Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 8
“I was broke and impoverished, living in New York, and I was sending out tapes to all sorts of people to try to get any work,” explains Kevin. “And I sent one to Peter Collins and he said, ‘Come see the band.’ So I flew up to Toronto, met with the band. I tried to go back home to the United States, and the United States didn’t let me back in. I was stuck in Toronto, with my two-year-old baby son in New York City. So I called them up and I said, ‘Do I have the job?’ They said, ‘We’ll let you know in a couple of weeks.’ And I said, ‘Well, I need to know now, because I’m stuck in Toronto.’ They said, ‘Let us call you back in an hour.’ So I stayed at the airport, had no money and no ticket anywhere, and one of the flight attendants came and said, ‘You can stay at my house.’ And then I called Rush, and they said, ‘Okay, you got the job.’
“So I said, ‘Okay, then, there’s another thing: I need some money.’ So they said fine. It was a Friday night and on Saturday, Pegi sent over some cash to me and I managed to get a house and was stuck in Canada for like a month before we started work on the album.
“I think they were looking for something different,” continues Kevin, on the subject of why they went with him. “They had a listen to my tape, and I think Neil was very impressed with the way the drums sounded. He asked me questions. ‘Why do the drums sound like that?’ And I said, ‘Well, you know, they’re analog and we recorded on a Neve, and I like not to EQ the cymbals.’ And so he said, ‘I love that.’ And then we went to work finally. We used an SSL console that went straight to digital and everything that I didn’t do. ‘That’s the way I like my drums to sound.’ So I was like, ‘Wow, okay, sure.’”
When asked if he was surprised Rush wanted to work with him, Shirley responded, “No, I wasn’t — why would you be? I didn’t know anything about Rush. I knew Power Windows, to be honest — that’s all I knew. And I knew Peter Collins from the Gary Moore stuff. Especially ‘Out in the Fields,’ which I was a big fan of. I thought it sounded great. But no, I was struggling too hard to even be impressed by it. I was like, anything that pays, I’ll do it. I mean, I was a fan of Power Windows to a point. I’ve always been a Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple head, so I really like that tactile rock, where you identify the performance by the style of the players. And Rush was always a little more technical than that for me, a little more progressive, so I wasn’t a huge fan. But like I said, I liked Power Windows. I thought it was a cool record, I had the vinyl, but I wasn’t really a fan — that should be said.
“Presto and Roll the Bones for me were very much indicative of what was going on in the ’80s. And we were in the beginning of the ’90s at that point. I thought it sounded like Flock of Seagulls, Men Without Hats, even Duran Duran and Depeche Mode — they’re all kind of lumped to me. I know there are Duran Duran fans that would kill me, but I kind of lumped them all together. It wasn’t something I enjoyed at all. And Presto and Roll the Bones had that very plonky keyboard-like thing about them. I didn’t like that. One of the things that’s a Peter Collins strength is he gets people around him who have opinions and he lets them work things out. He doesn’t have the grand overview like a Mutt Lange does. Peter gets people in and he watches them work to their strengths. And so when I got in there, I was kind of hell-bent on making a heavy record. And they weren’t that in tune with that, but they weren’t diametrically opposed to it. There was an element they wanted to introduce into the music. They took what they could from that and from me in that regard and applied it to the album.”
And according to Peter Collins, Geddy had an agenda that aligned with that too. “The bottom end was an issue with Geddy,” says Peter. “He wanted a bigger bottom end. He had worked with two English producers back to back, an English and Australian engineer, and I think he was still unhappy with the way the bottom end was sounding. So that was an issue for this next record.”
But as usual, these were creative issues, so there was no interaction between Collins and Rush manager, Ray Danniels, back at the Anthem office on College Street. “No, never. I barely saw Ray,” says Collins when asked if he worked much with Danniels. “Mostly at gigs. And he’d come by the studio when we were in Toronto. But he was very, very supportive.”
