This Day in Music History (09/24): Rush/Caress of Steel

Caress Of Steel is the third studio album by Canadian rock band Rush, released on this day in 1975. The album shows more of Rush's adherence to hard progressive rock, as opposed to the blues based hard rock style of the band's first album.

Although Rush's previous album, Fly by Night, dabbled in longer conceptual pieces such as "By-Tor & the Snow Dog," such works were the central focus of Caress of Steel. Long pieces broken up into various sections and long solo passages are two prominent elements of the album. It includes the band's first two epic pieces, "The Necromancer", and "The Fountain of Lamneth", which were also blamed for the commercial failure of the album itself; the latter runs 20 minutes total and comprises the entire second side of the original vinyl release.

The album cover for Caress of Steel was intended to be printed in a silver colour to give it a "steel" appearance. A printing error resulted in giving the album cover a copper colour. The error was not corrected on subsequent printings of the album.


Although the band initially had high hopes for the album, it sold fewer copies than Fly by Night and was considered a disappointment by the record company. The album eventually became known as one of Rush's most obscure and overlooked recordings, consequently being considered underrated by fans.

Caress of Steel did not attain gold certification in the US until December 1993, nearly two decades after its release. It remains one of the few Rush albums to not go platinum in the U.S. Given that and record company pressure to record more accessible, radio-friendly material similar to their first album – something Lee, Lifeson and Peart were unwilling to do – the trio feared that the end of the group was near. Ignoring their record label's advice and vowing to "fight or fall," the group's next album, 2112, ultimately paved the way for lasting commercial success despite opening with a 20 1/2 minute conceptual title track.

Song info:

"Bastille Day" - Rush's Led Zeppelin influence is still prominent on this record, most obviously in this song, which discusses the storming of the Bastille in the French Revolution. 

"I Think I'm Going Bald" - This was written for Canadian rocker Kim Mitchell, who at the time was the frontman of the band Max Webster and a close friend of the members of Rush. According to the book Contents Under Pressure, it was also inspired by the song "Goin' Blind" by Kiss, who Rush had frequently been an opening act for in their earlier years.

"Lakeside Park" - Mentioned in the song, May 24 is Victoria Day, a Canadian holiday. Lakeside Park itself is a park in Port Dalhousie, St. Catharines, Ontario, where drummer and lyricist Neil Peart grew up and worked during the summer as a teenager.

"The Necromancer": I) Into the Darkness, II) Under the Shadow, III) Return of the Prince - A necromancer is one who practices necromancy, a type of divination involving the summoning of spirits of the deceased to discern information about the future. "The Necromancer" starts with heavy influence from J.R.R. Tolkien's literary mythology. The Necromancer was a pseudonym used by Tolkien in The Hobbit for the character Sauron. The song departs from the story of the book as Part III sees the return of By-Tor from the song "By-Tor And The Snow Dog" from Fly by Night, this time as a hero and not a villain. "Return of the Prince" was also released as a single in some countries. Also in the introductory prologue to the song, the "three travellers, men of Willowdale" is a reference to the band itself, an allusion to the Toronto suburb of Willowdale where Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson grew up and formed the first incarnation of the band. On the inside gatefold of the album, just below the lyrics to "The Necromancer", the Latin phrase "Terminat hora diem; terminat auctor opus" appears. This translates (loosely) to: "[as] The hour ends the day; the author ends his work".

"The Fountain of Lamneth": I) In the Valley, II Didacts and Narpets, III) No One at the Bridge, IV) Panacea, V) Bacchus Plateau, VI) The Fountain - The final song on the album, "The Fountain of Lamneth", predates epics like "2112" and the Cygnus X-1 series, and is only 34 seconds shorter than "2112". It is the first epic song Rush had recorded, consisting of six parts which forms a complete story about a man in search of the Fountain of Lamneth, chronicling the individual occurrences of his journey.

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