Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 32
“And all this time, Booujze was always encouraging both Geddy and me to ‘get crazy,’ until we decided we were ‘the world’s funniest rhythm section.’ We began to think this album ought to be called Don’t Try This at Home. Otherwise, this song is all about feel, the right looseness for the verses and a relentless drive for the choruses, then a gentler groove for the instrumental passage.”
“There’s no solo in ‘Workin’ Them Angels,’” noted Alex, speaking with Joe Bosso from Guitar World. “What happened was, I originally recorded a solo over this section of very Celtic-sounding mandolins. It was a cool solo, nothing wrong with it, but just before we mixed the album, I called Nick and said I didn’t think the solo was necessary, that it sounded better with just the mandolins. I was prepared for a big disagreement but Nick was like, ‘Dude! Absolutely. I was thinking the very same thing.’ I hate to disappoint guitar fans who are waiting for solos, but sometimes you just don’t need them.”
The guitar solo as embedded event is back come “The Larger Bowl,” but again, the overriding signature is the use of acoustic guitar. Alex calls the song “experimental” and says that it is “acoustically driven; there’s a very cyclical thing about it. Lyrically it’s a pantoum. I think it takes lines two and four of every four-line stanza and makes them the first and third of the next. Or the first and second of the next. I never get that quite right. It’s something Neil has been working with for a long time, lyrically, how to use the device. And the music is written in a way that it’s looping. It’s only four chords, but they keep looping through the whole song. I think it’s a really interesting approach for a song, from us.”
Further on the use of acoustics, Alex told me, “Before we actually started writing, I mentioned to Geddy that I thought it would be refreshing to take an acoustic approach to writing. He thought that was a great idea. In fact, we both started out on acoustic, and it lasted for about five minutes, and then he put the acoustic down and he picked up the electric bass. We wrote like that in the old days, but he hasn’t played guitar in decades. It’s not really the best way. The best way is how it ended up: me being on acoustic and him being on bass. And the whole writing process on acoustic, I don’t think I played electric . . . no, I didn’t play electric once while writing. And of course, the album has a lot of acoustic on it, either in a primary or secondary role. I love using acoustic as support. I think it adds a richness to the heaviness, of this record in particular. And certainly guys like Townshend and David Gilmour were masters at using acoustic to make a big statement.”
Asked about other acoustic inspirations, Alex says, “I went to see Tommy Emmanuel play a couple of times, and I was so blown away watching him. He did an acoustic set, just him and the guitar, and that was spectacular, really inspiring. I went to see Stephen Bennett play. We got together afterwards. I’d never met him before, and we had a couple of drinks and we jammed a little bit and played and talked about the harp guitar, and he tried to show me a few things. It was impossible. And he gave me a capo that I ended up using on a couple of things. I just found I was playing acoustic a lot more at home. Friends would drop by and you would have a glass of wine and sit in the backyard and strum away, for hours, and it’s really a lot of fun. And I started fooling with different tunings. So I was in that headspace when we started working.”
Also notable in the song is a track of real tambourine and sampled tambourine played by Neil. As for the solo, it’s typical obtuse Alex, laden with lots of chorus, played over a track of electric and a track of acoustic.
Fate is addressed even more directly in “The Larger Bowl,” where Neil muses over economic disparity — who winds up with the larger bowl, as it were. The pantoum structure adds a hypnotic quality, like a chant or a blues song, both of which use repetition to focus one’s thinking on an idea. Explains Peart in the tourbook, “The title for ‘The Larger Bowl’ came from a bicycle trip in West Africa, as described in The Masked Rider when a song with that title wafted through a feverish, hallucinatory ‘dysentery dream.’”
This took place in 1988 at the Happy Hotel in Cameroon, where Neil was on a bike tour with four friends. The dream had him whisked back to Toronto in an armored helicopter and then to Halifax in a truck where he did a phone interview in a clothing store, where a song called “The Larger Bowl” was playing. The title is also partly inspired by seeing women in Africa carrying bowls on their heads.
