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Rush Across the Decades, Book 1 by Martin Popoff May 12th, 2020 |
With extensive, first-hand reflections from Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart, as well as from family, friends, and fellow musicians, Anthem: Rush in the '70s is a detailed portrait of Canada's greatest rock ambassadors. The first of three volumes, Anthem puts the band's catalog, from their self-titled debut to 1978's Hemispheres (the next volume resumes with the release of Permanent Waves) into both Canadian and general pop culture context, and presents the trio of quintessentially dependable, courteous Canucks as generators of incendiary, groundbreaking rock 'n' roll.
Fighting complacency, provoking thought, and often enraging critics, Rush has been at war with the music industry since 1974, when they were first dismissed as the Led Zeppelin of the North. Anthem, like each volume in this series, celebrates the perseverance of Geddy, Alex, and Neil: three men who maintained their values while operating from a Canadian base, throughout lean years, personal tragedies, and the band's eventual worldwide success.
"In his always compelling manner, Martin Popoff digs deep into the crucial first decade of rock's legendary trio. Brilliantly detailed and passionately presented, Anthem flows with all the confidence and capability of Rush's music itself. I literally couldn't stop reading this. Page after page, chapter after chapter, Popoff illuminates Rush's storied career with an infectious passion and precision. A remarkably thrilling, vivid account."
— JEFF WAGNER, MEAN DEVIATION: FOUR DECADES OF PROGRESSIVE HEAVY METAL
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1: Early Years
Chapter 2: Rush
Chapter 3: Fly by Night
Chapter 4: Caress of Steel
Chapter 5: 2112
Chapter 6: All the World’s a Stage
Chapter 7: A Farewell to Kings
Chapter 8: Hemispheres
Discography
Credits
About the Author
Martin Popoff — A Complete Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
The comparison is a lark — but it’s funny, so I’ll give it anyway.
Under the black country skies of Trail, British Columbia,
in the mid-’70s, heavy metal ruled. It was as big a deal
in my hometown as in the dual cradles of metal civilization —
Detroit and Birmingham. Where they had steel and car parts,
we had a lead and zinc smelter, an employer of thousands in our
small town and a satanic mill that sat on the hill, looming over
the city center. In fact, that’s where you went after high school if
you weren’t going to university; you went to work “up the hill.”
Okay, comparing Trail to the towns where Sabbath, Priest, the
Stooges and MC5 were created is laughable. Plus my dad was a
teacher, my mom was a nurse and I grew up wanting for nothing
in a spacious house built in 1970 by the family in the idyllic suburb
of Glenmerry. But me and my buddies were still all angry young
metalheads, and I’m pretty damn sure we were listening to Rutsey
’n’ roll Rush at eleven going on twelve before 1975.
So “Working Man” indeed, if not exactly for me and my
immediate circle. That song really connected in Cleveland, and it
made a hell of a lot of sense for the busted-up hard partiers working
at Cominco. In my late teens, running the record department
and selling stereos at a couple different stores, I got to know
quite a few of those people (from a wary distance). They were
scary and cool, and more than occasionally they would drop ten
grand on a pair of Klipschs, JBLs, Bose 901s or carpet-covered
Cerwin Vegas, usually powered by a new Yamaha 3020, much to
the delight of my boss Gordon Lee, who still runs Rock Island
Tape Centre forty-something years later.
Of course, all these guys were Rush fans too, cranking “Bastille
Day” in their Camaros and Mustangs (yes, Gord threw me in
the deep end as an installer) and pontificating over 2112 while
they nurtured their private pot stashes growing in the cupboard.
They knew about Rush because I sold them their friggin’ Rush
records but also because we had the quintessential rock radio station
in KREM-FM, broadcast over the border in glorious high
fidelity from Spokane, Washington, where they worshiped these
wise Canadian swamis of sound. In fact — fond memory — they
played the entirety of 2112 when it came out, and of course we were
all ready with two fingers to hit play and record as the sun set.
But there was another bed-headed gathering of beer buddies
poring over the seven Rush albums we will be celebrating in this
book, and that was the aspiring players. I was one of those. The
day I jumped in my purple ’77 “baby Mustang” (a Toyota Celica)
and drove seventy miles to Nelson to pick up my nine-piece set
of black Pearls, inspired equally by Neil Peart and Peter Criss,
was magic. (Forty years later, I got to show Peter the receipt as
he signed some records for me at my book table at Rock’N’Con
in London, Ontario.)
