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Rush Across the Decades, Book 2 by Martin Popoff October 13th, 2020 |
In this follow-up to ANTHEM: RUSH IN THE '70s, Martin Popoff brings together canon analysis, cultural context, and extensive first-hand interviews to celebrate Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart at the peak of their persuasive power. Rush was one of the most celebrated hard rock acts of the '80s, and the second book of Popoff's staggeringly comprehensive three-part series takes readers from Permanent Waves to Presto, while bringing new insight to Moving Pictures, their crowning glory. Limelight: Rush in the '80s is a celebration of fame, of the pushback against that fame, of fortunes made — and spent ...
In the latter half of the decade, as Rush adopts keyboard techno-logy and gets pert and poppy, there's an uproar amongst diehards, but the band finds a whole new crop of listeners. Limelight charts a dizzying period in the band's career, built of explosive excitement but also exhaustion, a state that would lead, as the '90s dawned, to the band questioning everything they previously believed and each member eyeing the oncoming decade with trepidation and suspicion.
• "This is the Rush biography that you need." — SPILL MAGAZINE
• "It takes an inquisitive researcher's mind to properly tell such a rich history, and ... Popoff more than proves he's the man for the job." — SONIC PERSPECTIVES
• "This will thrill Rush's huge fan base." — PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
• "A must for Rush fans." — LIBRARY JOURNAL
• "The amount of detail is astonishing ..." — METAL-RULES
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction
Chapter 1: Permanent Waves
Chapter 2: Moving Pictures
Chapter 3: Exit ... Stage Left
Chapter 4: Signals
Chapter 5: Grace Under Pressure
Chapter 6: Power Windows
Chapter 7: Hold Your Fire
Chapter 8: A Show of Hands
Chapter 9: Presto
Discography
Credits
About the Author
Martin Popoff — A Complete Bibliography
INTRODUCTION
Get any pile of Rush fans together at, say, one of the many legendary
RushCons over the years, and you can quickly elicit
strong opinions on what parts of the band’s ’80s catalogue are
valid and which are not.
It was an action-packed decade for the boys, as they finally
found themselves, by dint of their own wiles and will, in the top
quartile, not so much with Permanent Waves but for sure come
Moving Pictures, a red-and-black record accepted as the band’s
masterpiece.
With Signals, Rush started challenging expectations. The ’80s
will mess with your head, and Rush took to messing about with
all the decade had to offer, enthusiastically so, given the guys’
predilection toward explorations of modernity. Keyboards and
hairstyles in tandem, Geddy, Alex and Neil took the mile when
offered an inch, and by the time we get to Power Windows and
Hold Your Fire, Rush was an astringent, high-strung pop band,
trendy keys and synths in excess.
Most fans went along for the trip, and if they weren’t always
happy with records like Presto, the concert halls were still filled,
as the band had no problem delivering the power trio power the
fans expected during a show, aided and abetted by a deep catalogue
of hits more analog.
And the productivity was impressive as well. Most ’70s bands
couldn’t hold a candle to Rush’s tally of seven studio albums and
two double live spreads in the ’80s, even if the guys decided to
notch back on the mega-tours. Rush were regulars in Europe,
but, never a world band, they began to visit less frequently, also
cutting back on how much of the U.S. and Canada they would
hammer at repeatedly.
As you may or may not know, Limelight: Rush in the ’80s is the
follow-up tome to Anthem: Rush in the ’70s. That book looked
at the long ramp-up to the Zeppelin-esque debut album in 1974
and the arrival of a transformational force in the guise of Neil
Peart, sadly and shockingly deceased from brain cancer just
as that book was getting ready to go to print. Peart, of course,
became heralded as one of the greatest rock drummers of all
time — and certainly one of the most air drummed — as early
as his third record with the band, 2112. Anthem then examined
the band’s first live album, followed by A Farewell to Kings and
Hemispheres, and all of a sudden, the ’70s are over and it’s time
for something fresh, including technological innovations as well
as the rise of MTV and the age of video.
Limelight: Rush in the ’80s is the story of these subsequent
years, beginning a couple of weeks into the “haties” (as voiced by
Morrissey) with the robust if brief Permanent Waves and bowing
out in November of 1989 with Presto, a record that bucked so
many trends, the band found themselves kind of marginalized,
or more positively, defiantly singular, sounding like no one else
while still essentially playing a form of mainstream pop.
