Driven: Rush in the '90s and In the End , page 9
“The nature of the recording style they have is a bit pristine and anal,” continues Kevin, “but I said to Geddy, wait until you hear this amongst guitars. You’ll hear it bites through. Your bass is so easy to hear through the guitars without making it louder than everything else. You can get a really deep groove through this thing and still hear all the notes. And so when we did a few tests on the first recording, he saw that, and he was like, ‘You know, this is really working well,’ and he got very comfortable with it. In the studio Geddy was a lot of fun, very easygoing, very straightforward to work with; he was concerned with detail, the minutiae, whereas Alex was very much concerned about where he was in the big picture. Alex was more abrasive in the studio — it was always more of a threat to him; the process was more difficult for him. And Neil, we never saw Neil. He came in and drummed and went back to his little room — and smoked wads of weed.
“There definitely seemed to be a rift between Geddy and Neil at that point,” notes Kevin. “You know, I don’t know that I ever saw Geddy and Alex talking to Neil. He would do his thing on his own, and they would work through a lot of stuff on their own; they were like two different facets of the same thing. Neil had his own room where he’d be writing. He’d come and do his bits, and he wouldn’t be in the control room when we were recording, and I don’t know why. Maybe Geddy wanted people around him that were committed to the same vision he had; I really don’t know. I mean, we went to his house, we went to baseball games, we looked at his baseball collection. Geddy was definitely the friendliest of all; he was the one who enjoyed the recording more than the others. There’s a wonderful version of ‘Stick It Out’ where he puts on his mother’s voice. He does this crusty old Jewish lady’s voice, and he redid the lyrics and we did a version like that, which I have to find somewhere — it was hysterical. ‘Geddy, Geddy, come here, come here.’ Really funny.
“We had lots of fun. We were staying up in Morin Heights and I remember we’d go out, Alex and I, and we would get pretty trashed. And then I’d go into the studio the next day, and Peter Collins would say to me, ‘Oh, Caveman, it’s about the drinkey-poos.’ I was like, okay, I got your point. ‘Caveman, it’s about the drinkey-poos.’”
But again, all told, it was a battle, with Kevin saying there were “lots of fights.” Ultimately, past the battle of wills, the band did things their way all through, and then to put an exclamation point on it, they did a cleaning-up process in the mix that helped make sure that in the end Kevin didn’t get the sounds he wanted.
Recalls Geddy with respect to the drums: “From Neil’s point of view, the whole analog approach, the whole kind of John Bonham–ish approach that Caveman took to recording his drums, Neil had feared there wasn’t enough nuance, there wasn’t enough subtlety in the sound. That’s one of the reasons we never did that combination of people again: the heavy-handedness. He felt he was a bit heavy-handed. I didn’t feel that way, although I’m kind of a sceptic — I had to be shown that going backwards was going forwards. Whereas Alex grasped it much more easily. I remember some of the songs we wanted to do a string section, and there was some frustration in finding a room because we gave ourselves the limitation of wanting to work in Toronto, and the studio situation in Toronto is kind of limited.
“Making a record is a strange dynamic, emotionally. Yeah, making any record, if there was change, had its difficulties for sure. You know, Alex not being able to use his gear and just recording the sound direct is hard, but every engineer we’ve ever worked with wants him to do that, maybe with the exception of Nick. I have no problem telling you if I was pissed off. It’s just I don’t remember being so. I mean, I didn’t hedge when we discussed Peter Henderson and those frustrations, so why would I hedge on the Caveman?”
“I think they thought I was overstepping my role from the get-go,” muses Shirley. “But I think that secretly Peter Collins enjoyed that they were being pushed, and I think Geddy enjoyed that they were being pushed, and he was going to work through it because he knew Peter would pull me back when he needed to. But Peter let me go. Peter sat in the room while Alex and I were having a hard-core fight about the sound — and Peter didn’t do anything. He sat there with his stogie in his mouth and his legs hanging off the chair and he just let us go at it, until such time as it was appropriate for him to step in.
