If At First…
By the end of 1972 things were coming together for Rush on the live circuit, through stamina and the continued determination of Ray Danniels and his cohorts. The band had a growing following, and were deriving income from up to five sets a night; they had gone from being a me-too covers band with a bit of sparkle, to defining for themselves a heavier, louder, and altogether more original sound. Each band member was able, confident and accomplished enough to consider himself a musician, not just a player. Furthermore, the threesome had enough material, and had nearly saved enough money, to make a record.
Despite the lack of previous experience, everyone involved was well aware of what they wanted to achieve next, and the steps required. The goal was simple – to achieve a recording contract. This was as true for Ray as it was for the band members, thinks Bruce Cole, recruited at the time to capture the essence of the band on film. “Their manager had the vision that they wanted to be a super-band, from the beginning,” says Bruce. This vision was a shared as the approach they took to achieving it. “From the time I got involved, the band members treated it as a business. These guys were serious about being musicians from day one. They did the right things in a conscious manner… they just weren’t playing in some club and somebody came along and said, wow, you guys are great, I’m gonna sign you up and make you millionaires. Every band that starts has a big vision, but they approached it, not from a rock and roll, “lets get laid tonight after the set,” point of view. They were going back to their wives, they were musicians.”
The one thing they didn’t all share was the music itself. John was in many ways as ambitious as Geddy and Alex, but his musical tastes were far more mundane, as were his plans. John wanted to make it onto the Toronto circuit and keep going for as long as possible, but this didn’t fit with where Geddy, Alex and Ray wanted to take the music or the band. For now however, it was so all much speculation – for short term at least, the aspirations were the same.
In a makeshift studio known as The Sound Horn at Toronto’s Rochdale College, engineer Bill Bryant recorded the band playing an album’s worth of two-track demos. Recorded straight after a gig when the band was already warmed up, most of the songs took only a couple of takes to get down on tape. Copies of the resulting demo were sent to record labels, only to be met with universal rejection by the Canadian musical establishment. Unsurprising perhaps, given that tastes in Canadian recorded music were still catching up with what was going in the local bars, never mind with what was happening on the other side of the pond. The “loud is good” philosophy of heavy rock might have filtered onto FM, but it was still a few tributaries short of the mainstream. Furthermore, however diverse their claimed influences, Rush did take a number of cues from Led Zeppelin. Alex was listening to little else than Jimmy Page at the time , and Geddy’s piercing vocals drew inevitable comparisons with Robert Plant. As Geddy might remark at the time, “oooooh, yeeah yeeah!”
There was little for it but to keep plugging away on the live circuit, where things were going from strength to strength. According to Bruce Cole, the band would work on their act like no other band he’d seen. “I used to go in to shoot Rush during rehearsals because it was very difficult shooting them live,” says Bruce. “They just got crazy during their rehearsal as if they we actually doing a live show. They would not only practice their music, they would practice their stage presence. I never thought that much about it, that’s just the way they did it.” They even went as far as the glittering costumes that were de rigeur in bands that had made it, but weren’t quite so common in the downtown bars. “We had the whole schmear,” recalled Geddy later. “Shiny clothes, big shoes. I see pictures way back then every once in a while and it’s pretty embarrassing stuff. We’ll write it off to the exuberance of youth.“ Embarrassing it may be in hindsight, but it worked. According to Rolling Stone journalist John Swenson, “Rush built up a reputation as one of the best live bands in the Toronto area, and became a bona fide underground sensation.” Agrees Bob Roper, who was about to play his own part in the Rush story, “The band were workaholics and put a lot of energy and professionalism into their performances. They were loud and aggressive and got a huge and enthusiastic response from their audiences most shows.”
It was early 1973. To help with the ever-increasing workload of managing Rush’s live activities, as well as those of his growing roster of bands , Ray joined forces with a former competitor, Vic Wilson. At the time, Vic was running a management agency called Concept 376. Ray and Vic both sold their enterprises to form SRO Productions. SRO stood for Standing Room Only, both a reference to the amount of office space Vic and Ray were juggling with, and an indication of the band and management’s approach to “passengers” – there was to be no room for hangers on. At the start, Rush was one of SRO’s least successful bands, but it was also the most unique, and as such it had the most potential. Ray and Vic wasted no time in inviting US-side booking agencies to see what the band could do, in the hope of wining support slots with more popular acts. One such was the ebullient, charismatic Ira Blacker of New York-based booking and management agency, American Talent International (ATI). “They were earning 150 bucks in a Toronto bar, doing some pseudo Zeppelin thing,” recalls Ira.