Along the way, we hear from the myriad producers Geddy,
Alex and Neil brought into the circle, not so much desperately
but avidly, curiously, looking for inspiration from industry
peers. Essentially what Peter Collins and Rupert Hine (and
slightly less so Peter Henderson) brought was pop modernity,
with the guys all too happy to push buttons on the latest
toys to craft a sound more in keeping with what they saw as
valid and au courant, the music of grown-ups. A contentious
dynamic of the book, which I argue is borne out in the music
and lyrics, is that the band was seeking the respect of folks
they thought were smart, folks who had good taste. You may
look at that as a negative, or you might see that as the guys
enthusiastically participating in the hustle and bustle of the
modern world, growing intellectually, not conceding that they
themselves couldn’t be new world men.
And becoming new world men meant that Geddy, Alex and
Neil would develop interests outside of music, because, after
all, wasn’t music itself moving toward the idea of multimedia?
Toward this end, toward becoming well rounded — in effect,
Renaissance men — as the ’80s wore on, the guys pulled back
from touring, spending more time on family, travel and other
creative pursuits. The business of Rush is very different in this
book versus the first one, reflected in the vast difference between
A Show of Hands and All the World’s a Stage.
But this isn’t the end of our story. Because of course Rush
didn’t stop at Presto, even if the band had slowed. More joy and
much more heartbreak were to star-cross the lives of Geddy,
Alex and Neil, and the story wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t
march forward and meet the heroes of our tale at their own
individual completions. Stay tuned as we continue this loud and
loving march through time toward a conclusion that now, with
the recent passing of the Professor, is very, very different and
darker than when this trilogy began.
-Martin Popoff
CHAPTER 1: PERMANENT WAVES
“Most promising keyboard player of the year.”
For all the turmoil in the music industry in the late 1970s,
including the changings of the guard (from rock, quickly past
punk into post-punk) to the recessionary year that was 1979
(saved barely by the arrival of The Wall, In Through the Out Door
and The Long Run), Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart —
a.k.a. Rush — kept moving forward from strength to strength.
Their sixth album, Hemispheres, proved that the band could sell,
and on tour excel, despite a record that was as anti-commercial
as they get. Broken down, that record gave up a side-long
song about Greek gods and a long instrumental, leaving room
for only two short pieces, one of them heavy slide-rule metal
(“Circumstances”) and the other hummable enough, but about
trees fighting each other. But the awards kept coming, allowing
for even more of the autonomy and validation the band attracted.
By the end of the decade, Rush was undisputedly the biggest
band from Canada.
Still, the band wasn’t making a lot of money. Rush had moved
away from the days of hit singles like “Closer to the Heart” and
“Fly by Night.” But the financial situation wasn’t dire, and there
was a sense of generosity within the Rush camp. They wanted
to give back, often playing B-city gigs that might not be particularly
profitable. The band also poured a lot of their profits into
making their show bigger and more extravagant any chance they
got. It’s a strategy that paid off: it made Rush, a still-small band
in 1979 and 1980, look huge.
In tandem with the band’s expanding maturity as a live act
was their consistent growth from record to record. Permanent
Waves would demonstrate a number of advancements, but these
would be subtle, and in part driven by the guys changing up the
environment in which they worked.
“We were torn at that point with what kind of music we
wanted to make, in terms of its length,” recalls Geddy. “We had
fallen into this pattern of writing these really long pieces and
that started to seem formulaic to us, predictable. Complicated
musical part here, this is where we do the chorus, and it kind of
got boring. So we thought, we still like to play long, complicated
pieces. If we had our druthers, that’s all we probably would do.
And then there is the lyric thing. How do we bring that in and
how do we keep improving? So we came up with this idea of
trying to make the long pieces but have them much quicker. So
over five, six minutes, as opposed to twenty.”
Permanent Waves did not let up on the quick edits, the progressive
virtuosity, the rapid arrival and dispersal of action points,
but as Geddy says, it’s almost as if the result was long songs defying
the space-time continuum, somehow being as long as they’ve
always been, but then there’s time left over (maybe that’s also
why Permanent Waves is such an irritatingly short album).
“It was a conscious thing, to not write really long songs,”
seconds Alex. “And what resulted from that would be fine. I
remember that when we wrote these songs, it seemed like they
were songs within songs, just smaller pieces. ‘The Spirit of Radio,’
for example, the sequence was a very key part to it. That led to
the signature guitar riff, off the top of the song. We all connected
to that one thing as the center, and all these other little pieces
branched out — the same thing but much more condensed.”