Indeed, this is why it was such a joy writing this book, remembering the camaraderie in bands, however short-lived,
talking over Neil Peart fills with Darrell and Marc, Geddy bass
lines with Pete and Sammy and Alex licks with Mark and Garth
— and yes, he looked exactly like Garth from Wayne’s World, and
I wasn’t too far off Wayne. Rush was our rarefied, mystical music
textbook, Neil and his wordsmithing challenging our brains at
the same time. (I’m sure for a long time, we thought Geddy was
scribbling all these fortune cookies.) Rush made you want to
excel on a bunch of levels at once, and I swear that was their
purpose for high school kids worried about what comes next.
Geez, man, they were perfect. Prog rock proper was too creepy.
Tales from Topographic Oceans may have well been the Moonies
coming to get you. At the other end, all our metal bands —
Sabbath, Purple, Nazareth, Rainbow, UFO, Thin Lizzy, Kiss,
Aerosmith, the Nuge and at the obscure end, Legs Diamond,
Riot, Angel, Starz, Moxy and Teaze — were friggin’ all right
with us. But Rush made you try harder. They politely asked to
pour your energies into something more positive. Eat right, use
those weights in the basement.
Neil was pushing the philosophy and literature at one end,
and as players, man, what they did for kids’ self-esteem is
immeasurable. We had a purpose, a hobby that was a neverending
hard nut to crack. And yet I gotta say something about
Rush: they made it just this side of attainable. I think if we’d got
the slide rules out and did the math on Close to the Edge, The
Inner Mounting Flame, Aja, Red, Brand X or Buddy Rich, we’d
have all hung it up. But Neil with his regular rolls down those
tuned toms? More often than not, building his beats with only
one of his two bass drums? Much of what Rush did . . . well, you
could get there as a kid. I could get there as a kid.
That’s a personal reminiscence of Rush in the ’70s, to be sure.
But from what I’ve gathered from friends all over the world (admittedly, most of them white men in their mid-fifties), it’s a
near-universal experience.
I want to tell you a bit about the history of this book. As you
may be aware, this is my fourth Rush book, following Contents
Under Pressure: 30 Years of Rush at Home and Away, Rush: The
Illustrated History and Rush: Album by Album. And since those,
there have been a number of interesting developments that
made me want to write this one. To start, only one of those three
books, Contents, was a traditional biography — an authorized
one at that — but it was quite short, and given that it came out
in 2004 before Rush was officially retired, it was in need of an
update. I thought about it, but I wasn’t feeling it, not without
some vigorous additions.
That, fortunately, took care of itself. In the early 2010s, I
found myself working with Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen at
Banger Films on the award-winning documentary Rush: Beyond
the Lighted Stage. Anybody who works in docs will tell you that
between the different speakers and non-talk footage that has to
get into what might end up a ninety-minute film, only a tiny
percentage of the interview footage ever gets used, the rest just
sits in archive, rarely seen or heard by anyone. Long and short of
it, I arranged to use that archive, along with more interviews I’d
done over the years, plus the odd quote from the available press,
to get this book to the point where I felt it was bringing something
new and significant to the table of Rush books.
So there you have it, thanks in large part to those guys —
as well as the kind consent of Pegi Cecconi at the Rush office
— the book you hold in your hands more than ably supplants
Contents Under Pressure and stands as the most strident and
detailed analy sis of the early Rush catalogue in existence.
-Martin Popoff
CHAPTER 1: EARLY YEARS
"We didn't have a mic stand so we used a lamp."
No question that the Beatles were and still remain the patron
saints of rock ’n’ roll. And February 9, 1964, the first of the
band’s three consecutive appearances on The Ed Sullivan
Show, would provide the nexus of that sainthood: that night, the
Beatles inspired myriad adolescents to take up the rock ’n’ roll
cause, including the heroes of our story.
But if you wanted to drill down, get more hardcore and find
out who might be patron saints of playing, it wouldn’t be out of
line to bestow that title upon those heroes — Geddy Lee, Alex
Lifeson and Neil Peart and their Canuck collective called Rush.
Of course, Neil, “the Professor,” chuckling through his
Canadian modesty, would deem that premise absurd, citing the
likes of his personal saints of playing, perhaps folks like The
Who and Cream, maybe Jimi and his band, Led Zeppelin or
maybe “underground” origami rockers like Yes, Genesis and
King Crimson. But pushing back at Neil, one might point out to
the drum titan that time moves on. Over generations, waves of
bands and rock ’n’ roll movements ebb and flow. Film stars from
the ’30s and ’40s are forgotten, big band orchestras are forgotten,
doo-wop bands are forgotten, ’60s and even ’70s radio playlists
are ruthlessly pared down to what can fit on the back of an envelope
— no one cares what you think anymore.
