Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 17
“Alex rediscovered just how heavy the acoustic can be,” adds Lee. “A well-strummed acoustic can be really heavy; it doesn’t always have to be a pretty little sound. Some of my favorite Who records have these huge acoustics. Pete Townshend has always been the quintessential rock songwriter, the Paul Simon of rock. And we were going for more of a drier, up-front sound, a bit of a throwback to earlier albums. Guitars did the job well. We threw out the paddiness and used keyboards more for counterpoint melodies, and not to just fill up space. There’s keyboards on ‘Limbo’ and on ‘Test for Echo’ but they’re very subtle. I think in one sense we eliminated the textural stuff because we found it was soaking up the guitar space.”
Alex now figures, “With Test for Echo we were getting back to the core three-piece, even less keyboards now, but we were also attempting some interesting arrangements for songs — and ‘Totem’ is a good example. That really stood out as a very cool, very rhythmic kind of song. A lot of the record is very quick, rhythmic kind of parts. And you know, when we finished it, it left a couple of holes in me. There were a couple of weak areas . . . in retrospect when I think about it now, Peter had commented on a couple of things, and he was right.”
“I’ve always been curious about all religions,” Neil told John Sakamoto, “and the ‘Totem’ idea came from the Freud book Totem and Taboo, which I ran across at the Chalet Studio where we were working, just in the bookshelf in the living room. I had been kind of rediscovering Freud by way of Jung and getting to understand the really deep stuff he was dealing with as opposed to some of the pop psychology that we were fed growing up. And I thought Totem and Taboo was such a beautiful title because it’s what we fear and what we worship, totem being what we worship and taboo being what we fear. What a beautiful, embracing metaphor.
“At one time, the song ‘Resist’ was called ‘Taboo’ because I wanted to have the two little set pieces of what we fear,” continues Peart. “And in ‘Totem’ I was just trying to appropriate all religions because that’s what I found looking around at different religions and different systems, is that they all have something good. So I thought why not have them all? The ‘Buddha smile’ is a nice thing, and I’d like to have twelve apostles — it’s all great. It was really just kind of tongue-in-cheek, with all the good things of different religions. And the elements of the angels and demons came from a writer who once drew a great parallel between the good Goofy and the bad Goofy, just like in the Disney cartoons. There was a good Goofy on his shoulder telling him to do good things and a bad Goofy telling him to do bad things. I like that as far as angels and demons go, which I think all of us definitely do have.”
“Dog Years” finds the band turning up the heat, creating a wall of sound but drenched in melody as per Geddy’s fence-straddling mandate. In effect, through the unique coterie of production and arrangement choices made, Rush is again creating a space for themselves no one else could — or would — dare crowd. All the tones are soft, yet technically we’re hearing a power trio playing energetically. It’s a conundrum.
At the lyric end, Neil makes no apologies for his most ridiculed tone poem, well beyond dining on honeydew or drinking the milk of paradise en route to a last-place tie with “Tai Shan.” Truth is, there are a ton of amusing but pointed observations amidst the bad puns. And if you don’t get that, try having a sense of humor.
As Neil told Jill Robinson, thinking about his seven-year-old Husky, Nick, “I try to weave it in on several levels, so certainly the listener is welcome to take it just as a piece of throwaway foolishness. That’s in there. Even the story of its writing is kind of amusing, because it was right when we got together for the first time, the three of us, after quite a long break apart. We did a little celebrating the first night, and the following day I was a bit the worse for wear and a little dull-witted, and I thought, ‘Gee, I don’t think I’m going to get much done today, but I’m a professional; I’d better try.’ So I sat down all muzzy-headed like that and started trying to stitch words together — that’s what I was there for, after all.
