Let It Snow
It was four years since the last writing sessions, but the environment at Chalet Studios was all too familiar. Less familiar perhaps, or at least less easy to define was the musical landscape, which had exploded over the four years into a wealth of variety. Some said grunge had died with Kurt Cobain, but the reality was it had pervaded a much wider variety of music; bands such as Green Day, Nine Inch Nails and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were keen to show how a hard rock edge could combine as comfortably with punk, as funk. While the threesome were well aware of the changing fashions and were keen to explore the pervading production techniques, there was no rush to follow the musical crowd. As for watching across the Atlantic, the burgeoning Brit-pop movement spearheaded by Oasis, Blur and the like was of no interest at all, hard edge or not.
Only two weeks after Alex had finally put ‘Victor’ to bed, the band reunited with a new zest, and furthermore, a whole new respect for each other. “Everybody was glad to be back there and just finding a new chemistry,” said Neil, who was keen to discover how well his new techniques would translate in the context of his band. As for Alex and Geddy, they might have been going for lunch or playing tennis on a regular basis, but the musical wavelength had lain largely idle. As a result, the pair knew each other as friends far more than they did as musicians. “I think I’m a lot closer to Ged now than I have been in years,” said Alex. “I think we missed each other.”
The three players sat in the sun outside the converted farmhouse, drank coffee and talked. At first, this was worrisome – they weren’t talking about music. However, they did touch on how their roles related to each other. Alex really, really didn’t want to take a back seat on this album, and he knew to make his case before old habits set in. He wanted back in the control room – but to talk about the others, not just himself. “Having been in the chair behind the console directing it all, it shed a whole new light on what Rush do,” said Alex. “I’m a little more definite in what I’m doing and the way I hear things.”
While Alex was being quite forthright in his views from the outset, Geddy, on the other hand, was anything but his traditional, bossy self. “I was feeling very laid-back, and very enthusiastic, and really eager to write, so I was being, yeah, sure, whatever, let’s go!” he said. Geddy came to understand that Alex wanted less of a back seat role in production, and was relaxed enough to see that it was good. “I think it was a slight maturing on my part,” said Geddy. “I was happy just to be working.”
The first night was washed down with a couple of shandies – bonding, you understand. “The following day I was a bit the worse for wear,” said Neil. As he nursed his coffee and flicked through the New York Times, one column in particular drew his attention. “The columnist was riffing on about things and she said she’s getting tired of living in dog years, where every seven years seem to go by like one and I thought it was a beautiful little image.” So, “muzzy headed” Neil set about trying to turn it into a song. “I thought, ‘Gee, I don’t think I’m going to get much done today, but I’m a professional, I’d better try.’” The result was ‘Dog Years’, inspired by Neil comparing his state of mind with the actions of his own dog Nick, a seven-year-old, big husky, and how his brain functioned. “What’s going through his brain? And I would think, ‘Just a low-level zzzzz static.’ ‘Food.’ ‘Walk.’ The basic elemental things. When I look at my dog that’s how I see his brainwaves moving.”
The other two appreciated the light relief of ‘Dog Years’, a welcome respite compared to the uneasy undercurrents that pervaded their conversations. “I really wondered about the future,” said Alex, as he and Geddy set about rediscovering each other. “It was a bit weird,” agreed Geddy. “We kind of were circling each other like cats in a new territory.”
Neil was troubled as well, but mostly about his own writing capabilities. His usual “slightly lost” outward appearance was this time based largely on the fact that he was, indeed, slightly lost. “I did worry about it,” said Neil. “I’d been away during the intervening time doing so many different things that I truly wondered – especially from a lyric-writing point of view – whether I’d be able to sit down at the desk and distill all of the thoughts and experiences into rock lyrics.” He was less worried about his drumming, and he practiced his new skills every day as a break from the wordsmithing. “Usually, in the past, I’ve struggled to find new ways of challenging myself,” he said. “This time, it was the opposite. I came in with so much, I had to edit myself. I have to say, it was a good position to be in.”
After a few days of discussion, Alex and Geddy found some common ground – in particular, that guitars would lead the album. “From that moment on everything went smoothly,” said Geddy. “We got to work with an amazing amount of energy.” Agreed Alex, “Once I exorcised those ghosts, the following week we wrote five songs. We dove into it, and it was very, very positive from then on.” It wasn’t all Alex’s show, as Geddy discovered when he turned up with the musical basis for what would become ‘Driven’. “I brought it to Alex and said, here’s the song; I did three tracks of bass but I just did it to fill in for the guitar,” said Geddy. “He said, let’s keep it with the three basses. So I said, ‘I love you’. I mean, who lets a guy do that in this day and age?” ‘Half The World’ also came out of these sessions, “One of our finest moments as songwriters as far as writing a concise song without being wimpy or syrupy,” according to Geddy.
