Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 2
“And even though we’ve got this great success — oh, that’s great, we’ve got success, we can do headline shows, we can spend more money on productions — it afforded us a hell of a lot of latitude, but it didn’t change that feeling when we get together to work on our music: ‘Okay, what will make us better? What will make us better writers, better producers, better players?’ That’s the motivation. Maybe it seems like we just started experimenting after that time, but if you look at the first Rush album and then listen to Fly by Night, they’re completely different records. What does ‘By-Tor & the Snow Dog’ have to do with ‘Finding My Way’? Worlds apart. That’s when the experimenting started. And then look at Caress of Steel. That’s an experiment in hash oil! We’ve always experimented.
“We’ve also always been pigeonholed and categorized. Most bands are, I guess. But I felt there was always more to us than the labels that were attached to us. I felt there was more going on, and we were easily written off as a three-piece metal band, or a prog band, or a sword-and-sorcery band. Maybe that’s a motivator for us, in a way. Keep trying to shuffle those labels off of us, you know? At the end of the day though, we’re a hard rock band — I’ve said that many times. I identify with that, and I think we would all agree about that — if we had to be labeled anything, it would be a hard rock band.”
The guys were so prepared coming out of the writing sessions for Roll the Bones that the performances and arrangements on the demos were referenced quite closely, with Neil nailing his meticulously mapped drum parts with ruthless efficiency. The album was recorded between February and May of ’91, using the idyllic and storied Le Studio in Morin Heights as well as McClear Place back home in Toronto. Thanks in the album’s liner notes would go to the birds, reflecting Geddy’s new hobby, and CNN, which the guys watched a lot, staying abreast of the news. Things went so smoothly — drums and bass put down in four days, guitars in eight — the guys finished two months early, moving the release date three months forward from the initially proposed January of 1992.
“We sort of do that,” mused Alex, on using Rupert Hine for a second time. “We like to give a producer a couple of chances. The experience was positive, everything seemed to go well, the album did well, and I don’t think we had any fears of working with him again. We thought that would be a good thing, so we just continued. Rupert has a great sense of musicality, arrangement, songwriting. That’s really what he brought to the whole project. We’re pretty set in our ways. We know what we want to achieve. It’s nice that we have somebody there to guide it along and make some of the decisions that we don’t wanna make. And I think that record got a little more meat on it. It was a little heavier, or harder. Good songs and some good arrangements.
“But it’s a funny thing with us, working with producers at least a couple of times. Maybe once you haven’t realized the depth of the relationship and how far you can go. I mean, we always learn from everybody we work with — that’s always key. I wonder now if we should just do it once and move on and go with the unknown. That’s exciting and challenging. With Terry, during those first few years, we were recording two albums a year, so it was a different environment. We hadn’t reached the stage where we incorporated other instruments; the band was simpler in its form and very comfortable with Terry. But after nine records, it was really time for us to move on and work with other people.
“You don’t want to stay in the same place, ever,” continues Lifeson. “It’s boring and you get itchy and antsy and you want to move on. And that’s always been the thing with us. It’s easy to do something over and over and over and over, like some current bands that are very popular, that have a particular sound and a very identifiable singer’s voice. They just create the same album over and over. It’s a great success, and that’s fine, but eventually that ends and it’s over and there is no growth, there’s no development. You can look back and say, well, I made a lot of money, and that’s all fine and good, but really what does it do for you? It’s always been key for us to change and to move forward. We experimented a lot. We’ve taken some chances and we tried some things, and we haven’t always been successful. And our fans have been vocal about those things, what they like and what they don’t like. And I’m kind of proud of the stuff I don’t like, because we learned from it, and we’re always moving forward. We’re always thinking about how to approach something in a different way.