And so, as time passes and the ’60s greats are forgotten, the
members of Rush seem poised to become the new “patron saints
of playing.” And maybe they’ll stay there. In the mid- to late
2000s, the world turned to pop and hip hop with more and more
music made by machines. If indeed rock died further through the
parallel precipitous contraction of the music industry, marked by
recorded music being made essentially free, then we might be
able to pick those patron saints once and for all.
As drummers are wont to point out, no parents ever had to
force their kid to practice their drums, and by side glance, this
is why the patron saints of playing are not some sensible choice
like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Gentle Giant, Kansas or Brand X. It
takes some fire in the belly, some excitement, some fuzz pedal, to
light up a teen and their dreams. And that is why Rush is the band
that wrote the manual for more of our rock heroes from the ’80s
and ’90s than anybody else. They inspired those who have made
all the rock music before the genre’s miniaturization a few years
into the 2000s. Debatable as it might be — and these abstracts, of
course, are — if the widest, most productive and beloved flowing
Steven Tyler scarf of rock history until the end of guitar, bass and
drums runs from, say, 1977 until 2007, then Rush songs are the
ones woodshedded most by the players who populate that time
span, the songs that advanced the capabilities of hundreds of your
favorite rock stars, making them good enough to be heard.
But before all that, the Beatles shot like a bottle rocket emitting
white heat around the world, and that included Canada,
where Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson (we’ll hear about “the new
guy” later) were politely taking notes in Willowdale, Ontario,
a vague suburb northwest of Toronto. The class chums were
barely teenagers when rock changed conceptually from individuals
to bands. And already there was set in place a maturity
and focus built of the duo’s Canadian experience, with which
to deal with the cultural sea-change rifling through school
lockers worldwide.
Gary “Geddy” Lee Weinrib was born July 29, 1953, in
Willowdale, so he was the perfect age to understand the get out
of jail free card slipped to him, one imagines, by Ringo. He also
had a brother and a sister in a family headed by two Holocaust
survivors, Morris Weinrib and Manya Rubenstein, now Morris
and Mary Weinrib of North Toronto.
“They both worked originally in what they called the ‘schmatta’
business,” explains Geddy, concerning his parents, “which was
on an assembly line, sewing clothes and things like that. But they
worked their way up to a lower middle-class kind of income and
raised me in the suburbs. So I was a product of suburban life.
Listen to the song ‘Subdivisions’; that’s where I grew up. It was a
bland, treeless neighborhood. A new subdivision.”
Geddy says that being one of the few Jewish kids around made
him stand out. “They bused us to a school when we first moved
to that kind of neighborhood, and, as a young kid, it was pretty
terrifying. It was a tough neighborhood. That part of Toronto
was just on the border of being transformed from farmland to
subdivisions, so it was in transition. You had the leftover mix
of different kinds of social backgrounds, so there were a lot of
pretty tough kids — what we called greasers back then — with
not much to do except beat up the new kids. So, it was an exciting
time. I hated living in the suburbs, and my first opportunity,
I got out. And I think a lot of kids that I hung out with felt the
same way. Everything was going on downtown. We wanted to go
downtown — we spent our time going downtown.”
“My husband had a sister in Canada, and we didn’t have
anywhere to go,” begins Geddy’s mother, Mary. “And she made
papers for us and we came here in 1948. My husband and I stayed
with her for a while; we didn’t have any trade or a profession, so
it was very hard in the beginning. My husband had a friend from
years before, when they were just children in school, and he volunteered
to teach us — and he was going to be a pressman, and
I was going to be a finisher, for clothes. So in about two weeks,
he gave us some lessons, and we learned every day. And then
another cousin got us into a factory. Garments. My husband was
making a dollar an hour, and I was making fifty cents an hour.
And after a while, I was so fast that they gave me samples to
work on, on piecework, so I was making more money.
“So we finally moved and had our own place, and two and
a half years later, my daughter was born. I remember when
we would look for places to live, the first thing we would say
was ‘We have a child.’ If you had a child, it was the hardest —
couldn’t rent anything. And after we moved, Geddy was coming,
and when we had two children, the landlord, this blond lady,
would not accept us. We didn’t have money for a down payment,
but my husband went to this society that helps people and they
lent us the money, and we bought a house, and we waited for
Geddy to arrive. I remember every room in that house; I had
rented every room just to make up for the five thousand dollars
we owed. And Geddy was born, and my husband was so excited
because he was a boy, and we already had a girl.