Alex and Geddy were cooking, but trouble was, nobody had told Neil, who had to content himself with writing lyrics and keeping out of the way. Every now and then, Geddy would cross the building to Neil’s wing, check some lyrics with him and vanish off again, leaving the “new boy” none the wiser. It was quite deliberate – the musical ideas were coming so fast, nothing ever seemed complete enough to play to the drummer. Geddy and Alex were unperturbed. “We were very confident and we felt really strong about the music, we wanted to complete it,” said Geddy. After a couple of weeks however, Neil was becoming more than a little frustrated, not to mention a tad anxious for the others. “I wasn’t hearing any of the words being sung to know if they worked or not as lyrics and I wasn’t hearing any music to know what I was going to be putting drum parts to,” said Neil.
It was quite a relief when Neil was finally invited to hear the Lee/Lifeson output and he found – that it was good! “Before we know it, boom – we were back to writing, ideas were just coming, and everything was fresh and exciting,” says Neil. The jokes started, and all three knew it was all going to be OK. Over time, the band developed a new process of slow improvisation, that was very different from past methods of jamming together and seeing what developed. “We’re responding to what each other is doing, trying to put forward our own ideas, and trying also to create something larger musically than any of those elements,” said Neil. “Instead of happening spontaneously in the moment, it’s happening over a slow period.” It might have seemed slower at the outset, but it was more efficient overall. “We seem to be getting all our results much quicker than we have in the past, and the results seem to be much more definite,” said Alex.
It was time to get a producer in: the choice needed no debate.
Peter Collins – producer, mentor, friend – joined the band at Chalet studios in late autumn of 1995, as soon as there was enough material for rough demos. His strength, as ever, was his objectivity – the ability to distance himself from the material, but retain the right for radical suggestion. “I think Peter is the last of a dying breed: producers who are interested in nothing but producing songs,” said Geddy. “If something sounds great he doesn’t feel he has to change it. No ego involved. There may be only three or four songs on the album that he kind of tears apart totally, but it’s a much better record for that.” Peter had an ear for what worked and what didn’t, and made “bold suggestions” to correct them. Added Neil, “Perhaps Peter’s greatest contribution is his instinct for pointing us in the right direction.”
This time, writing and recording really was all digital, using Cubase Audio – which was still not quite there. “It drove us crazy! It’s a brilliant idea, but it wasn’t quite ready,” said Alex. “The great thing about it was that we were able to put down ideas and then move the arrangement around. We could add another chorus or take a line out of the chorus, and hear it back instantly.” The walls of the studio were decorated with “goofy” slogans to lighten the atmosphere, such as “Being geniuses together”, “Individually we are a ass, together we are a genius”, “If you want something done right, just forget it” and “I’ll shut up when you fuck off”, goofy perhaps but serving to bring the trio even closer together.
Alex’s new-found self-belief was overriding anybody else’s potential for pickiness – he just didn’t care. “You sit in the studio and someone says, ‘That note’s a little flat,’ or, ‘You really didn’t hit the beat there.’ But I’ve finally come to realise, who cares? It’s all about feeling,” he said. Good call – and he wasn’t afraid to challenge the others when he felt he had a good idea. There was the mandola on ‘Half The World’, for example. “I just wanted to try it,” he said. “So I just futzed around to get a feel for it, and it changed the whole personality of the song. I remember Ged, when he first heard it was like, ‘Whoa, I don’t know about that.’ It was so unusual for a Rush song to have that kind of texture.” On 1 November a blizzard struck, the claustrophobic, slightly oppressive atmosphere setting the tone for much of the album. Against this snowy background a number of songs came together, such as ‘Test For Echo’, “the quintessential Rush song,” according to Geddy, and a reflection on the band’s own concerns. Said Geddy, “We were not certain that anyone listened to our music anymore… so this song is a kind of question: ‘Is there anyone out there?’”
