output, much of what helped them to “elevate from the norm” of an already markedly intellectual musical genre, is Neil Peart’s adult lifetime of reading almost every genre from poetry to fiction to philosophy, a lifetime of reading reflected in his eye and in his lyrics.

Bibliography

Birzer, Bradley J. Neil Peart: Cultural Repercussions. WordFire Press, revised 2nd ed., 2022.

Popoff, Martin. Anthem: Rush in the ’70s. ECW Press, 2020.Weigel, David. The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Progressive Rock. New York: Norton, 2017.

Christopher Rush

“And I’ve finally found a place to call my own”: From Genesis to Revelation and Trespass

The early days of Genesis set the scene for this band’s unusual dual nature, in that they appear to mimic typical trends of Progressive Rock, yet they do it in their own unique way.  Just as many future band mates find each other at school (seemingly at some sort of art college, where like-minded aesthetics-driven individuals already predisposed toward non-traditional workforce occupations and hobbies tend to congregate), the core of Genesis (Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, and Mike Rutherford, along with initial guitarist and driving force Anthony Phillips) met at Charterhouse School, what the British call a public school (what we call a private school).  The difference for Genesis, then, is they met at effectively a “posh” school for children of well-to -do British society, unlike many others (Jethro Tull, for example, formed from a core of grammar school students Ian Anderson, John Evan, and Jeffrey Hammond).  This imbricates with another initial difference for Genesis, in that they met each other while still minors, and most other Prog rock bands met each other when at a college or in their twenties.  Genesis’s music matures while the band members themselves are maturing into adulthood.

Another Prog rock distinction of Genesis, as their name implies, is their religious … “affinity” is too strong a word; perhaps “acceptance”? “tolerance”? (if we could dissociate it from its unfortunate connotations in our day).  Anthony Phillips says, “we weren’t particularly religious, we just liked the hymns and tunes.”  They certainly do present religious themes and allusions more positively and more frequently than most of their Prog compatriots, at least, and their debut album, From Genesis to Revelation, is a good example.  While it is still likely true (forty years on) that many Genesis fans are “Invisible Touch”-era fans, and may not know that Gabriel-era Genesis albums exist, it is just as likely that many Gabriel-era Genesis fans do not know From Genesis to Revelation even exists, especially as it technically belongs to their first manager Jonathan King and was not re-released in the anniversary Genesis box sets back in 2007.  While the album sounds very much like a juvenile outing, Peter Gabriel’s voice is a foreshadowing of greatness to come (much like the first time James Cagney appears on-screen in The Public Enemy, and one instantly recognizes what a real actor looks like).

The album is lyrically influenced by the Bible, as its name indicates as well as the general proto-concept-like nature of the album, telling a rough musical version of sweeping themes of the Bible (more or less – no verses or characters are quoted, really, but the general impression of Biblical allusion and influence is inescapable).  Phillips says the interlinking music to unify it as a concept album came from the hymns, especially J. Herbert Howell hymns, they all loved.  Giammetti says Gabriel’s reference to the “happiness machine” in “Am I Very Wrong?” comes from Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine, which fits with what we know of the band’s general love of literature, though no one seems to know who wrote the lyrics for that song specifically.

Giammetti reinforces their early love of science fiction during the focused writing of Trespass (as Genesis, fully committed to being professional musicians, moves to their third drummer, John Mayhew, before Phil Collins): “The only moments of distraction involved walks in the surrounding countryside and reading sci-fi novels and books on mythology (which would greatly influence their lyrics).”  Giammetti further says the album features “literary references to movements such as Surrealism and authors like J.R.R. Tolkien and Lewis Carroll (for the fairy tale themes) and William Blake (for the visionary aspect).”  It would be wonderful if he quoted the band members to verify this, but he does not.

More helpfully, though, Tony Banks says of his composition “White Mountain” that “Both Fang and another character in the lyrics, One Eye (already mentioned in ‘One-Eyed Hound’ [unreleased single in From Genesis to Revelation days]) come from the children’s book White Fang by Jack London.”