“And it was a nice neighborhood,” continues Mary, “on Charles
Street. It was a really nice neighborhood, easy. It was a mixture
of young and old people. Afterwards, we moved to Willowdale.
Actually, first it was Downsview, and then to Willowdale. Allan
was born in Downsview. My husband sold the house overnight:
we went to a wedding, and his cousin was there, and he said, ‘You
know, Morris, I have a customer for your house.’ It was a bungalow.
So my husband gave him an enormous price and said, ‘If
she’ll pay it, I’ll give her the bungalow.’ We came home from that
wedding, two o’clock in the morning, and his cousin is sitting in
the driveway and said, ‘Sign here.’ So the next day we had to go
look for a home, and then we went to Willowdale.
“Everybody knew everybody, and it was nice — nice neighbors,
great place to be because all the kids were the same age,
with a lot of friends all over. It was a nice neighborhood: shopping
was easy, everything was easy. I remember when we bought
a store in Newmarket and we used to drive to Newmarket, and it
was treacherous. There were no roads, there was nothing, everything
was muddy, and if it was raining, you could hardly get
through. So my husband used to say, ‘You’ll see, in a few years
all of this will be built up.’ And sure enough, a few years later
everything was built up.” Typical of her sunny disposition, Mary
Weinrib remembers Willowdale more positively than Geddy.
“Pretty boring,” says Geddy. “Not much to do. So that’s why
music became so important to us because we would go to each
other’s basements and listen to music, and everybody had different
favorite bands. That was the social life. There was nothing
much else. The occasional concert, drop-in center, that kind of
thing. When I was twelve, my father passed away. And we were
kind of a religious family, a Jewish religious family, and in that
kind of household, when a father dies, the son, the firstborn son,
is supposed to . . . has a lot of responsibilities in terms of the
grieving process.”
Morris had never fully recovered from injuries he sustained in
a Nazi concentration camp. As part of Geddy’s grieving duties,
he says that he attended synagogue twice a day, morning and
evening, for eleven months and a day, and he had to abstain from
rock ’n’ roll, even removing himself from music in school.
“There are still songs that were popular that year that people
talk about and everyone should know it and I go, ‘What?’” continues
Lee. “There’s just a gap in my learning. Anyway, when
that year was over, I kind of dove headfirst to try to catch up to
being a normal kid, to play with other guys in the neighborhood.
And I often wonder if that’s what really made me hungry to be
a musician, the fact that it was kind of kept from me for a year.”
His mother called Geddy a “great kid, quiet; he really had
a good sense of humor, and he was a happy child. And he was
actually very respectful since he was a child, good in school, had
lots of friends; he was very good. Until his father died. It was
hard. We moved, and two years later, my husband died. And
Geddy was, I think, about twelve. He was really a big help to
me because after my husband died, I was in shock. And then
we had a store, and two weeks after, I was thinking I can’t go to
that store. I can’t go. They used to give me all kinds of pills and
this and that. Once when I was really, really crying and Geddy
heard me, he came in and sat on my bed and he said, ‘Mommy,
I know why you’re crying. You don’t know what to do at the
store, right? Daddy would really want you to open the store and
try, and if you can’t make it, you know you tried.’ And the rest is
history. He left, took all those pills, called the girl who helps at
the store, because she had a key in Newmarket, and he said, ‘I’m
coming out.’ I just want to give you what kind of help this child
was. Even later the same year. It was December, Christmastime,
I needed somebody to come and help in the store. I had a couple
of girls, and Geddy volunteered. And all day long, he was at the
cash. He didn’t even want a lunch.”
Driving home on Christmas Eve, Mary decided that Geddy
deserved a present for working so hard. Geddy said that Terry
next door had a guitar for sale for fifty dollars. Once his mother
was over the shock, and as they arrived home from the store, she
had given him the money.
“We’re telling him he’s now the man of the house,” continues
Mary. “You’re now the man that is the head of the house. So this
kid, after about two or three months that I was at work, he said,
‘I’m so glad, I’m so happy, Mommy, that you are working and I
can go to school because I thought I had to go to work instead
of school.’ You see, his father was actually a musician when he
was young. In those years, there was no thing where you could
become a big star. If somebody needed a drummer, he was a
drummer at a wedding. If someone needed a guitarist, he was
a guitarist. When we were in Germany, we lived with an old
German lady and we had one room. And she had a mandolin,
and he always used to talk about music and this lady says, ‘Here,
have the mandolin. Play!’ So he used to, every morning, go under
my window and make up all kinds of songs with a mandolin.