Lyrically speaking, “They had changed,” continues Collins, who goes on to chart the construction process. “There were fewer story songs coming from Neil; that’s one of the things I noticed. There were more sort of abstract ideas that he was putting into song form. Slightly more mystical, perhaps relationship-based, rather than the ‘Red Barchetta’ type of material or ‘Manhattan Project.’ The process would be, the band would work on their own until they got the songs into some sort of shape where they could play them to me. And then I would come in for a week, usually, a week to ten days, and they would have some basic demos to play to me, and I’d sit and listen to them and make notes — both rehearsal facilities had studios — and we’d work on them, adjust and fine-tune and make changes and come up with something we could track to. We’d have all the tempos established, keys, all the basic changes.”
Material-wise, “It seemed like a natural progression. I didn’t think, oh my goodness, this is a complete change. I took the material as it came and worked with it and tried to maximize it. I didn’t notice any huge difference in direction in songwriting. I’d noticed that gradual difference, from moving away from story songs. And something like ‘Stick It Out,’ I suppose it went with the whole direction of using the Caveman and a more organic sound and a little bit more classic rock.”
As for the attendant heaviness, “A lot of it was encouraged by Kevin,” figures Peter. “It was coming from the band, but it was heavily supported by Kevin. He was a huge Zeppelin fan, he was a fan of recording everything very simply, of having Alex go and play out in the room as opposed to in the control room, which Alex was not happy about at all initially, and then he grew to love it. And the whole concept of the drums being more of a mono item, where you could see the drums as one instrument, rather than drums spread out over the stereo picture.”
Fleshing out this concept of Alex freed from the confines of the control room, Peter figures, “Kevin just believed the guitar needed to be in the room where the instruments were playing, because not only would the guitar player be more in touch with the sound, he also believed the sound of the drums and the leakage going into the guitar pickup was an important part of the guitar sound. I had never heard that philosophy before, but I liked it. I guess Alex liked it as well. We certainly bought into it. Because normally in the control room, after he had played something, there would be the discussion about, you know, was that good, what do we need to redo and blah blah blah. But if he’s out in the studio, he wasn’t party to all the discussions about his performance. He could just read a book, wait until he was asked to play again. And he didn’t have to deal with all the critiquing of his work. It was difficult initially, but he grew to really enjoy it, and certainly on Test for Echo we did it that way as well, even though Kevin wasn’t engineering.”
Peter says the guys were a bit taken aback by Kevin’s forthrightness, his confidence and directness. “Yes. I think they were. They’re not used to that, that cavalier sort of attitude. They are used to very, very detailed engineers, very detail-oriented, which Kevin’s not. He wants the big picture and he wants it to hit him. He’ll make that decision fairly quickly, and it’s kind of written on Kevin’s face whether it’s happening or not. I love that about him, but it was a bit of an adjustment for the band. I’m not sure whether Neil seemed happy with his drum sound at the time. He might have questioned it, because on the next record we went back to more of the individual miking of each element of his kit.”
As for ditching the keyboards, “I was supportive of them going as well,” notes Collins. “I like to think of myself as a commercial producer, and in the amount of time that lapsed between finishing Hold Your Fire and working on Counterparts, my sensibility changed, and I was totally aware of the Seattle sound, that whole movement, and I realized it didn’t particularly involve keyboards. What I understood is that an essential part of Rush’s sound was keeping it in that simple analog area. We did bring John Webster in on Counterparts, but it was not very much.” Webster, having worked with Stonebolt, Red Rider and Tom Cochrane as a solo artist (and myriad other famous sessions, along with Peter on Hey Stoopid), is credited with “additional keyboards,” while Geddy takes a simple synthesizers credit.
This eye toward Seattle, reflects Peter, “precipitated a change of direction back to more of their roots sound from the ’70s. It was just in the air. They had done the hyped-up sound and they were ready to do something else, a more organic sound, and to incorporate from time to time some of the more progressive elements of digital recording and digital sounds, combining the two.”
