Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 27
“A little bit the same as motorcycling,” continues Alex. “He could shut out the rest of the world and focus on staying on the road, you know, looking out for other cars. This is his kind of escape and how he dealt with being on the road. You try to deal with being on the road in positive and constructive ways. Because it’s so easy to slip into bad habits. And we’re lucky. We’ve managed to stay away from those pitfalls. But to say that we didn’t come close on occasion would be inaccurate.”
Chapter 6
Rush in Rio
“You gave us goose puppies!”
Victory-lapping it up around North America for only five months, Rush would cap off the Vapor Trails tour on an extraordinary note — playing Brazil for the first time ever. Three triumphant shows, the net effect captured on a live CD and DVD package called Rush in Rio, released to great acclaim on October 21, 2003. It won the Juno for best DVD in April of 2004. Serving as a sense-overwhelming exclamation point to the short summer and fall tour, the Brazil stand represents the global phenomenon that Rush had quietly become. And this without cultivating that status — despite being world travelers individually in their personal lives, Geddy, Alex and Neil never got out much together as a band.
Rush in Rio captures the mania of the band’s three-night stand in Brazil, consisting of shows on November 20 at Olympic Stadium in Porto Alegre, November 22 at Estádio Morumbi in São Paulo and November 23 at Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Until that point, Rush had only toured Japan once, did the hula in Hawaii twice, toured Europe with limited atlas-cracking imagination and hit Mexico for one show on the Vapor Trails tour. That was it for globe-strobing. Also bear in mind that South America loves hard rock, heavy metal and progressive rock, being quite the hotbed of the two natural convergences of the three: power metal and progressive metal. Tucking Rush under the equator and under those flame-thrown conditions would prove explosive.
Geddy offers a glimpse into the machinations that took place to make something like this happen in the first place. “Usually we get this yearly request to go play the Rock in Rio festival in January. And every time they held one, and they’ve invited us, we’ve been either in the studio recording — and you can’t just stop that and do a one-off gig — or we’ve been not on the road at the time or not working; it’s just been bad timing all these years. And the promoter was just determined to get us there this year, so he kept negotiating with us and pleading with us to come down, saying, ‘You have no idea your popularity down here,’ which of course was true. We had respectable record sales but we didn’t realize how much of the record sales can’t be accounted for because there’s such a huge counterfeit record market down there; you have no way of knowing what you really sell.”
Surely then, there must have been certain guarantees. “Oh yeah, they promised us they’d pay us a certain amount of money per gig, and they’ll pay for our expenses and they’ll send us the cash up front. Our manager, being exceedingly xenophobic and paranoid, wanted to make sure all these things were in place before he sent us down there. That wasn’t in question. And I don’t think we had much doubt about that, quite honestly. Because our agent down there is the same as our agent in Europe and the rest of the world, and he’s very experienced. There’s no way he’s going to connect us with somebody there where we’re not going to get paid; that wasn’t really in doubt. What was in doubt was whether we were as popular as he said we were, or whether they could provide the technical assistance we needed to put on the kind of show that we do. But I had talked to some friends of mine who had played down there in other bands, plus other managers and stuff. People have been doing gigs down there for quite a while, so really, I don’t think there was much to fear.”
“We’d had offers for years to go to South America and never really added it up, or it never felt right or whatever,” confirms Ray, back at the office. “Neil is an adventurer, and he would rather go on an adventure off on his own than carry this thing called Rush with him. It’s tough enough just to get these guys to Europe on a regular or semi-regular basis. So when it came around this time, I’d made them aware of it, and Alex and Geddy had said they really want to go and they were ready to go. I had a promoter who had been trying for at least a decade, more like fifteen years, to get them. So I kept putting demands, requests, roadblocks, whatever, of what it would take to get them. And we had this very aggressive promoter who just kept saying yes, yes, yes, and we ended up going. And much to our surprise, it was as big as he thought it was going to be.
“But understand, there had been big shows in Brazil,” continues Danniels. “They’d had this Rock in Rio series for years. I had gotten feedback, over the last five or ten years or whatever, that we were becoming the biggest band that had never been there. And that in itself was an attraction. U2 had been there, plus Rolling Stones, Chili Peppers, Iron Maiden — bands that were perceived as bigger than Rush had been there, as part of Rock in Rio or on their own. So there was this legacy about Rush, that we hadn’t been there.
“And when we got there, I understood. First of all, you’re coming to a country of a hundred and eighty million people. It’s a lot of people, a big country, and São Paulo was a place of over twenty million people, seventeen million in the city itself, over twenty in the area; in Rio, probably six million in the area. These are big cities. And radio stations there sound like radio stations in secondary markets in North America — they play everything. Granted, because we were coming there, we were getting extra airplay, but I’d been in São Paulo for a couple days and I was hearing Rush between the Chili Peppers, Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, Eric Clapton, Tool and whatever else is going on today. They just play rock music. They play Bob Marley on the same station. So I got it. Once I was there, I got it. It’s a show, it’s an event, we had some fans, but then it becomes bigger than that. And they promote — the promoters do a very good job. It’s massive television advertising; it’s newspaper, radio, you name it.”