“There was something about the record that was really fresh
for us,” continues Geddy. “It was written quickly. And the recording
session was so smooth — or maybe it was just in comparison
to the horrible pain of Hemispheres — but it seemed so fresh and
energetic, and there was a really good vibe to the whole session.
We weren’t so far from home, not so isolated from family, in a
new studio. You walk in and there’s this beautiful view of this lake
and the Laurentian Mountains. So it was a very happy, good-vibe
record. And we finished it very quickly, I think five or six weeks.”
Leading up to the sessions at the iconic Le Studio, in Morin
Heights in rural Quebec, the band had taken their longest break
yet; they’d had six weeks to recharge. The band enjoyed a rural
retreat before entering the studio, with writing and rehearsals
taking place at Lakewood Farms, near Flesherton, Ontario. This
mirrored their approach to Hemispheres and was something they
also did for the next album. The sessions ran in September and
October of 1979 toward a release date of January 14, 1980. At the
farm, the gear was set up in the basement, and Neil had some
space for lyric writing, which he could do in a cottage nearby.
The songs were further honed during a handful of warm-up
tour dates as well as demo sessions at the Sound Kitchen, Terry
Brown now presiding.
“It was the first album we did at Le Studio, and it was such a
treat to work there,” notes Alex. “We set up a volleyball net and
court outside of the front door of the house we were staying at,
which is by a lake. We put lights up so we could come back at
two in the morning when we were finished recording and play
volleyball for a couple of hours and drink and all that stuff. It was
about a mile to paddle or row from the lake to the studio from
the house.
“That’s before Le Studio became a big complex, so it had
a very homey vibe to it. [Owners] Yael and Andre Perry were
just wonderful people. We had some great dinners; I have very
fond memories of it. That was a very traditional period. We had
just gone from that last concept, Hemispheres, and we had been
recording in England, but that one we recorded at Le Studio but
mixed it in England, at Trident. It was an attempt to condense
our songs a little bit, be more economical, try to get as much
as we could in that four- to five-minute framework rather than
eight to eleven minutes.”
“That became a regular thing, an obsession,” says Geddy,
keying in on Alex’s mention of volleyball. “That was one of our
early introductions to sport activities [laughs]. We’d finish at one
in the morning or whatever, and we kind of perfected the art of
night volleyball. And we played even in the winter. We’d have a
few drinks and get a bit fortified after the session and go out on
the volleyball pitch. We built light standards and had it lit so we
could play at night. And sometimes we’d even play after dinner
a little bit, but then we’d get back into the studio, and our hands
would be all swollen from punching this stupid ball. We were
like, I don’t know if we should be playing like this, after supper.”
“It’s on a kidney-shaped lake, called Lac Perry, after the
founder, Andre Perry,” explains Neil, as, years later, he walked
through the burned-out ruins of the studio, at this point
consigned to be taken over by nature. “And at the other end
there’s a beautifully appointed guest house that we would stay
in, month after month over the years. And it’s only six hours
from home. All of us lived in southern Ontario at that time.
So it was convenient; we could even have our families up to
visit. It was very much a home away from home. In wintertime
I would cross-country ski between the guest house and
the studio. I would get up in the morning and go cross-country
skiing, and then ski right in to work, because all the trails link
right along here. It became such a nice escape. A lifetime passion
was formed here. The assistant engineer taught me how to
cross-country ski — the late Robbie Whelan.
“What a workplace to walk into every day,” reminisces Peart.
“I mean, I’m a lifetime nature lover anyway. And to be exposed
to this view, changing through the seasons ... We worked here,
first time in fall, which was glorious. And then later in winter
and summer and spring as well. There’s a mountain that goes up
opposite the guest room, dining room, and every morning we’d
watch the autumn colors change on that hillside. And the three of
us, we actually hiked up there one time. We often have subgroups
that we write as. And one of them, our new wave romantic group,
was called the Fabulous Men. And the three of us hiked up to a
high ski trail called the Portageur. I’d ski by it in winter so I knew
it was there, and I led us up there and I carved it into the tree, the
Fabulous Men. Probably still there [laughs].