“‘Dog Years’ is what came out of that kind of mentality, and born of observations over the years too, of looking at my dog thinking, ‘What’s going through his brain?’ And I would think, ‘Just a low-level zzz — static.’ ‘Food.’ ‘Walk.’ The basic elemental things. When I look at my dog, that’s how I see his brainwaves moving. Other elements in there of dog behavior, and I’ve had this discussion with other dog owners too: ‘What do you think your dog is really thinking about?’ I say, ‘I don’t think he’s thinking about too much.’”
Asked by John Sakamoto about the line “We get it backwards / And our seven years go by like one,” Peart explains, “That came from a columnist in the New York Times. She was riffing on about things and she said she’s getting tired of living in dog years, where every seven years seem to go by like one. And I thought it was a beautiful little image.”
Neil adds that upon pondering the lyric for the first time in his hungover muddle, “I wasn’t sure at the end of it if it was stupid or smart, but I liked it and it definitely made me smile, so I passed it along to the other guys and they had the same response. That was just an example of sitting down not in the right frame of mind for creative work but forcing myself to go through the motions and something different came out of it.”
“The humor aspect was great,” chuckles Peter. “The one about the dog, ‘Dog Years.’ You know, usually the humor is reserved for the instrumentals and the liner notes, but there were a couple of real tongue-in-cheek songs.”
There are all sorts of eyewinks in this one, including a roll call of clichés, various puns, and a quick tribute to Signals, with the line “One sniff at the hydrant.” Best, however, is “In the dog days, people look to Sirius.”
“Virtuality” doesn’t get the respect it deserves given Neil was writing a song about the internet when the internet was barely getting started. Such is Rush, always the early adopters. Sometimes they win with that formula (Signals) and sometimes they get burned by it (Hold Your Fire). Quite admirably, Neil penned a song back then that doesn’t even read as dated now, despite so many minefields he could have stepped on. There’s no fax tones, no mention of AOL or MySpace, just a thoughtful message that rings even more true today. He even gets in a nod to English punker Elton Motello, whose single “Jet Boy, Jet Girl” was a minor sensation around Toronto in 1979 because the album Victim of Time got wide distribution as an Attic Records release.
When Jill Robinson asked if Neil spent much time surfing the net (I’m surprised that language was used in 1996), he says, “No, ironically, or perhaps not ironically, having got the message of the song itself. But I certainly do dabble in anything new that comes along, and I spent a bit of time getting netted and explored around just to see what it could do. Just couldn’t resist poking a little fun at its pretensions.”
The song warns people not to replace reality with this newfangled technology.
“That’s where my quarrels lay,” continues Peart, “because I think it is going to be the most excellent video game in the world when things like that are available. When I think about traveling to places, and thinking how would you translate Palermo, Sicily, or Abidjan, Ivory Coast, to virtual reality, the first thing they’d do would be to take away the smells, the garbage, and de-funkify it all, make it all Disneyfied. That might make an ultimate video game, but it cannot possibly even approximate my experiences of those places. No virtual reality can take you to the top of Kilimanjaro or to Tiananmen Square, or to the heart of the Sahara. None of these places is accessible any other way but by suffering for it.
“For me to pretend there’s an easy way to any more than approximate it, it can’t be any more than a book or a movie or a TV documentary, except magnified of course. Maybe you can add smells and sounds, and maybe you can add the feeling of the wind, and so on. That would be great, I have no problem with that, I love things like that. It’ll be a great sensual experience. My only quarrel comes with people who tend to pretend that it is as good as reality, and nothing’s that good.
“I see their wonderfulness with no problem at all,” qualifies Neil. “I see why they’re really cool and lots of fun. It’s just that differentiation between reality and virtual reality, as I said before, it can’t be as good. And sometimes it can’t be as bad. I’ve had some really nasty experiences in parts of the world that might have been Disneyfied a little for my enjoyability, but the fact is that’s how they are. That’s part of the experience: part of the suffering getting to these places is what you have to endure.