“Waking in a sweaty tangle of twisted sheets, I only remembered the title, but I knew I had to write that song. Make a dream come true, as it were. Back in the early ’90s, I gave that title to some words partly inspired by the dream’s location, Africa, about life’s unequal ‘fortunes and fates.’ The front of my rhyming dictionary had an index of traditional verse patterns, and I tried writing in some of them, as an exercise, like solving a crossword puzzle. Among sonnets, villanelles, and sestinas, I particularly liked a Malay form called the pantoum and wrote several lyrics using that scheme, including ‘The Larger Bowl.’ However, I never even submitted them to my bandmates until this album — fifteen years later.
“It must have been the right time, because, to my delight, Alex and Geddy responded to the challenge of ‘The Larger Bowl’ and its unusual construction. Musically, the song seemed to benefit from stylistic influences we discovered, or recovered, during our Feedback project, when we recorded a number of cover tunes from our earliest influences. That spirit of youthful enthusiasm, and the spirit of the ’60s, is alive in several of these songs, from the blues sections in ‘The Way the Wind Blows’ to the ‘feedback solo’ in ‘Far Cry,’ and the simple rhythm section backing for the melodic guitar solo in ‘The Larger Bowl.’”
“Spindrift” is another of Neil’s weather reports, crashing waves tossing Peart into existential crisis. The ominous music echoes the literary sentiment, just as it did back on “Jacob’s Ladder.”
As Peart described in Modern Drummer, “Beginning with the punches and rolling hi-hat, it steps through several different movements, and the parts are deceptively simple. Detail is the god here. The first verse, for example, uses only 8th note bass drum accents, while the second one introduces 16th notes, to kick it up a little. The whole song is a ‘muscular’ performance, and I had to concentrate hard on laying it down and on locking in with the vocals. That is sometimes an underrated part of drumming and of being an accompanist: if you’re playing a song, with words and music, the singing is often considered . . . oh, let’s say, ‘important.’ For that reason, and perhaps because I write the lyrics, I give a lot of attention to the vocals, trying to frame them effectively and unobtrusively, while punching them up rhythmically when I can.
“Years ago I saw a documentary on the making of Who’s Next, and Roger Daltrey was talking about how much Keith Moon, for all the apparent wildness of his drumming, was actually very sensitive to the vocals. Daltrey demonstrated that quality by playing a bit of the multi-track tape of ‘Behind Blue Eyes,’ soloing the drums and then adding the vocals. Keith was clearly doing what I describe — framing the vocals, punching them up with accents — even though in his case it might have been his natural, instinctive musicality rather than my studied approach.
“Between vocal lines in the choruses, I was able to come up with more of those fills launching from the left floor tom (even deliberately repeating one, to Booujze’s shock, but hey, sometimes repetition can be effective). It was Booujze’s idea to reprise the intro after a false ending, and once again he urged me to go crazy in it, so I did. We rarely use fade-outs these days, but this one seemed inevitable, and I was pleased to find that Booujze was amused, as I have always been, by the notion of putting a ‘comedic’ fill right at the bottom of a fade.”
The false ending to “Spindrift” was in the Rush tradition of songs like “The Spirit of Radio” and “The Big Money” — because of the band’s prog predilection, this device always came with twists, extra features. Acoustic guitar in this one is heard only during the break, where Alex dips his toe into the idea of soloing but then recoils. There’s also a bit of individual note picking — King Crimson–like — but this is executed on electric. The song as a whole is relentless and roiling like an agitated surf; it’s a fairly heavy number very much with a Clockwork Angels feel, with particular kinship to that record’s “Seven Cities of Gold,” and for that matter, “Earthshine” from Vapor Trails.
Noting Raskulinecz’s contribution, Alex said that “Nick came up and threw himself into the situation. A few songs we didn’t touch at all. Some songs we moved a few things around, and there was one song called ‘Spindrift’ that we made radical changes to. We were very impressed with Nick; he wasn’t afraid to tell us we had the song all wrong. Most producers are afraid to do that with name bands. Also, he allowed us to re-record anything we wanted, as many times as we wished. A lot of producers these days just want to Pro Tools parts together.”