“In the summertime there were paddleboats on the lake, or
a little rowboat,” continues Neil. “Oh, and there were Alex’s
radio-controlled planes. There were many stories of him crashing
and us chasing them. One of them went down way across
the lake in the woods, and all we heard was ‘bzzzz, crash.’ So
we went across there in the boat with the radio-control thing,
and he worked the servos, and we’d all be creeping through the
woods listening for a ‘beep beep’ and, you know, sure enough,
there it is up in the tree. So all kinds of personal, friendly adventures
like that.
“And being immersed in the French-Canadian scene was for
me life changing because in 1980, I bought a cabin and have
had a place here ever since. I loved the cross-country skiing and
snowshoeing in the winter, and the rowing and swimming in
the summer. It still really speaks to me, this area. In the autumn,
of course, the colors are spectacular. There’s so much history
here, both personal and professional. Thinking of those first few
records, Permanent Waves, Moving Pictures, Signals and Grace
Under Pressure, so much that happened here.”
About Permanent Waves, Neil says, “In those days, we all
recorded together in the room, all of us. All of us were learning
the song and interacting with each other’s parts. So a lot of stuff
was hammered out — is the best way to put it — here. You know,
by playing it over and over again; that’s the way we worked in
those days.”
“Everything on the Permanent Waves record came together
in a relatively short period of time,” adds Geddy, surveying the
whole experience, but reflecting on how prepared the band was.
“In fact, it was one of the most pleasurable and easiest albums for
us to record. It was just one of those great writing sessions. At
that time, it was still three of us sitting around, throwing ideas
together and writing together in typical garage band style. We
would write two songs, rehearse them, take them into the studio
and lay down live backing tracks. Everything just clicked. Morin
Heights was beautiful, and the engineer was terrific. It all came
together in a very quick and spontaneous way, which I think is
reflected in the songs. Subsequently, we’ve tried to maintain that
over the years.
“It’s much more interesting to try to take that idea of being
progressive and not do it in a way that people expect you to be progressive,”
continues Geddy, further attempting to articulate what
was different about the songs on this album. “What is a progressive
band? Oh, you do a concept album that has space involved, and
here’s the long instrumental portion, here’s the overture. That, to
me, just seemed less interesting than saying, okay, let’s do ten individual
songs and each one of them can be a mini concept unto
itself. And it’s okay that there’s a thread that connects all those
songs, and the thread is the concept, right? It’s not the repeating
melody lines or the repeating elements that keep reappearing. To
me, that was a step forward. That was Rush progressing and not
just staying in the same mold we had cast on 2112.
“But it was a challenge. Can we write a song that’s five, six,
seven minutes long — those are short songs by our standards —
and still deliver something really interesting musically? Is there
enough time to be musically adventurous in five minutes and yet
tell a different kind of story? That was the whole key, and that
began ten years of experimenting. And it’s a never-ending experiment,
still to this day, really. Structurally it was interesting to see
if we could be very aggressive one moment, very melodic another.
Still have those instrumental sections that have a climax and a
peak — that’s the way you would structure a ten-minute piece —
but shrink it all down and see ... does it sound edited together?
Does it still have a flow? Does it still have a rhythm to it that feels
good to listen to? Those are all things every writer of that genre of
music has to deal with, and we were obsessed with it.
“But I think we spent five weeks, six weeks making that record.
It was just boom, boom, boom, and then we went to England and
mixed it at Trident. Without the difficulty of Hemispheres, we
never would have found Trident Studios. So everything happens
for a reason. All the crappiest experiences of your life prepare you
for the next step.”
“They came very well prepared for that album, with a lot of
preproduction,” says Terry, obviously pleased with the contrast to
the previous project. “They had spent an inordinate amount of
time rehearsing, so they came to the table with things finished,
as it were. We didn’t spend as much time together as they spent
together preparing the songs. That was a big change. It was a
fun record, but it wasn’t easy. It was hard from a playing standpoint,
but again, they were really starting to push the envelope
as players.”
“There was a strong division between Hemispheres and
Permanent Waves,” reflects Neil with respect to the compositions,
“even though we still had long pieces and a lot of extended
arrangements and instrumentation and so on. But there was
a change of attitude in the late ’70s and in the music we were
responding to. ‘The Spirit of Radio’ incorporates stylistically and
again, implicitly, what all that was about.
“And from Permanent Waves, that set us up to be able to do
Moving Pictures. What we decided to do at the end of Hemispheres
was realized with Moving Pictures. Very often, that’s the case;
there’ll be a whole album’s growth necessary to take us to where
we’re going. And I remember a critic around that time in the ’70s
saying he just wished he could give us a big kick in the direction
we were going. And that was a nice criticism, you know? And
one of the few worthwhile ones we ever received. That was really
thoughtful. I remember Geddy pointing it out to me, how great
that was. He was acknowledging that we were going in the right
direction, but it was taking too long.”
