Our record company Mercury had told us in no uncertain terms that we were a huge disappointment to them. They had signed us on the basis of our first record [Rush, 1974], which was pretty straightforward hard rock. But we loved all those English progressive rock bands - Yes and Genesis - and on our third album Caress Of Steel we had a song that was 20 minutes, The Fountain Of Lamneth. Mercury was like, 'What the fuck? Who are you guys?' And even we thought that: Who are we?

Caress Of Steel had bombed. The gigs were half-empty. We named it the 'Down The Tubes Tour'. We joked about Neil [Peart, drummer] going back into the farm equipment business, and Alex [Lifeson, guitar] and I going back to painting movie theatres. When we started on 2112. We thought this would probably be the last record we make. So we were like: fuck you, Mercury. If we're going to go out, we'll go out doing our crazy shit, not failing at what you want us to be.

Neil wrote a story for the song 2112 based on Anthem by Ayn Rand. Neil's story was set in a futuristic totalitarian state, controlled by the priests of the temples of Syrinx. One day our hero finds a device. He's not sure what it is, but it has strings, and he figures out he can make music with it. He presents it to the priests but they shut him down because they want control over everything. He contemplates ending it all, because he doesn't want to live in a world that can't embrace such a thing that he's found...

We didn't know what kind of feedback we were going to get from the record company. We were pretty afraid of that. Our manager didn't get it at all, and when he played it for Mercury everyone in the room was puzzled by it - except for Cliff Burnstein, who went on to manage Def Leppard and Metallica. Cliff thought the album was awesome, and for us that was so heartening.

Sales were slow at first. And then we had that terrible thing in England with the NME. 2112 was speaking out against totalitarianism, but the NME called us fascists. It made zero sense. Ayn Rand had a very controversial image as an anti-socialist and extreme right-wing capitalist, but that was a side of her work that was not of interest to us.

My father Morris and my mother Mary were both in Auschwitz for a time, so I was really deeply hurt by that NME story. At that time in Britain, the press was hunting down anything that sniffed of fascism. I can't blame them for that. But they got the wrong guys with us. I am not a violent type, but I wanted to punch the guy who wrote that. Definitely, I could have helped educate him.

In the end, what the NME said didn't matter. At first, 2112 was a slow seller, but when we went back on the road we were getting better gigs, even headlining some shows. It was a defining album. The artwork for the album by our friend Hugh Syme became a brand, it transcended the record and became very representational of us as a band. The album was a vindication. From that point, we were free to make our own mistakes."



PART 2 "A HUGE LEAP FORWARD"