Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 6
“The deal was, you had to go out and get an instrument or instruments that you don’t know how to play,” chuckles Alex, giving his account of the legendary Rush/Primus jam sessions from the road. “That’s what we would do. So after our soundcheck, we’d come back and have dinner. They would do their soundcheck; they’d come back. And from six to seven, we would jam. We bought a flute, a harmonica, a clarinet, some weird drums, all just cheap stuff from pawnshops. And we would jam for this hour. We did it every day; it was just a riot. It was the most bizarre music you could imagine. And we started recording some of it. I don’t know where those tapes ended up. But I know there are these tapes kicking around with probably twenty hours of these crazy jams, from Berlin, from America. They’re probably sitting somewhere at the bottom of a case. You don’t think about it at the time . . .”
“We had a little practice drum kit for that,” adds Neil. “Alex would go to pawn shops and come in with a flute or a violin. And there’d be bicycles, pipes; everybody was playing something. And pretty well every day we just had that kind of free-form blowout.”
MacNaughtan was witness to some of this, in the course of performing his unofficial duties of keeping the band entertained. “It became the habit that they would jam every night together in one of the shower stalls or something. And the thing was each guy could not play the instrument he normally would play. There are photos I shot of Geddy playing drums, Alex playing accordion. Geddy would play acoustic guitar, Neil would play his bongos, Alex had another stupid instrument, like a triangle or something. He would find anything. Like if it was in the shower stall, he would play the pipes. Whatever made a sound, he would goof around on. He bought a flute.”
“I didn’t really catch on to Rush until my freshman year in high school,” explains Les Claypool, who would become one of the key figures in the ’90s promoting bass playing as an art form, and doing so in front of often confused alternative rock audiences, at some sun-dappled festival gig populated by much more accessible and digestible acts. In essence, Les was to the ’90s what Geddy was to the ’70s, and what Billy Sheehan or perhaps Steve Harris was to the ’80s. “What converted me was, I joined the RCA record club, where you get six records for a penny or ten records for a dime, and one of them was All the World’s a Stage, which I proceeded to wear out — and wear my parents out with. Besides the power of the music and the drums and whatnot — I wasn’t a bass player at the time — those lyrics were compelling because it was this space and dungeons and dragons kind of thing, which as a young fellow you are very much drawn toward.
“And then eventually, becoming a bass player, well, Geddy Lee was my hero when I was fourteen. There were only a handful of guys who were playing bass that were really in the forefront in rock. I was just learning Zeppelin and Aerosmith, and then along comes Rush, and the bass was very prominent in the mix, and he had a distinct tone. His tone was as compelling as his playing, and for a good many years I tried very hard to replicate that tone. Unfortunately being a young fellow of limited means, I had no idea how you got those tones. I just kept trying to crank up my crappy little amp. And I had a bass that had flat-wound strings on it. It was just the strings it came with, and there was no way I was getting anything close to a Geddy Lee tone on it. It was just a flappy, flumpy thing.
“I remember seeing those guys,” continues Claypool. “It was my very first concert, and it was Pat Travers opening for Rush at the Cow Palace in San Francisco. And I remember scalping a ticket, even though it wasn’t sold out, but I didn’t know that driving down. I figured it was sold out. So I had a scalped ticket at probably twice as much as I should’ve paid for it. I drank three beers and threw up in the parking lot. And I went in and saw Pat Travers, which was amazing, because Mars Cowling is a phenomenal bass player, and then Tommy Aldridge doing his drum solo. And here comes Rush. And I remember seeing the black Rickenbacker. I used to draw pictures of Rickenbackers . . . I would look in magazines. I wanted a Rickenbacker more than anybody, but I didn’t have any money. And there was this guy next to me. He was another bass player in my school, and he had money and a big fancy amp, and he had just gotten one, a Rick. And before they came onstage, there was the bass sitting there, and there were the roadies setting up. He’s like, ‘Mine’s just like that, the black!’ And I’m sitting there going, ‘You bastard.’