But outside Ray’s purview, boots on the ground, “All hell broke loose every day there,” says Geddy with a shake of the head. “You know, you never know what you’re dealing with when you go to a country like that. When they ask, you tell them what you need technically and they say, ‘Oh yes, we understand.’ That doesn’t mean you’re going to have it. That just means they understand what you want. This was the fine line of semantics that we discovered.
“So every day there was a new surprise, in terms of the technical aspect of getting the show up, let alone twenty cameras and a recording truck. And the recording truck, by normal contemporary standards, was quite basic. And I think the same is true with a lot of the photographic equipment they were using. But they had some good cameramen and they had a great director and really good crew and a lot of experience in the periphery.
“But again, you just never know what’s going to happen. We hadn’t counted on it being such a circuitous route from São Paulo to Rio. It took the truck about eight hours to get there. And because the shows are so much later . . . I mean, we didn’t go on in South America until ten thirty, and we play a three-hour show, so do the math. And of course for the show in São Paulo the previous night, it was raining throughout, so the gear was all wet. So it was a case of loading trucks in the middle of the night, in the rain, and then driving eight hours. By the time they got the first piece of equipment on the stage, it was about two in the afternoon. We usually arrive at six in the morning and the show is ready to go by six in the evening. They were up against it, definitely.”
Howard recalls all too well the logistical nightmares of the trip, but this was balanced by the excitement of the fans. “The Brazilian audience is passionate and they actually love the band,” explains Ungerleider. “We never realized how much they loved the band until we went down there for the first time. I mean, I remember sitting next to Geddy and we looked at each other and Geddy went, ‘Who would have thought? Look at this.’ There were people who’d come up to us in the hotel and they’d be in tears crying. As Brazilians say it, ‘You gave us goose puppies!’ It’s goosebumps but they called them goose puppies; I thought that was pretty funny. And we were staying at a hotel where the sushi chef carved the man in the star out of a radish and put it up there, not because the band was there but because he loved the band. There was all this passion.
“On the other hand, Brazil doesn’t have buildings that are really conducive to playing in, other than the soccer buildings. You see where the people come in, the openings, they’re tiny. You can’t get your equipment in. The trucks can never get into the facilities, so you wind up pushing all your equipment a quarter of a mile from where the trucks can make it to, across plywood, over grass, over a moat that people usually urinate in during soccer events . . . think about what the smell would be.
“So you’re loading equipment in past all this stuff, and then it’s raining and everything’s turning into mud. Then when we get to the stage, we have to zigzag around an area that goes back and forth for sixteen feet. All the equipment has to go across the lawn, over the moat, down here and up. It took a long time. And people were just filthy. There was a point in time with that Rio show when we didn’t think it would go down. Everything was late getting there, and your stagehands are trying to understand you but there’s definitely communication errors happening. But that show went off and it was magic. This magical thing happened, and it just became this brilliant, amazing rapport between the audience and the band.
“But yes, it was raining for the first part of it, raining all day, and that’s where all the mud came from and it was really hard. I remember hauling cables through mud, and things were filthy and everybody was stressed out. No one really slept the night before because we had to go from São Paulo to Rio on a bus, and not a tour bus but a regular street bus that was uncomfortable and bumping around. None of us slept. We were up for forty hours, and then we had to do all this. But we pulled the show off and they shot it. I remember the first five songs, where I normally use ten spotlights, I only had two, because the generators had gone down right when this show started — no one knew but us. Still, everyone loves that video to this day. They’re like, ‘Wow, that’s the best!’ And the crowd was amazing, just incredible.”
Long-time crew member Tony Geranios corroborates Howard’s harrowing tale, admitting, “I got a little unhinged. I actually walked off one of the trucks I was loading. A little immature of me. But these guys didn’t speak any English, and we were supposed to have somebody in the truck. I load the band gear every night. I don’t physically load it anymore — I point. We have the union people that do that. And I’m trying to tell these guys — I’m supposed to have an interpreter there — ‘This has to go on like this, man on each corner, lift it together.’ And I’m in there now lifting as well, and getting this thing up. And two of the guys on the other end just walk away when I’m lifting it and it falls on me. Didn’t get me, but knocked my glasses off.
“And I got pissed off, and I go, ‘Fuck you, guys. I’m out of here.’ Road manager got really pissed off at me. But as Howard was saying, we had to ride these trucks from the semi, because the semi couldn’t get into the arena because the entrances were lower than these trucks could get through. Everything is loaded from the semi into an open-back truck, and then driven to the stage and unloaded from there. And that day it rained. It took us eight hours to unload all our trucks and we didn’t have that many trucks. Eight hours to get to the stage.”
But again, the end result made it all worth it. “Totally blown away,” laughs Tony. “Had no idea. Had no clue whatsoever. It was very impressive. We were welled up with pride, you know?”