“When they came up with the material for Permanent Waves,
it was pretty exciting,” says Terry, “because it was so different. But
I hadn’t had the conversation, ‘We need to come up with something
shorter or more concise or different.’ Hemispheres was a hard
record to make, and it drained everybody creatively, so it seemed
only natural that the next record was going to be quite different.
You couldn’t do two of those in a row.”
The engineering credit on Permanent Waves went to Paul
Northfield, who begins his long association with the band at
this point.
“It was September of ’79 and I was working in Morin Heights,
Le Studio. At that time the studio’s reputation was built on not
just the equipment, but the people who worked there. Its reputation
had already started to rise as there had been some great hard
rock records done there. And it was convenient. It’s in Canada
and it’s a beautiful area. When people came to the studio, either
myself or Nick Blagona, the other engineer, would be assigned
to engineer the projects. There would be myself and an assistant,
and in this case, it was Robbie Whelan.”
In terms of Paul’s history, he explains: “In the case of the
studio, I was hired because of my credentials, because I’d worked
in London for four or five years, and I’d gotten a track record
of working with people like Gentle Giant, Emerson, Lake &
Palmer and Yes, and to some degree, Steve Howe. I had a resume,
so I think they suddenly saw an opportunity to have somebody
in the mix who had a different point of view, and a point of view
they really liked.
“And people often used house engineers. So when they
walked in the door, I kind of assumed I was going to be sitting
in the engineering seat and Terry was the producer — I made
that assumption from day one — and I sat down and talked to
them about it: ‘This is how things work out here,’ ‘This is a good
place to set up drums.’ And I think in that moment I probably
sold them on the idea of, ‘Oh, okay, let’s have Paul sit in the
engineering seat and Terry will sit in the producer’s seat and this
will be a change.’
“It wasn’t until later that I realized Terry did a lot of the engineering
himself. That’s the way it was. I guess at the end of the
day, they probably came and met me and realized I had a lot of
experience that might be interesting to bring to the table, and so
Terry decided to take the producer’s chair, rather than doing both
jobs, and we worked from there. I did all the hands-on stuff, and
he would be overseeing the whole project as a producer often does.
“There was a lot of camaraderie with the band and with
Terry,” continues Northfield. “It was very much like a boys’ club.
Becoming part of the recording process with Rush was entering
into their world. Because they spent so much time together
on the road, working a ridiculous amount of time, and when
they were not on the road, frequently either writing or recording.
They had a sort of insularity about their environment, and so
obviously that included Terry, and subsequently included us —
myself and Robbie. We would often eat with them, most times,
actually, for dinner, essentially for two months during the recording
from beginning to end. We were recording twelve hours plus
a day, seven days a week. So that’s the atmosphere at the time.”
About his role as engineer on Permanent Waves, Paul says, “I
made a lot of suggestions as to what the best places in the studio
were, because I knew the room and the basic setups and the idiosyncrasies
of the equipment we had. Because at that time, there
wasn’t the same level of standardization you have now in studios,
and there wasn’t the rental aspect of recording. Now you can
pretty much go anywhere and have any equipment, and if you
don’t have it, you can get it within a day or a few hours; you can
have it shipped to you as a day rental. That didn’t exist then.
Each studio had its particular strengths and weaknesses, and
those contributed toward how records sounded.
“And even the monitoring and speakers we used, I mean, we
were mixing and recording using very large speakers that were
mounted in the wall, in the ceiling, above the control room
window. And that has a profound impact on the sound. There
was no uniformity. These days, there is relative uniformity. If you
don’t like the speakers when you walk into the studio, sitting on
the console, you go and get the ones you like. But those small
high-quality speakers didn’t really exist in ’79. That’s not to say
none existed, but it wasn’t until probably the mid-’80s or the
early ’80s that things like the Yamaha NS-10 became popular.
But at that time, part of my role was to be like, ‘Okay, I am familiar
with this room, this is the equipment we have, these are the
good things we have, try this, try that.’”
Paul also understood the narrative the band was writing for
itself concerning the previous album and this one.