Even by this early stage in their development, Genesis is recognized as “one of the country’s ‘thinking’ bands,” says Michael Watts in a Melody Maker article from January 23, 1971.  Surely the lyrics are a significant factor in that assessment, and even if direct or obvious literary allusions were not replete, the atmosphere Genesis songs creates from their outset distinguishes them as a literary band.  Gabriel, describing them in that same Melody Maker article, says “I see the band as sad romantics, you see.”  Mike Barnard, temporary Genesis guitar player between Anthony Phillips and Steve Hackett, says he and Gabriel would “tour the Lake District” between tour gigs at this time.  Surely that is proof of the Romantic poets’ influence on fledgeling lyricist Peter Gabriel.

“Can you tell me where my country lies?”: Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Selling England By the Pound, and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

Genesis hits the jackpot with drummer number four, Phil Collins, and guitarist number three, Steve Hackett (not ignoring that Tony Banks and Mike Rutherford had been playing guitar on their albums from the beginning), and in the next few years create four unique, exquisite albums not just for Prog rock but for all music.  Nursery Cryme, especially because of the menacing cover art from Paul Whitehead, establishes a darkling Britishness and experimentation that definitely comes through in the music and lyrics.  Giammetti says “The Musical Box” is inspired by Oscar Wilde and Peter Gabriel’s Victorian mansion in which he grew up, with “Harold the Barrel” likewise displaying a Dickensian flair.”  Steve Hackett offers more specific literary influence for “Seven Stones,” confirming the eclectic reading habits of his new lead singer, saying, “Pete was interested in the ideas he had read in the I Ching, so the lyrics were influenced by The Book of Changes.”  Tony Banks corroborates Giammetti’s earlier generalization of the band being influenced by mythology for the final song on the album, “The Fountain of Salmacis”: “The lyrics are based on the myth of Salmacis and Hemaphroditus.”  Mike Barnes specifies this is the version in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, book four, and there is no reason to discredit this, considering their Charterhouse education and corroborated experience with mythology.

Foxtrot opens with what I have been telling students for years is Peter Gabriel’s reference to Keats’s great poem “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” but Giammetti and Barnes both credit Tony Banks with writing the lyrics, influenced by Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and the Marvel comics character The Watcher.  As deeply as that wounds my heart to learn, at least there is still a definite literary influence (and mild assuagement from the discovery that Genesis members read Marvel comics).

This album’s lighter fare, “Get ‘Em Out By Friday,” bears influence of science fiction, especially in the ending of “Genetic Control” requiring all people be no taller than four feet to enable smaller, more profitable government housing.  Gabriel says, “I tried to put some sort of Dickensian feel into this song,” which may at least tenuously count as literary influence here.

Many sources historical, literary, and religious influenced “Supper’s Ready,” Genesis’s great Prog epic (in the shorter category of single album-side epics such as “Tarkus” and “2112,” as opposed to entire concept albums such as A Passion Play and The Lamb).  Though Gabriel says the ending is a “mixture of Christian and Pagan symbolism,” I have no qualms tearing up every time I hear it in sound theological anticipation of a future historical truth when “the supper of the Mighty One” occurs, whether eggs are served or something else.

Of Selling England By the Pound Giammetti says “the usual references to mythology and literature are relegated to a marginal role (albeit still present) in favor of historical references and social comment,” which is certainly in keeping with other de rigueur Prog rock inspirations.  This dynamism from Genesis comes at a time, says Giammetti, when Prog rock is starting to lose its way: ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery he calls “passable,” Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans “heavy-going,” Rick Wakeman’s solo Six Wives of Henry VIII “indigestible,” and Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play “pretentious,” all of which “confirm that delusions of grandeur had hijacked the musical genre which seemed to be merely running its course and becoming increasingly unpalatable….”  Little wonder new sounds like Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s Birds of Fire, and Fripp & Eno’s No Pussyfooting being so popular, and Glam rock peaking at the time as well.

In contrast to all these, Giammetti has nothing but superlatives for this album, with which I agree.  Despite the contemporary satirical nature dominating the album, some literary influences and understandings affect the album, evidenced in Gabriel’s alliterative humor throughout the lyrics, surely influenced by his love of Spike Milligan and the Goon Show.  The most overt literary influence is in “The Cinema Show,” written by Tony and Mike, in which the romantic overtures of Juliet and Romeo (the literary influence here should be obvious) are followed by recollections of father Tiresias, inspired either by several classical authors or, as Giammetti says, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.  Either is credible.

