Limelight: Rush in the '80s, page 17
Big metaphors for small things: that’s a good clue to help us decipher the considerably inscrutable “Distant Early Warning” lyrics. The big metaphor here — and the imagery, set props and machinery — comes from the Cold War, something certainly on the minds of everybody in the early ’80s. Here, it’s a metaphor for personal relationships, the gulf between people (see also “Different Strings” and “Entre Nous”). Underscoring this is the chorus. The way Neil has arranged the words makes it sound like it’s the world that drives him crazy with worry, or conversely, it’s an unnamed intimate in his life or a universal intimate that might exist for anyone out there in the real world. There’s no bigger metaphor than the world and there’s no more smaller “thing” than what goes on between two people we’re unaware of across the coffee shop.
This song too, seems to build on the likes of “New World Man” and “Digital Man,” more specifically the chorus of the former and the verses of the latter. And one can’t help but notice an influence from the Police. I once asked Stewart Copeland if the debt has been acknowledged. “Effusively!” he laughed. “We are good friends. And they are so fucking Canadian, those guys. And they don’t mind all the early jabs I used to hurl in their general direction, which once again was all about the hairdos, not about their musicality. I just saw all three of them a month ago over at Neil’s place. And how we did laugh together, I tell ya. But Neil never fails to mention the, you know, debt of inspiration. But they’re so Canadian — that’s how they do it. You know what I’m talking about.”
“There is always something interesting,” says Geddy about the Police catalogue. “Like the way they used rhythm, the way they structured songs, his attitude of the drums — really interesting. Or the way that Sting would emote. He would multi-track his voice in a particular way and create this really cool sound. Those are the kinds of things that resonate with another musician. We didn’t want to sound like the Police, but you can draw from all these bands that are doing good things. Sometimes it’s a singer of a kind of music that is very divorced from your kind of music. But I hear something that singer does, whether it’s a male or female: ‘Oh, that’s really cool the way she just used her voice. I can learn something from that.’ These things influence you. You just add them to your stew, to your repertoire, to your toolbox, whatever you want to call it, and they inspire you.”
Adds Alex, “You don’t really want to hear something and copy it. Like Geddy said, where it’s coming from is what inspires you when you hear that band. You know, the Edge, I love the way he was using delays. He wasn’t the first guy to do that, but he was very effective in the way he incorporated it as part of his style of playing. And the same with the Police. Andy is an amazing guitar player, really crisp sound, and yet there was power in his playing, the way he played his chords, the way he struck them, the counter-rhythms he would play. That was very influential and inspiring.”
But in terms of figuring out how to fit guitar into what was suddenly a four-instrument band, Alex says that was all his doing. “This was purely about the application in our band, how I wanted to address that. I didn’t really search somewhere else to hear how somebody else did it. We were unique. But there are so many components, other than just the guitar and the keyboards. There is Geddy’s bass playing, which is very active, at that time. And his vocals, and lyrically, the number of words, and Neil’s energetic playing. There are a lot of complicated things in the soup.”
“The thing you look for is not the thing you already know how to do,” adds Geddy, sagely. “I wasn’t listening to a lot of metal or prog rock bands. Because you kind of know how to do that. You’re listening for things you don’t know. You want something fresh. You are searching for those ideas that have not occurred to you, that you can apply to your own style and sound. That make you a better musician.”
Geddy admits he doesn’t quite know where, after all this fearless exploration and exploitation, Rush ended up fitting in the ’80s. “We’ve never had that conversation,” he says. “Ever. I don’t think we’ve ever used the words, ‘Are we relevant? Is this relevant?’ No, we do what feels right and we try to keep it natural and not think of those things. It’s too big — no thinking allowed. It’s too big to think about. You can’t think outside yourself and be inside at the same time; I don’t think it works. So we come up with a sound or a song or an idea we like and one thing sparks another. Every record is like a journey that is unknown until it’s finished. We don’t really know what we’re doing until we finish doing it. And then we look at it and go, ‘Wow, that worked out.’ And that’s a time capsule; that’s this period of time. And I love that about us. We don’t know what the hell we’re going to do until we’re in the business of doing it, until we are in there working and writing and it’s about the moment. That’s a very satisfying thing for a writer or musician — it’s a nice way to live.”
As on Signals, track two is a fast-paced rocker, only the business of the song is somber, commemorating the death of Le Studio staffer Robbie Whelan, who died in a car crash near Le Studio in May of ’83 while working on Asia’s second album, Alpha. Whelan was thirty-one years old and left behind a wife, Carla.
“Robbie was the assistant engineer here,” reflects Neil, walking through Le Studio years later. “He was a part of all the volleyball games, and the song I wrote, ‘Afterimage,’ is about him. I mention the footprints on the lawn. You know, that was us playing volleyball at the other end of this lake, until the sun would come up. And then, you know, the usual musician’s hours — sleep ’til noon and get up and go back to work. And then we would take a break at dinnertime; we’d play a few games too, right up to when the snow would fall. We’d be shoveling off our volleyball court because it was such a necessary output and exercise.”