And fortunately, says Peter, Alex and Kevin “were cut out of the same cloth. They’ve both got a real rock ’n’ roll sensibility. Even though Alex’s taste incorporates effects more than Kevin’s would, they still have that very basic attitude toward rock, while both Geddy and Neil could get to more cerebral places. Alex wanted to rock. And you know he was kept . . . not kept from it, but the type of music that Rush does . . . a lot of it is quite complex. And Caveman’s sensibility is not complex music. It’s very rootsy, so he connected with Alex at that level. Alex really liked his guitar tones, and it was not as stressful as it had been when we worked in the ’80s. We didn’t multi-track guitars endlessly. We kept one guitar, it worked, we did it. I seem to remember using more acoustic guitar as well.”
After one particular war over reverb, Kevin and Alex went and got loaded at the bar that evening on “five bottles of scotch” and worked out their differences. “Yes, and then Alex was actually kind of cool with that,” says Peter. “And again, he was recording not in the control room for the first time in a long time. We set him up with amplifiers in the studio, he had a stool and he had headphones, he was removed from all the conversation going on in the studio. There was Geddy talking to Peter — Neil wasn’t in the studio a lot — and Alex didn’t have to listen to them going, ‘Was that good?’ He would get in there and he’d play. And he gave up his PRS guitars for a while. I said to him, ‘They’re pretty guitars; they should be like coffee tables. Why don’t you play the Les Paul? Why don’t you play the Telecaster again?’ And so he’d pull out these old guitars and he really enjoyed it. He would take the Les Paul, plug it into a Marshall and turn it fucking loud in that room, in Quebec, and he’d play, and I think he had a blast.”
“A lot of players, as they get older, tend to rely on effects to disguise some of what they see as inadequacies in their playing,” says Shirley. “And I see it all the time. I shouldn’t say older, but the more experienced players, they drift away from their roots, where they never had the option to disguise things with delays and choruses and reverbs and all sorts of things, and they tend to rely on it more. Especially when there’s one guitar player in a band and you have to fill a void, a stadium every night, just to be able to pluck a string and have it go ‘ga-zing, ga-zang, ga-zoong’ is a wonderful thing. But in the studio, it all sounds like a jingle to me. And I’m still not a fan of that stuff; I fight it all the time with all the ‘heritage’ acts I work with.
“But I got a sense after the whiskey evening at the Four Seasons hotel in Toronto, where we just got destroyed, he kind of accepted that’s where we were going to go, and that we were going to leave the past behind in terms of his guitar sound, and he just came in and he enjoyed it. Maybe initially he resigned himself to it, and then he just embraced it. It was like, I’m a kid again, I’m playing my guitar, I’m playing all my old guitars, you know, it’s fun. It was creative, everything that you know it should have been. There were new parts coming out; there’s ‘Between Sun & Moon’ when the Tele came out, ‘Animate’ and ‘Stick It Out,’ where he had the big dirty Les Pauls going on. It was exciting for him not to have the same old PRS with a bee-in-a-jar type of distortion that he’d had for the past five or six years.”
And then there was Geddy, who had summarily given up using a bass for the frequency of bass a long, long time before, maybe since Signals back in 1982. Deliberately, of course — the choices Rush made were always highly deliberate. But that doesn’t mean it always made for good music. And the guys often recognize that, expressing regrets from time to time, changing over time, varying in intensity.
“Geddy’s one of the great jokesters of all time,” says Kevin. “He’s so much fun, really a blast. We started recording in Quebec and Geddy had his Gallien-Kruegers; he had the big black and green cone bass speakers. Never liked the sound of them — it’s, you know, why did you employ me to do this job, when I’m not a big fan of what you do? But he had these big speakers, and when he hit the bass guitar, it sounded like a big low note on a piano. It went ‘ding, ga-zing, ga-zing’ and I thought it sounded awful. I never liked the Level 42 thumb bass.
