Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 25
“It’s one of my favorite records that we’ve ever done,” summarizes Geddy. “There’s something about that record that is really raw and really passionate. And in some ways, even though it’s nothing like it, it has a kind of focus that reminds me of 2112, in a way, just in its kind of balls to the wall attitude, the playing. It’s a real album of playing out. Alex and I wrote a long time. The first stuff we wrote was not very good, and we threw a lot of stuff away. We almost needed to write a practice album before we got to the real one. It had been so long, so many years, since we’d written together. But we had to get a lot of stuff out of our system, shake off the rust.
“But when we finally started getting to the good stuff, a lot of it was just jamming, playing, that we recorded. We just left the machines running and recorded it and shaped the songs out of that spontaneous performance. We learned a really important lesson from that. You have to respect a performance, especially one that is improvised. And I think a lot of the spirit of that record comes from the fact that some of those are the original jams. A lot of those songs, or the final guitar parts and bass parts, were just things we had jammed together. There’s a real honesty about it.”
Adds Alex, “I think Vapor Trails really requires four or five listens before you get a sense of what it’s about and where it’s going. It requires a commitment from the listener to get into it. There’s a lot of meat on dem bones. For us, that’s what music is all about. In our music, we like to challenge the listener and make it so that every time you put it on, you hear something else or you get a different emotional reaction to a song you didn’t have before.”
Hype was sky-high for Rush’s first tour in more than five years. Ticket sales were brisk, giving the band a glimpse of what can happen when you make yourself scarce, something they had only toyed with in the past, be that with touring, records or indeed even interviews. One must also remember that making oneself scarce can blow up in one’s face — you can be forgotten — and that emphatically didn’t happen here. Remarkably, the Vapor Trails tour proved that Rush could be an arena-level headline act for an uncommon twenty, twenty-five years, indeed for every tour since 1980, and really, with only moderate scarcity practiced, more like a gentle and relaxed elasticizing of its record/tour cycle beginning in the early ’90s.
On the subject of playing big shows versus the grinding gigs of the club days, Alex offered at the time the following observation. “You know, we played a small gig in Germany on the last tour. It was a 1,200-seater, a little kind of club thing. And people always ask that: Do you miss the old club days? Being right there with the audience? And no, I don’t. We’ve been doing arenas for so long that that’s where we’re quite comfortable. To us, that is an intimate setting. There’s a greater sense of power, I think, in an arena. The lighting can be more dramatic; the smoke onstage can add a sense of mystery to what’s going on.”
Ultimately, Alex and the band saw a flurry of activity in all corners with the arrival of Vapor Trails. Rust had to be shaken off, a new show needed designing, and of course, many, many interviews had to be conducted to tell the world that Canada’s prog icons were back. “It’s a little overwhelming,” remarked Alex. “We’ve always done a lot of press before a release but the workload this time around is three or four times what it’s ever been before. I think it’s because we’ve been away for five years. Times have changed. The internet has become so much more important, so there’s a lot of website interviews that we do now. I think we’ve made a really good record and people are either surprised by it or very interested in it. It’s just upped the amount of work.”
“That stands for all of us now as a difficult time,” explains Neil, with some distance. “There were sonic battles on the melodic side of the band, and Alex and Geddy had both made a solo album in that interim. So they came back as little dictators. I don’t think they would mind my saying that, and knowing they had done it all themselves, written music, been in control of everything, produced it, the art direction and everything, made it the way they wanted it. So they were coming from that place.
“I was coming from such a lost place. I love the image of the ghost rider, and of vapor trails, and it was a way for me to process all that horrible experience, and what I might’ve learned from it. So that was very difficult too, for all of us to find a balance, the commonality that I described, that we needed. The common energy, even if we don’t agree on things. So if you can find a central point, okay, that’s what will satisfy us all. And it’s not a compromise; I choose the word carefully.