And when we were coming to Canada, I said, ‘You’re not taking
that big thing with you?’ And now I wish I had it. So he takes
after his father, really.”
On Geddy’s religious duties after his father’s death, Mary
explains, “All year, he used to go to say prayers to his father, twice
a day, morning and evening. I had a friend who used to take him,
take him to school, take him at night, bring him home. Yeah,
he was really young. Actually, he taught himself his Torah, and
taught himself to say the prayer. A week before his bar mitzvah,
I called the rabbi and said, ‘Here, we’re having that bar mitzvah,
I don’t know if this kid knows anything, because we didn’t have a
teacher to teach him.’ But of course, the rabbi was sitting beside
me. I was crying for a big reason, here my heart went, and the
rabbi put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, ‘Mrs. Weinrib,
I wish I had your son’s gift. Your son has a gift from God.’ Who
would believe that? You know what I mean? I just thought [he
said this] because I’m crying.
“Even before, when my husband was alive, the first thing he
brought to the house was a piano. We didn’t have a stitch, nothing,
no tables, no nothing, and we were teaching Susan piano
lessons. One day, on a Sunday, the teacher came and she taught
them something new. And I invited her for tea, and all of a
sudden, we hear playing, and the teacher says, ‘You know, I have
to go and congratulate Suzie. She really did a good job.’ And we
walked in, and it was Geddy. And the teacher said to me, ‘You
can’t let this go. This child has a very good ear for music. You
have to give him lessons.’ And he was like ten years old. But at
the time, we could just afford it for Suzie.
“All teachers told me this, actually, so I knew. His father had
the same ear for music. This man, in the morning, woke up
with radio, went to sleep with radio, and in the store, the music
was blasting. And you know what? He used to make fun of the
Beatles. My husband used to say, ‘“Yeah, yeah, yeah” — with
this he’s going to sell records?’ Always when I hear the Beatles, I
remember what he used to say to me.”
Soon Geddy would be listening to the Beatles again, but in
the meantime, it was hard for him to miss out.
“Yeah, it was; it was very hard. He couldn’t have any. Maybe,
in my presence, he never listened to music on the radio. He was
really doing his thing because he had to go and say prayers. And
after the year, he really came out. He was himself. After a year,
you can start. Especially when he already had his guitar. Because
his father died in October, and I got him the guitar in December,
the twenty-fourth actually. And then I remember, he had to do
a year in enrichment class to catch up, which was in a different
district. And then the next year, he went to Fisherville Junior
High School, and sometimes he knew more than the teacher did.
Because he had this background already. And that’s where he met
Alex. He used to bring him home. I used to love Alex. He’s such a
nice, cute guy, very polite, very nice and a very good relationship.”
Indeed, comic relief for Geddy came from this new partner
Alexandar “Lifeson” Živojinović, born August 27, 1953 in Fernie,
British Columbia. “First time I ever became aware of Alex was
at R.J. Lang Junior High School; he was easily noticeable back
then because he was a bit of a teacher’s pet,” chides Lee. “I also
had a friend, Steve Shutt, who became a well-known hockey
player, and we went to school together, and he was one of the
few guys that I met in high school that actually was much hipper
than he looked. Steve was funny because he used to grow his hair
every summer when he wasn’t playing hockey, and as soon as he
had to go back to hockey, he used to cut his hair, so he was like
this hidden freak. We got along pretty well back then, and he
was the first guy who made me notice Alex.
“Because I was playing and looking for other people to play
with, he said, ‘Well that guy there is a good guitar player. You
should hook up with him.’ Steve would talk to me because he
knew I liked music, and I was playing an instrument, and he
would talk to me about this guy, Alex Zavonovich — that’s what
he called him; he mispronounced his name — and he said, ‘You
should call this guy up; you guys could jam together.’ So that
was the first time I became aware of him. But I didn’t actually
make contact with him until we were in the same class next year
in Fisherville Junior High. He was a funny kind of kid, a yuckit-
up guy, and he got me laughing. So we hit it off in school. Plus
we liked the same kind of bands, and there was the fact that he
was a guitar player. I was playing bass, so it was kind of a natural
fit for the two of us. We would all sit at the back of the class. I
think he was the first friend I had in that area where we kind of
got irreverent together.