Buoyed by the live roster and unperturbed at the failure of the demo, Ray and his new partner Vic convinced the band it was time to put a single together. In the absence of a record deal, SRO formed its own label – Moon Records – for the purpose and borrowed money to finance its first pressing (not least from Geddy’s stalwart mother). It was suggested that a cover song would be safest, rather than one of the band’s weirder compositions – the boys agreed to record the Buddy Holly number ‘Not Fade Away’, with a Rush original, ‘You Can’t Fight It’ on the reverse. The single was recorded at Eastern Sound Studios in Toronto in the spring of 1973, under Englishman David Stock who worked at the time for SRO. David was an established engineer – though admittedly his experience was more in radio jingles than rock songs.
Several hundred copies were pressed, and never-say-die Danniels took it around the record labels and sent it to the radio stations, but to no avail. Despite a distribution deal with London Records, the remaining copies were sold mainly after gigs for the princely sum of 69 cents.
The pressure was starting to show, not least on Rush’s drummer. That summer, John took some time out from the band. This was ostensibly through illness – he had suffered from diabetes throughout his childhood – but it wasn’t helped by his discomfort at his situation. While John would have been quite happy to continue down the heavy blues line as part of a jobbing band, it was becoming clearer by the week that the others had different, higher aspirations. For Geddy and Alex, it was difficult to make out whether there was writing on the wall, but it was clear that John was hitting it. The pair started to think about whether, and how he could be replaced. For the time being, there was too much momentum for anyone to change anything in particular. After a couple of weeks to recover, John came back, but the unease hadn’t gone away.
Ray and Vic’s efforts nurturing relationships with US promoters were starting to bear fruit, and their second foray outside Canada was to be the biggest gig yet for the boys. In September 1973, the band played a festival at The Brewery in East Lansing, Michigan to 3,000 people. It may have been small in festival terms, but to the threesome it was immense. In the first of many bizarre pairings, on October 27 Rush played to a 1,200 strong Toronto crowd at the Victory Burlesque Theatre, in support of the New York Dolls. These were very exciting times indeed, and there was evidence enough that even if the band hadn’t yet made it, it had all the potential to do so.
While the band was making it live, there was still no record deal on the table. Ever in the shadow of the label-heavy US, Canada wasn’t the best of places to be starting a new musical movement. Its recording industry consisted of a number of small, independent labels, jostling for space with the subsidiaries of US-based companies who were geared towards promoting US-based rock rather than taking the risk of prowling for new Canadian talent.
As the nights of 1973 started to shorten, Ray decreed that if the single wouldn’t cut the ice with the labels, then he might stand more chance with an album. David Stock was again asked to produce, and they booked five days of studio time at Eastern Sound. Money was tight – the band could not afford to break from the gig schedules, which were an essential source of funding for both studio time and equipment rental .
Nobody had been happy with the live lyrics, and John had been working on improved versions for some of the studio versions. At the last minute before the band went into the studio however, he tore them up and threw them away rather than show them to the others. It is unclear whether this was through a loss of confidence, a fit of pique or both but he was later to regret the action. “It was an incredibly selfish, stupid thing to do,” he said. For the others, writing new lyrics was just one more thing to fit into the schedules. During the day, the band would catch up on sleep, rehearse and gig, and when they had finished they would head to the studio for the late night slot, which could be booked at a quarter rate. The band would carry on until the wee hours, recording songs and writing lyrics for the next batch before dismantling the equipment and going home again, ready to do it all again the next day. It might have been gruelling, but it was also “very, very exciting,” according to Alex. The first song to be recorded was the cover ‘Not Fade Away’, which was to open the album. The band worked through ‘Need Some Love’, ‘Take a Friend’, ‘Here Again’, ‘What You’re Doing’, ‘In the Mood’, ‘Before and After’ and ‘Working Man’. Already recorded for the single, ‘You Can’t Fight It’ was also to be included in the running order.
