Little Victories
With impeccable timing, Nancy and Geddy’s daughter Kyla Lee Weinrib was born a week after the tour ended, on 15 May, 1994 at 4:45 am and weighing 7 pounds, 9 ounces.
Almost as quickly as the threesome declared their time out, they realised they wanted more than a quick break. For Geddy, first and foremost, this meant putting music to one side. “When I leave the band, I’m gone, I can leave the rock world pretty easily,” he explained. “I don’t want to bring that life into my household, there’s a different thing going on there.” Alex had a gentle start to the break, collaborating with Tom Cochrane on ‘Ragged Ass Road’; meanwhile, Neil’s multiple hobbies gave him plenty to get on with. Surprising then, that Neil’s first thought was to his drumming. He’d already declared he was finding himself in a bit of a rut, and he wanted to do something about it; unlike the other two, nobody had thought to criticize the “perfectionist” Professor in the studio, so he was having to work it out for himself. His conclusion, he surmised, was that he was trying too hard for his own good. “I was getting perfect metronomic time and was able to play along with click-tracks and sequencers and all that, but I was getting more and more rigid,” he said. The rigidity wasn’t just affecting his playing, but he felt the results were also suffering. “It all got really stiff and linear, and as a listener, too, I didn’t like the way it sounded. It sounded stiff and uncomfortable.”
As it happened, Neil had been building up to putting together a big band drumming video, an idea he’d had following his rather stressful live performance in New York, at the Buddy Rich memorial gig. “I’m getting a lot of the pre-eminent drummers in the world in to play an arrangement of one of Buddy Rich’s pieces,” said Neil. “That’s the kind of thing I would like to do just for personal satisfaction, because I think it deserves to be done and I’d rather have me do it than someone else!” While the video was a tribute to the great Buddy Rich, Neil wasn’t being totally altruistic – he was doing it because he loved the music. “Big Band music is what I’d like to play on the side,” he explained. “It’s like playing Rush music. It’s conceived architecturally but with lots of room for fooling around in the middle.”
The recording of ‘Burning for Buddy’ took place at The Power Station in New York, engineered by Rush regulars Paul Northfield and assistant Simon Pressey. For Neil, the whole experience was more than he could have imagined – he’d never seen, or heard, so many drummers in one place. A total of 21 drummers were used, including Buddy’s nine-year-old son Nick, as well as Rod Morgenstein (from the Steve Morse band, which had supported Rush in 1986) and Steve Smith, who Neil had met via Jeff Berlin a few years before. “Nearly all of these great drummers were also great human beings,” Neil said. “Some of them I will feel close to all my life, even if we never see each other again.”
While playing with Steve Smith, Neil sensed something new in Steve’s drumming. “Always a great drummer, he had suddenly become a monster, so musical and with such beautiful technique,” recalled Neil, who asked Steve what had happened. “Freddie,” Steve had replied. Steve explained how he had been working with drum teacher and mentor, Freddie Gruber, a jazz player of the old school who had worked with luminaries such as Charlie Parker, Miles Davis and indeed, the great Buddy Rich himself. “He just knows how to teach drummers,” comments Neil’s current drum tech, Lorne Wheaton. “He deals with so many amazing things that nobody even sees.”
When Freddie popped by at The Power Station, he and Neil got talking. “I mentioned to him that I was fighting the ‘war of the grips’ – unable to get the power I wanted from traditional grip, or the finesse I wanted from matched grip,” explained Neil, who had spent most of his career playing matched1. “Freddie said, yeah, I noticed that. I could fix that in half an hour.” What an opportunity – Neil arranged a week with Freddie for later in the year. “I knew I needed ‘something’, I just didn’t know what. There was no way of knowing if Freddie was that something, but it seemed better to find out than to wonder about it.” When the week came, it was more revelation than discovery as Freddie gently picked Neil apart and put him back together.
The pieces of advice were simple, but profound – for example, that what the sticks did in between hitting the drums, was more important than how Neil did the hitting. He also suggested Neil went over to traditional grip – this might sound trivial, but you might as well be asking a jockey to ride side saddle. Freddie packed Neil off with some new exercises, a renewed sense of determination and something new to be obsessive about – it was perfect. By the time the ‘Burning for Buddy’ album was released, on 4 October 1994, Neil was already well into the routine.
“I spent the last two years in my basement basically playing for the spiders,” Neil said a few years later. “That did me more good musically than two years of touring would ever have.”
Alex was in no hurry to give up on his playing either, but he needed something to light his fires once again. “I was at a point when I felt lazy and unmotivated,” said Alex, for whom the year off posed a conundrum. Alex was not what is called in the trade a ‘Completer/Finisher’ – his house was littered with half-made projects. “I’m by nature a bit of a lazy person,” he remarked. “I can get very excited and enthusiastic about something, and after a short period of time, I lose interest and I don’t see it through.” However, he thought to himself, he had no more excuses. “I couldn’t see myself sitting around for a year and a half not doing anything more constructive than working on my golf game,” he said. The solo project was calling him, and given this one opportunity, it would be folly not to take it. At the end of 1994, Alex got off his backside and started work.
