Limelight: Rush in the '80s, page 24
“Lyrically it’s always been a reflection of my times and the times I observe. Every one is a reflection of me. But they can come out of conversations. Geddy and I have had conversations sometimes that lead to a song because I know it’s something he would like to say. The collaboration between Geddy and me is intense, because I’m writing for his voice. So of course he has to feel not only comfortable with it, but inspired by it, and be able to mean it every time he sings it.”
“Mission” was very much one of those songs in which Geddy was part of the mindspace from the start. Neil remembers the discussion that generated the lyric. He and Geddy spoke about how they both always had music as a mission, whereas many people go through life never feeling they have a mission at all.
“That song came out of a conversation he and I had in the mid-’80s, so we would have been in our mid-thirties,” says Neil. “A lot of our other friends were at that crucial time of life when you’re learning to settle, or making all those adjustments to go, ‘Okay, I’m middle-aged now.’ And we would talk to friends who would say things like, ‘When did you know what you wanted to do?’ You know, ‘What age did you know what you wanted to do, and how did you figure it out?’ and all that. Well, to us, of course, we knew what we wanted to do from age thirteen and spent our lives in the pursuit of it.
“But we realized there was this whole other group of people — among people we knew and cared for and respected and loved — fighting their way through life too. And again, a lot of times my lyrics reflect people I care about — I want their voice in there. So ‘Mission’ is sung in the first person but it’s somebody else.
“So Geddy and I had the conversation about our friends going through that life crisis that we had been spared because we had a mission. I took that and put it in the words of someone wishing they had it. And also making the comparison — ‘Be careful what you wish for.’ There’s a line toward the bridge of that song: ‘We each pay a fabulous price for our visions of paradise.’ And, ‘If their lives were exotic and strange’ . . . I was thinking of painter Paul Gauguin, when he went through the suffering he went through to do what he did. Because, ‘Ah gee, I’d like to be a painter and move to Tahiti.’ And, you know, it wasn’t really like that. It never is, the fantasy. Of course we are living a fantasy to a lot of people, and I try hard not to trample on that unnecessarily. But my life ain’t no fantasy, you know. It’s for real. And my aches and pains and struggles and sorrows are real. I don’t have to make them up or pretend them. And that’s why even I might use fictional devices, like in a song like ‘Mission.’”
“Turn the Page” finds the band continuing with this record’s — and the previous one’s — furtive, agitated, high-midrange pop rock sound, distinguished by Geddy’s clacky, percussive bass and Alex’s throttling of his guitar until it squeals and pings.
Alex agrees that these late ’80s records took on a much different tone than those quickly crafted in the unadulterated power trio days. “From a guitar standpoint, my sound had really changed. It was much more wiry and brighter. Part of the reason for that is, again, there was such a conflict between all the keyboard stuff that was happening and where the guitar fit into that. The main part of the problem is, when we made those records, we decided to do all the keyboard stuff before we did the guitar stuff. And it was just a scheduling thing, more than anything. It was just more convenient to do the keyboards that way. When it came time to do guitars, it was hard to figure out where the guitar was going to fit in because there was so much of this going on. And I think with Hold Your Fire, we kind of reached a peak, and that was it. And then every album after that we just gradually started to thin out the keyboards.”
Neil agrees with Alex’s description of the guitar sound as “wiry,” but with an asterisk. “Yeah, but that was his choice of the guitars and the guitar sound he was going for at the time, you know? No one to blame for it. And if you listen to other music from the time, there was a prevalent guitar sound. The Fixx and stuff was highly compressed. Processed, I call it, processed guitar sounds. That’s what he wanted! You know, hindsight is a pretty useless thing. And drumming-wise, I always just wanted a great natural drum sound, with the addition of all the electronic effects and stuff. But that’s been the linear pursuit for me, just getting a really great natural drum sound.”
