Chapter 7
"We almost died by the end of the 'Kings' tour," recalls Alex. "That was the tour where we'd work for 12 days, have a day off, work for nine days, have a day off. We got really burned out! It was a very tough tour. We worked a lot that year. We had a week off, then we went to England and started writing 'Hemispheres'. We were in a rehearsal house about a mile from Rockfield for two weeks. We'd finish writing and rehearsing one morning at 10 o'clock. The crew came in at noon, moved the gear to the studio where we were working by four that afternoon. The material wasn't all written, we were still stuck on a few things so we ploughed through. Once we started working we figured we're OK, we're gonna finish.
"We had planned five days session before mixing in London, maybe go to Europe for a few days and just relax. And we went overtime. We were there at Rockfield until two in the morning the day that the other band were coming in. We managed to push them off for a few days. They weren't really in a hurry. Thank goodness that they would do that. We were late on everything. We had one evening off, when we recorded the album. We worked for about five weeks straight on the recording end of it. We left for London that morning. Two o'clock in the morning. Went into the studio at noon that day at Advision, started mixing; we were there about 10 days. Nothing was working. It sounded awful. Everything sounded terrible. Gedd had some vocals that he had to do, that he did at Advision. It was a very trying time for him. It wasn't working out for him... very, very tense. To go through that at the end of the tour. We were in England for three months throughout 'Hemispheres'.
"At that point, while in Advision, Broon was almost out of his mind and Terry never gets angry and he was. I've never seen him like that before or since. And he said 'I have to get out of here'. He took the tapes around to three or four studios, just to hear them in another studio and he finally went into Trident, put them on and found the problem. He heard everything that was wrong with the mixes at that point, that he couldn't pin down before. We'd had a lot of really good fortune with 'A Farewell To Kings' at Advision. 'Hemispheres' had a different feel to it, and it was just not happening. At Trident everything stood out. We moved all the tapes there. Managed to book two weeks and mixed 'Hemispheres' there.
"By the end of it we were happy to go. We had two parties! A private party on the second to last night and we had just us and Terry, and the guys that worked at the studio. We got totally out of it! We had a very, very good time that night. The following night we had some friends over, and we had some champagne. It was such a relief to get over that whole thing, and to get home. We couldn't wait to get home. The entire year was really hard. At the time we were all quite happy with the record. We felt that all the blood, sweat and tears had been worth it. It was another album that was a transitional album for us. 'Hemispheres' was an important album for us to do.
"'Hemispheres' set us up really well for what was to come next. When I listen to that album now, it's a dark album for me to listen to. I suppose I associate the whole tenseness and frustration and really hard work that went into that."
Geddy later explained why he thought they had run into problems during the recording of the album. "With every album, we want it to be that much more perfect. (With 'Hemispheres') the material changed and the approach to recording the material had to change to a certain degree because the music called for a different tone."
One of the songs that required a new approach was 'La Villa Strangiato (Weird City)'. "It was sort of a heavy release for us," said Geddy. "There were a lot of different ideas about music we wanted to put into a song. We wanted to put together a very complex song that had a lot of different time changes and had a lot of really radical changes in mood and rhythm. A little bit of humour is in there also. We spent more time recording 'Strangiato' than the entire 'Fly By Night' album. It's recorded in one take but it took 40 takes to get it right! It was our first piece without any vocals at all. So each section had to stand up with a theme and musical structure of its own."
And 'Strangiato' was not the most ambitious composition on the record. That distinction was reserved for 'Cygnus X-1 Book II--Hemispheres'.
"The basic idea came from a book I was reading called 'Powers Of Mind'," says Neil, "and it was just an incidental thing that was mentioned in the book, but it was something I'd read before so I tied it into a whole lot of things and it's the basic constant conflict between thoughts and emotions, between your feelings and your sort of rational ideas. Apollo and Dionysius have been used in a lot of books to sort of characterise those two elements, the rational side and the instinctive side. I've always been really interested in the way that those two themes transmit themselves into people in political life or in social life. All those conflicts are always going on between people. Whether the instinctive way is right or the rationally thought out way is right, and the basic theme of 'Hemispheres' is that conflict, the battle of the heart and mind.
"'Armageddon' is really the focus of that. It's the climax of that conflict and our hero Cygnus comes in and breaks up the conflict between Apollo and Dionysius. One of the main points that I wanted to make in the lyrics is that the battle is inside each of us. It's not some abstract cosmic battle, it's part of our everyday personal lives. So much of what we do in a day is governed by an idea or a feeling, and sometimes they can be battling each other."