Adds Geddy, “‘Afterimage’ was a very personal song and was really about the loss of a friend. So I think we took extra care to make sure it was very heartfelt and that recording went well.”
As Alex told Jas Obrecht of Guitar Player, “‘Afterimage’ is a story about a dear friend of ours who was killed in a car accident. We wanted to celebrate his life, but there is a sadness to the music, and the guitar solo is a translation of that. I think about him every time we play that song. He worked at Le Studio, so we were right there where he was. We turned the lights down a bit, and I was emotional and excited. I don’t know how many times my eyes got all teary going into that solo when we were running it down. Halfway through, I’d get so fired up that I would go out of time, so we’d rewind it to the front, and I’d go [in sobbing voice], ‘Okay, let’s try it again.’”
Indeed, one can hear the emotion in the playing of all three guys, Neil hitting hard, Geddy articulating on bass and Alex playing almost punk rock-angry with his chords. Of interest, once the original driving verse where this straight-line magic happens is over, we never hear this arrangement again. Many moons later there is another verse proper, but Alex has switched to muted Andy Summers–like picking. All told, “Afterimage” is quite a progressive metal song, with lots of oddly stacked parts and two verses that are different from one another and separated by so much. Perhaps due to the pain of it, the song was performed on the ensuing tour, after which it was never heard again.
“Red Sector A” opens with more chimey guitar from Alex, set to Neil playing his best Stewart Copeland–busy hi-hat, both attentive to a bubbly sequencer pattern. But the melody is dark, as is the lyric.
As Neil explained to Jim Ladd, “I read a first-person account of someone who had survived the whole system of trains and work camps and Dachau and all of that — she was a young girl, like thirteen years old, when she was sent and lived in it for a few years. And then first-person accounts from other people who came out at the end of it, always glad to be alive, which was the essence of grace. Grace under pressure is that. These people never gave up the strong will to survive, through the utmost horror and total physical privations of all kinds. They just never, ever wanted to be the ones who were shot, you know? They were always the unlucky ones, which was an important thing that I wanted to bring out.
“And also, I learned from the first-person nonfiction accounts I read that these people would keep their little rituals of their religion. If it was supposed to be a fasting day, even if they were starving to death, they would turn down their little bit of bread and their little bit of gruel, because this was a fasting day. They had to hold onto something, some essence of normality; you know, that was important. And that moved me. That’s intense.
“I wanted to give it more of a timeless atmosphere too, because it’s happened, of course, in more than one time and by more than one race of people. It happened in this very country in which we sit. You know, the British did it, no one can set themselves above that. Slavery involved how many countless countries in terms of the commerce of it all — people shipping them around like animals. No one can set themselves above that in a racial or nationalistic way. So I wanted to take it out of being specific and just describe the circumstances and try to look at the way people responded to it.
“Another really important and, to me, really moving image that I got from a lot of these accounts was that at the end of it, these people of course had been totally isolated from the rest of the world, from their families, from any news at all. And they, in cases that I read, believed they were the last people surviving. You know, the people liberating them and themselves were the only surviving people in the world. It sounds a bit melodramatic to put into a song, I realize, but it’s true. So I didn’t feel like I needed to avoid it as being overdramatic because I heard of it and read of it in more than one account.”
Particularly poignant of course is that Geddy sings Neil’s words, Geddy’s parents having been Holocaust survivors.
Closing side one is “The Enemy Within,” which is the closest Rush would ever get to ska. After explaining to Jim Ladd the concept of the Fear Trilogy (this is part one; we’d already gotten the subsequent parts with “Witch Hunt” and “The Weapon”), Peart says that “eventually I got my thinking straightened out and the images that I wanted to use and collected them all up and it came out. ‘The Enemy Within’ was more difficult because I wanted to look at how it affects me, but it was about more than me. I don’t like to be introspective as a rule. I think I’m gonna set that down as my first rule: ‘Never be introspective!’ But I wanted to, and at the same time I wanted to write about myself in a universal kind of way; I want to find things in myself that I think apply.”
The expensive but tacky sci-fi production video created for this song echoed the messaging of the “Distant Early Warning” clip, namely that Rush was a futuristic, cutting-edge band. Despite actively attempting to drive viewers away, with its darkness, close cropping, jerky editing and intentional blurriness, this video was picked as the first ever to be played on MuchMusic, Canada’s version of MTV, when it launched August 31, 1984. Unsurprisingly, MuchMusic would become a boon to Canada’s long-running and undisputed biggest rock band. In turn, Rush enthusiastically got involved in made-for-TV video clips, a synergistic pursuit with all the film footage they would craft for their stage presentation. In fact, at this time, Geddy had mused that the band wanted to make a video for every song on the album.
“The Body Electric” also got the same kind of dystopian treatment, Orwellian even; it was certainly sci-fi, with more focus on story than its brethren clips. It makes sense given the lyrics, and the music makes sense given the lyrics too, the guys turning in a robotic, mechanized sound collage.