“Well, not albums,” laughs Alex, not willing to say whole records failed. “Some songs are certainly weaker. And of course, you feel this once you get more distance from the album. They can’t be helped. We never started with twenty songs and burned it down to the best twelve. We always work on those twelve, and that’s all you get. So it’s do them all one hundred percent. Invariably there are some weaker songs than others. There’s a lot of information, a lot of music to work on. That’s why we have producers, someone to bounce ideas off of and help you feel a little more focused. There are some arrangements that haven’t worked, some songs that haven’t worked, sounds at times, little things that just don’t get me to one hundred percent satisfaction.”
That restlessness, again, is something Rupert Hine greatly appreciated in the band. He recalls: “I do remember having a chat — mainly with Neil, although the whole band were there — about how much we admired David Bowie for being the finest example of an artist who will risk losing half his fans — and he often did — on each new album. But he always picked up the same amount of fans who’d never bought a record of his before, album after album after album, all the way through the ’70s and half of the ’80s, at least. I would speak to so many people who said, ‘I’ve never liked a David Bowie record before, but this new one’s fantastic — I actually went out and bought it.’ And you know there’s one just like him who’s not bought it for the first time. And Bowie would continue this process, which kept him fresh and at the absolute top of his game for like fifteen to eighteen years.
“Neil loved that idea,” continues Rupert. “With a band, it’s much, much harder to do, some would say almost impossible, certainly to do it to the degree that David Bowie did it. Rush have done it, I think, probably more than any other band, in trying that idea out, to keep themselves fresh. To make their writing have new purpose. Neil particularly, who after all is the textual voice of the band. He’s the one the responsibility falls on each time to make sense of each individual song and the whole album. It’s a contextual and very much textual parallel route.
“I’m not saying that Geddy and Alex haven’t contributed to a lyric, but Neil often writes these completed lyrics, and they’re presented to the band as a complete idea, which in and of itself is unusual and really good. From a producer’s point of view, that is the best, because right from the get-go you know exactly what you’re trying to do with this song, what’s being communicated. I hate when you’re working with a band that haven’t gotten the lyrics together yet — ‘We’ve got a line and the chorus, which is going to go blah, blah, blah.’ So we’re recording arbitrary parts to a song that’s not yet saying anything.”
Given his bond with Neil over lyrics, Rupert figures it might have been Peart who wanted him as the band’s producer more than anybody else.
“Thinking about it now, yes. I know the idea originated with Neil. Often the most conceptual discussions about the album and its music — as opposed to its arrangement and production — would always come from Neil. I would assume that’s because he’s the man in charge of the words that come out of Geddy’s mouth. The voice piece of Rush — the horn if you like — is Geddy’s voice, but the motor is Neil. I feel that he is often driving the band, the band’s ideology. It’s collective of course; sooner or later, it’s collective. But I feel that the essences of change probably start with Neil. They certainly felt like they did in the two albums I worked on, but I’m imagining that’s probably always true.”
If Neil is the engine that drives the ideology of Rush, Hine figures that “Geddy is the M.D. of the band, the musical director. He’s involved in everything, even guitar solos and what have you — always lovingly, never unpleasant or provocative in a bad way. He would be the organizer, the equivalent of a tour manager. That’s the pragmatic side. But to me it’s always, ‘What are we trying to do with this record that I’ve been invited to be a big part of? What’s the point of doing this record, apart from it being #14 in your lifelong story? What are we going to do that’s going to make this chapter really significant? What is it that you guys want to say?’ And as soon as you use a word like say — and I would all the time — you feel everyone’s looking toward Neil. The voice of Rush is Neil. He was always at the epicenter.
“On the day-to-day stuff, it was Geddy, and Geddy is such a lovely chap, a fantastic man to work with, bright-minded, sparkly, very funny. I carry with me all the time his Jewish grandmother voice, which is just to die for. And I’d say Alex has more fun making a Rush record than the other two put together. He just seems to be in the sandpit playing. That’s when he’s at his best. I wanted to see him in the sandpit the whole time, you know, not being watched over by his parents.”
