Limelight: Rush in the '80s, page 30
“And it is when you come back to making a new album, you are standing there, the three of you with your drum kit, your bass guitar and your guitar. And to keep that fresh, over that many albums and that many tracks, requires some inspirational thinking. And probably rather than trying to rely on the same three guys to come up with inspirational thinking, the best thing is to get someone in the mix who can shake it about. They don’t have to come in with the great idea, but they do have to come in with a provocative role. And that sort of provocation can be on some very subtle levels; it doesn’t have to be confrontational, although that can be good too. But that sort of provocative, constantly teasing, constantly moving things around, freshens it up for them. I sensed that very early on, that they wanted things to be pushed about a bit — by someone from outside.”
And now it was time to take it outside, to go earn for the guys, their families and all the staffers and crew, the income that wasn’t really going to come from these offbeat records made for no one in particular but Geddy, Alex and Neil, and maybe Rupert.
Only five songs from the album — “Superconductor,” “Show Don’t Tell,” “The Pass,” the Police-like “War Paint” and “Scars” — were played on the Presto tour, a five-month jaunt that would cover all of America and large Canadian markets only. The band was determined not to be on the road too long.
The Toronto stand would raise $200,000 for the United Way; staff back at the office printed up “I Survived Rush Playing Toronto” shirts because of the demands put on the band for complimentary tickets and such. Mr. Big, featuring Buffalo bass legend Billy Sheehan (also of Talas and David Lee Roth), would provide most of the support. “Good friends, good musicians, good people,” says Neil, with Geddy adding that “Billy Sheehan was a terrific bass player. I was always aware of him, and he’s still just a monster bass player.”
“I’ve got pictures of Neil practicing archery with Pat Torpey,” laughs Billy, referring to the Mr. Big drummer, sadly deceased in 2018 at the age of sixty-four. “There’s a photo of me with Jeff Berlin and Geddy backstage. Yeah, we had a wonderful time with those guys. I’d met them a couple times here or there over the years, but I never knew them that well, and then when we were on tour with them, we didn’t know what to expect. They’re a little intellectual, so we thought this wasn’t going to be much fun at all. But we had a riot. And they were just so generous and nice. Great, great experience.”
Voivod (Rush with fangs?) was called on to play in Quebec and Toronto. Of note, that band’s acclaimed Angel Rat album from 1991 would be produced by none other than Terry Brown.
“In 1990 we toured with Rush for Nothingface,” recalls Michel “Away” Langevin, explaining what had been the band’s fondest career memory, until, that is, Voivod won a Juno of their own in 2018. “And of course Rush being a huge influence, and Terry Brown also, we wanted to try out recording with him, although the album turned out to be a bit mellow for the average Voivod listener, both in the mix and the performance. We got the gig through our management, who in the Nothingface days worked for Donald K Donald, a big promoter who books the stadium shows here in Montreal. And our management was in touch with Rush management, and the song ‘Astronomy Domine’ was doing really good on MuchMusic and MusiquePlus, and so we were offered two shows at Maple Leaf Gardens, one show at the Forum in Montreal and then another show at le Colisée in Quebec City. It was an amazing year for us, 1990, with that song getting us these Rush shows and also a North American tour.
“Both managements had a meeting arranged for us,” continues Michel. “We met the band, and of course they were our heroes, so we were pretty intimidated. But they were really, really nice. We also had, on the first show, a bottle of champagne backstage with a note signed by the three members, which we gave to Piggy [guitarist Denis D’Amour, deceased from colon cancer in 2005], because he was the biggest Rush fan ever.”
Voivod is considered the thrash metal Rush, in the same way that Victoria trio Nomeansno is considered the punk Rush. But Langevin isn’t too sure if the Rush guys saw any of Voivod’s math metal performance at these shows. “Well, they probably caught some of it. I seem to remember Blackie [the bass player] saying he saw the members watching on the side of the stage. But I never really saw them at all. I was very focused, and these were big crowds for us, and we were a bit nervous. I had seen some bands get booed off the stage opening for Rush. But when we played ‘Astronomy Domine,’ at every show, the crowd was louder than the music, which was a new experience for us.”
