Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 19
“And I’ve done that in the studio the last couple of records. For example, on ‘Resist’ on Test for Echo, I worked and rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed that song, and I worked out every possible kind of fill that might work. But I didn’t allow myself to orchestrate them so that when I played them in the studio, I didn’t know. I knew what would work, but I didn’t know how it was going to come out. That’s an example of how the drum solo is. I’ve worked out the structure of it and the arrangements and the transitions — that remains constant — but the content of the movements is strictly whatever comes out of me that night.”
A career highlight for the band would take place on February 26, 1997, when Alex, Geddy and Neil were presented with their country’s highest honor, the Order of Canada, both for (quietly) raising over a million dollars for charities over the years and (loudly) being Rush. The guys had long been rock heroes championing their roots, but now they were to be recognized as established and exemplary Canadians in a much wider realm, outside of mere entertainment, now part of the national fabric of the country that made a more than workable place for Geddy’s and Alex’s parents as immigrants.
A similarly patriotic milestone would be met in May of 2012, when the band was ushered into Rideau Hall to receive the Governor General’s Performing Arts Award for Lifetime Artistic Achievement. This was followed the next year by their own Canadian postage stamp, featuring the Starman of 2112.
“I don’t think that after Test for Echo the intention was to take a very long break,” says Alex, inevitably alluding to the tragedies that were to present themselves upon Neil and necessarily the band. “We enjoyed making Test; it was a very fun record to make, good vibe in the studio. The tour was great; doing ‘An Evening with’ was really a lot of fun for us. It gave us a chance to play stuff like ‘2112’ in its entirety [‘Natural Science’ was brought back as well]. The tour went really, really well. We were healthy through the whole thing, and we got to the end of it fine. I think we were planning on taking a relatively short break and then back in for the next record. No one could know that what happened would happen.”
What happened was that on August 10, 1997, Neil’s only child at the time, daughter Selena Taylor, was killed in a car accident. Unthinkably, Neil’s inconsolable wife, Jackie, succumbed to cancer less than a year later. Subsequently, Neil has expressed the unfathomably sad sentiment that, in fact, Jackie had died of a broken heart.
“That tour, it was mellow, it was good,” reflects Geddy. “That’s why that whole thing came out of . . . it was such a lightning strike. Just threw everything apart. I mean, there’s no good time for that to happen, but we were in a good space. Maybe that helped, in a way, because there was no bitterness, there was no animosity, there was no backbiting between us. So when that terrible moment occurred, you can just think of him, and be there for him as his friend. You know, there was no frustration with, oh, what can we do? What do we do for him? And can we ease his pain in some way?”
Agrees Alex, “We were coming off a tour that was very positive, off of a record we felt good about. We were all in good health and in a good mental state. I think we came off tour with a little reserve energy. We were feeling really positive about whatever we were going to do next. So that made the whole thing that followed that much more devastating.”
Alex remembers getting a message to call the office, and that it was urgent. “I think Geddy was away at his cottage, so he was sort of out of the loop. I called a very close friend of mine who had gone through the same thing years previously and asked him for some advice. And he was instrumental in helping me deal with it, and to find the right things to say and the right things to do. Because it’s a terrible, terrible extreme to go through. So I visited them that night. I didn’t go in. I slipped a note under the door, just so they knew I was there and I was there for them, and they reached out to me the following morning. And from that point on, I was there every day for two weeks. And we all took on our own responsibilities within that house of pain. It was awful; it was very, very hard.
“The funny thing is, it’s as if the band didn’t even exist, at that moment. The whole thing for everyone was to get Neil and Jackie strong again, and able to survive. It was really all about survival. And they couldn’t do anything, as you can imagine, at that time. So there’s a group of us that came there, and we mounted a headquarters and we just dealt with everything and did our best to make their lives as quiet as possible.”