Still, Tony understands why this type of thing wasn’t a regular occurrence. “Sure, I mean, for us just to do that Brazil stuff, we had to rent a 747 for about two weeks. And half the time it didn’t fly — it just sat at the airport. You have to have different truckers. We had to transfer the gear when we went into Mexico, for example. Just the amount of production cost. Why we haven’t gone to Australia, why we haven’t gone to Russia, why we haven’t gone to a lot of countries, it’s the fact that this band won’t just pack up their instruments and go into a festival type of situation and use whatever rental gear is there. For them, every show they do, they want it to be the show they’re presenting, no matter where it is. There’s a benchmark.
“Plus you can’t really change the show a lot because of the way the synthesizers and the samples are set up. For a long time, we didn’t have much flexibility of being able to change things around or shorten things because one song goes into the next one. I make the switchover. The samples from the last song are still playing as I do the switchover to the next because all of them are online at the same time. The only thing that differentiates what you’re hearing is the output. I have eight discrete outputs per thirty-two inputs. There’s thirty-two inputs going into eight outputs at the front of the house. So it’s a matter of making the switch. Anyway, point is, when you switch over to the next song, that other machine is still playing.”
“Awesome audience — it’s a World Series audience,” recalls Ray, on finally getting to see the shows themselves happen. “It’s a big deal, a big event. Traditionally, in South America, they don’t put the shows on top of each other. Usually they want to make sure there are three weeks to six weeks between shows like this. So the show takes on a life of its own. That said, a big part of the audience was hard-core Rush fans who had waited a long time, and some of them were twenty-five and some of them were forty-five. It was a pretty broad section of people.”
Adds Neil, “We had no indication of record sales or conventional measures of success like that. That led us to believe we had a small loyal following there. That’s what we went expecting.”
Instead Rush played to their biggest crowds ever (excepting Toronto Rocks in 2004), and so onstage, Peart’s main concern was “the mental congruence of things. We were trying to film sometime during that tour and it never happened and it never happened. And then it was suddenly, okay, we’re going to film the last show. Okay. And the story’s been told before: the weather, the trucks getting there late and so on, there was no soundcheck and nothing was tested until literally the minute before we hit the stage. And we’re just going, ‘Okay, we’ve got nothing to lose here. It can only be terrible.’
“But it was just magically elevating. And you can’t say, ‘Okay, it’s the last show, I’m going to be better.’ That’s kind of a self-defeating prophecy there. Because you can’t will yourself to do that. It has to happen and that’s what we did. We just came out there and played against all these odds we couldn’t blame ourselves for, so we weren’t feeling that way. It was like, ‘Okay, we’re going to do this better than anyone has a right to expect under these conditions.’ It was a magical night.
“And then going back to the hotel, the three of us, and all our wives were there, so it has that feeling that almost never happens at the end of a tour. There’s actually time to reflect and glow in it collectively. The Snakes & Arrows Live tour, I remember, Indianapolis, we flew home, separated. It was all great, but Brazil, after the show we were with all our families. ‘Yeah, we did it.’ That was one of the rare occasions that we could actually bask in the glow of having accomplished something. Not only that great show, but that tour and everything that brought us there. That was one of those beautiful moments for the three of us and loved ones to share. If anything, the first show on that tour was the ‘we’re back’ sort of thing, and by that time we were into the progress of the tour, surviving night by night, and then playing in Brazil for the first time ever, and in these giant soccer stadiums. All of that was so unfamiliar that survival alone was perfectly acceptable.”
Again, a huge part of making mere “survival” acceptable was having to contend with the weather. We’ve heard about preparing the show in the rain, but now the band had to execute onstage.
“We had rain on the first two nights,” says Alex. “In Porto Alegre, which was the first gig in the south, it was raining hard. By the time we went on it had stopped, but everything was wet. The stage was wet, our carpet was wet, some of the gear was wet. There was a problem with the console; it got wet. We managed to get it all going and working; it was a real miracle. The next gig in São Paulo, we do a three-hour show and we split it with a little intermission between the two sets. Towards the end of the first set, it started to rain. And during the second set, it rained. And I don’t mean it rained on the audience and we watched them get wet — it rained everywhere. And the wind was blowing towards the stage. So really, all of us, including Neil, were soaked, water just pouring off us.
“The advent of radios makes things a little less dangerous up there,” explains Alex, when asked if electrocution concerns might have stopped the show. “So you’re not really worried about making a connection from one point of electricity to another, for example from the guitar amplifiers to the mic PA, so we just carried through. But toward the end of the set, my pedalboard started to short out. Some of Neil’s electronic kit started to short out, but we made it through that set.
“The following day, which was the following gig, in Rio, it was a long drive,” continues Lifeson. “They just started setting up when we would normally be doing our soundcheck. So no soundcheck, no line check, no video line check. There were problems with the power; requirements had not been met. There were problems with the staging. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The audio truck for the recording of the DVD . . . boy, it was a relic from another era. But we managed to go on at ten thirty and the show went off without a hitch. The camera setup for the DVD all worked. It was amazing that we got away with it. All the equipment problems we had the night before had miraculously sorted themselves out, thanks to our terrific crew.
