Limelight: Rush in the '80s, page 11
Late October through the end of December saw the band include “Subdivisions” in their set and work from pieces of music during sound check, in particular “Chemistry,” as they played Europe supported by Girlschool, followed by the southeastern U.S. supported by Riot.
“Everybody was great,” recalls Riot guitarist Rick Ventura. “I actually remember Sandy filling in for Neil Peart during a sound check [laughs], because Neil wasn’t there yet. And I remember Geddy checking us out when we opened for them at the Nassau Coliseum. A few times, actually, he would listen to us at sound check, and I’d think, wow, that’s Geddy out there listening to us — interesting.”
Adds Riot manager Steve Loeb: “Scorpions were cool, AC/DC were drinking already at breakfast and Blackmore made everyone clear the corridors when he was on the way to the stage. The coolest band was by far Rush — not a single issue. You want full sound and lights? You got it. That did not go down with anyone else.”
“While we were on tour with Saxon, they offered us the Rush Moving Pictures tour in the States, and it was like a dream come true,” says Riot leader Mark Reale, sadly no longer with us. “So we came back from the English tour, I think we did two quick weeks with the reunited Grand Funk Railroad, and then we hooked up with Rush, which was amazing, the best. It was just us and Rush, and every night, I think we played for almost an hour in sold-out arenas.”
In late ’81, Geddy lets his long hair down and indulges to a considerable extent his sense of humor, appearing on the Bob & Doug McKenzie comedy album, The Great White North. Bob and Doug are two typical Canadian “hosers,” played by Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas, in the popular SCTV skit that went whatever constituted “viral” in the early 1980s. Dave is Ian Thomas’s brother, Ian being part of the Anthem Records family, and Geddy went to elementary school with Rick. The album came out on Anthem and was a hit, going gold in the States and triple platinum in Canada, with sales of over 350,000 copies. Geddy sings (and speaks) on the musical track “Take Off,” which is a novelty rave at radio, along with the duo’s take on “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Geddy brought his whole family down to the session, which he says only took about an hour.
During this period, Rush again did well at the Junos, with nominations for Group of the Year, Album of the Year for both Moving Pictures and Exit . . . Stage Left, and Recording Engineer of the Year, and a win for Best Album Graphics for Moving Pictures (Exit . . . Stage Left was also nominated for Best Album Graphics, and The Great White North won Best Comedy Album). There was also a hit Rush Laserium show at the planetarium in Seattle, and Exit . . . Stage Left was broadcast on TV with FM simulcasts.
The band got some much-needed time off in early 1982. A one-month writing session at the Grange in the Muskoka Lake region led to two weeks of dates in early April, with Krokus and Riggs supporting. The late spring and summer sessions would birth Signals, but three months of recording didn’t prove enough to get the album’s synthesizer/guitar balance down, and the guys had to stay overtime, which cut into additional planned family time in July.
“I was learning the keyboards at that time,” begins Geddy, modest about a path he had been on now for five years. “So that was kind of my thrust. I think I was actually taking piano lessons at that time too, to try to get more adept. I was fascinated with the electronic side of music and trying to integrate that into our sound, in a way that would give us more melody, you know, bring more emotion to a song, by the addition of a new texture. Suddenly a new melodic part could give the song more impact, more resonance. We always joked about wanting to be the world’s smallest symphony orchestra. That was a way of trying to make that dream come true. Quite simply it was ‘more.’ More was what we were after.
“Those decisions seem like huge decisions when you talk about them in retrospect,” says Geddy, on the increased use of keyboards. “But when you are doing them, they don’t seem like such a big deal. We had these new synths and they were giving us noises and new textures. And anything that brought something new into the music usually spurred writing. And so we were mixing the live album at Le Studio, and we were bored out of our minds, and we had this Oberheim, and we started jamming. We had this new toy, and we used the new toy! We came up with the song ‘Subdivisions,’ and it kind of set the tone for the record.
“And, yeah, it ended up being quite a different thing, but it didn’t feel like it was going to be at the time. It just felt fresh. Looking back, it is quite a departure, but I think that’s the way it always is with us. We don’t really have this big conference where we say, ‘Look, change now!’ We just kind of slip into something that seems new and fun to do, and we do it, and before we know it, it’s over and it was ‘Wow, they really changed.’ But from the inside, it doesn’t really change like that.”
“I don’t recall feeling we had to move away from something,” adds Alex, echoing Ged’s expressed spirit of exploration. “It was more moving into something, always looking for — from my point of view — a new effect or a new way of playing chords. I was experimenting and searching for things, not for some need to leave something behind but just to go somewhere else. Bringing the keyboards in, like this big Oberheim, was a cool new thing. And these chords sounded great and the synth sounds were very cool and there were other synths that were coming along. They were all fresh, cool things you wanted to base your writing around.”