“Anyway, that show was a religious experience for a fourteen-year-old kid, however the hell old I was. It was phenomenal. It was Hemispheres tour, so they had ‘Cygnus’ and the ships going through the black hole and the two hemispheres, the brain was coming at you — it was mind-blowing, unbelievable. So from that point on, there was nobody that could beat Geddy. I had friends that had big record collections — I didn’t — who were always trying to turn me onto other things like Larry Graham and Stanley Clarke. And I’m like, ‘No, Geddy Lee is the best bass player on the planet.’ I just wasn’t hearing it, until I got a little older, that there were these other guys. But Geddy and Chris Squire were the two guys who were able to take the bass and give it a distinct tone that cut through. Even John Entwistle, who was fabulous and had a fabulous tone; it wasn’t as present as Geddy’s tone. And of course, years later, I picked Geddy’s brain to find out how he did it. I got some secrets. I don’t think he gave me all the secrets.”
Further on, what makes Geddy special, Claypool explains that “his phrasing is very unique and he’s very melodic, and you just didn’t hear things like that back then. A little bit here and there — Paul McCartney is a very melodic player, but not as aggressive as Geddy. And of course Chris Squire. But the interaction between Neil and Geddy was so intense, it seemed like every low note that Geddy hit, it was accented by Neil’s kick drum and vice versa. So between the two of them, and with everybody in the audience air drumming and playing air bass, it was a pretty spectacular thing. And I think a lot of Neil’s and Geddy’s presence also contributed to the textural playing of Alex. You know, Alex is not a riff rocker. He plays these very textural, layered, full guitar parts, and that lends itself to having this movement underneath it that is really cool and very distinctive. It’s like there is the cupcake, and Alex is the icing on the cupcake.
“And Geddy’s definitely much more than just a bass player. The thing about Geddy’s singing, it was always the thing that repelled all the girls that I would play Rush to. Any girlfriend I even came close to having wasn’t so keen on Rush. And a lot of it was that Geddy’s voice back then was very distinctive and very piercing. It’s a love/hate thing. And I myself, as a performer, have learned there is also a love/hate relationship with people who either listen to what I do or avoid listening to what I do. So I understand. But my wife actually grew up in Iowa, and both she and her sister listened to Rush. And I knew I had stumbled onto a unique woman when I met her.”
Flash forward from Les’s early intense study of Ged to when Primus is traipsing around America and Europe with Rush. Les says, “When we went on tour with Rush, we were all very excited. And in fact, that was one of the reasons we got Tim Alexander as a drummer; we started auditioning and we just started jamming on Rush tunes, and it was like whoa, we’ve got something to connect on. But when we toured with those guys, especially when we toured with them in Europe, we kind of got shit for it from the cool bands at the time, the Nirvanas and the alternative bands. And some of the British press were like, oh, Primus is supposed to be this young hip band; why are they going with Rush? There was a stigma attached to that. Which I’ve now watched slowly devolve. I remember Nirvana was supposed to tour with them. It was talked about, and they couldn’t believe we would tour with them. And it’s like, well, Rush was my favorite band in high school. Why wouldn’t I take the opportunity to do this? It was a great thing. It was a great thing musically, and it was a great thing to meet and befriend these guys.
“I mean, here were guys that in my youth, when I was in high school, they were my world, they were my band. So to meet these guys . . . I think Alex was the first guy I met, walking down a hallway backstage. And they had some tour manager back at the time who was a real hard-ass, and he wasn’t very nice or very friendly — until all of a sudden we became friends with the guys, and he came to get a little brown-nosy. But he went along the wayside. But I don’t know, they warmed right up to us for some reason. We just hit it off. I don’t remember exactly when we first kind of sat down and started hanging out with them, but it was somewhat surreal, because they were such a big part of my teenage years.”
As for his recollections of the jam sessions with the guys, Les says, “Oh yeah, we had some amazing memories of jamming with the Rush guys backstage. We had a little drum kit, and either Tim would be on the drum kit or sometimes I would be on the drum kit, and I remember Neil banging on the lockers, and Geddy’s playing bass and I’m playing bass, and I’m watching what Geddy’s doing. And I’m going, ‘Holy shit, this guy has still got it,’ just effortlessly playing this amazing stuff. And this was a daily occurrence. And Alex coming in and grabbing a guitar and playing it with a tortilla chip for a pick. Unfortunately, I was very high that day, so some of it’s a bit of a blur, but I remember thinking to myself, hey, if I were sixteen and I was able to look forward to see this, I would literally shit in my pants.
