It’s been 52 years since Rush released their debut album, featuring the standout track “Working Man.” The Canadian prog rockers’ self-titled debut put them on the map, but it was that breakout closing song—with its portrait of everyday working life—that helped introduce the band to a larger audience.
Written by Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee, “Working Man” features heavy guitar riffs and a 20-year-old Lee’s soaring vocals and bass, rounded out by John Rutsey’s pounding drums. The seven-minute epic delivers lyrics about a working man’s long days on the job to earn a paycheck, with little time left for living his life.
In a 2014 interview with Radio.com, Lee confirmed that “Working Man” was written in tribute to the hard-working class who longed for a better life.
“Our parents were hard-working,” Lee explained “Life was a struggle for most people, no one was wealthy. You thought a lot about your future, and what kind of life do you want to live? Is it going to be enough for me to have that kind of life, where it’s all about work, and a beer at the end of the day and a hug from your kids, and do it all again? So, it’s kind of an ode to that guy who we worked so hard not to be, in a sense. We wanted to be musicians, and that was our ticket out of there. That was our escape for what was sort of inevitable for all of our friends and the world that we came from.”
“Working Man” got a lucky push in the United States. In an interview with Classic Rock, Lee noted that the song put Rush on the map in America after a Cleveland radio station picked it up.
“It was a very different time, before the consultants took over American radio,” he said. “So you hear a song like ‘Working Man’, seven minutes long, on the radio. And that led to us singing with Mercury Records. Whether that deal would have come some other way, who knows? But certainly that was the breakout.”
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The singer also noted that the song really stood the test of time.
“’Working Man” is one of the first songs we wrote that people started to respond to,” Lee told The A.V. Club in 2015. “It was very influenced by our earliest influences—Cream and people like that. It was just sort of a bluesy kind of jam song. We used to be big fans of Cream’s long version of “Spoonful” and things like that, you know, where you had this kind of bluesy song that went into this long jam thing. That was just kind of our version of that idea, and it stood the test of time pretty well. It’s aged pretty well.”
More than 50 years after recording “Working Man,” Lee, now 73, is on the road for Rush’s Fifty Something Tour with Lifeson, touring keyboardist Loren Gold and drummer Anika Nilles—and he’s still playing the classic song, according to a setlist posted by Billboard.
It’s no wonder. In a Rolling Stone Q&A with fans, Lee was once asked to name his favorite song to play live. “’Working Man’ for me,” the Rush frontman replied. “I love playing ‘Working Man.’”
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