The Art of Noise
Well.
Whatever the band had done, last time round, it had worked. ‘Permanent Waves’ had been an altogether more pleasant experience to record than ‘Hemispheres’, and had resulted in a top ten hit album. Nobody was under any illusions – there was no clear formula, no direct way of doing the same again, and anyway, who would want to do that? Besides, there was too much going on “out there” to spend too much time navel gazing about the past. “Rock music was changing dramatically at that point,” said Geddy. “With the influence of reggae and white reggae, and more sort of aggressive punk music that was coming out, we very much wanted to be a part of that.”
As well as the new artists on the block, a number of older performers were re- inventing themselves. Yes vocalist Trevor Horn had turned producer and was spearheading a technological revolution in music, accompanied by such stalwarts and innovators as Peter Gabriel. New Wave was being replaced by synth-laden pop counterbalanced by a resurgence of heavy rock, the latter characterised by journalist Geoff Barton as the “New Wave Of British Heavy Metal”, or NWOBHM. With Rush’s credentials and capabilities, it seemed possible for the band to steer a path through both.
The initial plan had been to release a live album based on the gigs recorded on the ‘Permanent Waves’ tour, but a number of jams during the soundchecks had been generating material that was too good to be left on the shelf. The band were also being badgered by Cliff Burnstein (who had, by this time, gained a reputation for being right), to release another studio album and capitalise on the success of ‘Permanent Waves’. “The creative hiatus provided by a live album was not really necessary,” wrote Neil at the time. “It would be more timely and more satisfying to embark on the adventure of a new studio album.” For a bit of light relief, the band cut heads with Max Webster to record the song ‘Battlescar’, one of the Websters’ live songs that both bands had been playing during rehearsals.
In the early summer of 1980, taking time out from Geddy’s fatherly duties, Rush got together at Stony Lake Farm, Ontario, a musical retreat rented from fellow musician and Canadian rockabilly hero Ronnie Hawkins. While Neil spent his time at the farmhouse working on the lyrics, Geddy and Alex made big sounds in a soundproofed barn. Big sounds indeed: the high-tech yowls of Geddy’s Oberheim synthesizer resonated around the barn and were immediately latched upon. Based on powerful, synthesised intros, the pair constructed ‘The Camera Eye’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’: the songs were wake-up calls, dragging the band physically and philosophically into the eighties.
Synthesizers were proving irresistible, but only to add the occasional, dramatic swathe of colour. “Some of the first really interesting polyphonic synthesizer keyboards were being made,” says Paul Northfield, who was to be engineer on the album. “The polyphonic Oberheim and the Prophets, they were texturally very interesting sounds because we had not heard those before. At that time it was a level of orchestration that had never existed.” All in the band were “for” the use of keyboards – and all were happy that it was Geddy in charge of the keys. In his room, Neil noticed an evolution in his lyric writing, adopting a more observational approach. Indeed, Neil would later say that his writing came of age with this album. The philosophy was hidden beneath the surface of more reality-based songs, such as ‘Red Barchetta’ and ‘Witchhunt’. “We looked at all those songs as little films, I think,” he said. “We were trying to make the stories that we were telling affecting, and having some kind of emotional impact.” The approach set the scene for the album, a series of short cuts that quickly earned the title ‘Moving Pictures’.
Musically the tracks were shorter, echoing with the simpler song structures of the band’s New Wave contemporaries. Alex was to be particularly disparaging of the lengthy arrangements of the past. “You can take five different key signatures and go through them all in one song - big deal!” said Alex. “We tried putting something together in 4/4 time for four minutes, that had all the elements of something we once would have done in ten minutes. It’s a little different… it’s a little tougher.”