As a postscript to this album, Gabriel remembers the cover artist, Betty Swanwick, as “a little bit like Miss Marple or an[other] Agatha Christie character.”  Even if few literary allusions appear on the socio-critical album, it seems Gabriel was often seeing and interpreting his world through literary lenses.

The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway would take its own paper to unpack all of the literary and cultural references throughout Genesis’s double-album concept magnum opus.  Rutherford had proposed their concept album be based on The Little Prince, but Gabriel insisted on composing an almost all-new epic story, and as a twenty-four-year-old British public school grad, who better to tell the story of a Puerto Rican graffiti artist in New York City?  Says Gabriel, “The story is like The Pilgrim’s Progress but on the streets of New York.  So it’s a spiritual journey into the soul but there’s quite a tough world feeding the imagery.  One of the influences was a film called El Topo by Alejandro Jodorowsky.”  Steve Hackett agrees with the spiritual backdrop of this story, reminiscent of “Supper’s Ready,” in that there is “something about the lyric that owed a bit to Dostoevsky – the redemptive qualities of those journeys and sojourns.”  While Hackett sees positive spiritual messages in the album, he also recalls how the album and the subsequent tour, and the rest of the band agrees, was a miserable, destructive experience, foreshadowing Roger Waters’s single-mindedness of The Wall and its effect on Pink Floyd.

On a positive literary note, The Lamb surely displays Gabriel’s affinity for the Romantic poets, echoing Keats with “The Lamia” and Wordsworth in the opening line of “The Colony of Slippermen” with “I wandered lonely as a cloud.”

After Gabriel and Hackett departed Genesis, despite early hurts, all members of the band have since reunited both for concerts and interviews, and all of which have seemed more than cordial.  Though they all shifted away from Prog rock, their commitment to literary influences has continued.  For example, Hackett’s solo album Voyager has a song “Narnia,” surely based on the stories of C.S. Lewis.  Gabriel’s “Rhythm of the Heat” was based on his reading of Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, and “Mercy Street” is clearly a response to Anne Sexton’s poem “45 Mercy Street.”

“It’s only knock and know all, but I like it”

The members of Genesis were (and presumably still are) well read, and their engagement with fiction, poetry, religion, and philosophy (not to mention the images, environments, history and political ideas of their British world) has resonated throughout their unique careers, especially during their Progressive rock days.  Steve Hackett observes, rather poignantly, that this literary aspect of Genesis may have been a barrier to any major success during that time: “If you read the classics, that was a chance you’d enjoy what Genesis did.  The criticism was that it sounded like it had been looked up in books rather than it being a personal experience.”  If I may end with a Gabriel line from “Back in N.Y.C.” in The Lamb, “Ah, you say I must be crazy,” but that is a significant part of the reason why I love Prog-era Genesis: I have read the classics and the Romantic poets and sci-fi authors that inspired these fellows, and their music is, despite what those critics say, very much a personal experience.

Bibliography

Barnes, Mike. A New Day Yesterday: UK Progressive Rock & The 1970s. London: Omnibus Press, 2020.

Giammetti, Mario. Genesis 1967-1975: The Peter Gabriel Years. Kingmaker Publisher, 2020.

Weigel, David. The Show That Never Ends: The Rise and Fall of Progressive Rock. New York: Norton, 2017.

An Annotated Discography

Christopher Rush

Early Days, 1968-70: This Was, Stand Up, Benefit

Like many if not most mid-’60s British bands, Jethro Tull began in a musical admixture of upstart American blues and early rock, European classical heritage, jazz, skiffle, folk, and whatever one was supposed to do about the Beatles.  Also like most British bands of the era, Jethro Tull was not the first incarnation of the group nor did its personnel lineup stabilize until many years into fame (though “lineup stability” for Jethro Tull is a complicated notion).  Each of these first three albums featured different lineups, if not formally: John Evan and David Palmer may not have been “official” members on Benefit, but they contributed significantly (David Palmer also contributes in minor ways to the first two albums … I said it was complicated).

