All Individuals
Back at the office, things were not looking good. Ray, who had mortgaged his house for the third time, had an ulcer and SRO (together with its Moon Records subsidiary) was several hundred thousand dollars in the red; meanwhile another financial crisis was looming: Ira Blacker had threatened a $1.4 million (US) lawsuit3. SRO had been busy with a number of new signings, each bringing their own stresses and strains, and the flagship band was sailing off on a course nobody expected. It was not all bad news for Rush – export sales were picking up around the world, especially in Europe and Japan, and Circus magazine readers voted the band the second best new group of the year, so they hadn’t been doing everything wrong. Even this was a two-edged sword given that Rush had been going for four years already.
At the Mercury ranch, faced with the growing displeasure of his senior executives, Cliff Burnstein remained bullish. “The label started having cold feet because the growth pattern was over, they started to think maybe this is not going to go anywhere,” he says. “All I could say was, listen, they are still good! There was nothing wrong with ‘Caress of Steel’ it just didn’t do as well but the other two albums continue to sell very steadily, so we are getting the numbers up cumulatively on all three albums and that gives us the figure base of people likely to go out and buy the next album, so don’t panic!” In January 1976, following a break it was time to usher the boys back into the studio. Ray met with Terry for lunch as was his habit, but neither knew exactly how things would turn out. “Ray and I would always meet prior to going into the studio,” says Terry. “He would always give me a directive about how we needed singles and how we needed to be a bit more commercially oriented, and I would always agree with him. At the same time I had this split allegiance, I wanted to get the best record we could make with the band, so there was always a bit of a tug.”
In the minds of Alex, Geddy and Neil, the next album would be exactly what they felt it needed to be. There would be another epic, it was decided, but it would be less musically indulgent and more direct. The music would be more up front, the lyrics would tell a clearer story, it would be better designed and more thoughtfully executed. In addition, the band had reached a comfort zone with its musicality: Geddy, for example, felt he’d defined his style. “I found it difficult to sing and play bass at the same time, so I started making my bass parts more melodic, which gave them something more in common with my singing. This helped make my bass patterns more musical instead of just fundamental roots. It also made my bass playing busier, which I liked.” It wasn’t just Geddy: all three players felt they now had the grounding they needed to pull off whatever was necessary.
The ideas for ‘2112’ started with a set of lyrics Neil had been writing on tour, based on a number of sources but which bore an uncanny resemblance to one book in particular – Ayn Rand’s ‘Anthem’, which had already inspired the opener to the album ‘Fly By Night’. Ayn Rand had fled to the United States to escape the totalitarian régimes of thirties Russia, and the theme of the book was very much about individuals against the system; given the context of disinterest, it is understandable that the band chose to make music that followed a similar storyline. “There’s a lot of passion there, that’s the way we were feeling at the time,” said Alex, still smarting some years later. “We knew what we were doing, what was the matter with everybody else? Why were they so worried? We weren’t!” Alex and his colleagues weren’t the only people to be influenced by Ayn Rand’s writings, says Donna Halper. “At High School, the book every self- respecting individualist wanted to read was ‘Atlas Shrugged’,” comments Donna. “Ayn Rand stood against the mindless conformity and obedience of the fifties and sixties.” Perhaps – but as the band were to find out, the messages didn’t always translate.
Geddy and Alex developed their music to fit the mood of the lyrics, a significant change from the past. As the band worked with Neil’s lyrical ideas, they adopted Ayn Rand as their artistic figurehead. “What caught our eye wasn’t her political point of view, but rather the artistic merit of her work,” said Geddy. The literary mentor gave the three permission to be themselves more than they had ever been before, “not to sell out and to keep doing” – or to really start doing – “our own thing.” Terry acted as a conduit meanwhile, and like concerned parents watching their adolescent offspring, Ray and Vic stood on the sidelines and kept as quiet as they could.
Towards the end of the sessions and still conscious of his own experiences with the ‘Caress of Steel’ cover, Hugh Syme came over to the studios to discuss the album concepts and share ideas for its packaging. Little did he know that the five-pointed star graphic on the inside cover would be quite so iconic. “The man is the hero of the story. That he is nude is just a classic tradition… the pureness of his person and creativity without the trappings of other elements such as clothing. The red star is the evil red star of the Federation, which was one of Neil’s symbols.”