At end of August 1980 the band decamped to Phase One studios in Toronto and hooked up with Terry Brown and Paul Northfield, to lay demo versions of the songs to tape. A month of dates followed, supported by Saxon, which gave the band an opportunity to trial ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Limelight’, the other songs being rehearsed during soundchecks. On 3 October, after a single day off it was back to Morin Heights, the guys still buzzing from the tour. “They arrived at the studio fully rehearsed,” says Paul. “Neil had absolutely everything, every drum fill, everything rehearsed in detail, and it would not change.” With this in mind, it didn’t take long to get things going. “I remember it being Friday night, we loaded in, and we started getting drum sounds,” recalls Terry. “By the end of the night, we had this phenomenal drum sound, and we went, that’s it! We came in the following day, and we cut ‘Tom Sawyer’, and it was stunning. Absolutely stunning.” Some new recording tricks were tried, particularly with the drums as Neil continued what had become a bit of a bugbear – “I’ve never heard my drums recorded the way I hear them,” he said. Paul Northfield suggested recording the drums through a PZM microphone5 taped to Neil’s chest: it wasn’t quite there, but it helped. “It added to it and it helped apply that special dynamic that I hear,” said Neil. Another recording change was with Alex’s guitars. Traditionally Alex recorded as he would play live, with the guitar plugged into an amp, which was miked through to the mixing desk and thence to tape. As Alex spent more time in the control room listening to the result, he realised he might as well record from guitar straight into the desk.
The mild autumn slipped deceptively into the closed off, wintry atmosphere, as Geddy described it, “of a prison in a home which is snowed-in.” The encroaching isolation worked in the band’s favour: cut off from the real world, they were able to focus exclusively on what they were recording. The team had the routine worked out – Neil and the others would record to a click, then Geddy would spend a few days recording his bass and a few pieces of keyboard. Alex was up next, and Geddy would finish off with the vocals. Simple.
Not everything responded well to this approach, but this was more down to the arrangements than the principle. “‘YYZ’ was an incredibly difficult piece to cut,” says Terry. Indeed, Alex had a particularly hard time with his parts. “He worked really hard, and there were times when we didn’t really know where we were going to go. We didn’t stop until we were absolutely sure we’d got the magic take on everything.”
It wasn’t all so intense – there was time for laughs over meals, and for occasional days off at the local ski resort, where Neil – for better or worse – was learning to snowboard. Some frivolity crept into the recording process itself, not least with ‘Witch Hunt’. The song required an “angry mob” sound effect, so band and crew trooped outside Le Studio where a couple of microphones had been set up in the mid-December snow. What started serious, ended hilarious, explained Alex: “It was so cold, it was really cold! We started… rauw, raew, wrow… ranting and raving.” Someone had the bright idea of cracking a bottle of Scotch to keep the blood flowing. “As the contents of the bottle became less and less, the ranting and raving took on a different flavour… we were in the control room after we had laid down about twelve tracks of mob – in hysterics. Every once in a while you’d hear somebody say something really stupid.”
From starting the album with an innocuous, Oberheim-driven wail, the new technologies remained mostly a framework for the other instruments. “Geddy only played the big Oberheim, playing just a single string note that would just gloss over the top, bass pedals or the occasional Mini-Moog piece, which would be like a simple melodic,” says Paul Northfield. Designer Hugh Syme added a bit of keyboard as well, to ‘Witchhunt’.
Like ‘Gawain’ before it, left behind at the end of the sessions was a lyrical piece based on Thomas Hardy’s ‘Wessex Tales’. The literary work was squeezed out by ‘Vital Signs’, a song of the digital age based on a sonically synthesised backbone, as if to say: this was the way of the future. “‘Vital Signs’ was a pivotal point in Rush’s career,” said Neil. “It was the first time we tried a new style, which worked.” Its lyrics were to prove almost prophetic, however – ‘Signals get lost, and the balance distorted’ – nobody would have thought the words could ever apply to the band. Perhaps as a cautionary tale of relying on too much technology however, various failures of equipment, not least the digital mixing desk, set the schedules back two weeks. When the album was done, Broon and the band realised they had achieved exactly what they were aiming for. They had deliberately aimed at something more accessible and commercial, continuing in the vein of the previous album. “I was convinced that we were going to be very successful with ‘Moving Pictures’,” says Terry. “It had a commercial edge to it, and we seemed to fine tune it just a little bit more. The boys were always pushing themselves to play that much better, better than they were really capable of doing, they worked so hard to get there, and they pulled it off. I thought it was the best thing since sliced toast!”
