Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 18
“Counterparts was a satisfying record to make, in the end, in terms of what it did for our sound. Test for Echo was, I guess, a bit of status quo. It didn’t seem like we broke down any great barriers with that record. I don’t think we advanced the cause of Rush to a tremendous degree. But at the same time, things personally were good. I had a little baby at home, I was pretty happy, we just moved into a new house. Alex was feeling confident as a musician — he’d been working with a lot of other players. Neil was in a good space too.”
“You finish the record and you move on to the next record,” reflects Peter Collins, never to produce another Rush record. “And you stay in touch, the odd phone call, the odd email. So no, after mastering, I kind of went back home and they were doing their thing. I really didn’t get much sense other than it was a very positive atmosphere when we finished the record and everybody seemed very happy. I went off to London to do a few projects, and that was it.”
The Test for Echo tour saw the band spend October ’96 until the end of the year covering a large chunk of America, with the Yule season spent in Ontario and Quebec (December 18 saw the band play a Molson-sponsored club gig in Toronto as part of the beer brand’s Blind Date promotion). May ’97 saw a similar jaunt, again through all parts of the U.S., winding up in Central Canada to close things out in late June and early July. The Test for Echo dates were billed as “An Evening with Rush,” meaning no back-up act, Rush playing for a superhuman two and a half to three hours every night, traveling by private jet for the first time ever, a well-deserved perk given the nightly workout.
“That was the first tour we did that way,” says Geddy, “where there was no opening act and we had two sets. We could actually indulge ourselves a little bit and try to invent some sort of dramatic or teasing beginning to the second set. We used ‘Test for Echo’ to open that second set, I believe. The big kind of production for that tour was the film we made for that song. We had fun using some kind of multimedia thing, exploiting the concept of that song into a fine combo of video and sound. Good tour. We had a lot of fun, a better vibe than we had had previous tours. I have really good, strong memories from that tour.
“Having to play long shows is good, and we played really well. That was the greatest decision we ever made. You know, we have so many albums, so much music. I was always so frustrated. You put your body and your life through all this torture and all this traveling around. And the yin and yang of what touring is, you get up onstage, you play for a little bit and it’s over. It’s like a cheat. You don’t feel like you really got your money’s worth. ‘An Evening with’ is getting your money’s worth, and the crowd is getting their money’s worth. You can play so much more stuff and you can get into a real groove.
“And especially having two sets. Both sets sometimes have very different feels to them. That twenty-minute break in the middle, if you’ve had a rough first half and you’ve had the twenty-minute break to get your head together, you can go and have a great second half. They’re like two different shows in a way and I really love it. It’s like extended touring for us because we get onstage earlier, so there’s a lot less waiting around backstage and a lot less wear and tear because of that, a lot less boredom. It’s hard on Neil, because of how hard he works, and it’s harder on my voice, but in the end, it’s well worth it.
“Our fans love it because we can go back into past albums,” continues Ged, on the benefits. “We can dig up nuggets from the past or change arrangements of some songs or really stretch out. That was the first time we were able to play a bunch of songs and do ‘2112’ as well. That helped us come to terms with who we were and who we are, and I think in a very positive, balanced way. It’s good for the fans; it’s good for us. We love to play. And it was nice to get on earlier; that was a big motivator for me.
“Our manager didn’t like it,” chuckles Ged, of Ray Danniels, who, if you think about it, is cursed with that sort of “bad cop” role with the band, if he’s doing his job right. “He might tell you now that he liked it. Just like my mom, he doesn’t remember those things. No, no manager likes it because if you have an opening act that can sell a few tickets, you know, it’s just insurance that you’re going to have a full house. But I think we convinced him that we would be so much happier and he could get more dates out of us. And in the end, that’s better for him, so he kind of went along with it. And it’s true — it is better for us; it makes us happier.