This Was is easy to call atypical Jethro Tull, looking backward at fifty years of output, but “typical” Jethro Tull is just as complicated an issue as who is in Jethro Tull.  It is clearly a heavily blues-inspired album, which is what Mick Abrahams wanted Jethro Tull to be, but it was not what Ian Anderson wanted, and history clearly shows who won that debate.  Many of the songs are effectively community property of the British blues scene at the time, many numbers are instrumentals, and Ian Anderson did not write the lyrics to many of the other songs, so identifying influences here is rather fruitless.

Stand Up sounds now like a transition from the mandatory blues origin to what established Tull was going to be, though that is also from the benefit, so to speak, of hindsight.  While some blues influences remain, notably on “A New Day Yesterday,” a song not-too-subtly comments on the band’s new direction, it is still an album of a band finding its footing, and many of the songs are about Anderson and the new group discovering that direction.  That is not to say it is autobiographical, but there is, still, very little literary influence on this not-quite-yet progressive rock album.  Glenn Cornick, fifty years later, indicates much of the album is autobiographical in a different way: “Half of Stand Up was about Ian’s family….”  One notable future live favorite song, “Bourée,” “was the first recording clearly to indicate Anderson’s interest in music from earlier historical periods,” which will be helpful for the band’s forthcoming musical and lyrical influences.

Benefit is another unusual album marked by growing pains: pressures of recording and touring now as a headline act instead of a supporting act, personnel burnout, and Anderson’s development as composer and lyricist.  Many fans seem to enjoy it more for the songs that are not technically on it: “Sweet Dream,” “17,” “The Witch’s Promise,” and “Teacher.”  Glenn Cormick says the autobiographical tendencies from Stand Up are still on Benefit.  Ian Anderson confirms this on songs such as “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me” and “To Cry You a Song.”  Audiences seem to assume the non-autobiographical songs are the ones about Anderson (the future cover paintings on albums all featuring miscreants looking just like Anderson did not help that misconception throughout the ’70s.)  Other lyrics, such as in “Play in Time,” Anderson flat out reviles as jejune.  For our purposes, as fine as it is, Benefit does not live up to its name.

Concept Days, 1971-73: Aqualung, Thick as a Brick, A Passion Play

Aqualung is undoubtedly Tull’s “breakout” album, many fans’ favorite, and greatly misunderstood, either by fans or by Anderson himself.  Despite more personnel turnover, Tull begins the ’70s with a masterpiece, which may or may not be a concept album.  Side one, called “Aqualung” on the album, features an almost Chaucerian cavalcade of characters, if the Tabard Inn had been in the red light district.  More importantly, we finally have actual literary influence on the lyrics: Anderson paraphrases “a line from the introduction of Robert Burns’ [sic] poem ‘The Holy Fair,’” foreshadowing Anderson quoting Burns on Heavy Horses.  “Mother Goose” references the eponymous character and Long John Silver, but since Anderson admitted he had never read Stevenson and the no nursery rhyme characters appear in the song, it is likely just Anderson’s general awareness of things that inspired this song over direct literary influences.  (The newspaper album cover for Thick as a Brick has a reference to Silver, a parrot, and “Jim Lad,” so perhaps Anderson was recalling the Disney movie more than the novel itself.)

The second half, “My God,” is a fascinating half of an album as a Christian to listen to, but if Scott Nollen is correct, it does not help us here at all: “The material on the album’s second half resulted from Anderson’s personal observations about organized religion, not from any deliberate bookish study. … Anderson proves that he came to the same conclusion as did Freud and [Bertrand] Russell … without reading any of their famous works….”  That ends that.  Though this quest for the literary influences on Prog Rock may not be as fruitful as I had initially hoped, perhaps it will lead to a more worthwhile exploration in another course about the relationship between Prog Rock and religion.  This is also the first Tull album that suffers, in a sense, from the medium limitations of vinyl albums: “Lick Your Fingers Clean” was supposed to end the album but cut for time; now on the cd and digital releases, the song reshapes the album with a much more upbeat and self-effacing ending as opposed to the downcast “Wind-up.”