With respect to the “Turn the Page” lyric, Neil told Malcolm Dome that it “expresses the attitude: How sensitive can you afford to be? If you’re watching the news or reading a paper, how much can you afford to feel? How much can you get involved in the world without wanting to kill yourself immediately? Another constantly recurring theme is trying to reconcile idealism with clear-sighted reality. I remain an idealistic person to this day, much to my pain sometimes. I grew up that way to the point where all life was then suddenly disillusioned to me. I’d imagined it as being so much nicer than it really is, and the hardness, the crassness and the inhumanity of it all really homed in on me. It was tremendously painful, and really hard for me to face. Thus the dividing line between youthful illusions and their subsequent loss with age is an attractive one to me. There are prices and rewards for that — you exchange your illusions and innocence for experience and the way things really are. If you weather it emotionally, that’s a fair exchange. I went through this change in a very extreme manner, and a lot of the current album does face up to this dilemma.”
“Tai Shan” is one of the band’s travelogue songs, this one being a tribute to China, looking down from a sacred mountain vantage reached after seven thousand stairs. With its pan flutes and Chinese guitar figures from Alex, it’s all a bit much, and the kind of thing that would be deemed cultural appropriation in this day and age. Also, the Buddhist vibe rings somewhere between hollow, insincere and patronizing, coming from these practical, no-nonsense atheists, the singer a cultural Jew.
On a technical note, Neil explained to Deborah Parisi that on the song he included “an antique Chinese drum which is far too fragile and valuable to think about using live. I brought it into our rehearsal studio and sampled it. I have a number of antique — especially Oriental and African — musical instruments that the only way I can use them is to sample them. So it gives you all that freedom. That’s what I like the most.
“I’m not a pioneer by any means,” added Neil on his level of comfort with the latest music technology. “I sort of take the Rolls Royce attitude of letting other people pioneer things and prove them and then adopt them — like Rolls Royce uses General Motors power steering because they make the best power steering. You don’t have to pioneer if somebody else does it. You can still be just behind the leading edge but have the advantage of things that are reliable. And you avoid the trendy aspect of things like Syndrums, where in the early days every beer commercial had that sound on it, and you avoid having to wince about your past.
“When I finally figured that digital sampling had come of age and it was a tool that I really wanted to have and could no longer resist, I went to Jim Burgess at Saved by Technology and said, ‘Here’s what I want to do, and here’s what I don’t want to do.’ And he recommended a setup and worked with me a lot to get the gear and the library of samples from my older records. It’s good to have someone like that to steer you in the right way.”
Hold Your Fire ends a robust fifty minutes after it began with what feels like a more successful version of “Tai Shan.” “High Water” is tribal, atmospheric and at the lyric end, still somewhat spiritual. It’s about the instinctual reaction we have to water, in the form of the ocean, mighty rivers, torrential downpours, redemptive rains, floods, mountain springs, even from “marble fountains.” Sparse as it is, there are strong melodies and even some new (and better) keyboard sounds. A fresh idea occurs at the end additional to the unifying theme of the front 90 percent, namely that we share kinship with water because all those many moons ago, life first jumped out of the froth and wriggled on land — this turns out to be the “home” part of the equation. On an amusing musical note, the chords Alex plays at the 2:12 mark sound like a quote from “Bacchus Plateau” from way back on Caress of Steel.
So do we deem Hold Your Fire a success? For the rest of all Rush time, there will be debate about this period’s overt ’80s-ness — that will never change. But indeed the band defends it, and its songs have lived on from the record in live and fan-fondness consciousness.
“At the end of Hold Your Fire, I was delighted with the record,” reflects Peter Collins. “We mixed it in Paris, and it was a very enjoyable experience. And we finished it and it sounded wonderful. My only regret soon after was the fact it didn’t go platinum. And I felt the responsibility for that quite heavily, and I expressed that to Geddy. I felt it was my fault somehow, you know, that it was the first album in a long time that had not gone platinum. From my point of view, why didn’t this do as well as Power Windows? And Geddy subsequently, in later years when we had the discussion, said, ‘Well, this album is loved by a lot of Rush fans. It’s nothing to do with that. Nobody knows why.’ But I took it very personally.
