Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 20
Seeing life in action, all forms of it, became part of Peart’s healing process. “When I got up in Northern Canada and I was riding along, ‘Oh, there’s a bear swimming across the river over there; oh, there’s a herd of elk over by the side of the road,’ and that revitalized my spirit. It was those things that finalized me, the landscape around me as I moved west and north, into Northern Canada, Yukon and Alaska, and then down through Western Canada and the western U.S., the majestic landscapes. I haven’t drawn these kinds of deep metaphors before, but you have to. It’s your tiny existence in a different context.
“And like I said, a map to me is a book of dreams. Since I was a little kid on a bicycle: ‘I wonder what’s over that hill.’ Down that trail in the woods. Nothing more attractive than a path that goes into the woods. And that stays with me now into the wintertime too: snowshoeing, cross-country skiing — the same fascination. I’ll look at the map, ‘Oh, I wonder what’s over there?’ Or I’m on my snowshoes and go down a cross-country trail. I have old familiar favorites that I like, but there’s nothing more stimulating or exciting than a new one where you haven’t been. Roads are like that, landscapes are like that, and when they are combined with the magic of life too — that holy trinity — I knew it was important. But now when I think about the resonance of what that means, the permanent world, the movement through it and the magic of eagles and elk and black bear, all these things around you remind you that life goes on, in a very primeval and evocative way. For a nature-loving kid, mind you — so this is probably a little idiosyncratic. It’s the kind of person I am — these things stimulate me.”
But there was always, albeit way back in the recesses, Geddy and Alex, if not Rush. Communication was minimal, and when generated, it was by carrier pigeon and smoke signal.
“Well, this is a period in the mid-’90s, when portable modes of communication were rare,” explains Neil. “I think I had a brick-sized cell phone for emergency use, but it wasn’t the kind that worked in half the places I went, especially the north and the west. So I got in the habit — from my grandfather, who died at ninety-three, around the year 2000, 1999, and he was quite solitary later in his life — anywhere I went, on my bicycle trips in Africa or in Europe, I would send a postcard. And joking ones. I remember on the Ghost Rider trip, I was down in a beautiful little town called Loreto in Baja, California, and stopped there for a couple days. It was so nice, with a fifty-dollar-a-night hotel room and a hammock in front of it, the Sea of Cortez in front of me, sitting there reading in a hammock. And I wrote to my grandfather and said, ‘Come down here, it’s really cheap, you can lie in a hammock and read all day.’
“So I started sending them to Geddy and Alex on my travels too. And actually, the Ghost Rider title came from one of those. Alex and I had a special written language called Moronese, and it started on our grocery list one year, when we would all be together and working on stuff, and we would write down our grocery list in pure phonetics, you know, and try to outdo each other. And we would say what is the obvious way that this word could be spelled? Bread is b-r-e-d, strawberries, hmm, so we would get really creative.
“I sent Alex a postcard from the town where he was born, Fernie, British Columbia. I picked up a postcard and I turned it over and it was the phenomenon of a mountain, with the clouds collected at the top and drifted away from it, and the locals call that ghost rider. And I went boom, that’s me — I’m riding with all these ghosts, and I feel like a ghost, and I’m alienated from the whole world: I’m the ghost rider. So I wrote to Alex, ‘Eyeemthugostrydur’ — ‘I am the ghost rider.’ Bing! Yes, I am. So that’s a perfect example.
“And I remember I was hiking in Glacier National Park in Montana, and I think as anyone from there knows, there’s a lot of grizzly country there and you’re not supposed to hike alone. But I was alone, and the one thing they say, make human sounds. So I’m walking along singing every classic standard song that I know, every Sinatra song, Tony Bennett song, all that stuff. And when I stopped to eat, even, I kept tapping my leg to scare the grizzlies away. And I could see where they were tracking, I could smell them in the air; it was a misty, close, rainy sort of a day. And I carried a big rock with me. I always say wherever there’s mountain lions around, I’ll never go down without a fight. So I always carry a pointy rock in my hand. And I wrote a postcard to Geddy from there, and I said, ‘I went hiking with a big rock, so if a grizzly attacks I can fight it off.’ Yeah, right. So those are two examples. Yeah, those were my two modes of communication with people in traveling. Postcards and phone calls, but only occasional payphones back then. I had occasion recently when I had to find one, and it’s strange how just over a decade, things can change so much.”
And Neil was aware that his network of friends was worried about him. “Yeah, absolutely. I was worried about me. Why wouldn’t you be? In the state I was in, of course they were worried about me.”