“So we went into the back room of the studio, and there was some stuff they were throwing out. And there was an old . . . what do they call them? B2 or something? The old Ampeg where the head folds into the cabinet like that — you fold it out. And it was awful; the speaker was all cut and destroyed. And I took it and I said, ‘Geddy, let’s try this.’ So we took it into the room and we plugged it in, and the speaker was distorting because it was all rattled and everything. And Geddy was like, ‘That’s useless, that’s a piece of shit, I’m not —’ ‘Let’s try it.’ So we tried it. And I went to the control room and I heard it and it sounded phenomenal. It had this natural distortion on it, but it still had this warm fatness. It wasn’t as loud as a big system, but it’s a recording session; it’s not a gig. And I could hear this big, low, thick bass in there, and I said, ‘You’ve got to record this amp; it just sounds phenomenal.’ So we recorded the bass on this whole album with this little Ampeg amplifier that was destined for the garbage.”
“Well, it was just using the old gear,” recalls Geddy of the sessions, a bit dismissively. “I think I had to bring every bass I owned at one point, try everything out. Because he wanted that real rock vibe. We went through that whole thing; you know, you get snippy with engineers — it happens. Because engineers . . . I’ve never met an engineer who is wrong. They are all right. How are you going to argue that? But at the same time, there’s always a bit of a turf war with an engineer, because he wants you to sound like this, you want to sound like this. And it may be the same sound, but if you’re not speaking the same language, you’re not quite sure if it’s the same sound until you hear it back. So you go through that kind of arm-wrestling. I have been known to have a fair share of arguments with engineers over sound. But I don’t remember anything profound with the Caveman. I remember being frustrated with some of his abilities in terms of using gear that was not analog, because he was like an analog beast. I’m sure that’s changed, because there’s been a revolution of sound since then. So it was a little frustrating from that point of view. And he had a terrible tooth problem at the time; he was in a lot of pain. I had to send him to someone to fix his tooth, but that’s a whole other story.”
“I wanted to get rid of the Wal bass,” confirms Kevin. “I wanted to get rid of Alex’s effects; I wanted to get rid of all of that stuff that smacked of Flock of Seagulls to me. And I was so anti-keyboards at that point in my life; I couldn’t stand keyboards on records. We were coming out of the DX7 phase, and MIDI had just come in and everyone had banks and banks of keyboards in every studio in the world and I hated it, I really hated it. I mean, there was a time when there was no guitar in music. It was dying out as an instrument, kind of weird. And as a Blackmore, Page, Beck fan — all those — that was awful. I’ve probably mellowed a bit, but I still don’t like keyboards.
“But the keyboards were not a big part of that thing. We finished all the tracks basically without keyboards, and then we got John Webster, who did all the keyboards in Aerosmith. We would send him tracks and he would send us back tracks, ear candy as Peter Collins called it, things going zing, zing, zing all over the place. But they were just sort of meant to make the rock sound classy. There were a few places he put keyboards in, but it wasn’t really done as part of our sessions. He came down maybe for a day or two and just threw on bits and pieces that were previously worked out. ‘We’ll put keyboards in this section, in that section.’
“But they definitely were not a part of the sessions. They may have been part of the writing and part of the preproduction, but once we started recording at Le Studio, it became a hard rock project. I mean, the rough mixes were very hard, very guitar-heavy, a lot of distorted bass. The drums were very roomy and ambient, kind of the way I like things to sound. And it was sounding very tough, especially tracks like ‘Stick It Out’ and ‘Animate’ — those were sounding super-tough. They tidied them up a little bit before it was released, much to my chagrin.”
Geddy was hesitant to ditch keys altogether. “I kept thinking, well, if there’s a part that’s just begging for it, why should you say no? I’m a big believer in rules are made to be broken. You can have a rule, no keyboards, but if there’s a part in a song that you just know would be better having a little melody there, it’s hard to walk away from that. We stuck a couple on in a couple little songs here and there but nothing major. And that was really good for Alex, in the sense of increasing his control over the sound of the band.”