“That was a difficult time coming together. Uneasy, for me to start writing lyrics; you know, what was I going to write about? Being angry and confused. That does come out. But I was very much interested, years later, in hearing that in my drumming. I can hear what I built from with that, and I knew where I was coming from at that time. But it was such a reflection of who I was then. Afterwards, I hadn’t listened to Vapor Trails in six or seven years. We’d grown from there and made Snakes & Arrows, which comes from such a different place in our lives. And ultimately good.”
“But Vapor Trails, like Hemispheres, had to be made,” continues Peart. “‘What cannot be altered must be endured’ is one of my sayings. That was the case — we had to go through Vapor Trails to get to Snakes & Arrows. That’s the price to pay. And we had to go through Hemispheres to bust out of that. And just to backtrack a little — because it’s such a beautiful circle — at the time of making that, we already decided that we would never make another Hemispheres again. It took so much out of us and we realized, okay, we’re done with that. We knew we were moving on, stylistically and song lengths and approaches and dropping the big thematic thing. And the interesting thing is that it was organic, in the moment. Okay, done!
“And Vapor Trails too was a struggle to get right and had some of the very same obstacles as Hemispheres did. Nothing seemed to click easily, and it took a much longer time than any of the others because we recorded it as we went, and made demos, and made the record all in the same country, which was all good. Now I can see what was successful and what wasn’t successful, and what the flaws are, and why my anger and confusion is sometimes good and sometimes not good in my drumming — I can see that clearly. But it doesn’t take away from that record being so important and on the whole such a positive step.”
As mentioned, concurrent with the making of Vapor Trails, Neil was toiling away on Ghost Rider. In his book, Neil truly opens up about himself. Though Neil is famously at odds with the interview process, through his writing, he bounds from last to first in openness. Starting as a famed recluse, his book shoots him past rock stars who chum with fans regularly and take every interview that comes their way; he amusingly winds up the guy who is the open book, literally.
“Well, there’s the double irony of it all, I guess,” chuckles Peart. “Despite being so private and introverted, yes, I love to tell about my life — but I decide what that’s going to be. And you know, website stories are a perfect example. It’s been kind of my creative writing outlet for the last year or so. Every break on the tour, I’ll put together an essay with photographs describing my experiences and little stories like the lady with her Buick and little incidents that I like, and observations I’ve made about nature or weather or whatever — all of that’s in there. But it’s not private, you know? There are no pictures of me with my friends, or my wife, or of my house or anything like that. It’s about my working life. There is a very clear distinction to me, what’s public and what’s private. And yeah, my books are about my life, and all four of my books are autobiographical travel books, which ought to be as un-private as can be but it’s still not. As a writer-to-reader thing, same as any of my favorite writers. I’ve never been tempted or even desired to be part of their lives. I must admit the cult of celebrity never affected me even as a kid. Like, I never wanted to force myself into Keith Moon’s life, you know? I could play his songs on my desk at school, and that’s all I needed.”
Once the Vapor Trails tour started rolling — to many a fan’s disbelief — Rush-starved crowds were treated to fully five tracks from the new record, namely “Earthshine,” “One Little Victory” and “Secret Touch,” as well as “Ceiling Unlimited” and “Ghost Rider” on alternate nights.
“Geddy and I sat down and listened to a lot of material,” explained Alex at the time, about coming up with a satisfying raft of songs. “We decided we wanted to shake up the set list: freshen it up, drop a lot of those songs that maybe a segment of our audience had gotten used to expecting, and mix it up a bit, play songs we’ve never played before or in a long time. That required us to go through all the albums and listen to everything. We listened to Caress of Steel, Hemispheres and, man, we hadn’t listened to those records in a long, long time.