“And then he was like, ‘All right, lads, let’s take a break for lunch; has anyone got the money?’ And off we’d go and have lunch at some fancy, awesome restaurant. But yeah, I think they thought I was overstepping. Like I said, Alex took me to the hotel bar to get drunk, and he wanted to read me the riot act. He was like, by the way, in case you didn’t notice, I’m the royalty artist and you’re the hired gun, so if I say something, it’s going to go that way. I’m like, ‘What if I feel differently? Then I’m going to say what’s on my mind.’ And so we kind of worked that out. I think one of the benefits of not knowing the heritage of the band and not being that familiar with the music is that it’s hard to come at them with the sort of godly worship status they so obviously deserve. I didn’t really have that sense of awe around them; I wasn’t awestruck by them, and so it was easy for me to do that. It wasn’t really arrogance . . . Yeah, it may have been a little bit.”
Kevin’s dynamic with the band was different from the one between them and Mr. Big. Explains Kevin: “Peter and the band were very cordial, a very respectful relationship. I didn’t necessarily always understand the nature of the producer that Peter was because I had never seen that before. He’s very much one of letting the creative forces happen around him and adjudicating them. He’s not like the elephant in the room, the great musician no one sees — he just looks at the overview. He sees when things are not working, or when they don’t feel right. Neil would play a part; he’d run through the whole song, and then Neil would say, ‘How was that?’ Peter would go, ‘Let’s do another one — I think you’ve got a better pocket somewhere.’ And then Neil would go, ‘Okay, here we go again,’ and he’d play the whole track again. And I was like, ‘Uh, that’s it?! You’re going to say “pocket” every time someone plays the drums? It’s like what about fix that fill or change that kick drum beat. But pocket? What is this, Oliver Twist?’
“For a start, I think the term producer gets used loosely. Wherever he is now, I think Terry at the beginning was more of a guiding hand. Whereas by the time they got ten years down the track, the guys were looking for inspiration. Producers are making and breaking records ten years later; the nature of the business had changed. There are people that are constructing songs, and radio is taking them to different levels, and they’re selling millions and millions of units. So they go, well, maybe we need to look around a little more. Terry’s great, he’s friendly, we get on well with him, we trust what he does, we go into the studio. Perhaps they never feel pushed or challenged. Perhaps they never felt like they were stretched musically, performance-wise or creatively. And so it may very well be that they were looking for a kick in the ass that a new guy was going to come in and do. I mean, if Peter said when he first met them that he hated all the records that had gone before, maybe they wanted to hear that. It’s like, great, guess what, we feel kind of the same way right now, ’cause we’ve lived with them forever — show us where you can take us. Show us if you have direction, show us if you have a vision, show us if you have a plan for us — that’s where I see that.
“But they obviously had that trust, that he was going to bring out all these elements that he brought out. I wasn’t there in the preproduction process either — they did this up in a studio in Toronto, where I went to see them for the first time — so I don’t know how much of an input he had in preproduction. All I saw was the studio environment. Alex and Geddy had prerecorded their parts and done demos with vocals, with a click track, and then Neil would come in and play on that click track, and that would be the basis for the beginning of the song. They would build up the song with these instruments and a click track, and then put Neil on and then rebuild the instruments. And there were some times when Alex couldn’t match a solo that was on the demos, where he had cut something and just didn’t feel like he could get it again. So we actually lifted those parts from the demos, from the room in Toronto, and used them in the final album.
“I think a lot of bands are open to change,” muses Kevin. “You’ll probably find that most of them want to change. There are a few of them that stick to these formulas they have. But I think Rush was like anyone else. Rush is consistently selling one million albums, one million albums, one million albums. They almost sell the same number of albums to the unit each time — the fan base is that solid. So anything they change, they know they have a fan base, and they’re always looking for something else in their fan base. Maybe we can cross over, maybe we can get like these guys, maybe we can get the bikers, maybe we can get the swoony teen girls, whatever. It doesn’t surprise me at all that they were doing this. I don’t think they’ve ever had boundaries for themselves. Maybe Power Windows and some of the Rupert Hine stuff was a serious, conscientious effort to try to garner some radio play and try to expand their market beyond what it consistently was — a big fan base.