“And when Geddy called me to produce the next record, ‘Well, Geddy you need somebody who can take you back up to platinum, or to the next level. I feel I’ve let you down on this record.’ He didn’t really accept that, but that’s the way I felt. I felt they needed somebody with some fresh ideas.
“So yeah, I basically fired myself. Because by that time I had a deep affection for this band. And while I didn’t feel I could call myself, you know, one of the brothers, I felt very close to them, and they all are very dear to me to this day. I truly wanted the best for them. I thought it would be better for them. After Presto also didn’t go platinum, I thought, well, I guess it wasn’t my fault, so when I got the call to work with them again, I was in there.”
Further testimony that the band’s drop in success wasn’t really Peter’s fault: with him gone, Rush really didn’t change the sound much for two more records. “I think Geddy might have made that realization later on,” says Peter, on the eventual idea to feature more guitars, essentially just idle threats, all the way up until Counterparts two records later. For his part though, Collins reasserts that “one of the main sonic issues of course was the bottom end and also where the voice lay in the mix. Because coming from my background, I wanted more voice, and sometimes it was a struggle come mix time as to where the voice was going to land in the mix. That was really from my memory the only issues we had. The keyboard thing was never a big deal for me, as I remember. I wasn’t anti-keyboards or had to have them. If we were going to have keyboards, I wanted them to be great.”
Coming full circle then, to one of Peter’s very first comments about the band, is the conundrum of Geddy’s voice. Collins talks about what ultimately happened on this front, saying, “Well, I wanted to bring him more into a midrange, less of the high stuff, more toward the lower end of his vocal range. And you know, a lot of Rush fans hate me for that. And of course years later when I worked with them again and tried to get Geddy to sing up high, he had become more used to singing in the midrange. With the fullness of time, I now realize how key that sound was. But at the time I really didn’t want him to sing like that. I just didn’t like it. I since have changed my opinion on it.”
But it was becoming obvious that changes needed to be made.
“We had tension,” admits Geddy, when it came to Alex’s role in the band. “Sometimes it was not overt. Sometimes it was swallowed up. You know, he was all in favor of the changes we were making, and he loves new sounds and he loves technology. He’s a real technocrat, that guy. Guitar players in general are like that. He really loves gear, loves playing with it. It’s like the old joke about a guitar player: when you’re recording a guitarist and you tell him, ‘That sounds perfect,’ he goes, ‘That’s great, I’ll change it.’ You know, they love to fiddle.
“So he was not against bringing in synthesizers. He was not against sharing the sound. I think what happened with him was that after the record was finished, he was happy with it, and he would go with the flow, and then you know, he would go away, the record would sit there for a while, and then he would hear that part of his sound was pushed to the side a bit to make room for these keyboards. I think it was only later that it bugged him. Maybe he felt like he didn’t speak up enough at the time, so the frustration built. It got to a point where he started putting his foot down, and he said I think these keyboards are really taking over our sound, and we should go back. It was his way of saying I don’t like the way my guitar has to struggle all the time to be heard.
“So it was fair enough. Synthesizers and technology . . . it’s fun, and it’s not fun. In that time period, it was all new and exciting to throw this sound into a band that’s been around a long time. It forces you to go in a different direction. It doesn’t matter what the sound is, it just sparks you. Whether that is good or bad, only time can tell. So you know, twenty years later, you look back and, okay, we went in that direction and because we started experimenting with electronics, you go, ‘Well, it wasn’t our best material . . . or was it?’