“Anyway, so it was actually Steve’s suggestion that I hook up
with Alex. And then, I’ll never forget, the next year we were in
the same class, and he always wore this paisley shirt and had
his hair combed and always sucked up to the teacher, I remember
very clearly. But that’s how we met, and then we found out
that we were both musicians and eventually it led to us playing
together. He was very likable. He was very funny. He’s still to
this day the funniest human being I’ve ever known. He’s got a
charm about him, you know. When you meet him, you just like
him. So I liked him, and we became good friends.”
Alex’s parents, Nenad and Melanija “Milla” Živojinović, also
arrived in Canada after World War II; they first met in Yugoslavia.
“My father was kind of sent out to B.C. to work in the mines,
as a lot of Eastern Europeans were at that time,” begins Lifeson.
“My mother’s side of the family . . . my uncles wanted to look
for better work, so they ended up out in Fernie as well, and we
left when we were very young. I think I was eighteen months
old or two years old when we left — I really have no memory of
our time there. And then we moved to downtown Toronto and I
grew up there and in the north part of the city.
“I became really interested in music at around twelve and got
my first guitar. My parents bought me a cheap Kent Japanese
acoustic guitar. I think it was ten or twelve dollars. You know, it
had the guitar strings two inches above the neck, and they were the
thickness of telephone cords. But it was really exciting. I was just
so overwhelmed by music and the sound of the guitar. I listened to
the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and all of that stuff
in that era. And the following year, I got an electric guitar, again a
cheap Japanese electric guitar, from my parents at Christmas.”
Alex had negotiated to get this guitar — his first electric —
in return for turning in a good report card. His parents, pleased
with his grades, kept their end of the bargain, although they had
to borrow the money to buy the instrument. Says Milla, “He
wanted to have a group with this next-door neighbor we had,
but nothing happened there. So we got the electric guitar. He
played constantly, in the morning, in the evening, after school,
all the time.”
Like Geddy’s, Alex’s upbringing was quite ethnic, not out of
step in a city and country built by immigrants.
“We ate very ethnic foods, all my parents’ friends were other
Yugoslavians, Serbs, Croats, a real mix. Typical for a workingclass
Eastern European family in Toronto, we couldn’t afford a
cottage or have that whole cottage lifestyle, which a lot of my
friends grew up with. It was very normal in Toronto to have a
place up north or east or west. The thing that we used to do was
go to Lake Simcoe, to Sibbald Point, and all the guys would play
soccer and all the moms would cook and unpack food, put out
the blankets. There was a museum up at Sibbald Point, and we’d
go to the museum and swim. And every weekend in the summer
was spent up there because it was free and you could drive up
there and there was plenty of room. I remember always stopping
for Dairy Queen on the way home. Very Ontario, absolutely.
“It was typically working middle-class,” continues Alex. “The
summers were spent playing with friends and running around.
There was school and hockey and winter sports, just like anybody
else. I’d say it was a very normal upbringing. My parents
were very hard workers: don’t complain about it, go do something.
I really respected my dad for that. And my mom was a
nurse for most of her life and worked at Branson Hospital for
twenty years or something and still does volunteer work. She
still tries to be very active. Yeah, it was a really great upbringing.
I certainly don’t have any bad memories of growing up.
“When I moved up to Willowdale from a central part of the
city, I was ten or eleven years old and John Rutsey was a neighbor.
He lived across the street, and we both had a great love for music,
and we played baseball and football. He had a couple older brothers.
We used to have great times doing sport-related stuff, but we
fell in love with music at around the same time, and he sort of
gravitated to drums and I did the guitar. In fact, we started a band
then called the Projection, which I still think is a great name. It
was a few neighborhood friends, and we all knew the same six or
seven songs, mostly Yardbirds, and we would play these parties in
basements. You didn’t get paid for it or anything, but we would
set up. We had small amps and basically no equipment, but we
would play these seven or eight songs over and over and over
again. It was really, really cool and I can still see it . . . We did one
gig — if I can call it that — in my parents’ basement and it was
dark and we had a black light and the whole deal. We continued
to do things like that and we kind of put a band together with
different people, but he and I were the core of it. At the same
time, I met Geddy that year in junior high school, in grade nine.”
Alex’s mother, Milla, fills in some of the backstory with
respect to how the family wound up in the East Kootenays of
British Columbia.