Geddy heard the news from Ray. “I was at my cottage. I remember my wife was out at the store. And the call came in, and when you’re told news like that, you can’t process it until you talk about it, until you say it out loud. So she walked in and I told her what had happened, and the two of us were sharing this; we both went white. We were at a loss; we didn’t know what to do. And I think that’s a common experience when there is a sudden loss. You don’t know what to do with yourself. There’s something atavistic about it. When you lose a kid, or you lose one of your flock or whatever, you’re looking for something to do, you’re looking for the right response, to find the missing person.
“So I called Alex and said, ‘What’s going on? I’m up at the cottage; where are you?’ ‘I’m in the city; I’m going to go over. They’re coming back.’ They were in Quebec but coming back to the city. And he said, ‘Well, I don’t know if they want any visitors, but I’m going over.’ And I said, ‘Okay, let me know,’ and I think at first he just dropped a note at their door saying, ‘I’m around; you can call me back.’
“That first few weeks were just heartbreaking. Shocking. So we couldn’t stay up at the cottage. We were just bothered, and we didn’t know whether to go be with him. And in the end, I just looked at Nancy and said I just had to go to him. There’s no right answer at a time like that. So of course we just went to them, and the next few months were very painful. It was hard. It was hard knowing what to do for him, what to be for him and Jackie, and how to comfort them.
“The next few weeks they had people to their house every day, and it was just very sad, a shocking thing. And so they finally had enough. I think the people coming over were making them more miserable in a way. The pain was so evident. I mean, it was just so hard on them. We could distract him and Jackie, and try to make them tell stories about Selena, but in the end, they decided to leave. It was their course of action — it’s too painful to look at all the things she used to touch, and all the things that were part of her, so they went to England and lived in England for a couple of months to try to get over the trauma. It took a long time. It just got kind of worse and worse. It got better and worse at the same time.”
Howard Ungerleider, basically hired by the band the same time Neil was and crucial to the road show since day one, recalls the day he heard the news. “I was at home in Toronto at the time and it was a shock. It made me cry when I heard about it. We all knew Neil and his family very well, and we went right over to Neil’s house and hung out there for days, bringing food, doing whatever. You feel helpless. There’s nothing you can do. Deep down inside we all felt so . . . like we felt his pain, and you can’t even describe what he was feeling. I know what we were feeling, which was horrible, you know, just to see them suffer through it.
“And I remember going over to Neil’s house, and they had the French and the Mahaffy families there [both had daughters sexually assaulted and killed by Paul Bernardo] helping them as well. Because they’d gone through that ridiculous tragedy, and just to be surrounded by all of this, as a support for Neil, it’s all you could’ve done. But it was horrible. It was one of those things where it makes you do a lot of reflecting and thinking about life. I remember Neil during that time, saying, ‘I thought that life was great and people suck, for a long period of time, but then now I realize that it’s people who are great and it’s life that sucks,’ which hit home, you know. I still get sad just even talking about it.
“I can’t speak for Geddy and Alex, but I know how it affected me and my wife. But it affected them even more. It was just horrible. Nobody should experience that in their lifetime, but unfortunately, it does happen, and when that happens, you are forced to deal with it. It brings up a lot of psychological pains and conjures up a lot of demons as well as thought processes — you start drawing parallels to your life. Do you look at yourself as being fortunate it hasn’t happened to you? You would have to say yes, you do. But I wouldn’t wish it on anyone, much less someone I worked with for so many years. I’m just really glad to see that although this has happened, that he’s come to another level in his life, and that he has pulled through it. But at what cost though?”
“I know how close he was with his daughter, so everyone was devastated by it,” recalls Ray. “And it was devastating to see how hurt he was, and particularly how hurt his wife was, and he was trying to prop both of them up through this loss. And of course, the loss is magnified if you only have one child. It was everything. Whatever he wanted me to do . . . eventually, when things quieted down, the house was sold; I took on that responsibility for him. But mostly what he needed was his space, and he needed to be away. I saw him in Los Angeles a couple of times. I think, actually, one of the first times I saw him, I took him to an L.A. Kings game and tried to make sure nobody bothered him or recognized him. We went out and we talked, and he would come to Toronto and he and I would get together. Because of course his parents were here, and there were some responsibilities here, and it was tough. I can still feel it today. It’s very tough. Very tough.”