Having got the songs to the demo stage, the band took a break for Christmas. They reconvened at the beginning of January and back in the snow, this time over the border in New York State, at Bearsville Studios3, at Woodstock, in the Catskill Mountains. The decision to record at Bearsville was driven by Peter Collins, who badgered the players until they agreed. “Bearsville was my favourite studio for the drums,” says Peter. “I knew that they would like it, a bit hippy-ish but it was just a fun place to be. I don’t think they had ever recorded tracks in America, I just love the room at Bearsville and persuaded them that’s where we should at least record Neil’s drums.” Despite Neil’s reticence (Le Studio was a stone’s throw from Neil’s place by the lake, after all), it worked out. “I think Neil loved it there,” says Peter. “It was a fabulous room, very big, all wood.” Agreed Alex, “It’s like a hangar, it’s about three stories high – Neil’s drums sounded particularly amazing.” In addition, the studio boasted a Neve desk, taken from The Who’s Ramport studios in London. “I know that the band were huge Who fans, I thought it would give them a kick,” says Peter. Geddy was delighted – initially. “I’m like, it’s the one they did ‘Quadrophenia’ on, cool!” he says. “It was cool until all the knobs started breaking and everything started buzzing!” The day they arrived at Bearsville, the blizzards started once again. Really. “It was simply unbelievable,” said Neil. “There we were right in the middle of the ‘Blizzard of ’96’.” Having oriented himself to the studio room, Neil settled down to record his parts – it took him three days this time. “He’s still very uptight about being able to recreate everything live that he does on record,” said Geddy. “Alex and I have loosened up about that stuff, maybe because we’re overdubs, anyway!” And overdub they did, Geddy painstakingly laying his bass on top of Neil’s hi-tech click track, having decided he quite liked Bearsville too.
It snowed all the time at Bearsville, and was still snowing as the posse arrived at their next port of call: Reaction Studios, back in Toronto, for the guitars and vocals. “What we wanted was somewhere private,” said Alex. “There aren’t too many studios anymore that are like that, who could accommodate us, with the kind of sounds we wanted and the size of the room.” Bass was finished off, then guitars and vocals overdubbed, with the (very) occasional use of a bass pedal or keyboard, for texture. Nobody was about to complain about that.
It was still snowing, just, as they went for the final mix at Toronto’s McClear Pathé4 studios. Accompanying Peter and the band was engineer Andy Wallace, known for his experience with grunge-ier bands such as Nirvana and Rage Against The Machine5. “It was my decision to bring Andy in,” says Peter. “I was fully committed to the much drier organic sound, no one can do it better than him. I felt also at a personal level the band would really like Andy, and they did. They got on extremely well.” As things turned out, Andy was just the man for the job. Andy’s skill was to take the finessed elements of Rush’s sound, and set them into the context of the late nineties. “When we heard his mix of a song for the first time, invariably we’d say something like, Wow, I never thought of it like that before!” said Neil. In particular, Andy was skilled in knowing what to leave in, and what to leave out. “He was terrific to work with, great to watch, very fast, very knowledgeable, very bright guy,” said Alex. “Nothing was in the mix just because it was there, it had to have a purpose and a place.”
As the final album was sent to be mastered, for the band anyway, the outcome could be judged as much by what it had achieved for the band, as its musical content. “There’s a new level of respect that we have for each other,” said Alex, who was so thoroughly comfortable with his position, he wanted to do it all again! “This whole new level of maturity that we’ve reached is really going to show on this next Rush record.” Geddy wasn’t so effusive, but then, maybe he couldn’t be. “When we do finish an album, I’m really high on it to a certain degree,” he said. “I’m also really pissed off at it because it didn’t go exactly where I heard it go in my head sometimes.” Snow. Now you can understand the album art.
Following discussions with Neil, Hugh Syme constructed an Inuit effigy – an Innakshuk – out of rocks, but his was less than 18 inches high. As well as being a cry in the wilderness, the snowy cover for ‘Test For Echo’ was a direct reference to the weather conditions. “It paid homage to the fact that it was one of the worst winters in the Woodstock area where they were recording,” says Hugh. “It was also a lot to do with sending out some kind of a beacon.” The band needn’t have worried if there was going to be an echo – on release in September 1996, the album hit the Billboard chart at Number 5. The title track achieved the most played rock track status on the radio within a couple of weeks, beating even those whippersnappers, Soundgarden.