Next up is “The Main Monkey Business,” the band’s first instrumental since “Limbo” on Test for Echo. This one explores further this idea of acoustics atop bludgeoning rhythms. One is also reminded of the connections between Celtic music and Indian music, across the buzzing acoustic guitars, Neil’s polyrhythmic drumming and the exotic, ethereal keyboard washes. There’s a bit of a cheat on the idea of instrumental, as Geddy sings a bit, mirroring the key parts. Even Alex’s guitar soloing shares those Far Eastern melodic touches with the likes of King Crimson’s Adrian Belew and Robert Fripp — incidentally, Fripp is the other famed guitar craftsman Steven Wilson collared to guest on Fear of a Blank Planet.
As Alex told me at the time, “I remember ‘Main Monkey Business,’ when we were doing that, thinking, we’ll never play this live. So let’s just track it up and make it a lot of fun, a really great thing to listen to. And of course, there’s no way we can’t do it live — so it’s definitely on our list! We’re going to try to do seven or eight songs from the record. But until we actually play them, we don’t really know if we’re going to have trouble with anything. It’s always difficult in the beginning but you work around it. A lot of those little details, like tracking the acoustic for example, you can approximate that stuff live. And the energy of the live show makes up for a lot of those little details that might be missing. But I’ve a feeling that when we start rehearsing and get comfortable with the songs, they’re going to sound really good live.”
Indeed the band would play much of the album ’til the end, and as Alex stated, the Snakes & Arrows songs came off as rip-roarin’ rockers, benefitting from the molten electric leveling that takes place in a hockey arena, something that also greatly improved selections from Power Windows through Roll the Bones.
Explained Alex further, speaking with Guitar World: “We wanted to do an instrumental that had some real substance, but we were getting pretty deep into finishing the record. So one day we started jamming and the song started to emerge. At first, it was extremely complicated — it probably had about twelve different parts to it — and Nick really helped us whack it down and simplify it. The only problem is, to play the song live I might have to bring out the double-neck. Man, I dread it though; that thing weighs a ton! You feel it the next day in your neck and shoulders. Maybe I’m just getting old.”
The band did do “The Main Monkey Business” live, but Alex opted for an acoustic guitar mounted on a stand along with his Les Paul slung around his neck, which he plays for the lion’s share of the piece. Not that he was the focal point — “The Main Monkey Business” came off as more of a percussion showcase than anything.
The title of the track comes from something Geddy’s mother once said to describe someone up to no good. “What kind of monkey business?” Geddy asked. “The main monkey business,” which Ged found amusing. The song was a Hemispheres-level work of origami to assemble. All that monkeying around led to a sprawling odyssey that was originally eighteen minutes long. In the beginning, Neil challenged himself by playing the piece without snare to support the song’s world music feel, but eventually added some piccolo snare at the point of Alex’s solo. There’s also all sorts of sampled percussion sounds, including sleigh bells.
“On Snakes & Arrows, the instrumental, of all things, ‘The Main Monkey Business,’ took longer than any song,” recalls Peart, “because we had such high expectations of what we wanted to be in there and what we wanted to get out of it. We were rewriting and rewriting and rewriting, all the way through. But that wasn’t arduous the way Hemispheres was. That’s what we wanted to do — we weren’t pressured by time.”
“The Way the Wind Blows” ambles in as old-school 3/4 blues before retaining that frame and becoming near heavy metal, or to strike a compromise, a hard blues reminiscent of “Whipping Post.” But soon, come chorus time, we’re into lush, Celtic acoustic strumming, the sun-dappled melody at this point taking us back to Test for Echo or My Favorite Headache. The solo break finds both Alex and the backing track arcing back to the album’s Eastern (or Moroccan, or Turkish) touchstones. Add to this the overt references to the Middle East and Middle West in Neil’s lyrics, along with lines that further explore fate, and you have across the record an emboldening of concept: religion across borders and cultures and free will versus predestination. This is all set upon a musical backtrack that also compares East and West.