“It’s just your spirit, something, just leaves,” says Alex. “And you’re so overwhelmed by the depth of the grief and the pain that you see, particularly in your friends, the pain that you feel, and it changes you for sure; it changes you forever. You look at things differently. I care in many different ways than I did then. I’ve always been a caring person, and by nature I like to help people and I like to make people happy, but that took it to another level. It gave me a sense of purpose. I’ve had a lot of sick friends lately and I deal with it so much better now. Maturing is part of it, yes, but based on what your experiences are . . . boy, something like that, you really learn a lot from it.
“I think the office made some kind of group press release at the time, but we didn’t get involved in any of the sites or talk to anybody directly,” explains Alex, when asked if they thought at the time that maybe this would be the end of the line for Rush. “What happened happened and that was a personal thing. We love the support from our fans, and it was beautiful to see their reaction to what had happened, and their support. But if new music was never going to happen, if that was the end of it, so be it; that’s the way life goes. You can’t do anything about that. We do this for ourselves. We don’t do this for our fans, per se, or we don’t do it for the money. Before anything else, we do it for ourselves. I think that’s the great thing about our relationship with our fans; they expect us to do that.”
“When they lived in England, I used to go over once in a while,” continues Geddy. “You know, people would come in and see them, fly in, and we would all make contact with each other, ‘Who’s going this week?’ and ‘Are they okay?’ We kept tabs on him. We just always wanted to make sure there was somebody with them. They had good friends with them; Liam [Birt], our tour manager and one of our closest friends, was with them a lot. It was very surreal. I don’t know how to describe it in any way. It was terribly dark. It forced all of us into a very dark place.”
And then Jackie was diagnosed with cancer, succumbing to the disease eleven months after Selena’s death. “It just became even more surreal,” continues Geddy, “and it was all part of that same thing, that same continuum. They came back and we would see them, and she was surprisingly okay about being sick, because she was so grief-stricken about the loss of Selena, and I guess this is what she prayed for. Poor guy . . . after she passed away, he was lost, and you know, he describes it in his book.”
And so began Neil’s odyssey by way of motorcycle, which he indeed recounts in his legendary Ghost Rider book. Geddy would receive postcards from the open road, with Neil using one of his many nicknames. “And you’d make an effort; we would send a letter to be waiting for him somewhere. He went through what he had to go through,” with Geddy intimating that the game would be played Neil’s way, at arm’s length, but that the contact would let him know the lines of communications were open if he wanted to talk further.
“I mean, he wrote such a great book about it as well,” seconds Ray. “It was painful. It’s painful to have someone you are close with for all those years go through that. It’s still painful for me to know he had to live through that. You’re never the same. How could you be? He and I would talk. And like I say, I had reason to go to Los Angeles once in a while, so I would see him. And whenever he came to Toronto, I would see him. We had lunches, dinners, a hockey game or two, whatever, there was contact. And of course, I was in touch with him because I was the one trying to sell the house at that point, and whatever other responsibilities came around. The one thing we didn’t do is knock on his door about any business opportunities.”
Chapter 4
Different Stages
“The one thing about too much solitude is that you don’t tend to make yourself laugh much.”
“Basically we’re talking about a journey that stretched fifty-five thousand miles,” begins Neil, on the grieving process by way of motorcycle he embarked upon after the deaths of the rest of his immediate family, “starting in Quebec, and going up to the Arctic, to Inuvik, and through Alaska, around Alaska, down to Mexico, across all of Mexico, from top across the Mexican mainland down to Belize, and generally stopping by night at motels along the way. I learned by then you can travel on the fly. I carried camping gear with me, which is a great little bit of trail craft, because you don’t have to worry then. If the motel I want to stay at is full, I can camp on their lawn. I didn’t have to; remarkably, everywhere I went I could always find a place. I camped a couple times by choice, went down in the Arizona desert, when it was pleasurable to do so.