Michel talks about what it was like to see how the pros took care of business. “I remember Neil came from behind the stage and Geddy came from the right and Alex from the left, and so they seemed to have their system down very precisely. It was a huge machine to observe, and of course, attending all the shows, watching Neil go at it on the drum kit.”
But typical baby band woes almost sunk the band’s shot at making a big impression. “Yes, when we went to the show in Toronto, we left from Montreal and stopped in Kingston to get gas, and the van never started after. And so we were pretty nervous because the show was the same night. The gear was already on its way to Toronto, and so we jumped into a bus in Kingston that was going from Montreal to Toronto, and we had to stand in the aisle of the bus the whole way, but we made it. We were lucky the driver let us stand. It was totally full. We left the van in Kingston, to be repaired. After the second show in Toronto, we were in the back of the Maple Leaf Gardens, and fans were there, and we were signing some stuff, and then we jumped in the back of the cube van we had rented to move the gear and we closed the door. They could not believe that. With no explanation. It was just a joke. But we were actually traveling on top of the gear, in a rented truck, a moving truck, and had to drive back to Kingston to pick up the van. It was funny to see the faces of all the fans watching us jump into the back of the truck and close the door.”
“The most memorable thing was the big bunnies, the giant inflatable bunnies,” says Neil about the Presto tour, which turned out, by all accounts, to be a most enjoyable trek. “That was amusing, the good bunny and the bad bunny. Because the title was Presto, which I had used in an ironic sense, wishing I had magic powers to make things right in the song. I really just liked the word. So we chose that as the title, and I think Hugh Syme came up with the idea of the bunnies making themselves come out of hats. So in the production design for that tour, we were playing off of that as a prop and we got two inflatable bunnies, forty feet tall or something. There was the good one and the bad one, and there was an animated movie of the bad bunny shooting the good bunny, who collapses. It was the theater absurdo.”
But the specific plot around good bunny versus bad bunny, Geddy explains, didn’t come until later.
“The bunnies were the big deal on that tour,” says Geddy. “Everybody loved the bunnies. They were just a matter of coming up with the idea and having them executed and working on the timing with respect to inflating them and deflating them. After we used them for a couple of tours, it was hard to put them away because people loved them so much. But after we used them on two, it was like, ‘Guys, we can’t just keep trotting these bunnies out.’ And somebody said, ‘It’s time we killed the gag.’ And I said, ‘Yeah, why don’t we do that?’
“I have this group of people who are involved in the preproduction every year — Norm Stangl from Spin Productions and a few other people — and every year he helps me create a team of animators or visual people that we discuss ideas with for rear-screen films. We were sitting around talking. ‘Is there something we can do with the bunnies?’ And we decided we would go all evil on the bunnies, make one an evil bunny and make one a good bunny, and we would literally kill the gag by having one of the bunnies pop up and suddenly, instead of being a sweet cuddly thing, be this evil one with a gun. He would raise the gun and fire a bullet, and the bullet would hit the screen and be animated, and we would go on this little animated journey with this bullet, looking for the good bunny.
“And it actually turned out to be a really clever bit of animation; it’s one of my favorite pieces. In the end, the good bunny rises, then the bad bunny comes up, fires the gun, a puff of smoke, and this cartoon starts, where there’s this bullet that has a personality, and it goes through all kinds of wacky . . . it was really loony tunes. And then it hits the good bunny, which deflates. Well, you could hear the crowd go, ‘Ooh.’ I mean, they didn’t like us killing the bunny [laughs]. It was a really bizarre little gag that came out of the dark corners of our creative ability. And to this day, I can remember people being so disappointed that we actually shot the bunny onstage.”