Back at the office on College Street — not a particularly nice part of Toronto, but who likes to move? — staffers looked at each other and then looked for work to do. It’s always been like that there. Rush is a business, and a business needs a product. And the office doesn’t handle death well, in the immortal words of Pegi Cecconi. In fact Ray, in that cursed role of nagging dad with the purse strings, of administrator, of reality check, of “that lawyer is a horrible person, but I’m glad he’s my lawyer and not the other guy’s” — all of these roles — actually started worrying that Neil would spend all his money and wind up broke. Peart always had expensive tastes, and now he was just burning and not earning. Seemed like a good time for another live album, an obvious time, a desperate time, the only option really, a no-brainer. In effect, Rush had broken up. Nobody was saying this formally or articulating to what extent it was a given, but no matter what the reality was, that doesn’t mean the brand doesn’t live on, and a good manager protects and maintains and tries to elevate the brand when possible. And if this was indeed the end of Rush, no one out there in the world needed to know that. A live record could mean — if we were all willing to play along — that Rush lives.
On November 10, 1998, despite Neil’s self-imposed exile, and despite voiced thoughts that the band couldn’t be pressed to produce, the Rush ball was kept rolling with Different Stages, a mammoth three-CD live set. Besides a conventional collection, the album includes a disc comprising a Hammersmith Odeon show recorded for (but aborted as) a radio broadcast, at the back end of the A Farewell to Kings tour. The other two discs include three tracks from the Counterparts tour, a handful of other isolated and fortunate incidents, but mainly selections from the band’s Chicago Test for Echo stand on June 23, 1997. Geddy at the time found this quite amusing, given that over a hundred shows were recorded for aural perusal. The Test for Echo album is represented with only three tracks, with the complexion of the album looking like a hits pack, with welcome smatterings from the ’90s albums and ’89’s Presto included.
“We had been recording material for two tours,” explained Geddy to the author back in ’98. “We are gathering quite an overwhelming library of material actually, and, coupled with the discovery of the tapes from 1978, it was just obvious that we needed to put a package together. And in my mind, seeing that we were coming up on twenty-five years as a band, I thought it was an opportune moment to put together a retrospective, in essence, from a live point of view. And because a lot of the responsibility for this project gravitated into my corner, I just kind of decided what the concept was going to be.”
Says Ged of the 1978 U.K. barnstormer, “The quality that we found on that particular show is remarkable for a twenty-year-old analog tape recording. This one was an effort to go into the realm of the idealistic. We recorded so many shows that I could choose performances I felt were as good or better than the recorded studio versions, or where there was a level of live excitement, or where there was something genuinely new that was brought to the version, as opposed to just the best possible available to me. ‘Animate,’ for example, evolved into something different live. So it was a more ambitious mission or goal. We accomplished a very satisfying result. In terms of tinkering, there’s really none on this album. The whole purpose of this album was to record so many shows that we wouldn’t have to do any.”
Most definitely, hearing “2112” in its entirety is a Different Stages high point. “We changed a bit of the emphasis and changed the tuning of the song a little bit to give it a heavier feel,” notes Geddy on the conceptual classic from 1976. “But other than that it’s a fairly accurate reinterpretation of it, twenty-two years later. I was really pleased with the way that came out. It was a lot more fun to play live than I ever thought it would be.”
The band takes it as a point of honor to reproduce the songs close to the way we know and love them. “For most of our songs, really, we do stick to the arrangements,” affirms Neil. “The arrangements are so carefully wrought that we’re quite happy to try to nail that on the night, you know? And other ones are a little looser by design. There’s also a consistency of live performance that is really important to us. I always remember seeing the Grateful Dead around the early ’90s. I had liked Mickey Hart’s book, Drumming at the Edge of Magic, and I had written him a letter of appreciation, and we corresponded a little. And we were in Atlanta one night with back-to-back nights off, so I went to see Grateful Dead. And Mickey said right away, ‘Well, it’s not going to be very good tonight, because we just had a good show last night, and they come in fours.’ And that was the kind of inconsistency that their approach to performance demanded, and their audience would forgive. So, fine. We really like more consistency, so every night is going to be good. And if we happen to be sparked up, there’s always room for that to show. We notice a difference and our audience notices the difference when it’s a special night.”
On a more micro level, Peart sticks to the original studio structures of most of his drum fills as well. “I do, with pleasure, yeah. Again, I worked really hard on all that stuff, and it’s a reflection of me and my character, how I like to see things built and the way I like to play, so why wouldn’t I? It just seems obvious. There are always little details I hear in the final record and I go, I wish I knew that accent or that vocal push was going to be there. Things get built and developed along the way. There are little things like that I’ve added afterwards, that I wished I had done on the record. But they are small details.” And in the end, there are all those air drummers to satisfy . . . “Well, they can do what they want. No, no, that’s strictly about me. The drum parts are made to suit me, and consequently, they’re played to suit me.”
Yet ultimately, surely, there’s a philosophical dissatisfaction, or deficiency, with the concept of getting out there and playing live, versus the permanence of a record that you can hold in your hand — one passes into the ether, the other becomes history.
“Well, yes, that’s the distinction,” affirms Neil. “Between temporary and permanent. In some ways, touring is an important evolutionary part of your progress. I used to definitely feel at the end of the tour that I was playing better and that the band was playing better than we had been at the outset. And as you’re learning and growing and refining technique and all those different aspects of being a musician, there’s no greater testing ground or proving ground than by performance, where you’re proving yourself every single night.