“It was just fairly explicit. I think they had decided they’d
indulged themselves to such a degree in doing anything they
wanted to do, musically. If they felt like they wanted to stretch
a certain section out for five minutes because they really enjoyed
playing it and wanted to experiment with it, they just did it. I
think after having done that with Hemispheres, they wanted to
say all of the important things in a smaller, more concise way.
And obviously it has its benefits, because it makes it easier and
more accessible for people. If they want to be heard on the radio,
it’s very hard to play a twelve-minute song and get any airplay.
“Although that seemed to be very secondary,” Paul continues.
“It seemed to be the challenge of being able to say something
concisely that appealed to them. They were very much an idealistic
band, probably driven by the fact that in the early days
when they did what other people said, it always went invariably
wrong. And when they just did what they wanted to do, they
got a really great response from their fans and their career blossomed.
So they were very idealistic about what they did. Now
we’re doing this because we want to — this is the direction we’re
going because we enjoy it.
“Their desire to change and be different and challenge themselves
was even down to the recording process. I remember it
driving me a little crazy in the early days, for Moving Pictures and
Permanent Waves. They had this idea that whenever we recorded
anything, even if we got it and everything sounded good, particularly
the drums, then we would change all the microphones on
the next song, for the purpose of not wanting to repeat themselves
and to be creative. Which, in theory, is very interesting. In
practice, there are certain microphones that are really excellent
for doing certain jobs, so to change them for creative reasons, for
change’s sake, was actually like, ‘Oh, really?’ Some of it may have
been a certain naïveté, but it was very heartfelt. This is what they
do. They’re not really interested in conforming to anybody else’s
preconceived ideas of what they should or shouldn’t do.”
Paul says Geddy took a particular interest in the production
side of things. “Yes, Geddy did take a more hands-on approach.
He was there all the time, sort of watching, sitting at the side,
present pretty much every step of the way. Sometimes when Alex
was playing a solo it would just be Terry, Alex and myself in the
control room. But even so, I think Geddy was there lapping it
all up and being a part of it. He was like a sponge, trying to suck
up everything that was going on in the studio. He was there in
the control room for almost every minute of making Permanent
Waves and Moving Pictures.
“One other thing about Geddy: he was the first bass player
I’ve worked with that came in with an overdrive kind of amp
sound. Although Chris Squire was also doing that at that time,
using a Marshall head and a Marshall 4x12 for the growl part
of it. That may have also been a bit of an inspiration for Geddy
because they were both Rickenbacker players.”
But Paul and Geddy never really talked about Yes. Northfield
says that was more an “unspoken thing, the fact that Rush were
playing progressive music, albeit a more metal-driven kind. They
really liked the arrangement depth that was there with the best of
the progressive stuff, and the experimentalism and the indulgence
that works both ways. It can be indulgent in a negative way but
also liberating. It’s like creatively, you just do what you like rather
than what is formulaic and what fits for a pop song or a successful
song. You go, ‘I love the way this thing plays, I love playing this
riff, I want to play it for five minutes’ because I love it.’
“Extended jams, even if they’re highly structured, they’re part of
what Rush was all about. That ignoring the formulas of the record
business, to just do what they like doing and what they were getting
a response from their audience with. Geddy came in with his
bass sound and with his attitude and his playing and was looking
for us — Terry and the new studio and me — to actually capture
that, and sort of surprise them maybe with something new.”
Addressing Geddy’s temperament, Northfield reflects on “his
humor and his focus, which kind of flipped back and forth. One
minute he’s being very relaxed and irreverent when everything is
going smoothly — the humor is flying, the side comments, the
relaxed banter. But if at any moment it seems like something is
not quite where it’s supposed to be, he can turn on a dime and
be very intense, for want of a better word. That’s happened to
me a couple times, where we go from being very easygoing, and
then for some reason he felt like something was getting missed
or overlooked, he would turn into a different kind of personality.
Not Jekyll and Hyde but fairly substantial swings.
“Humor is important for the whole band. They egged each
other on. Alex is a natural comedian, but Geddy has a sense
of the absurd. A good example is when we did the vocals for
Permanent Waves, he had a mandolin. It might’ve been one that
was lying around at the studio. But he would be doing vocals and
holding a mandolin, and every time he would stop singing, he
would play the mandolin, just to mess with us. Normally when
you’re recording vocals, you want to keep everything quiet. So
what that meant was we had a lot of work. One of the albums he
had the mandolin and on another it was a harmonica, and on one
of them he had a set of congas set up. And he did that to fuck
with us, you know?”