It was time, once again, to turn the attention to the tour, that Hobson’s choice they faced after every album – the fact that it was nearly two years since they’d last played together was incidental. “After 22 years, it’s really boring,” remarked Alex. “It’s exciting to get up on stage and play, but the other 22 hours that you have to deal with can be really tough at times. The buses have gotten a little bit bigger, but the ride’s pretty much the same!” Geddy, in particular, hated the wrench from his “normal” life at home; as did Neil, though he was quick to see the upsides. “I think it’s something that’s hard to step away from, because it is such a monumental challenge,” said Neil of touring. “It almost seems like cheating to leave out the hardest part.” All the same, the European fans would be the poor cousins once again. “I’m afraid that we haven’t paid enough attention to Europe,” said Geddy. “Every four or five years we go over and do a token tour. But if you don’t go over there like everybody else and tour every album, you’re going to fall out of public consciousness – I think that’s what’s happened to us.”
For the first time ever, the band decided to tour without an opening act – not a decision taken lightly, but there was a wealth of material crying out to be played. Neil had always said that ‘2112’, for example, would never get played again. “You can’t go back,” he had said, but he was overruled, not least because it had never been played in its entirety. “We were still opening a lot of shows back then; we were playing 40 minutes a night and we couldn’t really give 20 minutes of that to one piece,” said Alex. “Having more time gave us the scope to do things like that, plus give a really nice sampling of the new album.” Nothing was ruled out, explained Neil. “The three of us were sending faxes back and forth with potential lists. Some were intended to be ridiculous suggestions, but even some of those worked out. Somebody else would take it seriously and say, ‘Well, wait a minute. What if we did this? It could really work’.”
As they practiced the material for ‘An Evening With…’, Geddy didn’t know how he’d cope with some of the older material, not least ‘2112’. “It’s very idealistic, and here we are almost 20 years hence and, God, can I put myself in the frame of mind to act out this mini-drama? I couldn’t help myself from chuckling from time to time.” It was also the first time out for ‘Natural Science’ since the ‘Moving Pictures’ tour. “Getting ‘Natural Science’ together so that it flowed was dodgy in rehearsals,” said Alex, “but by the time we got on the road, it had become my favourite song to play.” The band planned to add a few jams into the show, and also added to its visual effects, with Howard once again planning a groundbreaking combination of video and light. “It’s probably the most theatrical tour we’ve ever done,” said Geddy.
Before the tour, there was time for a couple of weeks off (Neil and Jackie went for a break to Polynesia), then it was time to get on the buses. And bikes: Neil took his motorbike rather than his pushbike, having convinced his mate Brutus to come along as a biking companion. In the end the pair spent more time in the saddle than in the tour bus, covering almost 40,000 miles. In New Hampshire in June 1997, Andrew MacNaughton took pictures of Neil and Phil from a helicopter, the pictures planned for a “scooter trash” book for which Neil took prolific notes whenever he had the chance.
Neil’s change of style had a major impact on the live show, at least acoustically. “The dynamics in his playing went through some profound changes, and it changed the tonality of his drums,” says Robert Scovill, who was behind the desk for the tour. “Early in the tour I sensed him struggling with some of the older songs that were obviously performed with the matched grip. At some point he began implementing both styles of grip depending on what era the songs came from. The whole thing just sprung back to life and in the end added great breadth and depth to his presentation.”
The planned outbursts didn’t quite work however – after a while they fell into patterns that repeated show after show. “We fall into patterns in our jams and after a couple months they stop being spontaneous,” remarked Geddy. “It’s like we cannot exist in a spontaneous world when we’re onstage.” Old pal Mendelson Joe sees this as an asset for a band such as Rush. “These people sweat, they give all in their own realm of music,” he says. “Ever ask an opera singer to jam? Rush’s music is very organised stuff. Disciplined.” Engineer Robert Scovill was recording shows for a prospective live album, which had been on the cards ever since ‘Counterparts’. Rather than pressure individual performances as had happened with ‘A Show of Hands’, the band chose to record every single show and cherry pick the best performances. Great theory – but the practice of using DAT for the recordings wasn’t so simple. “It was a relatively new format of digital recording and it gave me a great deal of technical headaches,” says Robert Scovill. “We had an extremely high failure rate of the recording medium; in retrospect, we are pretty lucky to have captured the amount of shows that we did.”
To the band however, everything was just fine. More than fine – the players were getting on better than ever, and they played together as well as they ever had. Even ‘2112’ had worked – “It was really a lot more fun to play live than I ever thought it would be,” said Geddy. Neil was particularly pleased with how things turned out on tour. “I certainly consider that tour to be the zenith of my career, and of my life,” he said later, effusive praise despite the tendon problems he had suffered in his elbow towards the end. “After so many years of apprenticeship, I believe we’re finally starting to get somewhere. Together.”