The artwork Hugh Syme pulled off on the cover of Roll the Bones is a stunner. It’s visually appealing, with the bold band name front and center — as is tradition, no distinctive typography for the band’s name is brought forward from the past, hence there’s no attempt at establishing a logo. Still, Rush in mixed upper- and lowercase letters built from black dice makes quite the impression. Note also top to bottom, the dice get “darker” as the number of white dots on each die decreases from six to two. This is set within a wall of white dice, or “bones,” in slang parlance, named because dice were originally made from ivory but also because of their visual similarity to a skull. And, of course, there is a skull on the cover: Hugh is always up for an extra joke for the eyes and brain. The boy in Syme’s realist painting recalls young men pondering their lot in life through Rush’s discography, including the figure on the Power Windows cover and the protagonist in the song (and video for) “Subdivisions” — as well as the vignettes drawn up for “Tom Sawyer” and “New World Man.” Our young Dennis the Menace type is booting a skull along a thin stretch of sidewalk next to a waterway, which is rendered in the exact same colors as the dice wall, reflective of it. The skull is one of the most rollable bones, and it’s also the bone most laden with meaning. It is in itself a memento mori, an object that serves as a reminder of death, as is the entire scene, from the young boy courageously flaunting death, to the weeds struggling to grow in concrete, to the evocations of chance and randomness one can derive from the dice.
Neil’s inspiration for the title was a Fritz Leiber sci-fi story called “Gonna Roll the Bones,” which he had read back in the ’70s; there’s no direct influence of the story on Peart’s concept or lyrics, but Neil had liked the phrase, so he jotted it down for future reference.
Unsurprisingly, the opening track on Roll the Bones is one of the album’s fastest rockers, and it’s quick to get rocking. “Dreamline” also finds Neil almost immediately getting down to the deep tissue and exploring the themes suggested in the record’s title and cover art. He’s already leapt from the platform and is examining the appeal of geographical exploration: the road trip, the restlessness, the vitality slaked from getting out in the world. Remarks about the fleeting nature of time and therefore life are reinforced by Alex’s guitar picking, which sounds like the ticking of a clock. Even Neil’s title, a made-up word, is laden with enough meaning to serve as a microcosm for the song as a whole, as well as the wider album.
“They have different satisfactions,” muses Peart. “‘Dreamline’ I really liked because I was able to write verses that were imagistic and non-rhyming, freeing myself from my usual neatness habits. Roll the Bones still remains really satisfying; it’s just a good selection of songs.” The opening lines have Neil referencing astronomy, which he was prompted to write about after watching a PBS NOVA episode on satellite imagery after one of his famed long stretches of cycling between gigs, this time between Cincinnati and Columbus. The CD single artwork for the song features three floating wishbones (one for each member of the band?) over an ocean and sunset scene. So there’s bones, a yearning, and a sense of the possibilities one gets from open vistas. A wishbone is called that because two people are to grasp the ends with their pinkies, make a wish and break it. Whoever winds up with the largest piece gets his wish. Here again, there’s the element of chance, rolling the dice.
“Dreamline” became a live favorite of the band’s for years to come — the song was strong enough to serve as opener on the Different Stages live album — as well as hitting #1 on the U.S. Mainstream Rock Tracks charts. Indeed, even if Rush had no ability to rock out at this juncture, “Dreamline” is built for live execution, given its pause for the verses and attack come chorus time. Again, even across this “heavy” part of the album, Alex’s chords are behaved and tightly wound, Neil’s drums troubled and trebly, and Geddy is playing a Wal bass. All three performers are further emasculated by a similarly timid sound, that of braying keyboard stabs, which, through lack of competition from Rush, become the signature of the chorus, the highlight of the song that is to be the highlight of Roll the Bones.
