The Canadian trio Rush stood in a Welsh farmhouse with no songs. They had rented the place for two weeks before entering Rockfield Studios in June 1978, hoping to write and rehearse their sixth album from scratch. On October 24, 1978, that album, Hemispheres, arrived as the group's most ambitious progressive rock statement, a record built on an 18-minute side-long epic and a fight for one perfect live take.
A spartan return to Rockfield
Rush had never worked this way before. For previous albums like 2112 and A Farewell to Kings, they arrived at the studio with material ready. Hemispheres took longer to record than either of those records, making it their most time-consuming project to that point. The band liked Rockfield, so they returned there, but this time the conditions were spartan, and Geddy Lee called them "very unusual." Alex Lifeson grew so irritated by a faulty door latch one day that he removed it and installed a hydraulic closer with a handle.
The big gamble sat on side one. "Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres" continued a story from A Farewell to Kings that had ended mid-sentence. Neil Peart began writing the text and plot three weeks before leaving for Rockfield, but when the band arrived, only half the lyrics were done. The narrative sends the soul of a space explorer to Olympus, where the gods Apollo and Dionysus battle for control of mind and heart. For the first time, Peart added gongs and timpani to his drum kit specifically for this piece.
Songs were recorded in sections, with all three musicians playing together at once. The vocals came later at Advision in London, where Rush returned because Yes had recorded some of their favorite albums there. Lee struggled: the songs sat in keys that forced him to sing very high, and during vocal takes he cracked several times and went for walks to calm down.
La Villa Strangiato and its 12 parts
Then came the instrumental that nearly broke them. "La Villa Strangiato," subtitled "An Exercise in Self-Indulgence," was Rush's first instrumental, made of 12 distinct parts. Lifeson called it a "musical recreation" of his nightmares, especially the ones from tours. The band wanted to capture it as one continuous live performance, not assembled from fragments. Lee said getting a satisfactory take required about 40 attempts. The piece also carried a hidden nod to an older jazz tradition: two of its fragments, "Monsters!" and "Monsters! (Reprise)," were drawn from Raymond Scott's 1937 instrumental "Powerhouse."
Lee said getting a satisfactory take required about 40 attempts.
Peart remembered playing the piece for four days and nights straight, even while tired and with sore hands, but in the end they had to build it from several takes. More time went into "La Villa Strangiato" than into their entire second album Fly by Night. The effort paid off: Hemispheres reached number 14 in both Canada and Britain, and number 47 on the American Billboard 200. The album's path to completion was not smooth. Terry Brown and assistant John Brand first tried mixing it at Advision, but after two and a half weeks they still could not get a satisfactory result. Rush briefly returned to Canada, then came back to London in August and finished the mix at Trident Studios in Soho.
The cover, by longtime Rush artist Hugh Syme, shows a figure standing on the left side of a human brain. The model was Syme's friend Bobby King, who had also posed for the Starman logo on 2112. The brain itself was borrowed from the anatomy department of the University of Toronto's medical faculty. What Rush learned in those Welsh and London studios changed them: after Hemispheres, Lee said the band intended to "break with tradition" and abandon long conceptual pieces on their next album. But in 1978, Rush pushed themselves further than they ever had before.