As Paul emphatically explains, Rush at this point wasn’t particularly
well versed in keyboard and synth technology.
“No, when they first came in to do Permanent Waves, it was
a three-piece band with a synthesizer that just played one note,
you know, one big string ‘deeee,’ like this, and Taurus pedals that
played the big, deep ‘oooooh,’ like that. And Geddy could just
flick a switch and play a super-low note on the Taurus pedals and
have this orchestrated, high, almost stringlike sound, which was
preprogrammed. He had this Oberheim synth, like four-voice
Oberheim, that’s not programmable. You set everything up. And
it was basically set to one sound. He might have had two sounds
on it, but all it did was go ‘zing,’ and then the Taurus pedals
would be like that thunderous low end.
“It gave them this kind of dimension, because sometimes
Geddy wanted to riff with Alex, high up the neck on the bass.
When you do that, suddenly all the bottom end is gone out
of the track. They could play as a three-piece, almost like two
guitars, but then the Taurus pedals would give the thunderous
low end. And then there’s the little zingy string stuff that would
sometimes come in on the chorus or on a section, which would
give it this orchestra feel. And that is not particularly high-tech.
That’s just one note from a pedal with a complementary high.
And then, obviously, he did a bit of Minimoog stuff, simple
Minimoog melodies, not technical playing. He knew how to
program the Minimoog for what he wanted; he was just a basic
programmer. He wasn’t a tech head about it.
“But then as time went on, just by nature of his desire, first
of all, polyphonic synths came in where you could play chords
— and interesting ones. The first really interesting polyphonic
synth he used was the OB-Xa. And that was funny, because that
was on Moving Pictures. And at that time, there was like, not a
battle, but a running gag between the guys in the band. Because
Neil would win drummer of the year in Modern Drummer, like
regularly. And Geddy was winning bass player of the year, and
Alex was coming second to Eddie Van Halen. And it was a
source of much ... I’m sure for Alex, it was a bit of a tough pill
to swallow, even though those things being what they are, they’re
more like popularity contests.
“But the thing that was really funny was that Geddy won
most promising keyboard player of the year,” chuckles Paul.
“For Moving Pictures. And that was when he’d just gravitated
to chords. And so he’d probably have a sense of irony or humor
about that because obviously he’s not a keyboard player of the
year by anybody’s imagination.
“But the use of them in the arrangements was a different matter.
You could argue that their arrangement sense was, between all of
them, really powerful. But in terms of his technique, like I say,
he’d just graduated from playing one note at a time or Minimoog
melodies to actually playing chords. And that’s when, suddenly,
the technology started to come in. And then for a while there,
I was very involved because I used to do programming as well.
I was more of a technical kind of person. A lot of my strengths
in recording and music come from a technical background, an
obsession with the technology, if you like.
“We had a big meeting at one point. I had latched onto somebody
who was a great electronics designer from the video side of
things. We talked a bunch, and for a while, there was the possibility
that we were going to be building a programmable way of
playing chords from his foot pedals, which was basically before
MIDI. Now that is very easy to do; you can just buy an off-theshelf
set of foot pedals and have preprogrammed chords under
every pedal. But that was something we actually almost did back
then. And at the last minute, Geddy kind of decided no, because
it was gonna cost quite a lot of money when you do something
like that from scratch. But he was very intrigued by that. But I
think what stopped him wasn’t how much it was gonna cost. I
think it was that he prefers to just play bass and sing, not pressing
this foot, that foot, this hand, singing, playing bass. That’s
been one of his frustrations as a musician, sometimes he was so
busy playing three or four things at once.”
Northfield calls Geddy a natural bass player. “He’s got very
good instincts. And on the aggressiveness of his bass playing, the
interesting thing is, he’s the only bass player I’ve ever worked
with who broke an E string on his bass in the studio. And when it
happened, I was like, ‘You what?!’ It has a lot to do with, I think,
the power in his right hand, the way he flexes his hand. You see
that right hand sort of twisting, and sometimes he’s really snapping
the strings, whereas other people that have great technique
hardly move their hands at all, and they can maybe play insanely
great or they slap and do all kinds of stuff. But his hand kind of
rotates as he plays, and he digs in. He uses his whole wrist to get
the power, rather than just his fingertips. Very few players play
with that kind of real digging-in, super-aggressive right hand. To
me, that’s where his power comes from. Plus a lot of conviction
and commitment. And then, obviously, in the early days, that
growly Rickenbacker tone, with the sort of fret buzz and the particular
... it was like Rotosound strings with the Rickenbacker
and the fret buzz and the aggressive playing. He built this really
chunky, growly, kind of Chris Squire–like sound.”