At the end of the sessions, they listened and found that it was… well, a bit poor really. David’s lack of appropriate production experience, coupled with the understandable haste of recording and mixing, resulted in the initial mixes lacking any of the vibrancy of the live performances. The raw edge had been well and truly blunted, and some of the tracks didn’t sound like they’d ever be album material. What to do?
Clearly, there was more to engineering than the band and management had imagined. Vic suggested bringing in the “teabag” Englishman Terry Brown, a producer who had cut his teeth on such popular bands of Sixties London as Procul Harum and Manfred Mann, and who now part-owned the highly reputed Toronto Sound Studios. “Trained in Britain, he was ahead of the curve of what was going on in Canada,” says fellow producer Paul Northfield. “His studio was probably one of the best in Toronto at the time and certainly he would probably be one of the most experienced rock recording guys at the time.”
Terry of course, was delighted to help out. “Vic said, we’ve got these boys, they’ve been working the graveyard shift over at another studio,” says Terry. “They’ve got this tape and they don’t know what the hell to do with it, and we need to cut some more songs, so can I send them over to see you?” Ray and Vic stumped up the extra cash for Terry to rework the mixes for the album. On his advice, the band re-recorded the flaccid ‘Need Some Love’ and ‘Here Again’, and replaced the unrepresentative ‘Not Fade Away’ with ‘Finding My Way’. ‘You Can’t Fight It’ was dropped altogether. As the boys started to do their thing, Terry was captivated. “Recording was just a thrill,” he says. “Superb would be a stretch, but they were good, and they had so much enthusiasm!” Alex’s guitar skills particularly caught Terry’s ear. “He doubled his guitar like no one I’d ever heard before, it was phenomenal. He was brilliant at it, totally brilliant. I remember to this day, I had this huge grin on my face!”
Spending a further few thousand dollars on studio time, the band recorded the remaining three songs, then Terry mixed the album in a way that captured the raw energy of the band’s sound. “They were great, they played really well, they cut the tunes really quickly,” says Terry. “Within three days, I handed Vic this finished, two-track master, and that became ‘Rush’.” For a cover, SRO turned to graphic designer (and keyboardist in local band Edward Bear) Paul Weldon, who had also designed the Moon Records logo. “I used the explosion graphic because I felt that it represented the nature of the band,” he says. “For a 3 piece group they had a lot of power and force in their sound.”
The finished album was to be released in December 1973, but not even the teenagers’ determination was a match for the OPEC oil crisis and its impact on vinyl production. Finally in March 1974, 3,500 copies of the album were pressed and released. “For best results play at maximum volume,” said the cover, sealing the fact that this was a rock n’ roll album in the best tradition. Thanks were awarded to friends and colleagues of the band, not least SRO employee Sheila Posner and the staff at the band’s regular joint, the Abbey Road Pub. The album was a solid debut, acceptable but nothing particularly remarkable: Geddy later characterised it, perhaps a little harshly, as “naïve.” Having released an album did put Rush at something of an advantage over other local bands, however. Locally, Rush were well perceived – as much a sign of the times as of the band’s prowess. “At the time, things really seemed to be happening in Toronto,” says Paul Weldon. “There were all sorts of bands in the Yorkville area playing all the many coffee houses. Many felt that Toronto was going to be the next major source of rock, pop & blues bands.” Paul was invited to see the band play Piccadilly Tube in downtown Toronto, a club with a reputation for live music. “I remember that they were LOUD!”
To support the release, the band did a brief, Rush-themed tour with fellow Canadian bands Mahogany Rush (Frank Marino’s band, whose name certainly was drugs related) and Bullrush, most of whose members were originally from the St Catharines band J.R. Flood. Then, once again, Ray and Vic began the task of diligently pushing the album at the record labels. Once again however, Rush’s wall of sound was met with a wall of silence. The labels were still more interested in the gentler sounds of yore, and they didn’t want to risk losing their existing customer base by promoting the raucous new genre that was hard rock. “It started off well locally, but it really wasn’t going to go anywhere,” says Alex.