“I came to Canada in 1951, June 18, with my parents and my
two brothers,” explains Alex’s mother. “I was sixteen and my
brothers were fifteen and seventeen. My dad was of Russian
descent, and in 1949, Tito, the president in Yugoslavia gave the
ultimatum to people coming in from different countries to take
citizenship. And if they didn’t wish to take citizenship, they had
to move out. And my dad had a sister in New York he hadn’t seen
for twenty-odd years, and he decided he didn’t want to take the
citizenship; he wanted to move out. So we had to go to Trieste in
Italy, and we were there for six months, in Provogo camp.
“We waited to hear the quotas for immigrants, and they
were offering us either Australia, New Zealand or Canada. We
couldn’t go to the United States, even though we applied because
of my aunt. So then we decided to come to Canada instead of
Australia, which was too far, and my dad wouldn’t be able to see
his sister as much. And so we came and worked on the farm.
To be able to come to Canada, you had to come and work on
the farm. And we stayed on that farm for, I think, a little over a
month. We were actually very lucky that we didn’t have to finish
picking the sugar beets because that was hard. We’d just started,
and the owner of the land, he said, ‘I see you can’t work on the
farm,’ so he was kind enough to let us go.
“And then we met a Serbian friend and moved to a small
mining town. My older brother worked in the coal mine and
my younger brother worked in the sawmill and I worked in a
restaurant. I was washing dishes for twelve hours. And my dad
was an older man, and he was injured in the First World War.
He had one artificial eye, and he wasn’t that well, so he didn’t
work at all. But after a few months . . . there is a religion called
the Doukhobors. They’re Ukrainian, Russian actually, and my
dad being Russian, they asked my dad to teach Russian to their
children in school, and that was the only job he had for a few
months. And then I met my husband Mac, Alex’s father. He
came to work there in the coal mine after his wife passed away,
and after a year or so of dating him, we got married.
“And then a year later, Alex was born,” continues Milla.
“And then we stayed until Alex was about twenty months. I got
pregnant with my daughter Sally, and we came to Toronto. My
parents and my brothers were here. We moved in April 1955, and
it was beautiful, actually. We moved near Harbord and Bathurst.
And Sally was born after a month or so, and my husband was
looking for a job. And then after he found a job — he worked in
O’Keefe, you know, beer — we moved a few places. It was difficult
having children, and we moved when my parents bought
a house. We moved upstairs with them, and we stayed about
two years. Then we bought a little house on Glencairn, close
to Bathurst, and we lived there until Alex went to school there,
grade one and two, and then we moved to Pleasant Avenue.
“When he was in grade one or two, Alex was a little worrier.
When we bought the house, my husband got injured and he
was in the hospital having surgery. And he overheard me saying
that we didn’t have money to pay the mortgage. And he went to
school and his teacher, she asked him, ‘Alex, you’re so sad. What’s
happening?’ And he said, ‘My mom doesn’t have money to pay
the mortgage.’ And she wrote me a letter and he brought the
letter home and I was self-conscious when I was talking to people
on the phone, for him not to hear. Because he was a worrier.”
Despite financial hardship, Milla, like Mary, has happy memories
of the neighborhood. “It was nice; it was mixed. When we
lived on Pleasant, we had Jewish people. I think we were the only
Christians on that street. But where we moved, a street called
Greyhound, there were Italians, Chinese people, Canadians,
Greek people, so it was mixed nationalities. I can tell you one
thing — that I’m Canadian, I love Canada, and as soon as I
came to Toronto, I really enjoyed life. Being in Fernie, that small
mining town, I didn’t really; I was quite depressed there. Because
there was nothing to do. It was a coal mine, so everything was
dirty, and there was one theater, one bank and one restaurant.
But when we came to Toronto, it was so different. Especially
when we came. We came in May, from a town just on the border
of Alberta and British Columbia, and in May it was beautiful
weather and the flowers were coming out and it was just lovely.”
As for Alex, Milla says, “He was a very, very good child. I
was bringing them up to respect people, to love people, to not
have any hatred to any other nationalities. I come from a country
where there were Croatians and Serbians, but I never had any
of that either. I had a lot of Croatian friends. Alex was always
friends with different nationalities — I remember a Hungarian
little boy, when we lived down on Brunswick Avenue, near Bloor.
Alex was a good child. The teachers used to send a very nice
report about him. He was very calm, but when he was a teenager,
well, this was his dream: to become a rock star. My dream was for
him to go to school — and then he quit grade twelve. And then
he said, ‘Well, I’m going to go and finish the following year.’ He
went, and he was a counselor, the president there. He did very
well, and the teachers were really liking Alex, and they came over
once to our place and they talked very highly about him.”
Both Milla and Mary were against their two angels going
rock ’n’ roll. But who was to blame for the boys catching the bug?