“And again, playing the same songs but trying to correct flaws, or improve bits of it, get inflections, pick up what the other guys are playing, and incorporating that, listening to live tapes after the show, hearing where you might have nailed the tempo down better, or where you are playing something somebody might respond to. So many things like that go on in the course of touring, especially in the early years where things were accelerated and there’s so much to learn, so you learned faster.
“Then it reaches a certain point, I find, where it’s just re-creation,” continues Peart. “I love rehearsing for the tour and the whole buildup for it and the band becoming tight musically and working and all of that, right through the rehearsals and everything. Then once you’ve played a really good show, that sets the benchmark that you struggle to live up to night after night. And then of course, if you do play a really great show, I’ve had this experience of coming offstage all exuberant, and then a cloud of disappointment sets in, like, ‘It’s gone; it’s over.’ So increasingly, that becomes less satisfying.
“I think to painstakingly craft a piece of work, whether it’s writing or music or drumming, particularly, it’s done and it’s there and you can enjoy it later. It has a sense of not only endurance but accomplishment, like you’ve made something. A show doesn’t feel like you’ve made something. That’s the difference. You performed something and it can be satisfying or not, depending on how well you performed it. But in essence, hey, you haven’t actually made anything.”
As for what Neil gets out of going to a concert himself, “I would say it’s more of a theatrical experience, really, for me. I don’t find that live performance has ever really changed my experience of music. Everything I get out of music, I can get from the album. I love to go see a band perform, of course, but that’s the essence; it’s performance, it’s the theater, the same way I like to watch a good play or opera. It’s that kind of experience, I think, more than the intimate experience of music that you can have with speakers or headphones or in the car.”
Back to Rush’s own stages, Geddy addresses the topic of his understated, some say meekly delivered, stage patter. “I’m not a big talker onstage. Over the years I’ve loosened up a lot; I feel much more comfortable. When I was young, I was just nervous. But as I’ve gotten older it’s much less of a big deal to me. When I talk I feel totally at ease. But I don’t remember, unless somebody threw a shoe or something at me, getting pissed off and yelling at the audience. There’s the occasional time where you’re in a general admission situation and people are shoving too much and you have to talk about calming everybody down.”
“Geddy was the one who always spoke, and he spoke very little,” notes Alex, who over the years took to spontaneously cracking a regular parade of jokes, quips and impressions on any given night. “You know, other than just introducing the songs, that was it. He was never the kind of host to the evening that some people are. It was all about getting down to business, playing. And I guess that’s the way it always was with us. We never worked out moves. You just reacted to the music whatever way you did and everybody was very independent.”
The resplendent triple gate packaging of Different Stages contains a nice collage of Rush memorabilia. “It’s stuff from all of us really,” says Geddy, “and some fans I think. Our photographer, Andrew MacNaughtan, put the collage together. I keep stuff; I can’t say I display much of it, but yes, I’m a bit of a packrat. When I see things I think are cool, I throw them in a box and put it in the basement somewhere.”
Finally, Different Stages adds yet another bonus, a computer program, Geddy explains, that allows the purchaser to indulge in musical sculpture. “Someone at Atlantic phoned me and said they had got in contact with this Japanese artist who had developed this interesting program called Cluster Works, and there was something about the program that they were anxious to use on a rock album. And something reminded him of the kinds of things we do with our lights and our live situation, with our lasers and so forth.
“He thought there was a nice fit between our music and the ethereal quality of these visuals. He flew down and showed it to me. I’ve never been a big believer in the enhanced CD thing, because in the past you always kind of get lyric sheets and things like that, so they make you feel like you’re getting a bonus when you’re getting things you normally would get anyway. I never really thought it was much of a bargain for the fans. But this struck me as being something different, and I imagine there are a lot of fans who want to play with that. So for those who want to play with it, it’s there.”
With the future of Rush still up in the air, on November 14, 2000, two years after the Different Stages live opus, Geddy offered for the fans’ consideration his very first solo record. My Favorite Headache would be his only solo album to date, just like Victor is the only solo excursion we’ve seen from Alex thus far.
“This record for me is very rewarding on two levels,” explained Ged to me at the time — I was doing the press rounds. “One, I’m very proud of it musically and two, I’m very pleased to be able to have worked with Ben Mink, who has been my friend for a long time. The whole reason this project came into being was my desire for the two of us to work together. And for us to work together and still remain friends at the end of it was a big accomplishment. I’m really happy about that. But musically the album is quite richly layered in terms of melody compared to where I normally operate. And it’s a slightly different attitude toward groove in rock. It’s a little rounder, groove-oriented music than what we end up doing in Rush. Lyrically, I guess after I got over the original shyness about it, it turned out to be a very rewarding personal experience, in terms of getting to know myself. It felt good to clarify my thoughts about certain things on paper. And the fact that can translate into a musical world also made me feel more complete.