The bunny joke was taken a step forward. In each city, the band’s production office would order up some impromptu, unofficial “Playboy” bunnies, who would emerge from side stage and give Alex and Geddy a peck on the cheek, a wipe of the brow and serve them both some much-needed refreshments. In terms of visuals, the band also carried with them a full laser setup, most impressive for the running laser man of “Marathon.” “The Pass” used excellent black-and-white rear-screen imagery. “Subdivisions” featured the classic video footage from seven years previous.
It was Andrew MacNaughtan’s job for the Presto tour — along with being the official photographer, acting as personal assistant and taking on various additional video duties as time went on — to “keep the band entertained.”
“Yes, we would get a bunch of wonderful films, comedies, foreign films, just really great stuff, to watch on the bus,” recalled MacNaughtan, in an interview with the author before his death in 2012 at the age of forty-seven. “And stupid films too. We would wear silly hats on the bus. And I remember, on the Presto tour, there was the movie called Moon Over Parador, with Richard Dreyfuss as the South American president or something. And he had these drinks called punas, and they’re basically cocktails that are fruity and delicious. And I remember they were served in the very elaborate puna glass or puna cup. My mission was to get interesting glasses we could drink these drinks from. So we always had unusual drinking attire, and of course we all had to be wearing silly hats. Just things to sort of help pass the time on the bus. You would go a little stir-crazy.
“Also for Presto, Alex always insisted on bringing his paint set. I schlepped that to his room every night, but of course he never used it once. So that was kind of funny. Also for Presto, Alex and Geddy played tennis virtually every day off. But then for Roll the Bones, Alex started picking up golf.
“As for Neil, during the Presto tour he rode his bicycle everywhere,” continues MacNaughtan, “from show to show. We would all be in a bus together, and the bus would stop about an hour outside of the next city we were arriving in, and he would be dropped off at a really inexpensive motel. It was almost like a game for him, more of a challenge for him. He was on this mission to find the most inexpensive motel room in America. He got it down to like $26 one night. Anyway, we would drop him off in the middle of the night, an hour outside the next city we were driving to on the bus. And we would continue on, and we would get into the hotel about five in the morning or whatever. And then Neil would spend the whole day, on the day off, riding his bike to get to that next city.
“I remember one time on the Presto tour, we dropped him off an hour outside of Salt Lake City. When he got there, it was already dark out, like around seven at night. And it was so hard for him to ride. He actually rode through snow. He went up through the mountains on his bicycle and it was just an absolute nightmare for him. He was so exhausted. But I’ll never forget that. I just thought it was really strange to be wanting to ride up and actually go through snow, over a mountain. That was his pastime.
“And then with Roll the Bones, they started doing a couple of different things. Alex is definitely full-time golf at that point. Geddy was starting to do some golf with him; I think Alex sort of turned him onto it. Neil was still doing his bicycle thing, but he started doing archery with various guys from the crew. They would set up a big archery target at one end of the arena, down a hallway or outdoors, and they would target practice, which I took pictures of. Those pictures appeared in the Counterparts tour book, him doing his archery. We stayed in a castle in Birmingham, and he set up a target at this big castle and he did that all afternoon. But golf: Alex actually played at Turnberry, the famous golf course outside of Glasgow. It’s on the ocean, and we stayed there on the day off before we played in Glasgow. Alex played golf with the soundman, Robert Scovill, and I swear to God, we were on the ocean and it was March and it must have been close to zero degrees. It was so cold and so windy.”
Robert Scovill was responsible for the surround sound system Rush was using. Says MacNaughtan, “Correct. It was Presto and Roll the Bones. I don’t know if it was every show, but that was pretty much the thing. And where you would really hear the full effect is in ‘Force Ten.’ It has an echoey, weird electronic drum sound at the beginning, and that’s how the song ends as well. You would hear that at the front of the stage, and then all of a sudden, Robert would make it 360 around the entire stadium with that echoing drum thing. Actually a better example would be in Neil’s drum solo. He triggers this electronic sound, when his drum kit is turning, and that sound he triggered, which would be repeating — bang, bang — went 360 degrees around the arena.