“And generally our feeling was they held up pretty good,” continues Lifeson. “Our recollection of them was much different from what we discovered. 2112 has held up well; it was such a great period. There’s a lot of anger in that record, and I think it stands up as an idea as well as a musical piece. Hemispheres was a transitional record for us, the last of those big concept things we did. There was always a question of whether it was a really great work of ours or maybe not such a great work of ours, but I think it stood up musically. There are some songs we can’t get around like ‘Tom Sawyer’ or ‘Spirit of Radio;’ they’re great songs to play anyway, so that’s okay. But some songs you do get quite tired of playing over and over. It would be nice to challenge ourselves a little more, particularly with the older stuff that was challenging to play even back then.”
Further on the process of going back and listening to the old records, Alex says, “My recollection of it was that things were a lot smaller and more amateurish. When we listened to all of those old ones, Fly by Night, Caress of Steel, Kings particularly, Hemispheres, they stood up pretty well. There was great energy, power and spirit in the playing. When you listen to something that you did twenty-five years ago, and you haven’t heard in twenty years, it can be an eye-opening experience. We felt a lot better about our catalogue at that point. We realized that some of these songs really improve with maturity. We’ll approach and attack them a little differently than we did in our early twenties when we wrote these things. We’ll definitely play them with a different sense of feel and rhythm.”
The first show back was in Hartford, Connecticut, on June 28, 2002, this after closing out the Test for Echo tour in Ottawa, July 4, 1997, almost five years previous to the day.
“Hartford, Connecticut. Wow, that was amazing,” reflects Ray, who says that after the show Neil was so happy. “He came over and he hugged me, and he was like, ‘It was good, it was good.’ Some self-confidence was back. That’s why we were in Hartford, in a secondary market and not somewhere big. But that’s the Rush style. Rush could’ve capitalized on it and used it as a big deal somewhere, but that’s not the way Rush works.”
“He’s a bit of a stage fright guy anyway,” remembers Geddy, who took it upon himself to keep Neil engaged and amused during the set. “It’s part of my job description. But it was very hard for him. It was hard for all of us to keep our cool because it was so emotional. And I don’t think we expected it to be so emotional once we hit the stage. I guess he did, but I didn’t. I figure, back to work, and Alex too. There was a moment when we gathered around Neil’s drums, first song. You know, you make that eye contact. We have little devices of contact that we always do to each other, and that makes you smile. And by three or four songs later we were fine.”
“You can ease yourself into the songwriting and recording part of it, and if it doesn’t work, come again,” figures Neil. “A show doesn’t work that way. There’s a whole other resonance on it, and a whole ’nother vulnerability to it as well. Trying to do your best onstage, and failing. Always. Nobody is always at their best. So there’s a constant undercurrent of self-examination and insecurity there; you are literally vulnerable, and also internally so. And so coming back to that night, there were several moments when we looked at each other, and if a face could speak, we spoke volumes to each other. The emotionality of it, and having come through fire back to that essential being . . . but backstage we were just so anxious and intense and focused. It was a remarkable state of mind, not nervousness exactly, but it’s tense, all right? I was super focused on one thing: ‘I’ve got to do that show now.’
“I must admit, I did,” says Neil, asked if he felt the pressure of all eyes upon him that night. “Again in that whole time, I was vulnerable. And I don’t like people to know that much about my life. It was unavoidable of course at that time so I had to deal with it. But there is an internal place I’m at when I’m playing, and the outside is a luxury. When I’m concentrating, I’m in such an internal world of milliseconds and shades and expression and all of that, and exertion. You know, working at an intense physical ability as well as mental. So when I do have the opportunity to come out and observe others, it’s a luxury. But that’s what that night was like.”
Recalls Alex, “It was interesting, because being the first gig, there were a lot of friends and guests there. It was just a beehive of activity in the dressing room, and we like to have a very quiet dressing room, a peaceful place. And of course, they really wanted to be a part of it. We went out into the gig, and I remember looking out at the audience and there were people crying, you know, in those first few rows, because they were just so happy we came out of this dark period and that we were still there. I think it gave them something to latch onto, that in our darkest times, there’s a light somewhere. And I remember a couple of points for the three of us where Geddy and I were right there with our feet on Neil’s riser and just totally connected, and it was an amazing feeling. A lot of lumps in our throats that night.”