That idea and others comes through loud and clear on the side-long epic. It achieves a unity that such longer pieces on 'Caress Of Steel' and '2112' were unable to attain. While the other long compositions seemed like stitched together song cycles, Hemispheres' is a complete piece of music. Evidence of the thematic and musical unity can even be found in the special effects: during the 'Armageddon' section as Geddy sings the word 'hemispheres' the left and right channels of the recording phase back and forth, emphasising the conflict between the two hemispheres of the brain.
Musically the familiar Rush sound undergoes further refinement. Even more than on the previous record, the music serves the lyrics and vice versa. The additional instruments are even more integrated into the piece.
Neil's lyrics continue to grow. They are as full of drama as ever, but they take on a more balanced and tolerant tone. The symbolic characters do not represent good and evil, but different points of view that must be reconciled.
Side two opens with a much shorter song, 'Circumstances', an interesting combination of the personal and the universal. The first two verses appear to refer to Neil's frustrating first trip to England. The chorus talks about the experience in more general terms as it discusses the chances we all take, the circumstances they occur in, and the way that the more things change, the more they seem to stay the same. The French phrase in the chorus besides conveying the latter thought more concisely also shows Neil's growing interest in the language. A few years later the three members of Rush began studying French. Neil himself had spent time in the French speaking Province of Quebec, and this motivated him to learn the language. The final two verses recall what appears to be Neil's personal experiences, as the song's character reflects on his current position and realises that all the things he once dreamed of as 'a boy alone and so far from home' have become reality. But the character still feels that he is the same person he was then. The song also contains a strong melody and even stronger playing from the trio.
'Circumstances' is followed by a squabble between the maples and the oak with tragi-comic results. In the 'Trees' the maples think that the oaks have far too much light. So the maples organise and move to cast off the oak tyranny. Unfortunately the result is that the trees are all made equal by 'hatchet... axe and saw.'
The album's closer is 'La Villa Strangiato' sub titled 'An Exercise In Self-lndulgence'. The weird city features the most intense playing on the record. What appears to be a studio production was actually performed live in one take. While on earlier recordings the band seemed to be trying to imitate the musical prowess of their idols, here they are actually outplaying many of them. The compositional foundation for the song is taken from weird dreams that Alex often had. Each of the separate musical themes is based on individual dreams.
With the album taking much longer than expected to complete, Rush found that they had only a few weeks off as they made some videos and prepared for another round of touring. The album was scheduled for release in October; the gigs also started that month.
Despite the fact that it was Super Bowl Sunday, the biggest day of the year for American sports fans, more than 14,000 fans surfaced for Rush's concert at the Philadelphia Spectrum on January 21. Blondie, the opening act, was a bad choice by the promoter because they were thrown off the stage in less than 20 minutes. These fans were hard-core! They had come to see Rush, so when Blondie's guitar player gave Philly his middle finger, the stage became filled with debris and on came the PA.
The crowd was fired up after booing Blondie, and it seemed to make us rant for Rush all the more. It was a general admission show and the floor became a flowing river of Rush fans following each and every note unleashed by Lee and Lifeson. Peart's percussive pounding left future Philadelphia drummers pondering their fate.
Hands were held high above the crowd on Lee's lyrical passage 'we only stop for the best' complete with black Rickenbacker double neck. A new dimension was added on 'Cygnus X-1 Book One The Voyage' and 'Book II Hemispheres'. Scriptures on the rear-projection screen pronounce the Prologue. The constellation of Cygnus is in sight with the six stars of the Northern Cross. Through the astral door the Rocinante is seen spinning timelessly through the spiralled space. At the end of 28-plus minutes of continuous music left and right hemispheres are united and we see the single perfect sphere.
Rush's grand finale was a presentation of the entire overture to '2112' (minus the Dream!). In the end Philly fans spilled over onto the floor, obviously in the mood for more. Rush responded with a medley of early classics including 'Working Man' and 'Bastille Day'.
Around this time the group won its second Juno award for best group of the year. But Alex, Geddy and Neil felt the weight of their growing popularity. "We were very, very careful not to let it get the best of us," says Alex. "That sudden success could really change you. You become lazy and constantly have other people doing things for you, and you lose perspective on why you're there and what you're doing."
For Neil... "The success put a strain on the friendship and it put a strain on the day-to-day relationships. It is something that we did go through at the time, we were not immune to it, but we were able to overcome the strain just by our closeness. We were able to help each other with difficulties like that and learned to deal with the pressure of things."