“All three of them were very friendly to us,” continues Les. “We became good friends. You know, Neil kept to himself a little more. He would kind of do his own thing. But there were some times where he would just bike from somewhere in Florida to another gig, and Larry and our road manager did the same.
“Geddy, he’s just kind of Geddy. He’s pretty mellow, got a dry sense of humor. We were hanging out in Berlin at some outdoor café and had a nice dinner, and I remember just sitting there after having a few drinks. ‘You guys have got to play “By-Tor,” gotta play “Cygnus,” you know?’ Because it was the Roll the Bones era and they were stepping away from some of those old tunes. And I can relate; some of my own tunes, it’s like your high school haircut. You go, what was I thinking? But we were really egging them on to bust out some of those old Dungeons & Dragons–type tunes. And they started playing them eventually. I don’t know if we influenced them on that, but we were definitely egging them on.
“Alex is just Alex. Sometimes he’s just Big Al, but he’s just an incredibly humorous guy. He would be a good character actor. He’s got that persona. He’s got multiple personas. One of the drunkest times in my entire life was at his house. We were in town for Lollapalooza ’93. Alex had invited us out to his house for dinner. They had all this food prepared and he busted out these really nice wines. None of us gave a shit about wine back then, and so we’re drinking this wine, having a good ol’ time. And we finished dinner and next thing you know, he busts out these frozen vodkas from his freezer. And we’re doing shots and everybody is getting a little loopy, and somehow it came up that Ler, Larry, needed a haircut, our guitar player from Primus. And he’s like, ‘Oh, we just need a bowl!’ So we get a bowl out, we put the bowl on his head, and Alex is trying to cut his hair. And it’s a glass bowl and it slips off his head onto the ground and it shatters and cuts Alex’s foot.
“So they end up finishing it with a different bowl. At this point, Ler is just a wreck, and Alex had turned on . . . he had this remote control with the hot tub, and the hot tub was going with this waterfall, and next thing you know we’re out in the hot tub, with the floating champagne glasses. And I’m wearing Alex’s wife’s favorite hat, unbeknownst to me, and I’m completely ruining it by hanging out in the waterfalls, drunken bastards.
“Ler comes out, he’s trying to put his swim trunks on, he’s rolling around on the concrete, completely nude, just oblivious, trying to put the damn swim trunks on, and Alex is a standing there with champagne going, ‘Damn, Ler.’ We have our evening in the hot tub, Ler ends up somewhere passed out, various people have fallen to the wayside. I don’t know what time it was in the morning. I ended up out in the studio with Alex, Tim “Herb” Alexander, our drummer, who didn’t drink at our party at all, and we’re trying to record some stuff. And I was so drunk, I couldn’t play the bass. I’ve never been so drunk that I couldn’t at least play something.
“Next thing I remember, I wake up, I hear this voice, ‘Trous, Trous,’ and that’s our road manager’s name. So I look around and I’m sitting on some couch in some room. I walk out of the room to the stairwell, and there’s Ler at the bottom, completely naked, holding a towel to his crotch. And he just kind of looks up at me, doesn’t even acknowledge me, and turns back around. ‘Trous, Trous.’ He’s calling our road manager. ‘Where’s my clothes? And who cut my hair?’ And then we played Lollapalooza that night in Toronto, and we were damaged goods.”
Les has passed on his appreciation for Rush to the next generation. “Yes, the thing is now, my son, who is twelve, he has been playing upright bass in school, in the orchestra for the past three years, and I just recently bought him an electric bass guitar, and he had no interest in it prior. He still prefers playing the upright bass, and he’s always had pretty eclectic tastes. His favorite band, if you asked me a year ago, it was Parliament, and he’s playing ‘Flashlight’ and ‘Atomic Dog.’ He was a pretty heavy kid, and he was learning about astronomy in school, and he starts talking about black holes, and I asked him, ‘Do you know about Cygnus?’ ‘Oh yeah, Cygnus the black hole that is closest to our solar system.’ He’s rattling off all this information.