“But for the most part, in North America, certainly, you can just ramble around: ‘Ah, okay, I’m getting tired now, I’d like to have a drink, I think I’ll stop, the town is twenty miles away, I’ll try there.’ It’s the same thing I do on tour with the band now too. It’s a way of being out in the world, engaging with the world. I’m on two-lane roads on that whole Ghost Rider journey, and to this day I go through small towns, the back roads, try to go to the independent motels, the independent diners, the mom-and-pop places, to keep all that heritage — traveler’s heritage — alive. Finding how improvisational that can be is a way to travel too.
“Those are character-building lessons,” continues Neil. “It’s interesting to note, in that same process, I looked at it in my drumming too. Becoming more improvisational, and being unafraid to drop the itinerary. Even the early days of us touring, we would plan our days off, where we would stay that night and book it, thinking you had to. Because that’s the kind of traveling I learned. And then I learned you didn’t have to. No, you can improvise. If you feel like going that way or stopping earlier or later, you can. So that kind of freedom, I had that. I packed up camping gear if I needed to or wanted to, and a spare can of gas on the back, just learning the art of travel as I went. And the little interludes with people at the roadside would be so reaffirming and would definitely lighten my day.
“The one thing about too much solitude is that you don’t tend to make yourself laugh much. And it’s great when people like Mr. Air Mail gives you a little laugh for free. And sometimes when I’m traveling, real human beings will make me laugh more than anything else, and that would be a little gift. Like the gas station in Oregon; the town was called Irrigon, Oregon, because it was irrigated, so Irrigon, Oregon — that was funny. I pulled into the gas station, and one of those signs that usually says ‘Mechanic on Duty, Officially Certified,’ well, this guy had ‘Maniac on Duty, Officially Certified.’ And I thought that was hilarious. ‘Do many people notice this?’ ‘No, no, not many. I just put that up for a laugh.’ Yes, thank you! A free laugh there. Those are the moments that add up to something else, especially when you are trying to apply yourself back to life and appreciation of human beings, as opposed to resentment for their mere existence.
“It was a long and very desperate trip, but lessons were learned as always, and unforgettable experiences were collected along the way, and also, so many thresholds got passed. And when I said my road back was landscapes and highways, through those landscapes and the wildlife around them, that’s been the path since then too. More and more nature. All the stories I write and even all those books, they’re really about nature. They may be about my travels, and they seem to be about motorcycling and exploring, but it’s the natural world that I am at pains to describe. Thinking about how to put in words how I might describe this to someone else who is not there.
“That became my entire drive in writing. I didn’t want to write fiction anymore. I didn’t want to make up stories. I wanted to capture what I saw in my travels and what I felt, and how other people described them if I could, and any dialogue I wanted to exchange. Remember that moment, remember how that conversation went and how to get that across to the reader. So the instincts that were refined down, distilled until I only had those three things left, that became the path for the next fourteen years after that. All of my writing — and even my creative thinking — grew from landscapes, highways and wildlife.”
Anonymity was important for Peart, as always, but more than ever at this time. “Yeah, it is, of course, but with a helmet on you’re anonymous anyway. In that whole fifty-five thousand miles, I don’t know if I was ever recognized once, in a little town at a gas station or a motel or diner. Because I’m just a guy sitting there with a hat on reading a book. If you don’t look to make yourself conspicuous, a lot of times you won’t. And if I’m not in a town where we’re playing, where people don’t expect me to be, a lot of times I can slip around and be a guy. And that’s all I want from traveling too — I just want to be a guy. I love your little town, I love your little diner, I love staying at this motel, I love the road we were on today, and that’s life enough for me. I don’t need somebody suddenly getting overexcited on me.”