“It felt like we were doing something that was edgier,” agrees Geddy. “We’ve always been guilty of being drawn to technology, like a moth to a flame. New gear comes by and it’s like, ‘Oh, we can get a new noise out of that, we can make a new sound, that’ll be something fresh.’ It’s looking for that new thing to bring into our sound. And I think we all had a shared interest in it, but I guess I was the guy making the noises, so it would be fair to say I was pushing that direction. I started writing on the thing, just for fun, saying, ‘Hey, what do you think of this?’ And then we would take it from there and all get behind it. Everyone has their input, but because I was the ‘keyboardist,’ I guess it came from my banging around on it.”
Again, a lot of this was inspired not just by having new toys but also by what exciting new music was happening around the guys, always enthusiastic first adopters, in the traditional sense, with technology, or with records by other bands. But of course first adopters also often share the teething pains, and so much of what they ingest and then push back out can be seen as fleeting and trendy. Bands could be flavor of the month, especially as far as the U.K. music papers were concerned. Syndrums and LinnDrums could make records unlistenable forever. Rush would enjoy some of the accolades for making music at the frontier, but they would also suffer some of the consequences, accused of jumping on trends, both in hairstyle and snare style.
“We always did listen to a lot of other bands,” continues Geddy. “We always tried to keep our ear to the ground, always listened to what was happening. And around that time there was a huge synth movement, starting in England, with Ultravox. All of those bands that we liked were bringing fresh noises into rock music. So we were like, ‘Me too; I want that too. Let’s try that.’”
Curiously, Geddy uses the word always, but looking at the records from Fly by Night through to Moving Pictures, and indeed interviews with the guys through that period, one doesn’t really see Rush picking up much influence from contemporary music. At the very beginning, it’s about their ’60s heroes, but after that, and even now, they don’t really rattle off names of bands. You never hear the guys talk about Deep Purple, Judas Priest, Angel, Thin Lizzy, Queen, Styx, or even the latest Yes, Jethro Tull or Genesis albums around this time. If anything, on a substantive basis, one wonders if they were picking up more from Max Webster, FM and Pat Travers than anything else laterally career-wise or stylistically in their wheelhouse. Were they inspired by King Crimson? Gentle Giant? Rainbow? Peter Gabriel on his exalted solo tear? Punk came out, and they ran the other way, sniping about the unprofessionalism of punk bands, fueling further fire and ire with the U.K. press (and then if politics came up, double whammy). But there were all sorts of interesting keyboard developments along the way, across that list of ’70s bands. Much of the early development seems to have come from Terry Watkinson.
And as for Geddy, it seems to be more about monastic communion with the gear itself, until he heard the new wave bands. “Farewell to Kings to Hemispheres even; those are all monophonic keyboards — single lines. String lines, melody lines added here and there, the line in ‘Xanadu,’ or white noise sounds and textures. Once you had the polyphonic world, if you can actually play it like a piano, it brought a whole other range of sounds into Rush music. And also a whole range of problems because, suddenly, here were these big block chords, or what musicians refer to as pads, soaking up the sound spectrum. And suddenly that forced Alex to take a different attitude toward the kinds of parts he was playing.”
“There were many things I liked about the direction,” says Alex, about moving into heavier use of the keyboard. “It looked like it was going in a good place, very modern and exciting. I did have my frustrations sonically — competing with the density of keyboards. Especially when you start layering them. They occupy the same frequencies. They are quite thick, and as a result of that, I went for a cleaner sound, trying to work around it. It was challenging but real rewarding most of the time. I thought it made it sound unique. And certainly, onstage, having these keyboards playing and as an accompaniment made for a much fuller sound. Plus it made us look really cool, with pedals and keys and playing bass and guitars.”
Both Geddy and Alex have a point. Signals would not sound like Soft Cell or Human League because the keys being played were akin to rhythm guitar parts. That meant if Alex played straight rhythm guitar, the two would cancel out, or sound like some sort of odd double tracking of indiscernible sounds. This made Lifeson explore new territory, which on one hand was exciting. On the other, a little devil on his shoulder was telling him he was out of a job.
It’s no different from how Fast Eddie had to adjust in Motörhead. If Lemmy was covering more of what was traditionally rhythm guitar territory, then Clarke could either address the dropout of proper bass or colorize up top. As it turned out, the band would sacrifice traditional bass sounds and frequencies, and Clarke would play a lot of higher-up two-string chords augmented by other screechy licks. Rush would get more “keyboardy” as the ’80s wore on, and Alex would instead become a pinger and chimer — his solution to a problem he shared with Fast Eddie Clarke.
“Again, this all seemed very natural at the time we were doing it,” reflects Ged. “We were all excited about it. I would bang up this chord progression and Alex would find a part that would fit with it, and away we would go. And before you know it, we’ve created a kind of four-piece sound from a three-piece sound. It felt like a natural evolution, but it was probably, to our fans, quite a dramatic shift. And it wasn’t without its frustrations. There were times that Alex would be frustrated he had to move out of the way a little bit sonically to accommodate this pad sound. But his attitude was ‘Well, it’s new, it’s fresh,’ and he was all for it. Otherwise we wouldn’t do it.