“Also I think early Rush was such an experiment for them, and so much fun, just three kids having a blast, being progressive and just throwing whatever you could, time changes, this change, that change. Occasional nods to Zeppelin, occasional nods to this, that and the next thing. But I think that in the five years when it became more of a job, they started looking at selling records and, you know, not really getting out there and having quite as much fun. There’s more than Molson on the rider at that point. I think we give them too much credit, when you think they are structuring their career. I think they just play — they play, they grow up, they have kids and their impetus is different. It’s like, you know, tonight instead of an eight ball, we’re going to have a beer, and somehow your writing changes when you do that. Or we’re going to go and have dinner with my parents, whatever; things change as you get older, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing, but I think that comes out in your writing.”
Geddy is the first to put a positive spin on the change, as well as take the mystery out of it. “I don’t know, it was just that we came out of a way of recording and the kind of gear we were using, the attitude we had, and we all wanted to make this kind of record. And you realize, well, he wants you to use this amp and really distort your bass and, you know, change. It’s one thing to talk about change and it’s another thing to change. I guess that’s what it boils down to. For me, pulling out the Fender and the old amps, and for Alex, doing what he had to do to change, was a little prickly. You’ve got to kind of prove it to yourselves. You could say, ‘Okay, I’ll try it. Show me it’s worth changing all this stuff for.’
“And so then you do. You lay down a couple tracks and then holy fuck, sounds great! And your frustrations and your fears disappear. It’s funny what you learn. Working with a lot of different engineers is informative, because every time you have a new engineer, you feel like you have to re-explain your sound to them, re-educate them, so they don’t wreck your sound, change your sound. But at the end of the day, your sound comes from your fingers. The way you play says more about what you sound like, and that’s one thing we all learned through that. Regardless of working with all these different people over six or seven records, it still sounded like us. At the end of the day, your sound is kind of indelible. It can’t easily be destroyed. Kevin Shirley . . . finding an engineer was an interesting search. I can’t remember how we ended up with the Caveman, but he certainly fits the bill. He was quite a character.”
As Kevin alluded to, the band had a novel, even ingenious, way of working, using their eight-track demos as a guide to extricate Neil’s parts, only doable because they were played to a click. These eight-track recordings were transferred to twenty-four-track, as it turns out, not entirely necessary, except for the fact that some of the performances were kept and used. Neil worked his way through eleven songs in three days, and then he was gone, which is pretty normal for drummers once they are recorded. Once finished, the band had difficulty sequencing the album, with Alex taking the reins with a magnetic board so the band could ponder the song order, which ultimately was predicated on the punchier tracks up front and a letdown at the end.
For the cover art applied to Counterparts, Hugh Syme went austere and ’90s — in fact, Syme would be one of the important album cover guys that helped define the ’90s aesthetic, along with Dave McKean, who did the same but at the heavier metal end of things. Syme offers a simple image in black, regal blue and faux-gold. The name of the band is rendered completely in lower case, and the album title is not included in the cover art. Lightheartedly sexual (after all, this is a rock ’n’ roll band), there’s a diagram of a bolt going into a nut. The roadmap-like foldout CD booklet reinforced this theme of items that are counterparts of each other. In effect, the real album cover consists of all these many clever Syme images collated and considered as a whole.
Wrote Neil in the tourbook: “The Concise Oxford defines ‘counterpart’ both as ‘duplicate’ and as ‘opposite,’ in the sense of ‘forming a natural complement to another.’ That’s what I thought was so interesting about the word: considered in this way, contraries are reflections of each other, opposite numbers, and not necessarily contradictions, enemies, The Other. Polarities are not to be resisted but reconciled. Reaching for the alien shore. Dualities like gender or race are not opposite but true counterparts, the same and yet different and not to be seen as some existential competition — we could do without that. Better yet: we could get along without that.”