“I said, ‘Check this out,’ and busted out Farewell to Kings and played him ‘Cygnus X-1.’ And he’s reading all the lyrics, and then I showed him the intro, the beginning part to ‘Cygnus X-1,’ on the bass, and he’s really getting into Rush now. Which is a phenomenal thing. He’s into Rush, the Residents and Parliament. That’s amazing! And I’m seeing way more young kids who are getting into bands who have musicians that are a little more technically proficient than some of the popular musicians of the past fifteen years or so; they’re getting into Rush, Yes, old King Crimson, and it’s an encouraging thing.”
Did this mean Rush were cool again? Were they ever cool?
Says Les, “I don’t remember Rush and the word cool ever being in the same sentence, growing up. But then again, we were the guys who weren’t looking for those types of things. What was cool back when this was going around? It was like Eddie Money, shit like that. Who gives a shit? It’s all subjective.
“To me, this is amazingly cool,” continues Les, pointing to the band shot on the back of 2112. “I wish they would still come out with this. That’s phenomenal; that’s unbelievable. That’s a statement. Look at the bulge! Look at Alex — he’s got the bulge going! It’s phenomenal. I would go for this look. I would do it in a heartbeat. I may not pull off the bulge though.
“The thing is — and I tell my kids this all the time — the people who are truly cool are the people that don’t know they are cool and don’t try. To me, that’s the definition of true coolness. It’s being comfortable in your own skin, which is what you’re wearing on your skin, how you’re wearing your hair, how you look, how you smell, all of it. It’s being comfortable with yourself. And I’ve always tried to project that. You look at pictures of the Grateful Dead. Were they cool? To their fans they were extremely cool and well loved. But there are a lot of people who would not think they are cool. I remember hearing comments by the Beastie Boys, who did not think Rush was cool at all. And here’s the Beastie Boys, a lot of people think they’re pretty cool. But there are a lot of people who don’t think they’re very cool either. So it depends on your perspective.
“I think if you spend your life trying to be cool, you’re just going to be this insecure wreck. Because it’s all subjective. And there are many elements to that subjectiveness: where it’s being perceived, what time it’s being perceived, by which age group, by which demographic, by which gender. I tell my kids this all the time: just be yourself and be comfortable with it. That’s the way to be a happy human being. And for these guys, they make music they believe in, and they’ve made music they believe in for a long time.
“I’m sure like all of us, they have different periods where they are less enthused by what they did. Because at the time we’re telling them, ‘You gotta play “By-Tor,” you gotta play “Cygnus.”’ And they’re going, ‘Yeah right, Claypool, right.’ They thought we were nuts. Why would they want to go back and play that dungeons and dragons stuff? Well, it’s your high school haircut again. You look at your high school haircut at a certain point in time, you go whoa, what the hell was I thinking? Then it kind of comes around. I have my high school haircut again. And for these guys, they are selling out sheds all over the place, they are revered . . . they have a revered hunk of music history. Last year they had their first big piece in Rolling Stone; I was blown away. It was like holy shit. And it took about thirty years. But I don’t have a subscription to Rolling Stone — it’s obviously not too cool to me.”
Chapter 2
Counterparts
“What is genuine enthusiasm and what is ego and what is territory?”
If there’s one thing Geddy, Alex and Neil were to bring forward from their experience on Roll the Bones, it was that rare and yet magical “when it happened” sense of spontaneity — creativity on the fly. It’s not something one associates with Rush, and indeed not even something that is all too detectable by the listener, but it is of no mind; if it sparked the guys, if it made record-making more enjoyable, then it was going to happen.
For two reasons: (1) the band were quite sure it made the music better and (2) at this point in their career, they damn well needed reasons to keep doing it. Might be an exaggeration, but imperceptibly, invisibly, as we enter the ’90s watching Rush, we increasingly got the sense that if the band ended for one reason or another, nobody was going to go off the deep end. Canadian to the core, no doubt a large part of keep on keeping on at this point was the responsibility the guys felt to their immediate family and their extended business families to keep the franchise operating at peak size. No inflamed desire or obsession to grow it, but more like, wouldn’t it be nice if we could keep doing this? And if not, there’s golf, baseball, biking, solo records, art, wine, planes, archery, learning French, travel, family, Canada.