“We started getting obsessed with rhythm around that period,” says Geddy, who makes a good point — with Grace and the records moving forward, for all the debate over keyboards, there’s just as much weirdness going on rhythmically. “Especially Neil and I. And even in Alex’s playing. Alex is one of the great rhythm guitar players on planet Earth, and rhythm guitar players don’t get their due at all. But yeah, we were trying to make our music rock and groove, you know? And that’s not easy. Especially for white Canadians.
“So you could say that in one sense, our influence early was classical, adventure-influenced rock, and now we were trying to take rock and complexity and make it groove. And that was like a new toy for us that we were bringing into the music. We were progressing and trying to become better musicians, and that always pushes the writing. And where our writing fails from time to time, it’s because we pay too much attention to our needs as players. Sometimes the player part of it dictates what you’re writing and what you need to do as a player, and that’s the end result. So I guess what I’m saying is there’s lots of reasons that fans have turned away from us at certain points in our career, and there’s nothing we can do about that.”
This one was based on an old Twilight Zone episode from 1962 called “I Sing the Body Electric” but more so is a basic story about oppression, “2112” for robots, as it were, with the protagonist trying to break free from hardwired patterns. At the start, one might say it’s the story of the album cover, but by the end, an intriguing narrative is implied. It asks what happens to its consciousness when a machine pulls the plug on itself. Since 1001001 is the ASCII code for I, it’s as if while the bytes break to bits, through the haze the android is hoping to retain some sense of self.
“With ‘The Body Electric’ solo, I got frustrated and crazy,” Alex told Guitar Player. “I couldn’t find a direction for it; I tried this and tried that. I’d work on something for a few hours and then go, ‘That’s bullshit. This is the same stuff that I’ve done a million times before.’ I’d put the guitar down and go out and watch the hockey game or whatever, trying to get some kind of inspiration. I went back in and thought, ‘Screw this. I’ll go wild.’ And all of a sudden everybody turns around and goes, ‘Hey, yeah! What was that?’ We played the tape back and thought it was pretty funny. That’s what sparks it: you hear something that’s crazy and funny. It was more of my personality, and it just went from there. After that, it took about forty minutes to do the whole solo. There’s a wang bar in that solo. I use it a lot now — too much. I’m noticing lately that my left hand is becoming much lazier. My vibrato is something that I worked on for a long time, and it’s gotten really lazy. It’s much easier to reach back and use the bar, and it’s such a nice vibrato. It’s down-and-up rather than the up-and-back vibrato that you get with your hand.”
“Kid Gloves” is one of Rush’s irresistible hooky melodic rockers, and inspiringly guitary, with Alex double tracking a Telecaster against a Gibson, the ultimate schoolyard brawl when it comes to axes. A jagged 5/8 verse gives way to rewarding pre-chorus and chorus all with minimal synths.
“It was difficult to get a starting point on that one,” reflects Alex concerning the song’s disorienting guitar solo, speaking with Andrew MacNaughtan, one of the band’s key photographers, now sadly passed. “The way I usually write solos is I’ll throw around different ideas, and I’ll keep playing until I lock onto something. And then I’ll keep that and then try something else and start fitting the bits together and then go back and redo the whole thing. That’s basically what happened with that solo. I remember it taking a very long time. I spent close to two and a half days working on it. It’s funny, you know, you can spend hours and hours trying to get just a direction and a starting point. Once you have one, the solo may take ten or twenty minutes. The solo on ‘Kid Gloves’ ended up taking about forty-five minutes once I had locked in on a direction. Then everything just fell into place.”
“Red Lenses” is alternately jazzy and post-punk, with Alex obtuse and texturizing and Neil being both tribal and electro. Lyrically, this one touches upon troubles in the news, the song perhaps serving as a microcosm or summary piece for an album that in general has Neil reacting to the swift and shifting world around him.
“There’s a quote by a French novelist,” reflects Neil, “maybe Flaubert, that what a novel should be is a mirror, just moving down the road, a traveling mirror. And I like that for a band too, as maybe a traveling pair of headphones picking up what’s going on around you and reflecting it. In so many ways, 1983 was a very tense year in the current events of the time, and the band was in upheaval. We were having trouble getting a co-producer we wanted to work with, and we were going through stylistic changes.
“The Soviets shot down that Korean Airlines flight that year, and a lot of my friends were having trouble with work or with relationships. It was just like an angst year, and that so comes out in the music. At the time it wasn’t one of our most popular records by any means, but people that like it really like it. And I totally understand why. Because if your life was like that at that time, it’s the soundtrack of your life right then.
“And again, it’s so heartfelt — all that angst is in the music. It can be felt there. Sometimes it’s addressed overtly like in ‘Distant Early Warning’ or in ‘Red Lenses,’ but other times it’s just part of the tension in the music. Those underlying things, like the anger in ‘2112,’ they communicate. So yeah, I do like that. I compared it once to being like a satellite dish actually moving down the road. Maybe that’s more apt for our times. Because we were there during the video age, and later we were there when rock rediscovered guitars in 1990 with Guns N’ Roses and Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, where before that, guitars had been relegated to the petrified forest of wilderness.”