“It was hard because everyone felt the sadness Neil experienced,” explains Howard, part of the senior team tasked with making an experience like this run smoothly. “That’s where it was hard as far as what we do. We had to get back up on the horse and go, but that’s second nature for us, for the band, for everyone. I mean, it’s time to go. I look at this as a really cool kind of camping trip. Especially when I was younger, when I ramped up a tour, it was like getting excited because you got together with a bunch of your friends and you are going to go camping. You are going to have a good time, and this is what it’s like for us. You get on the buses and go to all these cities and it’s like a big camping trip. So the camaraderie and the drive and incentive of what you want to accomplish keeps you going. You just get right back up there and do it. It’s easy for everyone to do this. The hard part was to deal with the emotional side of what just happened, and be sensitive to it.
“After five years, you don’t know,” reflects Ungerleider, on the real possibility that what was happening in Hartford would ever happen again. “Who knew? But a painter never stops painting; a musician never stops playing. I worked for a guy named Brian Auger, amazing Hammond B3 player, and he was one of the guys who taught Keith Emerson how to play keyboards. This guy has to be in his seventies and he still plays; you just never stop. Once you’re great at something, you are not going to stop unless you’re physically made to stop. Even Oscar Peterson had arthritis in his later years before he passed away, but if you’re a musician, you’re going to go. If you are creative, you’re going to go. And these guys seem to be a wealth of creativity, especially when it comes to writing music. You have the best drummer in the world playing drums. I mean, it’s pretty cool.
“But it was still unbelievable,” continues Howard, on when he heard Neil was coming back. “You had no idea what was going to happen. And we didn’t expect it to ever happen, because Rush is Rush. There are three guys in Rush. You need the three guys to have Rush. But yeah, he did come back, and not only did he come back, he came back with a vengeance, which was unbelievable. I got a call from Geddy, saying, ‘Hey, we’re going back on tour.’ And Alex said the same thing: ‘We’re going to go back, record a record,’ and I was just so happy when I heard that. I wasn’t happy for myself; I was happy for them. But it was one of the best news bulletins we had. Just the process of Neil coming through that, it was outrageous. And that’s why you have to respect what he wants. You have to give him his privacy and his quiet or his downtime, whatever he wants to do — give him his space because he deserves it.
“To see the power and the musicianship back again, yeah, just great,” continues Howard, on Hartford. “It was an outdoor shed show, at the Meadows, and it was a very good feeling. The first shows back on any tour are kind of edgy because you haven’t done it in such a long time. You’re memorizing all these cues, and they have to remember all their lyrics and everything else. There’s a parallel to it. It’s sort of like a marriage with lighting, choreography and musicianship. But it was really, really, really good and from that point on, it just rolled forward.
“I mean, their legacy is having three of the best musicians to ever exist,” says Howard. “There will be people who would disagree, but I recognize the talent because I’m here watching it every day. I challenge people who are out there to try to take on what these guys do onstage every night, and do it as well as they do it. Rush is a band that people will definitely remember for generations, and the fact that already they have three generations of fans, that’s pretty impressive.”
Part of that fan base over the years included an increasing number of famous folk. “Oh for sure, there are loads of celebrities who are Rush fans,” agrees Ungerleider. “It’s surprising, but there are a lot of ballplayers. Randy Johnson was up onstage in a chicken suit, basting the chickens. There are a lot of pro golfers who come out. Jack Black comes out. We’ll see other bands come out — there’s constantly other bands. You know, the younger bands idolize Rush. The guys from Tool came out. My company that I own does production design, and we do a lot of other tours. We do lasers for Tool; so we’re friends with them. Maynard owns a winery, and he brought some of his wine to Las Vegas and gave it to the band — very cool guy. I heard Will Ferrell was at our show. People you don’t expect would pop up. It seems more people are coming out of the woodwork now.”