Noted Alex of both “The Way the Wind Blows” and “Bravest Face,” speaking with Mac Randall: “The bluesier stuff on those two songs was just so fresh and so much fun to play, and it’s true, I seldom play like that, so it was a great opportunity to stretch out. In both those cases, the idea and the tone came together at the same time. Some of that was due to the fantastic selection of amps at Allaire.” A few precedents exist for this kind of playing by Alex, albeit they’re sparing. The beginning of “Available Light” and the outro solo in “Ghost of a Chance” are nice examples.
Geddy, speaking with Philip Wilding, explains that Nick Raskulinecz was central in this song coming together. “His phrase was, ‘I’d be curious to hear . . .’ You knew then that you were going back into the studio. We were working on ‘The Way the Wind Blows’ and we were very close to nailing it. And I come into the room and Neil’s playing the part and I see Nick’s face, and it’s almost like he’s stroking his chin, you know? So he asked Neil to come in and he said to him, ‘I’d be curious to hear you play . . .’ and he describes what he wants, and Neil says, ‘So you’re asking me to completely rewrite both verses?’
“Neil had a look on his face like he was going to explode. But he wasn’t — he knew Nick was right. He trusted Nick’s ideas; he wasn’t threatened by them. He was a little pissed off because his hands were killing him, but he says, ‘I’m going back in there’ and on his way back in he was like, ‘Oh fuck, what am I going to pull off here?’ Then he realized he had this part that might work, so he threw that in and you should have seen the room. It just lit up. I was just dancing — yes! He transformed the song totally. Nick had this big grin on his face and he brought Neil in to hear it afterwards and Neil went, ‘Well, when you’re right, you’re right.’”
Next up is another instrumental, “Hope,” with Neil lifting the title for the song from the “I still cling to hope” line that is part of “Faithless.” The twelve-string acoustic number with a two-minute-long solo finds Alex delving deeply into his new love of acoustic guitar, Lifeson virtually writing a tribute to U.K. acoustic revival figures like John Renbourn, Bert Jansch and Davy Graham, not to mention the Jimmy Page of “White Summer” fame.
Alex told Mac Randall that the song is tuned to D-A-D-A-A-D, adding that he’d “been messing around with a few different alternate tunings at home, and during the writing sessions, whenever Geddy was working on vocals — and I wasn’t sleeping on the couch — I’d sit in the corner and strum my acoustic. I just fell in love with the sound of that guitar and that tuning in particular, and that’s where ‘Hope’ came from. It was nice to do something on my own for one of our records; I haven’t done that in a really, really long time. What you hear on the album is the first full take, which we mixed right after we recorded it, so it’s about as pure as you can get. Rich Chycki had his tape measure out and measured the mic setup right down to the inch, and it was very effective — you feel like you’re sitting right in front of the guitar.”
“That’s the thing with Al,” mused Geddy, in conversation with Philip Wilding. “He’s so spontaneous that if you walk in and he’s playing something, you have to run and hit record; you have to grab it. Three minutes later you’ll ask him what he just played and he’ll be, ‘I played what?’ That’s the story of my entire relationship with him: ‘What was that, Al?’ ‘What was what?’ He did ‘Hope’ live; we let him have a go at it twice. I actually thought the first take was good enough. I was standing in the booth going, ‘That’s it!’”
Neil echoes Geddy’s sentiments: “Alex can just pick up the guitar and not even be paying attention and Geddy will be like, ‘What’s that you just played?’ And Alex goes, ‘I don’t know.’ In the most beautiful sense, Alex doesn’t know what he’s doing.”
Reiterates Geddy, “Yeah, when I’m up at the desk editing or doing my vocals you can hear him in the background either noodling away on his acoustic guitar or asleep on the couch. I’ve got the demos we did for this album, and you can hear him in the background on them, either playing or snoring.”
A live rendition of “Hope” was included on the two-CD Songs for Tibet: The Art of Peace album issued in 2008. This was a different version than what was included on the band’s own Snakes & Arrows Live album from four months previous.
“Faithless” is one of Neil’s most direct expressions of atheism, and to underscore his tough words, the song is serious and seriously slow, especially for Rush.