Thick as a Brick is Anderson’s response to those who considered Aqualung a concept album: here is a genuine Tull concept album, albeit a parody of the form, complete with newspaper and persona singing the song (considered at times two only because of the limitations of the medium – the liner notes treat the whole thing as one poem by Gerald Bostock), all as a satirical sendup of British education.  Barrie Barlow, who had played with Anderson and Evan in pre-Tull days replaces Clive Bunker on drums, either solidifying “classic Tull lineup pt. 1” until John Glascock replaces Jeffrey Hammond on bass for Too Old through Stormwatch.  Lyrically, TaaB is complex, perhaps too much so, but the album really is an impressive unity between the music and the lyrics, certainly more than any Tull album before and possibly since, depending on how one views Songs from the Wood.  More than Aqualung, TaaB fulfills the multi-movement suite typical of Prog Rock, and this is likely better understood today in disc and especially digital versions of the album that break the sections down into more accessible sections.

The song features a number of allusions to literary types, if we can consider comic book heroes such as Superman and Robin “literary,” and it references poets as a social class, though that does not give us much direct assistance.  Anderson/Bostock references Biggles, from the British childrens’ book series, though it may be a stretch to call that a literary influence, since it is possible Anderson is mentioning it the same way I might reference to TeleTubbies or Bluey, only as a kids’ pop culture thing I have vaguely heard about without any specific knowledge.  Likewise, a reference to the Boy Scout Manual cannot be considered for our purposes as an “influence.”  The album cover and newspaper are also rife with clever allusions to general knowledge, such as a “silent prayer” by Billy Graham to close the broadcast day of BBC2 and Alaister Crowley as a special guest on the program “Bible Stories,” though it is, again, hard to call these literary influences.  The song features brilliant lyrical moments, as Anderson often does, such as the “wise men” not knowing how it “feels” to be “thick as a brick,” cleverly combining wisdom, feelings, and intellect, but the search continues for major literary influences.

A Passion Play is a somewhat hastily salvaged album from terrible experiences in Switzerland following the success of TaaB.  Whereas Deep Purple turned their Swiss discomfort into the incomparable Machine Head, Tull scrapped most of their Swiss creativity until decades later for the rarities album Nightcap and the 40th anniversary box set of Passion Play.  Like TaaB, Passion Play is a Tull concept album, but unlike TaaB it takes itself seriously (excepting the beast fable smack in the middle), which is likely why critical response to this is less positive, despite its criticism of religion.  The album is intelligently structured, using classical epic ring composition or chiastic structure, as the songs mirror each other until the turning point of “The Hare that Lost its Spectacles.”  The album opens with dying heartbeat sounds and closes with reborn heartbeat sounds, mixing the classical epic chiasmus with the its namesake of a medieval passion play thematically.  Rolling Stone writer Stephen Holden recognized “a pop potpourri of Paradise Lost and Winnie the Pooh, among many other literary resources,” but that only returns us to what we are trying to avoid, merely recognizing literary similarities in the lyrics.  The song asks “how does it feel to be in the play?” but that does not prove Anderson is conjuring up his inner Jacques from As You Like It.  There is, though, at the end, the line “Flee the icy Lucifer.  Oh he’s an awful fellow!”  Aside from the Andersonian downplaying of the seriousness of perdition, if this is not a reference to Dante’s depiction of Lucifer trapped in ice in the Divine Comedy, I would be astounded, for who else conceives of Lucifer as icey?

Eclectic Days, 1974-76: War Child, Minstrel in the Gallery, Too Old…

War Child is an odd, eclectic album, sandwiched among four very unified albums, distinct from Passion Play in part due to the band’s poor reception of critics’ poor reception.  Even though the album is structurally distinct from Passion Play, it is thematically similar: songs discuss mortality, morality, femininity, masculinity, VD, tea, musical critics and other beasts, patriotism, and more.  Lyrics even allude to life’s “passion play,” as a couple of songs were salvaged and repurposed from the disastrous days before Passion Play, so it is a bit arbitrary to designate War Child into a new “era” of Tull albums.  The cover picture, central to many other Prog Rock bands and album meanings, here presents Anderson’s “jester” persona, which becomes a staple of albums and concerts for several years (“Back-Door Angels” has the lines “Think I’ll sit down and invent some fool / some Grand Court Jester” – most likely this is, at least in part, typical Andersonian religious criticism.  For someone who claims to be an atheist, he spends a lot of time writing, singing, and thinking about religion).  While featuring the first overt nods to his homeland of Scotland that will be more developed in Stormwatch, lyrically, on the whole, it is hard to discern any meaningful literary inspiration here.