“We did change the way we approached songwriting. You’ve got lyrics, and normally it would be guitar, bass and lyrics and we would hash something out. And now it’s guitar, bass, lyrics, keys — hey! As soon as I go over to the keys, there’s no bass line that works in the same way, right? There’s this pad progression, and now it’s figuring out a guitar piece to go with it. Or Alex figures out a guitar piece that we loved, and then I tried to accompany it on the keyboards. It creates a different kind of music and a different kind of sound for the band.”
Geddy admits the shift in style was a bit of an adjustment for him as well. “When we started rehearsing for the tour, I got frustrated because I couldn’t play my bass anymore. I had to play these blocks of keyboards, and then the bass parts would end up being very rudimentary bass pedal parts. So suddenly I went from being a bassist to being kind of a lousy keyboardist [laughs] playing these booming bass pedal parts. And Alex turned into more of a soloist over top of all this stuff, and that’s the way the songs were structured. So there were some adjustment problems for me live. It was the beginning of kind of a wrestling match.
“For the next few albums, we kept experimenting with how to balance new technology, new sounds, with still being a three-piece rock band. That was really the experiment over that whole period, right up into Counterparts — looking for that balance of Rush sounding like Rush, Rush being a rock band, Alex having the freedom to play the kind of guitar chords he wants to play, and yet use this beautiful idea to bring all kinds of externality into the sound. There is orchestration suddenly, there are all these harmonies, all these harmonic possibilities we never had before. And as a writer I found that super exciting! There was so much more music in our music as a result of it. But it came out at a price, and it came out as an argument, as to how to make everything we want happen at the same time. It was tough.”
“It was very challenging,” agrees Alex. “I wouldn’t say it felt organic. I really had to think about what I was trying to do and where I was trying to steer the guitar. And it certainly wasn’t like that for every song. There were some songs that were more difficult than others. But generally, it worked well, I thought. And also during this period, I used the chorus sound a lot, which is a wavy sort of sound, and that tends to take a little bit of the articulation out of the guitar sound. When you combine that with dense keyboard sounds that are sort of doing this same swirly thing, it makes for a difficult placement of the guitar. Whereas the straight guitar sound cuts through more easily.”
As for Neil, he found the baking and making of Signals arduous too. “That was a very long process when keyboards came in. We needed to expand our sound palette or get another member. And by then we already had such good chemistry among the three of us that it didn’t feel right to add someone else, so it became a DIY situation, with all of us trying to expand that palette.
“And keyboards, of course in the Minimoog era and with Taurus pedals, it was pretty primitive, with limited possibilities. But as they got polyphonic, there came more possibilities. I’m very much less of a ‘less is more’ and more of a ‘more is better’ kind of person. So I was always very excited about every growth that came along. And that’s true for me as a drummer too. As more possibilities came along in sampling and electronic drums and all that, it was exciting and irresistible.
“That applies to the whole band too, as each new development came along. Some things, like the guitar synthesizer, died an unlamented death. But around Signals or so, keyboard sounds became bigger and took up more space. And then all through the ’80s, we started working with Peter Collins and Andy Richards on keyboards, and those guys had a million ideas and a million giant sounds. That’s when Alex started feeling the squeeze, really.
“Sonically, I think Signals is the one he complains of, but there was always something going on,” continues Neil, reminding us of the joyous heavy guitar on Signals. “Because Geddy was always busy with keyboards, sometimes Alex and I would be the rhythm section, and we would communicate about how our parts would intermingle. That was a really good phase to go through, just for that reason.”
Any tensions with Alex and his role would be dealt with by this three-man team, but Rush’s relationship with its “fourth member,” Terry Brown, would come to the end after Signals. Not so much as friends — the guys were too sensible and Canadian not to be able to manage that — but Terry stepped down as their producer. It really was down to creative differences, and the knife would cut both ways.
“It was becoming a major thing, the electronics,” explains Terry. “Lots of keyboards, electronic drums. I mean, Neil had the double kit not long after that, and that was something I didn’t really get a handle on. It just didn’t do it for me. Reading Bill Bruford’s biography, he gets into that whole thing too, how technology was sort of driving everything at that point. And it was problematic — interesting, but problematic. It didn’t appeal to me, the whole MIDI keyboard thing, that sort of upper technology in keyboards and electronic drums, sequencing, pedals. And it is becoming a very complicated issue, certainly for the band, to get those elements onstage working properly and doing shows night after night.”
However, Terry doesn’t recall Alex struggling much at being sidelined by the tech. “I didn’t feel at the time it was a problem for Alex. It wasn’t until I read about it afterward; at the time we never had that discussion. I don’t know if he kept quiet about it; he might have had an internal struggle. Maybe he didn’t feel the guitars were taking a predominant enough role, but I could cite many instances since then when I felt more strongly about how the guitars sounded. Looking back, it was just the tip of the iceberg.”
Paul Northfield figures there was a significant shift in the dynamics of the band at that time, especially when it came to Terry Brown. “Moving Pictures became so successful that they probably had much greater confidence when they went in. They had been touring incessantly. I think they had done two hundred shows in a year on Moving Pictures and had been Billboard #1 or something like that. They had been on overdrive, solidly, ever since the release of Moving Pictures.