Unexpectedly for Hugh, his keyboard skills were brought to bear as Geddy invited him to have a crack at adding some synthesizer to the opening of the title track. “Geddy had an interest in keyboards, so it became interesting for him to have an added texture on the project and I think the band had a degree of trust in checking it out,” says Hugh. Not only this, but he added a Mellotron line to Geddy’s song ‘Tears’. “Whatever was compelling in that song touched me and I was able to respond to it.” At the tail end of the sessions, the band found there was room for one more song. Starting a tradition of last minute tracks, they hastily threw together what would become ‘Twilight Zone’.
And it was done. The band had managed to stick to their ideals, but these were tempered ideals with a little realism. “‘2112’ was not commercial in the sense of radio commercial,” says Terry, “but it had commercial value, no question about that. I thought it was a pretty good balance, and I know the band did, it seemed to have worked.” It was, “like coming back with a vengeance,” said Alex. “We came back punching: that album still feels like that to me when I listen to it today - I can feel the hostility hanging out.”
Terry took the completed album to his friend George Graves, who worked at mastering company JAMF (Just Another Mastering Facility) in Toronto. George was immediately impressed by the boys, who were loath to let go of their new creation. “Rush was a band with members who were down to earth and didn’t have an ego problem,” he says.
Then, it was over to the powers that be, to see what they thought. First plays of the album at Mercury, now owned by Polygram, did not go well, and as the March release date approached, the company remained dubious about its commerciality, particularly as the band insisted on filling side one with the epic piece rather than the shorter tracks. For once, Cliff agreed with his bosses. “People were a bit freaked out at the company, and I was not one to argue,” he says. “I said, it’s not commercial in the sense that we pick hit singles off an album, which is the way they were used to selling the records. I said, you know, they have a fine following and it is a very ambitious record, so as long as the following is growing you just go with it.”
So, they did, but all parties recognised the huge risk the band was taking. The rebellion was a gamble, and the album had to succeed. “If it hadn’t done well, we wouldn’t have gone on,” said Neil. Released in March 1976, the album included a credit to Ms Rand in the liner notes, not only for her indirect moral support, but also to cover Neil’s backside. He thought to himself, “Oh gee, I don’t want to be a plagiarist here.”
Whatever was the magic formula, this time it worked. By June, ‘2112’ had sold 160,000 copies. The band was delighted, the record company was delighted; the management was relieved. “Just when it was crucially important, we pulled through,” said Neil. Then it was back to work. Cliff Burnstein got on with what he was best at – radio promotion – and this time he found he was pushing against an easier door. “You could feel that there was a ground swell of support for them around the country,” says Cliff. “It was very exciting and gradually we got more and more radio stations trying to find Rush. One of the things we would do was to buy advertising time on radio stations that didn’t play Rush, and people would hear the advertising and they would go and buy the fucking album, without having heard it before on the radio station. It always had a fantastic effect.” With ‘2112’ as well, Cliff found that an increasingly powerful fan base was emerging, that started doing his work for him. “‘2112’ was an underground album, a total word of mouth thing,” he says.
What Rush had attempted with ‘Caress of Steel’, it had achieved with ‘2112’, considered by the band to be the first fully-fledged Rush album. “‘2112’ was the album on which the sound of Rush was born,” commented Geddy. “We realized for the first time that we’d won a hard fought battle for our own independence and created a sound that was all of our own.” According to UK journalist Geoff Barton, “It marked a turning point in Rush’s career.” Not that it lit up the world – this was no ‘Sgt. Pepper’ – but it did well enough, peaking at 61 in the Billboard chart on 4 October 1976. What was more ‘2112’ paid for itself, the first time Rush had covered the costs of an album with its sales alone.
Despite this goodwill, the press was reasonably dismissive. Even rags that were supportive of the band, such as Circus, were a long way from fawning. “If Geddy’s voice was any higher and raspier,” commented the magazine’s Dan Nooger, “his audience would consist exclusively of dogs and extraterrestrials. He screams and howls like a man with his joint caught in a thumbscrew.” The desire to lead by musicianship led to claims that Rush were serious and distant, much to the band’s incomprehension. “We never really were that serious,” said Alex later. “You do a couple of things that may seem that way and you’re labelled no matter what you do. I don’t know, most of the time you couldn’t give a fuck, you have a good time and that’s it!”
First and foremost a live band, all it took to capitalise on the new-found popularity was to go on tour. The years of live dates had created a fan base that was not automatically swayed by whatever radio was playing; with ‘2112’, the fans found their own anthem, and Rush had found a dispossessed audience that they could relate to. “They got firmly entrenched with their audience, and the audience is always there for them,” says Terry Brown. Not least a young Brian Warner, later to take the stage name Marilyn Manson, who claimed ‘2112’ was “The scariest album I ever heard.”