“I mentioned Palermo, Sicily, because I was there recently. The people were so great; the place itself just had a charm. When I was coming back into the town after being out in Sicily for the day I was thinking, ‘Wow, this place is dirty and smelly and funky, but I love it!’ It just won me over despite any flaws, and that would be a case of where reality is rife with reality, where all the dark sides of things are very present, to be endured or just wrapped into your package of things. All of these sides of Palermo, for instance, just made it more charming to me. That’s just the way it was.”
Reflecting on the line “I can smell her perfume, I can taste her lips, I can feel the voltage from her fingertips,” Neil says, “That’s a perfect one to dwell on, because it points out a lot of the irony of what I was trying to get across. What happens in an email relationship or something is that imagination, of course, is called upon to make it come alive. Imagination is a wonderful thing, but it’s also slightly dangerous because it invites illusions. I love the image that verse opens up with, seeing a woman’s face through the window in the rain; that’s a really romantic image. I’ve had that experience, seeing a woman driving by in a car, or if I’m driving by and see a woman in the window, it’s a beautiful thing. The same experience if I’m riding my bicycle down the road and a car goes by. Sometimes I’ll smell a woman’s perfume. Imagination, though, is a little bit of sense input, but the rest of it, if you put anything more into it, it’s just imagination. All I was pointing out there is, here’s a romantic little image that is imagined, so let’s not pretend that it’s real. You cannot feel the voltage from her fingertips, but you can imagine it. That’s all I was trying to say.”
At the other end of the spectrum, “Resist” is a rare, lush ballad for Rush, the band pulling out all the stops and avoiding anything trite. Instead, “Resist” is in the passionate spirit of “The Pass” or “Bravado,” maybe better because it doesn’t try to be a rock song. Says Neil, speaking with John Sakamoto, “I took the Oscar Wilde quote (‘I can learn to resist anything but temptation’) and added that I can learn to resist. In other words, the exercise of will is the weapon against futility or helplessness. Maybe I can’t resist temptation, but I can learn to get along with what I don’t know, and I thought that was a really important distinction.”
Alex was really pleased with this one, calling it one of his favorite Rush songs. At the beginning, he plays a hammer dulcimer. On the Vapor Trails tour, Geddy and Alex surprised everybody by deciding to do the song acoustically after Neil’s drum solo, a performance that proved popular with the fans — indeed, this is a beautiful Rush song and quite novel in construction for the band.
Next is a near-instrumental called “Limbo,” or Rush “Limbo,” pun intended. The sound effects at the beginning are from “Monster Mash,” as is the fairly buried line “Whatever happened to my Transylvania twist?” The song was assembled as a hodgepodge of parts the guys had lying around, and it really doesn’t go anywhere. It certainly is not a follow-up to “Where’s My Thing?” and “Leave That Thing Alone” — it’s too casual and ragged.
Test for Echo closes with “Carve Away the Stone,” another one of the record’s difficult but vaguely spiritual constructs, melodic but on the serious and heavy side. A sluggishness is maintained through a jagged, jammy quality, not least of which is Neil’s replacement of snare with toms, his many switch-ups of the beat and his spirited end of bar fills. Alex is gloriously noisy as well, turning the song into some sort of psychedelic excursion. The exhaustive quality to the musical track makes sense, given that Neil is essentially retelling the story of Sisyphus rolling a stone up a mountain, though with a twist — the song encourages active participation in lessening one’s burdens, telling Sisyphus to “chip away the stone.” This theme of creating your own luck through preparation is a sort of reprise of one of the main lessons of Roll the Bones.
Once Test for Echo was committed to tape, all fifty minutes of it, it was time to mix. “Yes, and I’m not sure that I’d locked Andy Wallace into the mixing at that point,” says Peter. “But that was really important for me to take this punchy organic sound another stage further. Andy Wallace was instrumental, in my mind, in getting to that point. And also working out the arrangements, trying to keep them as . . . I won’t say as simple as possible because that’s against their whole credo, but I wanted to bring in more acoustic guitar. And so I would look for opportunities in the arrangement to do that.