Fortunately for familial relations, Mary didn’t blame Alex and
Milla didn’t blame Geddy.
“I liked Geddy,” laughs Milla. “To tell you about Geddy, I
remember talking to his mom. And his grandmother was a sweet
lady; she used to call me and say, ‘Is my Geddy there? Well, you
know what? He’s going with shiksa now.’ He was dating a shiksa,
a Christian girl. Nancy was a shiksa. She would get so upset.
And I would say to Geddy, ‘Your grandma is calling you to go
home.’ So we had fun with them. And then we started going to
concerts that they had in Toronto together.”
“Geddy brought Alex home one day,” recalls Mary. “And he
seemed to me like a nice, intelligent boy. Quiet, not like a wild
animal. And I liked him right away. And I still like him. Good
sense of humor, like Geddy, and they got along very well. The
rest is history. I remember one day I was going to tell something
to Geddy, early morning, and I walk into his room, and I see
blond hair on the floor, somebody covered up with blond hair.
And I’m thinking — a girl? And I close the door carefully, and
I think, wow, Geddy let this girl sleep on the floor. And I’m
going to work, and an hour later, I call Geddy — he’s up — and
I said, ‘Geddy, how can you let this girl sleep on the floor in your
bedroom?’ ‘Mum, it’s not a girl. If it was a girl, she wouldn’t be
sleeping on the floor.’ It was Alex! You see, Geddy loved his bed.
He could never go to a sleepover. His bed was his everything.”
Milla didn’t blame Geddy for sending Alex down the risky
rock ’n’ roll path. “I realized that this was what Alex wanted. I
mean, he was a self-learner. He never took any music in school,
any teaching from anybody. He just went on his own. And that
was another thing that I was very proud of. I knew there was
something he inherited from someone because he just did so
well by himself. The lyrics and all that, and the notes — he could
read well.
“But it was me more than my husband,” says Milla, on
attempts to steer Alex right. “His father, everything was okay with
him, very positive. I was a little bit worried about his future. If
he doesn’t finish high school, what’s going to happen? And if the
group doesn’t succeed, what’s going to happen with his future?
Because I tell you, I worked nights, I worked factories, I went to
nursing school in 1970 to finish nursing and worked hard, worked
in electronics and everywhere. And his father worked two jobs;
he was a plumber and an electrician, and he worked for Massey
Ferguson as a stationary engineer, second class, for twenty-five
to twenty-six years. Plus he went on his day off and worked. So
I think that’s why Alex always, always respected hardworking
people. And today, that’s why sometimes I say to him, ‘I’m fine.’
He will always ask, financially, to help me. I would say, ‘I’m fine.’
He would say, ‘Mom, you worked so hard; I just want you to be so,
so comfortable.’ His father passed away five years ago [this interview
took place February of 2009], and he respected him so much
because of that, of that hardworking. He loved him so much too.
And that hard work. And that’s how, you know, myself as a child,
as a teenager before I came [to Canada], I went to school and I
had to work too. We wanted him to be something, to have education,
and well, he chose something else, and he did very well.”
Alex knew the value of non–rock ’n’ roll work as well. Like
Geddy helping out his mom in the store, Alex did the kind of
work teenagers resent but then later look back at and realize was
character-building.
“Yeah, I worked at Dominion for a while, in the meat department;
that was in grade ten, just exactly the time we started the
band. And then I also worked with my dad. He worked many
jobs. He was an engineer at Massey Ferguson, and he had his
own plumbing business, like a one-man plumbing business. But
he would take me out. In fact, later on, when I still worked with
him, and we were playing the Gasworks and all those clubs in
the early ’70s, I would go out and help him from time to time.
He would pick me up in front of the Gasworks at one thirty
in the morning when we finished playing, and I would go with
him and we would work all night on some plumbing job, and he
would take me home at eight o’clock in the morning and I would
completely collapse until five o’clock in the afternoon and then
head down to the gig later that evening. And then he would do
the same thing.
“And I tried my best to get out of that whenever I could
because it was always hard. Yeah, those two were the main little
jobs that I had. There were always things around the house that
I got volunteered for. But you know what? It was a source of
a little bit of money and it paid for the rent of the Marshall
amp and gas for the van and things like that, so we all pitched
in. Because those early days, we really didn’t make any money.
Maybe a hundred dollars, one fifty, and even earlier than that,
fifty dollars — the first gig we played was ten dollars. Although
ten went a long way in 1968. Well, not that long.
-end excerpt
Anthem: Rush in the '70s