“But Neil has always struggled with being on the road, and that tour was no different. He couldn’t wait for it to be over. But that didn’t influence how he played night to night. He certainly was always happy to come off the road at the end of the tour. But I recall it was a very positive tour — we played well and we sounded good, with more focus on the band and getting through our whole repertoire of music.”
Peart had found his own novel method of making the road spectacular, having recently become a long-distance motorcycle madman. “When the next concert tour came up, the wheels started turning,” explains Neil. “How can I combine this sort of adventure touring with concert touring? And I thought, okay, if I had a bus with a trailer and a friend with me to look after the bikes and navigation, and plan the days off . . . My friend Bruce came out for the Test for Echo tour, and we did forty thousand miles on that tour, just in America, riding every day, five hundred miles on a day off, three hundred miles on show day, just dying from lack of sleep.
“I was thinking about traveling by motorcycle. But the logistics of doing that . . . in the past, the three of us had always traveled together on the tour bus and now the other guys wanted to fly. I really don’t like flying so that was an easy agreement. ‘Okay for now you guys fly and I’ll travel by motorcycle.’
“But how to do that? As I say, I got a bus with a trailer so after a show I could sleep on the bus in a truck stop or somewhere like that, and then unload the motorcycle from the trailer in the morning and tell the bus driver, ‘Okay, I want to be on this little road.’ Of course, I don’t just want to ride the interstates and freeways. I want the back roads, the smallest towns, the smallest roads, the most remote destinations, all of that.
“So eventually it evolved, the logistics to make that possible and to get enough sleep in between, getting up early and riding all day and playing a show. And when your day peaks at eleven o’clock at night, you’re not going to go to sleep right away. I seldom get to sleep until two o’clock in the morning, but I like to get up at eight and get a day’s riding in, so sleep has to be caught up somewhere. And especially a few tours ago we didn’t have as many days off as we do now, so I would be in the dressing room before the show, and if I had twenty minutes free I would set my alarm clock for twenty minutes and sleep for twenty minutes, wake up, warm up, go onstage. My bus driver, he can sleep anytime. He just crawls in his bunk and sleeps for eight hours. In the middle of the day, in the middle of the night, it doesn’t matter, because it’s what he has to do.
“But it’s such a source of adventure to me,” continues Peart. “Every day is an adventure. I just have this hunger to see what that road on the map looks like in real life. For the last four tours and well over a hundred thousand miles now, I’ve been going from show to show, here and in Europe, by motorcycle. It just fills the day in such a healthy way. I’m filled with stimulation and input all day; I’m out there dealing with the real world. My life’s on the line and it’s as existential as you can get, motorcycling. If it’s raining or cold or windy, I’m the first to know about it.
“But the smell of the flowers, and in the last couple of days riding through Saskatchewan and Alberta, the smell of the manure, the smell of fresh hay and the horses in the fields . . . it’s pretty much May now, so it’s late spring/early summer and the bright color of Canadian summer that is particular to this time of the year . . . The lilacs were in bloom a little bit south in North Dakota and Minnesota, and one of my favorite smells in the world is lilac.
“It’s such a fulfilling way to pass the time and so free too — I leave after the show on the bus, and I’m on my own. I have my bus driver and my riding partner and we go to some truck stop, and then I go stay at some little town in a cheap motel that night. As long as I show up for work the next day, no one cares and no one knows where I am that night. That’s one of the nicest feelings. At the beginning of the R30 tour — I wrote about it in Roadshow — the first day off we were down in Tennessee and just took off riding all day and that night settled in a Best Western hotel in Sweetwater, Tennessee. And my thought was nobody even knows where I am.
“It’s liberating, especially when there is a crushing kind of insularity about touring. You’re traveling around with a group of fifty people who are together all the time, every day. And the bickering and the inevitable office politics are of course a part of this life like any other. It’s a traveling company going around. They used to call it a touring company in the theater sense and it’s very true. And the expectations of people who would like to invade my life, you know, become my new best friend and all that, I’m so free of all that.