For the first time in many years Alex was having to write his own lyrics, and following his initial nervousness he let his imagination run riot. As a theme emerged, it became quickly clear that it was going to be quite a dark record, covering some of the less pleasant sides of love, obsession and retribution. One song, ‘Victor’ was based on a W. H. Auden poem, the mood of which fit so closely with his own thoughts he decided to make it the title track. “It really caught the essence of what the record was about,” said Alex. Some of the lyrics were deeply personal, in particular referencing the 25 tumultuous years he had spent with his wife Charlene.
To lighten things up a bit, Alex put together ‘Shut Up Shuttin’ Up’, involving Charlene and her best friend Esther (“who’s a real character”). “I got them in to do this little bit of nagging about the funny little habits that some of us have, and the silly little things that we argue about that end up becoming big things in the overall picture,” he said. “We had them in there for about seven hours going through so many different things, and they were well lubricated with a couple of bottles of wine. By the end of it, of course, we couldn’t get them to shut up.” It was an altogether family affair – Alex’s 18-year-old son Adrian co-wrote and participated on two tracks on the album, ‘At The End’ and ‘The Big Dance’. Other songs were co-written with Bill Bell, who Alex had met when working with Tom Cochrane – not least ‘Strip and Go Naked’, named after a cocktail Bill had invented. “After you’ve had a couple, that basically is what happens,” said Alex. “On the other side, we thought that was kind of what the song was about. We stripped the whole song down to very basic elements.” Alex was careful to avoid over-emphasising his skills as a guitarist. “I don’t feel that I need to showcase my abilities,” he said. “I’ve been playing for a long time and I have a pretty good track record – lots of records where I’ve had a chance to let loose – and I didn’t want to do that with this record.”
As the material came together for the album, Alex called a few of his friends – bass player Les Claypool from Primus, drummer Blake Manning and local friend and fellow Dexter, bassist Peter Cardinali; he also roped in his son Adrian. For vocalist, Alex decided against using himself. “I’m not a singer,” he said. “I didn’t feel that I had to really sing on this record all over the place to satisfy something in my ego.” Having trialled Sebastian Bach from Skid Row on a number of songs, Alex settled on Edwin from I Mother Earth. “He just has a certain quality and a menace in his voice,” said Alex. “I called him up, and he said that he’d love to give it a whirl.” Despite Edwin having to work evenings at Alex’s home studio (as he was recording an IME album at the time, ‘Scenery and Fish’, coincidentally being produced by Paul Northfield), Alex was very pleased with the results. “I think he’s done just a fabulous job on it,” he said. Alex also included Canadian female singer Dalbello on the song ‘Start Today’, though he claimed not to notice any similarity with early Geddy. “Well, you know, it didn’t occur to me when she did it, because I was sitting there in the control room staring at her in the studio doing it,” he said.
It quickly became apparent that the schedules for ‘Victor’ would exceed the time originally allotted. Fortunately, Neil’s own projects added an extra six months to the available timescales. With Neil needing more practice time, and Alex ensconced in his own project, the gap became ever bigger. “It was just a chain of circumstances” commented Neil. “I got all fired up about that and wanted to let all that new information mature in my head.” So, the year became eighteen months, and Alex was grateful for the extension. “I realise now it would’ve been impossible until I had a length of time like I did to work on it,” he said. Over the months, Alex had been involved in just about everything – “I wrote the material, I played guitar, I played bass, I played some keyboards, I did some prog-ramming, I worked on the cover, I paid for the thing!” The result was, at the end of the production, that he felt more confident about his own capabilities than he ever had before. “I pushed myself much harder than I think I’ve ever done before,” he said. “I’ve come out of it with a new sense of who I am and what I want to accomplish, and a whole new work ethic. I love work now, and I can’t get enough of it.”
The album was released at the beginning of 1996, and true to form, Alex decided not to put his own name on the cover. “I didn’t want to call it ‘The Alex Lifeson Project’ or the ‘Big Shot, Big Deal Project’,” he said. The album wasn’t a world beating success, but it achieved respectable sales; for Alex, it was enough. “It was something I did for myself, and if no one had bought a copy or heard it, it wouldn’t have bothered me,” he said. “It threw me into an arena where it was like a question of survival – if I didn’t finish this, I would never finish anything and I would lose so much self-respect, and I got through it and that’s what mattered to me. But I was mostly really moved by the number of good reviews that it got, and that was a wonderful thing.”
The feedback included the views of his compatriots in the band. Geddy and Neil were, “very positive and very supportive, and I love them for that.” However it wasn’t totally to his colleagues’ tastes, as Geddy remarked, generously, “I like a few things on it.” After all, he confessed, “I can’t be objective.”
At the end of the project, Alex said that he wouldn’t be writing any more lyrics for Rush. “I don’t think so… that was enough for me!”
