Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 26
With Howard’s help and other specialists, one of them Geddy Lee, who by this point had become a keen visualist not without technical acumen, Rush created a grand cinematic experience for the Vapor Trails tour, offering a symphony of images (the main ones revolving around a dragon motif) to operate in sync with major and unmercifully regular pyro effects (“sweltering hot this tour, I can tell you,” laughs Alex), not to mention a bank of white clothes dryers, the day’s wash spinning around throughout the show.
“George Steiner on our crew went out and got them,” says Alex. “He sourced them down and kind of fixed them up a little bit, took the heating elements out of them so they were working but not heating. And he installed aircraft landing lights in them so that when you opened them up, they glowed. You had to put Canadian quarters in to keep them going. Every night we tried to have guests up onstage, to pump quarters into the machines to keep them running.” On the subject of other domestic chores, Alex lets on that the kitchen was also very well equipped. “We brought our own chef out on tour. Our food was always fresh, organic. And we could tailor the menus to whatever we wanted individually. So it was great having him out.”
Geddy offers a bit of color to the story of Rush’s celebrated live film work, the Vapor Trails jaunt the most extensive yet. “I have a group of animators I work with. Norm Stangl at Spin Productions here in Toronto has been my point man for over twenty years, in terms of making weird animation and rear-screen stuff. And every year we try to do something different or try to invent some interesting effect or gag, and we’ve had a lot of fun designing different things. We usually use different stylistic animators every time out just so we get a different visual look. It’s really one of the most fun parts of my gig, and it’s something I always look forward to in preparing for a tour, sitting down with new creative people and having one of these great meetings where we just throw around all kinds of whacked-out ideas.
“And this time I wanted to do something very fresh and very spontaneous,” continues Ged. “We were put in touch with this guy named Greg Hermanovic over at Derivative who has invented this touch software that is really very cool, which has allowed us to have an actual live VJ, kind of, on the road with us. And what we would do is design live concepts for about fifteen different songs, and he would design elements that he would blend live every night. Some of them would be purely abstract, some of them would be representational, and it really opened up a whole new area.
“As a result, no two shows were the same because Jim Ellis, who was our operator, had the ability to improvise on a nightly basis. And sometimes the combination would just be magic. But you could go to two shows and they really wouldn’t be the same, although the elements would be the same. Depending on how he was feeling it, and how the band was feeling that night, the show around us would vary. And of course, the longer the tour went on, he would start throwing new ideas in, so the show kept growing visually. It was really fantastic, and I thought it worked terrifically, better than I ever expected. It was a wonderful addition to the show.”
Geddy adds flesh to the tale of the dragon, prevalent in the film, and then talks about the packaging of the tour’s subsequent live memento Rush in Rio. “In the original Vapor Trails design, Hugh Syme had one version of the cover where on the back, very small in the corner, was this tiny dragon, who was the cause of this great vapor trail. And when we were doing the preproduction for the tour, I was looking for animation ideas to use live. I wondered what it would be like to exploit that little dragon a bit more, turn him into a character, which people at Spin Productions developed into a full-blown character that we used during ‘One Little Victory’ live. It was a cool, humorous way to use this dragon. So again, the dragon was picked by Hugh to become the representative of the show in Rio, and of course, he’s got him dressed up like Carmen Miranda.”
“The live experience and the studio experience have always been two different things for me,” says Alex, looking back on the tour that was. “The kind of energy that is required in the studio is quite different from the live show. Looking back, the live part of the whole experience has come full circle, the Vapor Trails tour in particular. We played the best we’ve played; we were really tight. The level of satisfaction on a night-to-night basis was the highest I think it’s ever been. Very few shows are tens but we had, I think, a lot of nines. And the energy level seemed to touch on an earlier time. I guess it might be because Vapor Trails was more of a three-piece kind of record, and we had come full circle in that respect.
“We also brought some stuff back like ‘By-Tor’ and ‘Working Man,” continues Lifeson. “They were truncated versions of the originals, but they were pretty true to their original form. I would say we’ve always prided ourselves on being close to the record but with that added element of it being live, with the energy you create onstage. It was always a disappointment to me to go see my favorite bands and not hear the original versions of the songs. That always seemed like a bit of a cop-out. So from an early point, we always wanted to reproduce what we did in the studio fairly faithfully. We might have eliminated some of the keyboard stuff here and there, or eliminated some of the vocal harmonies that Geddy does. I try to help out as much as I can in that department, and we do have some samples. But he really loves to layer his vocals and he does a terrific job at that. But those are some of the things that are expendable live. I don’t think they get missed given the energy of the live show.
“Certainly ‘Resist’ was different on that tour,” says Alex, “going from an electric version to an acoustic one. We always wanted to do something acoustic but we weren’t quite sure. We always resisted the urge. We didn’t want to do an unplugged thing, which always seemed so trendy. But we thought it would be a nice break in terms of the three-hour show. Plus it would give Neil, depending on its placement, an opportunity to catch his breath after his drum solo. And to do it with quite a dynamic shift. So we worked on sort of a folk version of that, and I thought we pulled it off well. Geddy and I both had a lot of fun just breaking down for those few minutes.”