Geddy agrees with the other two's observations about the period. They could now indulge in, and be able to pay for, just about anything they wanted, a situation that had led to other bands growing apart in the past.
A six-week European jaunt began in mid-May at the Newcastle City Hall in the UK. Five of the 18 dates were in London where demand for tickets increased dramatically after the 'Farewell To Kings' tour. Next came Belgium, West Germany, Sweden, Denmark, Norway and Switzerland. The eight-month tour ended June 4 in Geleen, Holland, at an outdoor rock festival with Mick Jagger, Peter Tosh, The Police and Dire Straits. The event was dubbed the Pink Pop Festival.
By this time touring was no longer a financial necessity for the band, but according to Neil it was a "musical necessity. Not only do we develop so much as individual musicians... it is valuable to our development as a unit. The observations that I make on the road looking at people and cities and watching the little trips going on between people and their emotional relationships, I love observing it all. I am a constant observer."
The band then took the summer off to write new material. Work was pretty much completed on three new songs, 'Jacob's Ladder', 'The Spirit Of Radio', and 'Freewill'. Even this working vacation was a relief to the trio who now had six weeks off the road--their longest break in five years.
It was soon over as the band embarked on a comparatively short four-week tour to break in the new material before recording. A show in Davenport, Iowa, on August 17 started things off, and included in the itinerary was a concert at Varsity Stadium in Toronto on September 2.
By the time this concert began the place was only about half-filled--quite a surprise. Local fans said many of their friends had seen the band half a dozen times or more and were going to skip the show. It seemed a rather unfriendly welcome home.
Another Toronto group, FM, opened the show and I realised that there was a distinct disadvantage to our seats. The 12-foot high stage made it impossible to see the musicians playing if you were sitting down, but I figured out that once Rush started playing, everyone would stand up and we would have the best seats in the house.
I was proved right, at least at first. When the intro music to '2112' came on, the crowd rose to its feet. Geddy began going wild ripping improvised riffs on his black Rickenbacker as he wailed through 'Overture' and 'The Temples Of Syrinx'. It turned out to be the best version of the song I ever heard. Unfortunately much of the audience did not deserve such a spirited performance. About halfway through the song, fans in the back of the field began screaming for those in the front to sit down. Then someone got the bright idea that grabbing handfuls of sod and throwing it at the people up front would be a good form of crowd control. Within a minute or two several hundred people joined in.
Things got so ridiculous that we finally left the front and went towards the rear of the stadium and did our best Canadian audience imitation. When the trio introduced 'The Spirit of Radio' there was almost no applause before or after the song. The show was quite a disappointment. The audience seemed blas� throughout, even when the band were playing in top form. As the concert progressed you could tell Alex, Geddy and Neil were discouraged.
Ten days later, on the last North American date of the tour in Allentown, Pennsylvania, it was a completely different story. It was an outdoor show at the Allentown Fairgrounds. Oddly enough there was even a handful of Toronto fans down for the show and they agreed that the Varsity Stadium gig had been a real let down. At the height of his popularity, Pat Travers opened this show and the rowdy capacity crowd of 25,000 gave him a strong reception.
Rush again kicked off the set with '2112', and the difference in the atmosphere was immediately apparent. It seemed like everyone in the place was pushing to get up front. The crush of people near the barrier was incredible, and at one point it actually broke, creating a dangerous situation. The audience surged back and forth and came close to being smacked into the wooden beams and nails jutting out from the wreckage. Geddy was able to calm things down long enough for it to be pieced back together.
The group played a great set, but this night was different. The combination of their playing and the emotional feedback from the audience made the show one of those standout gigs among hundreds. Rush were right on, throughout, more certain of the new songs and freer on the old ones.
The band's sense of fun was also in evidence. Pat Travers joined in, and Rush became a four-piece for a raunchy version of 'Working Man'. Geddy announced it was the last night of the North American tour as the road crew carried the band's pilot, ducktaped like a Mummy, onto the stage. Alex played an all-out heavy metal solo while sitting on top of the hapless flyboy.
The pilot was in Allentown to fly the band back by night to Toronto so they could spend a few days with their families, but within 11 days they were back in England to play their last two live dates of the 1970s, a pair of shows at Stafford Bingley Hall. Attendance passed the 20,000 mark and fans were turned away at both concerts.
After the English encore dates it was back to Canada to work on influencing the music of the 80's.