Later, Peart brings it closer to home, stating, “Counterparts. Words and music. Guitar, bass, drums. Writing, rehearsing, and recording. Flying and driving and working and laughing. Alex’s flashes of dazzling spontaneity, twisted humor and emotional fire, Geddy’s melodic instinct, wry wit and meticulous passion, my own obsessive drive and rhythmic bombast. True synergy, I guess: the whole greater than the parts — which are, after all, just humble old us.”
After all the teething pains, the noses bent out of shape, the expense and the time spent, Counterparts opens in authoritative fashion, Neil grooving like he hadn’t for years, allowing himself out of his cozy matchbox so that he and his fans could breathe again. This blessing is bestowed upon “Animate”: Peart’s drums sounded expensive but less precious, throaty like one of his hot cars rather than fingers tapping on the jewelry case, idly shopping for watches. Arrives Geddy and all those thoughtful guitars from Alex, creating a bassy mélange that is warm and plush. An arcane and mesmerizing melody then transports the listener into the dense forest of what is arguably Rush’s finest track past Signals until the end.
“I love [‘Animate,’] offers Geddy unequivocally. “I think it’s one of the great songs we’ve done. There’s something about the bestiality of that song, the insistence of it.” Bestiality might be going too far, but then again, Rush had been raising bunnies lately. But insistence, sure — not only have the band rediscovered panoramic and proper production, but they exploit it fully, filling up the sound picture with performances that are regal, bold and driving. Heck, even the lyrics read like a mysterious invocation of dark forces, reinforced by Neil’s rock ’n’ roll chant at the start, an unexpected count-in, casual and absolutely welcome.
While Neil applied concepts around male/female duality from both Carl Jung and Camille Paglia to his idea of an interesting love song, Geddy got busy using that Ampeg amp “on the verge of death” that Kevin had forced upon him. There’s also a cool shift where Neil breaks out of his groove and creates a tribal rhythm inspired by African music. The break continues with a regular beat, Alex texturizing in the background, Geddy’s bass gnarly. Escaping with a muscular fill from Neil, the band is back into another sublime verse, interesting synths bubbling in the background. Fully a creative success, and really, no breakaway from recent Rush ideals, just recorded with enough bass.
As Neil expresses in the tourbook, “[‘Animate’] is not about two individuals, but about one man addressing his anima — his feminine side, as defined by Carl Jung. Within that duality, what ‘a man must learn to gently dominate’ is himself, his own ‘submissive trait,’ while also learning to ‘gently dominate’ the animus — the male thing — and the other hormone-driven ‘A-words’ like aggression and ambition. We dominate by not submitting, whether to brute instinct, violent rage or ruthless greed. For the rest of it (meaning the rest of the album’s songs), we can all dominate or submit as the occasion warrants, try to reconcile the duplicates and opposites, and dream of racing through life at the speed of love (one hundred and eighty-six thousand miles per second, if you believe in love at first sight). Everyone wants the ideal of ‘forming a natural complement to another.’ A counterpart. Friendship, love and partners in life and work are the rewards for bridging that gap between ‘duplicate’ and ‘opposite.’”
The album’s lead single would be an even heavier track, leaving no time to catch one’s breath. “Stick It Out” crashes into view with an elephantine heavy metal riff played simultaneously by Alex and Geddy, no Neil in sight until a hi-hat pattern meekly presents itself. Geddy’s not so fast with the praise on this one. “In retrospect, I love the riff — it’s a great riff song. I love playing it, and it’s a very bass-heavy song, which always makes me happy. Lyrically it’s kind of a so-so song for us. I don’t know, I think the best thing about that song is the vibe and the fact that it’s stripped back down to a trio, back to doing riff rock. I think that was the important thing about that song. ‘Animate’ is more what we were after, this combination of bringing different rhythmic attitudes back into it while trying to add a bit more funk at the same time, but be big-bottomed and aggressive.”