“Also during Presto,” continues Andrew, “Neil and Geddy took me to a couple art galleries. I remember we went to one in Richmond, Virginia, that was really cool. So we would do a lot of art galleries. And for Presto and Roll the Bones, Geddy and I collected fine art photography. We would go to art galleries to actually purchase photographs. Of course, he had way more money than I did, and he purchased a lot of great art photography, all from the great masters.
“For Presto, they used footage from the video for ‘The Pass,’ black-and-white rear-screen imagery. And they had a big curtain that was painted to look like a vaudeville show, with an old man in a top hat. For ‘Time Stand Still,’ there would be Aimee Mann footage from the ‘Time Stand Still’ video, her singing her line. ‘Subdivisions,’ I think they used the same footage from many years ago, on all the tours. I could be wrong. ‘Marathon,’ they had a running laser guy. They had a full laser setup on both tours. And the hired Playboy bunnies, that was for Presto, of course, every town. They’d have a girl in a bunny outfit come out and bring them drinks. These weren’t official bunnies. I think this was arranged by Rush’s production manager. His name was Nick Kotas. I’m not sure what his title was; he basically worked in the production office.”
Then there were the books. “Yes! Neil and Geddy are both big fine art book collectors.” But not first edition literature. “No, nothing like that. Neil has a couple of those, but it’s not really his thing. But the fine art books, because we would always be going to these galleries, yes, they collected a lot of art books. Of course Neil is a great reader. He would read a book every two days, basically; it’s crazy. Oh, the other pastime during Presto and Roll the Bones — their favorite, favorite, favorite thing — Neil insisted he had to have the New York Times at his door every Sunday. No matter what. No matter where we were, Buttfuck, Nowhere, I had to get him his Sunday New York Times so he could do the crossword puzzle. Geddy would do it as well.”
It was a lot of living packed into a mere six-month tour, all of it in North America, all of it supported by Mr. Big. Following the last show on the tour — in Irvine, California, June 29, 1990 — Rush wouldn’t play live again for another year and four months, more deeply taking that time they’d vowed to take, for family, for themselves, for personal enrichment.
There was one lone show, however, stuck in the midst of this personal development time away from being Rush. On September 15, 1990, Alex and Geddy performed as part of the Music & Tennis Festival at the North Ranch Country Club in Westlake Village, California, alongside a bunch of other old-timers like Eddie Money, Kansas, fellow Canucks Saga, and REO Speedwagon’s Kevin Cronin, plus their warm-up act from the Presto campaign, Mr. Big. It would be as close to the professional circuit these childhood friends in tennis whites would ever get. But they could always dream . . . as Alex would continue to dream about becoming a pro golfer, as Geddy would dream about being a major league pitcher. But of course, there would be more Rush to come in the ’90s, followed by a series of tragic events for Neil Peart that would turn the band’s dreams into a sorrowful, seemingly never-ending nightmare.
Photos
The Professor, May 10, 1980, at the Palladium, New York, NY.
May 11, 1980, at the Palladium, New York; this was the last of a four-night stand.
Geddy with blue Rickenbacker, Madison Square Garden, New York City, May 18, 1981.
Alex and his classic Moving Pictures tour look, same Madison Square Garden show as left.
Another shot of Neil from May 10, 1980, at the Palladium.
Neil, Maple Leaf Gardens, November 17, 1982. Support on the night was Vancouver post-punk band the Payolas, featuring future production legend Bob Rock.
Geddy, Providence Civic Center, Providence, RI, December 5, 1982. Support act was Irish blues rocker Rory Gallagher.
Alex and his leather pants, same Providence show as left.
Geddy and a good look for him, Sporthalle, Böblingen, West Germany, May 6, 1983. Support on the night was Nazareth, who Rush supported in 1974 and 1975.
Alex: singer! Same show as above.
Ads for Moving Pictures, Exit . . . Stage Left and Signals.