“But on the other hand, I don’t have to isolate myself. It doesn’t have to be like Roger Waters wrote about in The Wall, that sense of alienation. I’m out with people every day, but I’m one of them; I’m not, ‘Hey, you’re that famous guy.’ I’m in gas stations and motels and restaurants. I talk to people every day, as people, and that’s wonderful. As much as I’m shy and reserved, that doesn’t apply to strangers. I’m perfectly happy to pass the time of day with somebody at a gas station.
“Anonymity is great, especially if you fancy yourself a writer,” muses Neil. “I like to observe, I like to listen and eavesdrop or be part of casual conversations. My little stories for the website. Like we were in Illinois last summer, some country gas station, a little crossroads town. This old lady is filling up her Buick and here’s two hulking guys going to fill up their motorcycles, big leather suits, and it’s intimidating as it could be. And this old, white-haired woman looks over and says, ‘I’ll pay for yours if you pay for mine.’ And it was just the most charming moment. I hold onto collections of those, pretty much daily, when I have some nice little encounter with someone, just as a person, and I love that.
“And it just feels artificial to me, these encounters whenever anyone does recognize me. Robert Redford described it once: ‘They just go all goofy, you know?’ And then I just get embarrassed. Who needs to feel that way? No one does. The other guys are obviously comfortable with it and they do the meet-and-greets every night. They’re much more comfortable with that whole thing than I am, and fine, you know, they can do it and I can hide behind drums or I can hide behind my helmet and stay away from uncomfortable situations.”
The prime motivation for Neil’s motorcycle trips, rather than the bicycle, was the ability to pack those grinding days on tour with experiences, and hopefully some of them would be extraordinary.
“I remember one time,” says Neil, by way of example, “we had a break in the tour, and we were in Durango, Colorado, and we had to ride to Cincinnati for the next show. We stayed there with our wives for a few days, and we had three days to do the ride. And we’re looking at a map, and I was looking at Mount Rushmore and thinking, ‘Bruce, do you think we can get from Durango to Mount Rushmore and then to Cincinnati?’ ‘Yeah, I think we can do it.’ We had to because we wanted to go to Mount Rushmore. When I have a day off, I want to do the most excellent thing possible. I used to sleep twenty minutes between soundcheck and dinner, and then twenty minutes between dinner and warm-up before the show — sleep anytime I could get it. Because we were up early every day and riding vast distances, but seeing so much.
“And it’s another thing I said about concerts: you don’t know if this is the only time you’ll ever do this, so you don’t want to miss anything. You want to hit every state, see every attraction from Grand Canyon to Mount Rushmore to the Hoover Dam. Nothing was beyond reach the first time.
“I learned better how to do it, of course, and every tour since, I’ve traveled that way. Always with a riding partner with another bike. So nothing has ever happened, but if it does, I can still take his bike and get to the show. That’s the only big responsibility. You’ve got a lot of people waiting for you to show up for work. You can’t mess around. I have to watch the distances on the show day and make sure they are doable, that kind of thing. But the freedom to feed my curiosity too, and the natural world of North America and Europe, while we are touring, is just phenomenal, to be able to do that.”
And as everybody’s been telling us, Neil’s always had some real animosity for the road. “Yes, well, I can’t imagine touring without having my motorcycle, honestly. Test for Echo was in ’96, and the number of tours we’ve done since then, and the number of independent travels I’ve done on motorcycles since then . . . I must admit, when I get the itinerary, I look at the days off. The day off in between, great, I can ride. Because touring, again, I’m not jaded about it. I love preparing for a tour, I love the rehearsing and getting to that performance state. And when we first start flocking together in rehearsal, it’s magic. I wouldn’t have it any other way; I love all that.