“The bad thing about electronica is that it’s like wrestling with an eel,” continues Lee. “The sound gets everywhere. Once you start adding layers of synthetic sounds, it just takes all the air out of the sound, so it’s always a battle. That’s when we started changing producers; that’s when we started looking for new sounds and new ways of looking at music. I mean, I’m really pleased we went through all that because it makes for some interesting music on those various records. If you listen to Power Windows, which to me is the most successful marriage of guitar and synthesizer of all the records we’ve made, that’s what we were after: a more angular use of synthesizers, still plenty of room for the guitars to shine. But it kinda became a bee in his bonnet for a while. And even when there was enough guitar, he was like, ‘Well, you just better make sure there was enough guitar.’ And that was a dangerous thing, but I understood it.
“It made the working relationship difficult, but we never really took it home with us. We would come in and lock horns over ideas, and sometimes I was right and sometimes he was right. And Neil was always the objective third party about that stuff. And you have a producer, and that’s why we always have a producer. Because you need that referee and that person you can turn to when you’re not sure. Or when you’re not sure that your own personal desires are superseding the desires of the band: ‘Am I taking my opinion too far?’ Because sometimes in the band, the loudest voice wins. It doesn’t mean it’s the right voice. And you learn how to do that with each other, how to get your way.
“As for me, I know I can get my way, but I’m not sure it’s the right way. So I want to have a producer to say to, ‘Look, am I crazy?’ Or ‘This thing I’m pushing for, is this the right thing we should be doing here? Does it make it a better song?’ That’s always part of the process, that whole to-ing and fro-ing. There has to be some argument and there has to be some tension, otherwise the thing is not alive. People paint this picture of our relationship because we’re friends and we laugh, and it’s like, ‘No, after you,’ ‘No, do whatever you want.’ It’s not like that. There are times when you have to fight for your ideas, and there are times when you need to have a discussion about it to make sure you are doing the right thing in the right way.”
“Hold Your Fire was another that’s not hugely popular but people that love it, really love it,” summed up Neil. “And I count myself among them — I love that record. It still sounds so great, and there’s so much passion in that record too. But it’s strange and I can understand why people don’t; like with Grace Under Pressure, I totally understand why it’s not for everyone. Hold Your Fire too is not for everyone. Power Windows was, I think, much more open. Yeah, extroverts — that’s probably the difference. Where Hold Your Fire is a bit introverted, even sonically for some reason. Although we worked with the same co-producer and the same people and all that, there was a difference in the character of those, interestingly. There are probably a thousand reasons why that should be. But our live shows stayed the same. People would come because they know they didn’t like the last record so much but like the previous one a lot and our old stuff, so they would still come and see us. We maintained and continued to build an audience for the live show, which in these times especially is the key to our survival and probably anyone’s.”
Chapter 8: A Show of Hands
“He’s very dramatic in how he plays the lighting board as an instrument.”
With four more studio albums under their belts, it was time for another double vinyl live album. A Show of Hands would feature material mostly from the tour for Hold Your Fire, but two Power Windows dates, March 31 and April 1, 1986, at the Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey, would also be represented, yielding the tracks “Witch Hunt” and “Mystic Rhythms.”
The Hold Your Fire campaign opened with Rush once again promoting a small local act in the opening slots of their shows. The guys had heard about Chalk Circle while they were writing and recording for their last album at McClear Studios in downtown Toronto. Geddy and Neil had talked about how it was refreshing having their ear to the ground once again, feeling the pulse of their city, after all those pilgrimages to rural settings to cook up Rush songs.
After a handful of Atlantic Canada tour dates, it was off to the States, supported by the McAuley Schenker Group — one bit of Rush lore had Neil and Geddy pondering putting together a project with blond bomber Michael Schenker back in the early ’80s, but it never came together. When asked if he actually played with Geddy and Neil, Michael says, “No, we just discussed it, and they said they wanted to do it. I think I may have blown it because I made a joke and said that Alex could be the coffee boy. Maybe I went too far, I don’t know. I can’t remember actually what happened or why it didn’t work out.”