The management team had rather more success with FM radio, however. “Everyone listened to the radio,” explains long-time tech Tony Geranios. “FM stations played album cuts, and AM was a top-40 listening format.” FM played less popular music largely because FM was less popular, and the DJ’s were left more to their own devices. The first station to pick up on the band was Toronto-based CHUM-FM, unsurprising as Ray Danniels brought the album in himself. “I remember Ray bringing the album into the control room,” recalls DJ Don Shafer, who had the honour of being the first DJ to spin ‘Finding My Way’ on his daytime show. His colleague David Marsden also played the disc on his evening show, and who happened to have tuned in but Alex himself. “I was thrilled; it was really, really exciting. I just never thought I would ever hear something like that,” said Alex, who liked hearing it so much, he called up David Marsden on air and told him so!
Later, the band would often drop by at the offices of CHUM-FM. “The band would come and talk, hang out,” says Don Shafer. “The early seventies in Toronto were a great time for radio and a great time for music – it was much more free form.” With all this good will and effort, sooner or later the band deserved a break. Which, through friends like that, was exactly what they were about to get.
As it happened, some friends of the band shared a house with Bob Roper, at the time working as regional promotion representative for A&M Records. Bob was paid to know people at radio stations, and so it seemed a good idea to pass him a few copies of the album and see what he made of it. “As a record guy, I could see that what they were doing showed huge potential,” says Bob. “I offered to help promote it whenever and wherever I could.” By no small coincidence, Bob was called by one of his own contacts, the music director for WMMS-FM in Cleveland, who was looking for new Canadian music for the station’s regular import show. Her name was Donna Halper, and Bob willingly sent her a couple of copies, with the message, “this thing deserves airplay.”
When the albums arrived, the first track Donna played was ‘In the Mood’, the intended single. “I’d like to say I was immediately impressed – I wasn’t though!” she joked. WMMS was an album oriented rock (AOR) station, so Donna gave a couple of the longer tracks a try. As she listened to ‘Working Man’, then ‘Finding My Way’, Donna realized she had something worth playing, and took the disc downstairs to DJ Denny Sanders. Before the end of his show he aired ‘Working Man’, a track echoing the mundane struggles of the factory workers that counted themselves among the station’s listeners. It didn’t take long after that for the phones to start ringing.
Before long WMMS had been inundated with calls, with listeners were asking where they could get hold of more music from this new band. So - Donna called Bob, and Bob called SRO, and Vic called Donna, and Donna called another contact of hers – Peter Schliewen of “Record Revolution”, a Cleveland music store specialising in imports, to arrange a delivery of the albums. Before long the entire first production run had been shipped south and distributed to the eager listeners. “Boxes were coming in and heading straight out of the door,” says Donna. Literally thousands of albums were funnelled into the city.
In particular the band regained the attention of Ira Blacker, who had seen Rush play in the past. “Ira was always looking for new bands,” explains Donna. “I was thrilled. Ira had a reputation for shaking things up and getting things done, and he was very hard to ignore. When I heard he was interested, I said to myself, now they’ll have to take the band seriously.” Not least, Ira’s company ATI was one of the top agencies in Northern America. When Ira asked who was handling their management in the US: nobody was, so he quickly offered ATI’s services and set to work sending out copies of the album to the labels, with notes describing the growing phenomenon. This time however, it was an American agent sending samples to his American network of contacts, missing out the Canadian subsidiaries altogether. In parallel he liaised with the import company Jem, to ensure the figures looked as healthy as possible. Ira was fully aware that this band, like any other, would need all the help they could get.
The ensuing few weeks were fast and furious, and everyone played their part. As Ira contacted labels on one side, other labels were contacting SRO via Donna to find out how they might sign this up and coming band. At one point, industry giants Colombia, Polydor and Casablanca Records were all showing an interest. Even A&M Records turned up late to the party! However, in the space of a Monday in early June 1974 it was Mercury Records that got the deal, through an unlikely sequence of events.