By this time as well, SRO was running quite a tight touring operation, not least by putting key crew members on retainers. For the first time its stage set incorporated “oil and water” projected visuals, setting the precedent for Rush’s future tours. Geddy acquired a doubleneck guitar and bass, largely prompted by the need to play rhythm guitar during ‘Passage to Bangkok’.
After a single date in Illinois on 5 March 1976, the tour proper began ten days later, with four consecutive nights at the Starwood venue in Hollywood. As Rush re- established themselves on the live circuit they were frequently having to play support at the start of the tour, so ‘2112’ couldn’t be played in its entirety, usually missing out ‘Oracle’ and ‘Discovery’. The band played three weeks solid, then took a month off, and finished the tour at a more leisurely pace to growing audiences. The success of the album meant that Rush were headlining the majority of the later events, filling the halls that they had played, half empty, only months before. The band could even afford a transport upgrade: from seeing the Dodge sleeper in a parking lot all those years before, now they could get one of their own. They still took shifts driving, however!
With success came the first controversy. Inevitably, the five pointed star on the ‘2112’ cover brought up suggestions of devil worship, and the nod to objectivist Ayn Rand even led to rumours the band were closet fascists. Unlikely, given Geddy’s parentage, but rumours seldom worry about the facts.
To capitalise on the upbeat mood, in August 1976 Ray Danniels proposed that it was time for a live album, a “greatest hits on stage” to serve as an introduction to the band’s material. Even before ‘2112’, the plan had been to do “something historical”, according to Geddy, which offered the opportunity to offer more polished versions of some songs, than on the original vinyl. “Some of the old songs have developed until they’re superior to the originals,” said Geddy at the time. “This gives us a chance to bring them up to date.”
The double album consisted of material taken from three consecutive dates from the previous tour, 11-13 June at the symbolic Massey Hall in Toronto. During the last night at the Hall, on which the majority of the album was based, the band played even more aggressively than usual, largely because they thought things were messing up. Neil broke a snare drum during ‘Temple of Syrinx’, and Alex broke a string on ‘Working Man’: it was that raw anger that the band wanted to capture.
Unexpectedly, the band ended up spending over a month mixing the album, which was more than any previous, studio album. “We were going nuts by the end of it!” laughed Alex. In hindsight the result wasn’t that refined, as Geddy acknowledged over a decade later. “It was very raw,” he said. “Our sound was like that in those days anyway, and we did very little fixing up or knob twiddling. We were growing so fast that by the time it came out we thought we could have done better.”
Many consider ‘All The World’s A Stage’ to be the closing of the first chapter, as the cycle of four albums then a live album would repeat three more times in the band’s career. Indeed, said the liner notes, “This album to us, signifies the end of the beginning, a milestone to mark the close of chapter one, in the annals of Rush.”
The touring fans were thanked, just as the previous album ‘2112’ had thanked the core team that kept the band on the road. “We felt we had reached a first plateau,” said Geddy.
Released on 29 September, ‘All The World’s A Stage’ sold extremely well, at Number 40 charting higher than even ‘2112’, and going gold in under two months. It was then that the touring began with a passion. It was incessant, week on week on week, indeed rarely did a seven day period pass that didn’t have a Rush gig in it. The US leg of the tour ran from 18 September through to 22 May, a full seven months, and the venues were an order of magnitude larger than the tour before. This tour in particular tipped the balance between Rush acting as a support act and performing their own headlines, not least their first Canadian headline dates outside the Toronto area! The band had to import their live equipment set from the US, and were slapped with a $15,000 fine for the privilege. Welcome back…
Despite the steady progress, one thing that was still not happening enough, was radio play. As an indication of Cliff Burnstein’s exasperation he put together a radio sampler, called ‘Everything Your Listeners Ever Wanted To Hear By Rush… But You Were Afraid To Play’. “That was my little contribution,” says Cliff. The EP was compiled with what were seen as more radio-friendly songs, namely ‘Something for Nothing’, ‘Making Memories’, ‘Bacchus Plateau’ and an edited version of ‘2112’. In parallel, an advertising campaign was devised to promote each of the five albums to date.
Rush had only limited success with radio perhaps, but the same could not be said for its relationship with its burgeoning fan base. Perhaps because of the band’s pariah status with popular radio stations, the band were becoming role models for disenfranchised teens and twenty-somethings who saw through the mass marketing of the pop charts. The growing numbers of fans had not gone unnoticed by the band, and the players were keen to develop the relationship. “If you look at the very big bands with longevity, they’ve grown and progressed and their audiences have grown and progressed with them,” said Geddy. “We’re not looking for immediate results; we’re hoping to be around for years and years.”