Minstrel in the Gallery is an entry somewhere on that ambiguous Venn diagram of concept album, thematically unified album, frame story, or just Prog Rock-era multi-movement suite.  It also features the first overt reference to mythology in “Cold Wind to Valhalla.”  As discussed earlier, calling even overt references to mythology “literary influence” is a stretch, at least until we get to Genesis.  “This is based on old folklore,” says Anderson. “In Norse mythology Valhalla was a huge afterlife hall of the slain, overseen by the god Odin, to which Valkyries took warrior heroes when they died.”  So Anderson has a working knowledge of Norse myth, at least.  The rest of the songs are primarily fabrications of Anderson’s creativity.  We are well beyond his need for lyrical autobiography, and nothing else on the album can be considered literarily inspired.

Too Old to Rock’n’Roll… finally sees the arrival of John Glascock and the “classic” Tull lineup for many, or at least its final phase.  It is also a candidate for the aforementioned Venn diagram, as perhaps an obvious concept album, though no one seems to think of it that way, or perhaps a heavily unified album, but it was also originally intended to be a stage musical that somehow transformed into a comic strip illustrated by Dave Gibbons (of Watchmen fame) and a television special.  When Anderson sang “Nothing is Easy,” he was not kidding.  Much of the album is more Anderson observations of real life, teevee, and car racing, but side one ends with an acknowledgment of literary and musical influences.  Anderson says of “From a Dead Beat to an Old Greaser” “the two characters are archetypal social stereotypes from my formative years – the dead beat, in other words the kind of Jack Kerouac follower and imitator, … someone who is into jazz and poetry and whatever but is just fantisising [sic] and has become a bit of a down-and-out; and the old greaser who is the rock‘n’roller motorbike guy. … It’s a sort of Jethro Tull three-minute quickie Waiting for Godot.”  Though we may have to collate his reference to Beat Poets with the general references to Mother Goose and mythical characters, we will gladly take his mention of Beckett’s play as a direct literary influence.

Folk Days, 1977-79: Songs from the Wood, Heavy Horses, Stormwatch

The three final Tull albums of the ’70s are, in a sense, their own world, both in their musical style of “folk rock” as significantly distinct from the already-diverse Tull sounds before them, and as, for many, the apex of “classic Tull.”  Songs from the Wood can also be added to the Venn diagram: I have never heard or read about it being considered a concept album, but the album bears great unity in lyrics and music.  It is also delightfully optimistic, containing very little cynicism, satire, or even sorrow.  Anderson had moved to the countryside during the band’s long hiatus from touring after throat surgery, which clearly influenced the content of this album, but more importantly here, Tull’s new manager, Jo Lustig, gave “a gift to Ian Anderson of a 1973 book titled ‘Folklore, Myths and Legends of Britain,’ a collection of stories and essays about ancient superstitions, festivals, places, and creatures.”  Anderson says of this book,

When I read it it certainly gave me thoughts about the elements of characters and stories that played out in my songwriting for the Songs From the Wood [sic] album, which then carried on over to the Heavy Horses album, and even beyond that into the Stormwatch album.  It wasn’t the only reference I had, it was just something new for me to learn from.  Other than a smattering of knowledge from history lessons or hearsay I didn’t really have a definitive literary guide to that world until Jo gave me this book.

That book taught Anderson about Jack-in-the-Green, but other songs, such as “Cup of Wonder,” feature “a lot of historical and pagan references here, resulting from my delving into our history as an island nation, the forces of religion and primitive beliefs, and so on.”  Anderson, unfortunately, does not list the specific sources of those historical and pagan references.

Heavy Horses is a very natural follow-up to Songs from the Wood (at its release Anderson referred to it as “Songs from the Wood, Part II, plus a little more Jethro Tull”), though it is also noticeably distinct.  Nollen distinguishes them: “Songs from the Wood can be situated primarily within an English Elizabethan influence, Heavy Horses borrows more from 18th-century Scottish music.”  It is also darker, with Stormwatch the darkest (and saddest) of the trilogy.  The eponymous track is a superlative return, in more concise form, to the multi-movement suite so characteristic of Prog Rock (a label, we should admit, Jethro Tull abjured), though it does embody the album’s darker tone, with the days of the plow horse dwindling with the advent of the tractor.  In fact, animal themes dominate the lyrics.  The bonus tracks on the 40th anniversary release show this could have been an excellent double album, as most of the associated recordings could fit the album perfectly, along with most of the bonus tracks from Songs from the Wood.  At least we have them now.