Ira Blacker had sent the record to Irwin Steinberger, who was President of Mercury at the time; as usual, Irwin had passed it to his Head of Artist and Repertoire (A&R), Robin McBride, for a listen. As luck would have it, on this particular day Robin was on his hols, so his secretary passed the disc on to precocious youngster Cliff Burnstein, who was working as head of album promotion to radio. “So there was a note from his secretary saying there was something that I have to listen to today, there was some urgency about it,” says Cliff, whose youthful opinion was often called upon when it came to new signings. As it happened, Cliff confused the band with Mahogany Rush, who he had read about in Creem magazine. “I had heard this guy Frank Marino was one hell of a guitar player, the next Jimi Hendrix.” His excitement waned when he saw the album, but he gave it a spin. As the opening chords to ‘Finding My Way’ hit the speakers, Cliff nearly fell off his chair. “It’s a cliché, but I was just blown away!” he says. “I wasn’t expecting it, I thought this was going to be some second rate piece of shit. I thought, Ohmigod, this is just incredible, now I am flying!”
Of course, as Cliff was an album promoter and Donna worked for an AOR station, the pair was already acquainted. “He was my hero,” says Donna. “His selling point was that he always put the band first.” Cliff wasted little time calling WMMS, to find that Ira’s story checked out. “I said, ‘Finding My Way’ is unbelievable and an incredible cut,” says Cliff. “Donna said, well, ‘Working Man’ is the one that’s driving everyone crazy here, and I said I haven’t even got to that one yet!” One listen to ‘Working Man’ clinched it for Cliff, who went in ears first. “I didn’t know if Rush was hot property,” says Cliff “There was nobody except for Donna to tell me people were reacting to ‘Working Man’, but if there was no ‘Working Man’ on the album, I felt so strongly about ‘Finding My Way’ that it wouldn’t have mattered. ‘Working Man’ was the icing on the cake for me.“
As Irwin Steinberger was away on the west coast, Cliff called Ira Blacker and set the ball rolling. “By the end of the day we hooked up a conference call with me, Ira Blacker and Irwin Steinberger and a deal was worked out,” says Cliff. “At 5pm that evening, we had a deal agreed.” “Irwin does due diligence based on airplay and import lists,” says Ira, who was able to paint the picture Irwin wanted to see. That was part of the game – but in any case, Ira had Irwin’s ear. “Irwin had faith in me,” says Ira. “The way I toured bands, I made sure they were all six days per week tours.”
Mercury only had one hard rock band on its books, Bachmann Turner Overdrive, and was looking to make something of another: the label needed Rush as much as Rush needed Mercury. Says Cliff, “Mercury records was not considered to be the label of choice. People didn’t bring stuff to Mercury generally that was highly thought of.” So, from his point of view it was an opportunity. “Cliff promised me he would devote large amounts of time and energy to Rush if they signed,” said Donna.
And they did. The label granted a contract worth 200,000 US dollars overall, incorporating a $75,000 advance and $25,000 to cover recording costs. The contract was to produce two new albums, with options for several more; furthermore, it gave them complete artistic freedom. “Then a six-year period started of very, very hard work,” said Alex.
Mercury’s cogs began to turn at an alarming speed, meshing with those of SRO and ATI to synchronise studio, live and outbound activities. For a variety of reasons including the need to shift the band away from the “import” category (which automatically categorised Rush as left field), Mercury decided to re-release their new signing’s debut album. This was no more than a Mercury relabelling, unless the change of cover shade from bright red to muddy puce is taken into account – in addition, the band extended a round of thanks to the Toronto and Cleveland booking agents who had been instrumental in their signing, as well as Donna Halper, who they saw as key to the whole thing. Speed was of the essence: “We wanted to take advantage of the fact that it was being played and selling in Cleveland,” says Cliff. “We got the album out within five weeks.”
To get things moving on the live scene, Ira Blacker sent ATI junior agent Howard Ungerleider to Toronto from New York. Howard’s experience was in booking multiple bands for a single night’s entertainment (“I booked Savoy Brown, Fleetwood Mac and Deep Purple as a package,” he explains). He also had hands-on knowledge of crew work, not least of doing the lights. He got to work quickly, ruffling a few feathers on the existing crew members (Ian Grandy in particular) and getting the show well and truly on the road. To grow the crew he started to bring in a handpicked selection of “reliable people” who he knew from the touring circuit, people who knew the ropes and who wouldn’t let anyone down.