Offering comment on the notable set list switch-ups put in place for the Vapor Trails tour, Alex reiterates of “Working Man” that “it was a real treat to bring that back. We weren’t sure about it; it’s such a simple, kind of straight rock song, but it ended up being a great opportunity to jam and to really play your heart out, for all of us. The same thing with ‘By-Tor.’ Some of those ’90s songs, they come and go. They’ll come into the set for a couple of tours and then they’ll go and something else will come in. ‘The Pass,’ for all of us, is one of our favorite songs to play, if not our favorite song to play. And ‘Bravado,’ the same thing; we hadn’t played ‘Bravado’ in a while, and bringing it back was a real treat because it’s got such a nice mood.”
“All the new material, generally, requires the most concentration,” adds Geddy. “Because as a bassist and a singer, those songs aren’t as firmly entrenched in my memory banks, so it usually requires a huge amount of concentration for me to remember to keep my bass lines grooving with the drums, to make sure I trigger all the samples with my feet at the right time and to sing in key. Even near the end of the seventy-date tour, it’s still a challenge. Songs like ‘One Little Victory,’ ‘Earthshine’ and ‘Secret Touch’ are by far the toughest part of the show for me.”
Concerning the new record’s extensive use of bass chords, Geddy figures, “That is not so much of an issue, in and of itself. The issue is playing them, singing and triggering all at the same time. Some of those songs have very complex backing vocal effects, loops that are put on synthesizer that I have to trigger at the right time, otherwise they sound fucked up. So I’m basically triggering some vocal effects while I’m singing, while I’m playing bass. It’s a bit complicated up there at times. And if you can’t hear it all, you’re in big trouble. In terms of older songs, I think the highest one to sing is ‘2112,’ parts of it. That’s probably the toughest vocal song. ‘Red Sector A’ is one of those songs I love to play because it gives me a break from the bass, and I can just go over to the keyboard and get into a whole different realm. Plus I think it’s a great textural change for us live. And it’s one of those songs that is just a perennial. But of the new ones, I think ‘Secret Touch’ is my favorite song on the record and I love playing it live. It’s got a great intensity about it.”
“We were doing ‘Bravado’ and ‘The Pass’ and both of those are impossible for me to play without feeling the emotion of them,” says Neil, offering his perspective on certain high-water marks of the set list. “That’s a nice thing. A lot of times it can be just a performance, where it’s ‘Okay, here’s the song I have to play and all these elements of subtlety go into playing it well, so here’s what I’m going to do.’ Whereas other times I do get swept up into the song itself and hearing the lyrics and watching the response of people through that. That’s another special thing about live performance, on the emotional side. Apart from the excitement and the cheering and the adrenaline reaction, when you see an emotional reaction to songs like that, and see people swept up in it — and feeling it yourself — that’s kind of an underappreciated and unglamorous part of what live performance can be.”
“Neil will practice for anywhere from twenty minutes to half an hour immediately before the show,” offers Alex, on the subject of gearing up for show day. “He has one of those little five-piece practice kits that’s just pads. But he pounds the crap out of them and that’s his way of warming up. It’s basically like him doing a drum solo for twenty minutes. He really plays hard on the thing. I like to do the same and warm up for a minimum of half an hour before the show. Depending on my mood, sometimes it’s an hour. Geddy, not so much. I don’t think I saw him practice once on the tour before the show. Although toward the end of the tour he had some tendinitis in his hand, so I do remember, actually, him spending a little time just warming up his right hand.”
Other than that, “you’d be very surprised. Backstage before a Rush show — and when I say backstage, I mean the dressing room — is much like a library. It’s very quiet. Neil is usually sitting in a corner reading. There is no psych-up. We get dressed, we chat a little bit about whatever, and somebody comes and gets us and we go on. There’s no group hug or prayer or anything like that. We just do our thing.”
“I’m not very hard to please,” adds Neil, when asked about food requirements, riders and such. “I like some salty peanuts and some ginger ale and a tuna sandwich on the bus. But there’s one thing; we always like to go to the show in the afternoon, for example, and do soundcheck and stay there. We always felt a certain uneasiness about leaving. There’s some kind of, almost superstition, where we think we won’t get back in time for the show. So that’s a pattern we established early on, and we always stuck to. I don’t think any of us has ever left the venue after we go there in the afternoon, whereas most people do. We were always more comfortable going to work and staying there, basically.
“Just being able to have dinner and have a rehearsal room . . . those are the kinds of things for me. Being able to have dinner when we want it, between soundcheck and the show, and having a room to warm up in. And then I leave right off the stage, so the rest of it doesn’t affect me. There’s a certain pattern to the day though, and you feel it winding up inside you through the course of the day. It’s a show day, which is unlike any other thing. You go to the venue and do soundcheck . . . when we did the big Toronto show last summer, I didn’t have a warm-up kit backstage, and it upset my whole rhythm of things, so to speak. That’s the kind of thing that becomes a really important part of the day, just to go in for half an hour and warm up on my little practice kit. That’s not superstitious obviously, but it’s important.”