Hugh Syme wasn’t particularly happy with his cover art for
Hemispheres. On Permanent Waves, the man redeemed himself
fabulously, creating a stunning cover image that went the extra
unknowable, abstract and magical mile, helping to define the
contents of the record, in this case conjuring words like austere
and modern. This is underscored by the arty shot of the band, as
well as the typestyles.
But it is the Hipgnosis-like cover image that is the real treat.
Canadian model Paula Turnbull is pictured, oddly lit, unconcerned
about the carnage behind her. (Turnbull would come
back to represent this cover on Exit ... Stage Left, which features
references to all the album covers up to 1981.) There are permanent
waves in her hair and a wave in her skirt. Behind her is a
big wave crashing over Seawall Boulevard in Galveston, Texas,
during Hurricane Carla, September 11, 1961, from an iconic
photo by Flip Schulke, who used to put himself in harm’s way
getting these shots. Also oblivious to the weather is a tiny Hugh
Syme, waving. A newspaper flaps and waves in the atmospheric
turbulence, with the famous incorrect advance headline from the
Chicago Tribune announcing Dewey Defeats Truman. The paper
complained, and Hugh altered it to say Dewei Defeats Truman
(some later reissues delete the headline altogether).
The red electrocardiogram-like pattern into which the name
of the album is artfully incorporated is a remnant of Syme’s original
idea, related to Neil in a phone call to his country home. Syme
wanted to tape electrodes to the heads of the guys while they were
performing and get ECG readings, which would be reproduced
in reds and perhaps embossed golds. Originally, the record was to
be called Wavelength, but the band found that title had been used
too many times. Permanent Waves was a bit of a dig at the music
industry, constantly announcing new waves in music.
Once the needle drops on the music, one is instantly confronted
with a bracing Alex Lifeson lick, which sounds like
Eddie Van Halen–style tapping but is in fact Alex picking rapidly.
Geddy and Neil punctuate in unison cascading fills, and
we are off to the races. A couple more intro riffs are tried on for
stadium-rocking size, and we are efficiently placed in the verses,
where Neil tells a nostalgic tale of the magic of radio. “The Spirit
of Radio” also features a brief tip of the hat to reggae, all the
rage around the world at the time and revived into a new context
by the Police, whom Rush admired. The band had added a
reggae intro to live renditions of “Working Man” and thought it
would be a fun touch in this song about the magic of music. And
the song continues to surprise — there’s even a part designed
to represent the turn of a radio knob and the quick sampling of
different stations one might hear.
“Yeah, it worked,” says Geddy of “The Spirit of Radio,” which
hit #22 in Canada, #51 in the U.S. and an impressive #13 in the
U.K. “I don’t know whether it was just a relief for people not to
have to sit through twenty-five minutes to get to the end of a
song, but we just took all our ability and all that experimenting
we’d done and focused it in a smaller time period, and the songs
really had a lot of power. We still had some longness going on
there on ‘Jacob’s Ladder,’ but ‘Spirit of Radio’ was one of those
songs that proved to us we could take a five-minute format and
make it complex and make it melodic and make it all work, so
that was a big learning moment for us.”
Explained Neil, speaking with Modern Drummer back in 1980:
“It’s not about a radio station or anything; it’s really about the
spirit of music when it comes right down to the basic theme of
it. It’s about musical integrity. We wanted to get across the idea
of a radio station playing a wide variety of music. For instance,
‘The Spirit of Radio’ comes from the radio station at home
called CFNY. That’s their slogan. They play all great music from
reggae to R&B, to jazz, to new wave, everything that’s good or
interesting. It’s a very satisfying radio station to me. They have
introduced me to a lot of new music. There are bits of reggae in
the song and one or two verses have a new wave feel. We tried to
get across all the different forms of music. There are no divisions
there. The choruses are very electronic. It’s just a digital sequencer
with a glockenspiel and a counter guitar riff. The verse is a standard
straight-ahead Rush verse. One is a new wave, a couple of
reggae verses, and some standard heavy riffing, and as much as we
could possibly get in there without getting redundant.”
-end excerpt
Limelight: Rush in the '80s