Meanwhile, Ira Blacker had been fixing numerous dates for far bigger bands than themselves, including Kiss and ZZ Top, and Rush became the obvious support band. “I toured their asses off,” says Ira. Agrees Bob Roper, “The door to American touring opened when Blacker came on board. The band had toured Southern Ontario constantly, to the point where they were playing the same venues over and over. Had they not been given the opportunity to spread their wings, they may have run into the ‘over-saturation syndrome’.” Canada had failed the band, but the US was coming up trumps. All it had taken was a foothold, south of the border.
Ira wanted to do more than get things moving – perhaps rightly believing he had more experience than Ray, he wanted to move in on his territory. “Blacker wanted to get rid of Ray, he sent me up there to take him out,” says Howard. Trouble was, when Howard arrived, he found he kind of liked things the way they were. Not that he was bowled over by their organisation, far from it – the audacious New Yorker arrived expecting to be put up in expensive hotels, and quickly found that such ideas were way out of Ray and Vic’s league. “I asked for Ten G’s for expenses, and I ended up sleeping on Vic’s couch!” he laughs. He moved on to crashing at Ray’s house, where he had to suffer Ray’s dogs – a German shepherd, “which used to look at me and growl, it was always pissed off,” and a “little, white, fluffy thing, like a snowball, which just jumped up and down,” he explains. One day it all got too much – for Howard. “I was in Ray’s back yard, the fucking snowdog thing was jumping up, and the German shepherd was biting me…” Of course, when he recounted it to the guys, they thought it was hilarious. “A biter, and the Snow Dog,” they laughed. “Sounds like an epic song!”
While Ray and Vic were running to keep up with all that was happening, for the musical threesome it was a time for some big decisions. They were being handed success on a plate, but the question was – should they take it? For Geddy and Alex, the question didn’t even come up. For John Rutsey however, this was a watershed moment. He was nervous about his health, and was not in tune with the musical thread that had developed between the other two. John had made it clear he would be happy to fall back to heavy blues, but the art rock bug had already bitten, and there was no going back. “We wanted to make our music more complicated,” said Geddy. “John was never really into that.” The pressure was not only coming from John: Geddy and Alex also needed John to make up his mind, once and for all. “He just wasn’t thinking the way Alex and I were,” recalled Geddy. “He decided it would be better for himself and us if he left.”
John quit while he was ahead, losing the band a drummer and a competent, if underconfident, lyricist. While the clarity of the decision was welcomed, it didn’t change the predicament – by now a fully booked, five-month tour of the US and Canada was looming, organised by Ira who was feeling quite naturally gutted. Nobody wanted to compromise the deal however, and all agreed not to tell Mercury until a replacement had been found. John did the noble thing, agreeing to play a number of the theatre gigs that had been booked as his notice. In June the band returned to the US to play a few dates in support to Kiss and ZZ Top. “Strangely enough, we had the best time we’d ever had playing together,” said Alex.
Donna Halper met the band in person for the first time at the end of June, when the three green-looking musicians arrived in Cleveland to play at the Allen Theater in support of ZZ Top. “They were excited about being there, and not at all brash or egocentric,” recalls Donna. “They knew that doing well in Cleveland was a big deal, and they meant it when they told me they wouldn’t let me down.” Already, it was obvious what a pull the band was. “I thought Geddy was wearing high-heeled boots that were way too high and I was afraid he was gonna trip!” says Donna. “But we noticed, Vic and I, that some folks were singing along to ‘Working Man’. Geddy noticed that too, and it seemed to give him confidence. I vaguely recall John Rutsey – he was evidently already on the way out – but Alex and Geddy seemed to have fun up there once they got over the initial nervousness.”
Meanwhile, Ira was having difficulties of his own. As part of his masterplan Ira had quit ATI and set up his own management company, I-Mouse, which continued to work at booking Rush even though he was in dispute with his old company ATI. Rush and SRO decided to stay with ATI’s top dog Jeff Franklin, floating Ira loose and leaving him more than bitter. Nobody won: despite being instrumental in getting Rush’s golden ticket, Ira had to take both SRO and ATI to court to get his due.