“‘Bravado’ is a song where I just loved how the music and the words married,” says Neil of the record’s next track, a hypnotic and measured dark pop song framed by Neil’s two-handed hi-hat pattern. “That’s one of our more successful overall compositions — arrangement, performance, all of that wedded together.”
Alex loves that his guitar solo on the track was a late-night one-taker: laden with emotion, performed in solitude on his Telecaster direct to tape, all the more perfect to go with Neil’s serious lyric about people doing the right thing, personal heroism from often unsung heroes, and Geddy’s steady and slow delivery thereof.
Rupert thinks of this song with respect to the album’s sense of emotion and fragility. “I suppose if you really are keeping things as fresh as possible that means danger — it’s got to. I mean, to be truly fresh is to go somewhere new and pushing that one foot forward inch by inch or leaping a little in the way that Rush have done, more than a little. So yes, there is a danger that probably makes some of the moments have a certain fragility. I certainly felt there was some emotional stuff that came out. I just referred to the playing around in the sandpit side of Alex, which I found quite emotional. There was a joy to that.
“People are a bit on the fence about Rush. They respect them a lot, but they think they’re too technical, you know, not emotional enough. And often Neil is somewhat narrative, with the objective view rather than creating a cry from the inside. Those aspects of Rush can keep them feeling like they’re a little distant in the way they communicate. I thought we got through some of that on ‘Bravado,’ which is still my favorite track of all the tracks I did with them. It’s one of the least ‘Rush-like’ tracks. It’s sort of a ballad, nothing terribly tricky. I get chills listening to that track. I do. I love it; it’s gorgeously harmonic, melodic, expressive, simple, but with meaningful text. That’s a set of skills that perhaps showed some of that fragility.”
Hine was particularly impressed with Neil’s busy playing late in the song, where he stretches out against yet another round of the hypnotic, almost haunting chorus refrain.
“Yes, there were a couple of points, one in particular, where I was listening in the control room. They were all playing together, and Stephen Tayler, the engineer I was working with on both those albums, I turned to him and said, ‘Are you checking out what Neil’s playing? Can you figure out how many limbs he’s got? Can you work out what’s playing what there? And it was ‘Bravado’ actually. It was impossible for just four limbs to play this part if you check it out. My count was six limbs he needed, not just five but six.
“So in the end we soloed everything to figure out how. Now we’re not even checking out sounds or anything — we’re obsessed by working out how on earth he was playing what he was playing. And in the end, I had to get out . . . they were still playing, and I had to go into the studio, I had to walk in front of him, I had to stand in front of his drum kit and I had to watch. And I’m staring at him, and that’s when I realized I still couldn’t tell. That’s only happened once in my life — it was completely weird. It’s a trick. He does these amazing, amazing trick things, that even when you’re looking at him, it’s a sleight of hand, it’s magic.”
“I spent days on that drum part,” explained Neil, speaking with Powerkick magazine. “Just over and over again. And that’s what I’m saying about time being a luxury . . . we finished songwriting and everything early, so I had time to rehearse my drum parts for two weeks after that. I had a demo work tape that I would play a song over and over until I was burnt out on it, and then I would start on the next one. So I spent a couple of hours every day on each song for like two weeks. ‘Bravado’ is a great example of that because I orchestrated every section of it so carefully, but I also left a lot of it free. A lot of the key things, a lot of the drum fills, for instance, I didn’t allow myself to work out. Every time they came, I just closed my eyes and let it happen. I didn’t want that to become too big a part of the recording, because you can over-rehearse, and a part that’s played the same way too many times can become stale. I wanted to leave a little bit of it feeling on edge.
“Over time, I think you learn that you want both, not just a well-worked drum part and not just spontaneity, but both. It shouldn’t be an either/or situation. I want to be both orchestrated and improvised. It’s the way I start working on a song. I think of everything that will fit in the song and try it out once, and everything that I don’t like, gradually I will eliminate. And then sometimes you do end up with less, because ultimately that’s what the song requires and thus I’m satisfied by it.