It wasn’t just in the US and Canada that the band was picking up a following. While the band was now focusing on conquering the East Coast, ‘2112’ and its live successor had sparked a growing interest on the other side of the pond, through a number of good write-ups in the music press. English journalists on the look-out for the next big thing, were very conscious of the growing phenomenon that was the Canadian band, Rush. In particular Sounds journalist Geoff Barton was devoting significant column inches to the cause. “I was saying, this is a band you should pay attention to,” says Geoff. “I think that sort of set the ball rolling, people genuinely seemed to be interested in this band. There was no great hidden agenda, it was just finding these weird albums from this Canadian band and being enthusiastic about it!”
In addition Rush caught the attention of UK-based booking agent Neil Warnock, who had a reputation for placing Stateside acts such as Kiss and Aerosmith in Europe and overseas. “I was doing a lot of work with ATI, who were Rush’s US agents,” he explains. “There was an underground thing already coming through on the band.” Neil phoned his contacts and fixed a potential European itinerary, before calling SRO and proposing himself as Rush’s international agent. “They told me on that first call that I was the first English accent that they had on the phone! They couldn’t believe there was any market whatsoever for Rush in the UK, or anywhere else outside of Canada and the US.”
Rush’s distribution label weren’t helping their international interests – while Cliff might have been batting the band’s corner, there was little awareness from Mercury’s UK office. “The band hadn’t even heard from their label and had no idea if they had sold any products,” says Neil Warnock. “The first thing I asked Ray to do, was fly around Europe with me and meet all the label heads and to meet the respective promoters who had been involved with the band, because I wanted him to understand the absolute apathy that the label had towards its bands, and I wanted to hear the opinions of the promoters, market by market. He went away quite disillusioned with the attitude of the label, but very, very, encouraged that there was a group of promoters who were absolutely in love with the band and were supportive of the band any time they wanted to come into the tour.”
Neil Warnock’s arguments were compelling. SRO and the band agreed an eight- day, stripped down tour of the UK’s major cities for June of 1977, with one date in Stockholm, Sweden. Neil hit the band just at the right time, he believes. “I was lucky enough to make the first call.”
The band was well aware of the growing interest in the UK, to the extent they even had Geoff write the words in the ‘2112’ tour book. Not all the feedback from Britain was good, however: it was also in the left-leaning UK music press that the accusations of fascism were growing louder. “There was a remarkable backlash,” said Neil Peart. “Collectivism was still in style, especially among [English] journalists.” The band remained a goodly distance away however, so were protected… for the time.
ver the summer of 1976, the musicians took some well-earned R&R. Geddy married his long-time girlfriend Nancy Young (“we’d been together on and off for seven years”) in a traditional Jewish ceremony that was followed by a couple of weeks in Hawaii. In the autumn it was back on tour, but this was altogether more comfortable, its peak two sold out nights at the Maple Leaf Gardens bowl in Toronto, playing to over 7,000 punters a night. While the trappings of success were starting to appear, not least in that the band no longer had to do its own driving, the road was still as long as ever: the tour didn’t conclude until May the following year, at the Aragon Ballroom in Chicago.
Things were getting big, and Vic and Ray knew it. In preparation for renegotiating a deal with Mercury they decided to reorganise their interests and in May 1977 they created Anthem Records, a new label that could pull together all of their existing artists, make room for new ones and ensure that Rush would not be ripped off by the larger companies. Though their hands had been forced in the early days, SRO had been operating its own label and publishing company independently of the major labels since the start, leaving the majors to do what they were best at – distribution. All three band members were set up as associate directors and local man Tom Berry was brought in as managing director. Mercury were given what would turn out to be a ten year distribution deal, with what amounted to an excellent package: an advance of 250,000 US dollars to cover the recording costs of each new album, and a 16% royalty rate. That’s entertainment.
‘2112’ had shown Neil, Alex and Geddy that they could make the music they wanted, and win. Not least, for future albums the band knew exactly what to do with everyone else’s opinions but their own (and perhaps Terry’s). As Geddy put it, “Fuck off, leave us alone. We know what we want to do and we are going to do it.” While it was time for a bigger sound, the band had rejected the idea of adding any new members to the band. At the same time, they required that they could reproduce their music live. They started to look for ways of expanding their capabilities without compromising either quality.
To continue the journey, Rush found its path drawn inexorably towards its musical roots, across the Atlantic.