“But for me having done a good show, it’s ‘Okay, done that,’” laughs Neil. “It’s the repetition that gets to me. And of course, we traveled around the U.S. so many times, and in my bicycle travels over twenty years, twenty-five years ago, and then motorcycling for the last twelve, thirteen years, I’ve seen a lot of those roads. And usually, it’s an unfamiliar road that is most attractive. So when we are on the east coast for example, you’ve got a day off between Pittsburgh and Boston, that can be challenging to find different ways. And I’m thinking about the route I would take. I would go through Appalachia Park, northwest corner of Massachusetts. That’s how I think of the itinerary. I see the map. I described the road once as a book of dreams. And it’s true for me; I’m thinking, ‘Oh, where can I get to today?’”
Back at the office, besides the swallowing up of the support act space, Rush also used an increasingly sophisticated array of live camera footage, complex video, lasers and strobes. The shows opened once again with the “Also sprach Zarathustra” intro music, followed by “Dreamline.” Tracks from the new album that made the first of the band’s two sets were “Driven,” “Half the World,” “Limbo” and “Virtuality.” An intermission followed, featuring B-movie trailers and the ubiquitous drive-in classic “Let’s All Go to the Lobby and Have Ourselves a Snack.” The Test for Echo tracks in the second set were the title track, “Time and Motion” and “Resist,” although the latter two only on occasion. “The Big Money” would be replaced by “Limelight” for the second half of the tour, and the impromptu “Wipeout!” was replaced with “Stick It Out.” “Subdivisions” would be dropped for the second leg, with “Red Sector A” getting moved from the first to the second set.
“Test for Echo was a hard but satisfying tour,” remembers Neil. “I thought we really played well on the tour, and I remember I documented this tour in journals and planned to write a book about it, so I have a lot of documentation on it. I remember writing notes in my journal about listening to the shows and how well Geddy was singing and how well we were playing. Very satisfying in that respect, but at the same time grueling physically. There were a lot of shows and I had the elbow problem going on toward the end, so I was in pain. But we did play really well.”
Neil elaborates on his injury. “The whole end of the Test for Echo tour, I was wearing an elbow brace because I was getting tendinitis. But I was so glad I could play all right. You know, it hurt, but it would be much worse if I couldn’t play right — that would be crushing. And I’ve never, fortunately, faced anything that was physically debilitating, feeling like I can’t do the job. That would be an awful thing to face, much worse than a limitation of hardware or an injury. That injury hurt like hell but I could still play, right? That’s all that mattered. I made that journal note at the time.”
Fortunately, the elbow healed to Peart’s satisfaction. “Oh, yeah! I had to really abuse the thing for months, night after night. How many times in the course of a show do I hit something as hard as I can with my right hand? You know, thousands, tens of thousands of times. So yeah, there was residual pain and recovery and all that. But I was glad to be able to do the job, to my satisfaction at least, no matter how stupid I looked with a big elbow brace and how much it hurt. That’s not the point; I’m not there to feel good. I’m not there to have fun, you know?”
On the evolution of his famed drum solo up to this point, Neil explained that “every tour it gets restructured and largely recomposed, at least as a framework. I remember, at the beginning of Vapor Trails, I went back and listened to the solo I was doing on Test for Echo. And I thought, well, I’m really not finished with that framework. As far as I’m concerned, that’s okay; I can go forward with that, and it still represents a vehicle of expression and exploration for me. And then I thought no, no, I can’t do that. So I did take it all apart, and the parts that I kept, I reconfigured or reorchestrated or whatever.
“To me, it’s a performance piece in that each tour has a different structure, but there’s always a structure for the tour that gets built on. And I feel it’s developed as I develop certain ideas and experiment with others, in the course of it. Because it, unlike a song, has a fixed structure of turning points and transitions and movements, but the content is not structured. It’s not at all remembered. I know when I switch to a mode — okay, this is the snare drum/bass drum part; okay, go into that. But that’s whatever comes out. That’s a way of being structured and loose at the same time.