For our purposes, we also have a long-awaited jackpot of literary influences on Anderson’s lyrics.  “Moths,” says Anderson, “was actually inspired by the John Le Carré novel The Naive and Sentimental Lover.  I’m a big fan of John Le Carré’s work.”  “One Brown Mouse” was “very much inspired by the Robert Burns poem ‘To A Mouse.’”  While we should likely stop while we are clearly ahead, Anderson does speculate that “Heavy Horses” may also have had literary (if nonfiction) influences: “maybe I also had the Observer’s Book of Heavy Horses!”  The book is actually called The Observer’s Book of Horses & Ponies, so he is either recalling a forty-year-old memory in bits and pieces, or he is making it up unintentionally, but it does have just enough truth in it to seem authentic.  Similarly, bonus track “Horse-Hoeing Husbandry,” was written “as a paean to the original Jethro Tull, who in 1731 published a book called Horse-Hoeing Husbandry.”  Perhaps an oblique literary influence, but it is at least a Jethro Tull song, if long dormant, written in direct response to a book and its author.  Considering the band’s name was foisted upon them by an early agent and Anderson had no idea who he was at first, this track is a fine example of Anderson’s and the band’s growth, in part by willing to look backward as well as forward.

Stormwatch is the darkest of the trilogy, as we have said, both in the lyrics and in the real-life context of the album.  Not only did David Palmer’s father pass away, inspiring the album’s closing number “Elegy,” but John Glascock passed away during the tour promoting the album, upon which he appears very little due to his declining health.  His death cast a pall on the band, especially in the callous way Anderson broke the news to them, and things were never the same.  David Palmer, John Evan, and Barrie Barlow left the band, and the ’70s and “classic Tull” came to an end, with “Elegy” becoming a poignantly fitting finale to the era.  The album features mostly more mythology and Scottish rural history (“Orion,” “Dark Ages,” “Old Ghosts,” “Dun Ringill,” “Flying Dutchman”) as well as current Scottish social commentary (“North Sea Oil”), a prescient song of change (“Something’s On the Move”), a rare beautiful and uncynical Anderson song (“Home”), and the first two instrumental numbers on a Tull album since This Was (“Warm Sporran” and “Elegy”).  Lyrically, aside from the general mythology and history influencing the songs, and album candidate cut for time “Kelpie,” Stormwatch is not significantly influenced by literature.

Bibliography

Anderson, Ian. “He Brewed a Song of Love and Hatred (and of quite a few other things too …).” Interviewer Martin Webb. Minstrel in the Gallery: 40th Anniversary: La Grande Édition. Chrysalis, 2015.

—. “I’ll Sing You No Lullabye.” Interviewer Martin Webb. Heavy Horses: New Shoes Edition. Parlophone Records, 2018.

—. “Kitchen Prose and Gutter Rhymes.” Interviewer Martin Webb. Songs from the Wood: 40th Anniversary Edition: The Country Set. Parlophone Records, 2017.

—. “May You Find Sweet Inspiration….”  Too Old to Rock‘N’Roll: Too Young to Die! Chrysalis, 2015.

—. “To Cry You a Song.” Interviewer Martin Webb.  Benefit: The 50th Anniversary Enhanced Edition. Chrysalis, 2021.

Cornick, Glenn. “To Cry You a Song.” Interviewer Martin Webb.  Benefit: The 50th Anniversary Enhanced Edition. Chrysalis, 2021.

Nollen, Scott Allen. Jethro Tull: A History of the Band, 1968-2001. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2002.

Thick as a Brick: 40th Anniversary Set. Liner notes. Parlophone Records, 2012.

Webb, Martin. “And the Stormwatch Brews….” Stormwatch: The 40th Anniversary Force 10 Edition. Parlophone Records, 2019.—. “Let Me Bring You….” Songs from the Wood: 40th Anniversary Edition: The Country Set. Parlophone Records, 2017.