Back at SRO’s offices, there had been a stroke of luck with the discovery of some old concert tapes, found during a move round. “We’d forgotten about them,” said Alex, who took as much delight as his compatriots at listening to the recordings from February 1978, which had been stored for a potential live release. “We took the tapes to the studio for a listen and thought that there was really something there!” Despite the past form of having four studio albums then a live one, a new live album was not inevitable. “We weren’t sure we wanted to release another live record,” remarked Alex. “In the past we’d done it to cap those periods in the band’s development, but we wondered really how relevant that was, this time.” However, the tapes started to push things in the right direction. With the band being so quiet – as a unit, anyway – the fans took it upon themselves to fill the gap. The idea of a tribute album was put forward for genuine reasons – there were plenty of bands out there who were seeing Rush as a major influence, and they wanted to show their appreciation. The message got garbled along the way, however: SRO made some enquiries about what was going on, and the band weren’t sure they liked what they heard. “It came to us that the label was in the quote-unquote business of doing tribute records. That felt a little fishy to me,” said Geddy. So, the management made some more enquiries, more signals were crossed, and indeed the balance was distorted. As Geddy explained, “I believe our legal people and our management, misrepresented us a little bit in that situation in an overprotective way.” As the situation got out of hand, some fans became incensed, and the band was left wondering what on earth had happened. “Our only concern was the exploitation of Rush fans by this thing,” said Alex, but that’s not what came across. Continued Geddy, “Somehow, by virtue of us questioning the legitimacy of the record company’s motives involved with that project, that translated into some disrespect for the musicians involved.” It got worse – the increasingly powerful World Wide Web played its part at spreading unfounded rumours about injunctions and other litigation. Even producer Terry Brown became inadvertently tangled up in the whole thing. Having agreed to mix the album (and why not – it seemed like a good idea at the time), he ended up part of what was seen as a problem.
Even as the ‘Working Man’ tribute album was released, on 2 August 1996, it seemed that nobody ever stopped to ask whether the band wanted to be fêted in such a way. “It’s very flattering,” admitted Alex. “A tribute is great for people who are no longer around, bands that have broken up that have been an influence. But we’re still an active band that plans on continuing for some time longer.” Agreed Neil, “It’s not a tribute album at all, as far as I’m concerned.” Despite his devotion to the cause of Buddy Rich, at least he had the decency to wait until the guy was no longer around. “Just imagine if there was someone going around doing impersonations of you in front of people. I mean, it is a tribute in the true sense of the word, and bless their hearts and all that, but I would never want to hear it.”
Of course, none of it would have happened without the Web. That marvellous technological creation, that global interconnection of wires and fibres, sending packets of information flying across the planet at the speed of light, was seriously pissing Neil off. “For the most part, it’s the worldwide wank,” he remarked. The tribute experience (and the fallout from it) was just one in a series of events that Neil saw as reducing, rather than enhancing his ability to communicate. Not least, word had spread that Neil generally responded to letters he received via Modern Drummer magazine. Given the power of the Web, this message had spread and Neil was being bombarded with letters. “Although it might be flattering to consider this just a reflection of my ever-growing popularity, I know that’s not the case,” said Neil, with a growing sense of unease. Eventually, in the August 1996 issue of Modern Drummer, he felt obliged to send an open letter to his supporters, calling an official halt to the whole thing. “By now the total of those responses would number in the thousands,” he said.
Despite Neil’s vitriol (and the backlash to it – “I’ve become the Salman Rushdie of the Internet for daring to poke fun at it,” he remarked, “I can’t believe the acid that had poured through the ether!”), by 1996 Rush prided themselves in having one of the biggest websites on the net. What don’t kill you makes you stronger, perhaps. All was not totally lost for the letter writing, as Neil continued to write to people whose work he admired, such as author Leslie Choyce, who had written a book called ‘The Republic Of Nothing’. As it happened Leslie owned his own publishing house, The Pottersfield Press, and he asked Neil if he’d ever thought about publishing anything.
Neil sent him some samples, including the previously self-published version of ‘The Masked Rider’ and within a matter of months Neil found he could add “published author” to his CV.
It had been quite a year.
By the late summer of 1995, the hiatus was coming to an end and Geddy for one was gagging to get back to work. “I started feeling like there was this hole in my life, and that was the need for me to express myself musically,” he said. Nothing was a given however – nobody wanted to make another album just because they could, continuing because they didn’t have the nouse to think of anything better. As Geddy put it, “to remain a member of Rush just to be a member of Rush,” this was clearly not an option.
All the same, the trio decided that they did want to try to do whatever it was they did. With some trepidation they made their way back to a rehearsal studio to write, and to see what developed. “We kind of left it at, ‘Let’s see how the first couple of weeks go and if it’s not there we won’t do it,’” said Alex. This time, it was Geddy who was worried about being up to speed, so much so that he’d taken his bass with him on holiday to Florida, a few weeks before. “I had to take an hour a day, sit in a room and make sure I wasn’t losing a step,” he said. As Geddy polished away the rust from his strings and redeveloped the calluses on his fingers, he discovered an undesirable side-effect. “I hate the fact that I’ve proven to myself that practice makes you better, ‘cause now I’m fucked.”