“With Rush, within what they do, to make it as heavy as possible was always the objective,” Collins adds, which sounds somewhat incredulous — not sure how adding acoustic guitar helps us get there, and not sure, frankly, that Andy Wallace did anything to heavy up the sound of the record. Two things were happening though: (1) the guys were pretty fed up with listening to these songs that, as Alex puts it, they had lived with for six or seven months, and they wanted that objective ear, and (2) indeed the concern, communicated to Wallace, was to have the record not sound too layered and therefore dense. Though Test for Echo sounds pretty much as dense as any other Rush record, the last time we heard the band sound really electric and separated and power trio–like was on parts of Moving Pictures, on all of side one except for “Tom Sawyer.”
Recalls Alex, of the mix, which took place in April of ’96, “I think that’s the first time Ged didn’t feel like he had to be in the control room all the time, and he wasn’t. And I think it was good for him. I think it gave him a lot of relief. For him it’s always been difficult in the studio because he’s always so intense about the mix and where it’s going, and he finally let go on that record. And I think he’s much more relaxed and better for it.”
It’s hard to find much good or bad to say about Test for Echo’s mix. One could call it bright and lively, even electric and sizzly, but there’s something about what each of the guys chooses to play at any given point that ensures the record doesn’t achieve heaviness, despite what was or wasn’t done at the mixing stage. There’s the pop melody, to be sure, but there are all these verse sections with barely a beat, or a sparse beat . . . heck, even undecided beats, where different things are tried throughout the songs. At times, it’s almost as if they’re demos from which they’d then start making decisions. There are also lots of stops and starts and switch-ups in mood, which add to this vibe of indecision. Modulation can sound like the result of searching for something. And then as a microcosm, back around to the mix, even that sounds noncommittal.
That said, there are some beautiful passages, some heavy passages and some great tones, especially with the acoustic guitars and Neil’s cymbals. And you have to commend the band for making a very different record from Counterparts or indeed any record before or after. And as always with Rush, the story on why it’s different is long and complicated.
“There was still a lot going on in the band creatively and expressively in the songs we were writing,” offers Neil, summing up. “I like the lyrics. I’ve said before that for me the first Rush album is really Moving Pictures. When I start to like my lyrics is probably around that time. And then from Test for Echo on, there’s a greater maturity and much more control of the techniques and the craft of putting words together in interesting ways, as well as effective ways of not hitting people over the head but still making sure there was a hammer in there. That’s good too.”
“I think part of it was being productive,” answers Geddy, asked why he felt the need to come back after his domestic time away. “It was hard for Alex coming back to that because he had so much control making Victor, and so Test for Echo was a tough record. It was a tough record to write and a slightly unfocused record. And that’s maybe reflected in the diversity of where our heads were at the time. I don’t want to say we were going through the motions, but it’s as close as we came to going through the motions. There were some great moments, and there was some really inspired playing on that record, but it’s somehow or another unsatisfying in totality. Not one of my fondest periods, creatively, for Rush.
“There was a bit of evidence of that burnout still. We probably needed another year before we came back. I mean, Test for Echo is kind of an adventurous project, and the whole idea of it was pretty exciting, but I never got the feeling that we really nailed that. It’s one of those projects that was great on paper, but I haven’t listened to it in a long time. That’s a personal feeling. My feelings about the record are mine, you know? I think it’s a decent record, but I don’t think it’s one of our best. And why that is, I don’t know. Maybe I had been too immersed in diaper changing.
“But we liked the record when we finished it,” continues Ged. “We were happy with it at the time, and touring it was fun, so there was no doom and gloom about the band. When you look back and you talk about Alex’s progression as a guitar player and the things we kind of forced him to change, it makes sense to go through to his solo record and get that whole total control. It made a lot of sense for him to be doing that record. After that it’s like the bubble had burst for him and he was quite happy. Through the making of Test for Echo, he was in quite a good frame of mind, and on that tour he was in a good frame of mind.