Finally, I asked Alex if there was any time on the tour where the band experienced a real musical breakdown, due to miscommunication or what have you. “Not really. We wear in-ear monitors, so we’re very aware of what’s going on and where everybody’s at in terms of train crashes, which is what we call them. But I can’t really think of anything on the last tour. Although it does happen. I’d say it happens twice, maybe three times, over the course of the tour, where suddenly somebody does something and everybody is lost, and it sounds like very outside jazz, and then it just immediately goes back to the song.”
Before we move on, we must mention that, while not part of any tour per se, as alluded to by Neil already, Rush ended up playing to their biggest crowd ever, eight months after the end of the Vapor Trails campaign. The occasion was the Toronto Rocks concert on July 30, 2003, billed as an economic booster for a city reeling from a bad tourism season due to the outbreak of an infectious virus called SARS and reduced travel in general due to 9/11.
Headlined by the Rolling Stones but with AC/DC receiving most of the effusive press, the day-long festival found 400,000 people tramping off to a retired military base amidst perfect summer conditions. Rush played third to last — a thirty-five-minute set — and were the hands-down hometown heroes, although the Guess Who (on just before Rush) were appreciated as well. Earlier in the day, the Tea Party played their well-known cover of “Paint It Black,” and amusingly Rush returned fire, with an impromptu and brief jazzy version of the poisonous Stones classic, segueing into their last song of the day — Rush’s set proper consisted of “Tom Sawyer,” “Limelight,” “Dreamline,” “YYZ,” “Freewill,” “Closer to the Heart” and “The Spirit of Radio,” in that order. The band looked impressive in black, and yes, the clothes dryers survived SARStock.
As Neil is wont to say, as the years went on, his life “got bigger.” Such was the same with everybody in the band. On tour, any number of activities would fill out the days of the guys. Upon being asked if Geddy had become a pretty serious book collector, Alex replies that “I think to a degree he is; I don’t know. He’s a collector, period. He collects wine, he collects baseball memorabilia, books. He’s the kind of guy who gets very interested in something and likes to really learn as much as he can about it.”
“I have lots of interests,” adds Geddy, on this same subject of leading big lives. “I play tennis, I travel a lot with my family and on my own. We go to France once a year to Burgundy to do wine tastings and things, so I’m a busy guy. I got pretty big into cycling this last summer, so I did a lot of cycling and long-distance riding. I make sure I plan at least one or two bike trips every year somewhere in the world. I’m a huge wine collector; it’s a great passion to me. Literature, of course. Films; I love cinema. It’s always been a big interest of mine.”
“I’m fifty, and it’s hard to lose weight!” Alex told me at the time. “Really, really hard. I’ve been really good about eating. I don’t eat any bread, potatoes, no real empty carbs. I used to think about losing weight, and I’d lose it — not anymore. I do yoga practice for an hour and a half once a week and I try to do a couple other days, but generally it’s just that once a week. I work out at a gym twice a week. I do at least two tennis clinics; one is two hours, one is an hour. I try to play on one other day. You know, I’m doing a lot! And it’s not budging.
“But I feel better, I feel stronger, and it’s important to get into shape for the tour. You really feel it out there, not so much in the first month or two months, but after it’s a real curve. You just get tired; you don’t have the same level of energy. It’s difficult to travel and your hours are screwed up. You get into that two or three o’clock in the morning slot where you’re going to bed. And I can’t sleep in anymore. On the road, really, the first half of the tour, I’m up six thirty, seven. I like getting up early, especially in the summer. Again, I try to do my yoga daily on the road and I love playing golf. Then halfway through the tour, that catches up to you, and by the end of the last tour, I was sleeping until eleven. You’re out of gas.
“Neil is the same way as Geddy,” continues Alex, comparing his two bandmates and what they do to stay sane. “If Neil’s into something he will exhaust it before he moves onto something else. When he got into motorcycles, for example, he really got into motorcycles. Now he does a motorcycle tour when we’re touring. He rides thirty thousand miles on a tour, and he writes his journals, based on his experience on the bike. He did the same thing with cycling — he got so into cycling. Writing for him, writing these travel journals, has become a really big thing. He published for the first time on the last tour, but he’s been writing these things for years now. He’d do a short, limited run of maybe 150 books for his friends. So he’s been learning how to do that and building up the confidence to have finally released a major work. With his last book, Ghost Rider, I mean, the material he had to work with was so powerful. But I think he really learned how to put it into print by doing all those other things. He’s always been super, super focused, quite disciplined.
“The last two tours — Test for Echo and Vapor Trails — he had the motorcycle,” clarifies Alex, on Peart’s extensive itinerary. “Prior to that, I think he cycled at least two tours, if not three, and he did other bike trips. For him, it’s the perfect thing. He’s not into sports. He doesn’t play any sports at all. He’s very uncoordinated, which is great for a drummer, but not for a tennis player. But he’s quite clumsy otherwise. But cycling for him, because he’s a solitary kind of guy . . . Maybe less so now, but in the past he really enjoyed his private time. He would get on his bike and ride out fifty or sixty miles and ride back, nobody but him. He could focus on his — whatever you would call it — cadence, the tempo of his bike riding.