There is more to music than the recording alone: once the album itself was finished, the band could turn its attention to the cover art and the impending tour. Neil worked with Hugh Syme once again on the cover for ‘Moving Pictures’, which lent itself to all kinds of puns. “I knew immediately I wanted to do something that was simple, a Fellini- esque interpretation of moving pictures,” says Hugh. “We had a couple of ideas, one was to have a faded place on a wall where a picture had been and there was still a nail and a string hanging there, like the picture had been there and had been moved. Simply that, but it was a bit dry and retiring and we decided it would be more interesting to do something a bit more cinematic.” The final cover was taken in front of the Ontario seat of provincial government, at Queens Park in Toronto. It included pictures being moved, and pictures that move, with people taking moving pictures of them. Geddit? For extras, Hugh borrowed friends, neighbours and even his hairdresser’s parents – “I had to call in a lot of favours,” he says. Given the number of extras, equipment costs and other overheads, the cover was extremely costly to make, so expensive in fact that the band had to foot $9,500 of the bill themselves.
Meanwhile, Geddy and Howard Underleider went to town on the live show. There were practical reasons why the visual effects needed to be taken to the next level: the high kicking had been relegated to the past and the players were ever more tied to the equipment they played, leading to a genuine fear that the audiences would not have enough to watch. “Geddy was looking for some really cool animation to accent the tour,” says Norm Stangl, at the time working at Nelvana productions in Toronto: he set to work on the first of a series of animated pieces that could complement the overall musical and visual experience.
The visuals were not the only things due for an overhaul: there were just too many new songs the band wanted to take live, and some older material was sounding stale in comparison. “There comes a day when we have to say, we have nothing to say with this song anymore. We can’t play it with conviction,” said Neil. So, songs such as ‘Fly By Night’ and even ‘Working Man’ were out – for the time. In were the new, keyboard- laden tracks – which led to questions about how (and indeed, whether) the songs could be reproduced live. ‘Witch Hunt’ was considered impossible, but there was a precedent of studio-only songs, such as ‘Different Strings’, ‘Madrigal’ and ‘Tears’. So that was OK – ‘Witch Hunt’ would be left out of the set. To deal with the newer songs there were a number of options – play “live versions” with new arrangements or get someone else in to join the live show. Neither felt particularly in the spirit of “Rush”, so stage right engineer Tony Geranios suggested creating a setup to enable keyboard parts to be triggered remotely. “When I saw what the band was doing, and the willingness to do everything themselves, I put forward the idea,” says Tony, who (and this was prior to MIDI) had been watching his brother’s experiments in triggering synth modules from a snare drum. All agreed, it was worth a try.
With a final reference to “our computerized companions: Albert, Huey, Dewey, and Louie,” ‘Moving Pictures’ was released on 7 February 1981. Ten days after the album was released, off they went, band and crew, the tour schedule a checklist of the major venues in the US and Canada.
It was like someone had knocked over a fire hydrant. “As the record went out I started getting phone calls from people saying, Wow, this is an incredible record!” says Paul Northfield. As a precursor to its own chart success, three weeks after the release of ‘Moving Pictures’, ‘2112’ went platinum, the first Rush album to do so. On 4 March, so did its live follow-up, ‘All The World’s A Stage’. By 13 March, a week after ‘Moving Pictures’ had achieved Rush’s highest ever chart position at Number 3, it went gold, and stayed in the charts a further two weeks, tipping platinum status. After some debate at SRO (as to which ones) a couple of singles were released – ‘Limelight’ reached Billboard #55 on 14 March; in August, ‘Tom Sawyer’ reached #44. ‘YYZ’ was nominated for a Best Rock Instrumental Grammy, and the band had never been so popular: the real world was a good place to be. “It really cemented our career,” said Geddy. Not least, it allowed the band to renegotiate its record contract with Mercury. Over in the UK and Europe things were looking good as well – catalysed by the growing NWOBHM movement, the band also reached Number 3 in the UK charts.
Things were going far, far better than anyone had expected, often with amusing results – not least when Geddy won Most Promising Keyboard Player of The Year, in Keyboard magazine. “We used to laugh about that,” says Paul. “It was hilarious, he had only just graduated from playing one note to playing chords!” Hilarious perhaps, but while Geddy and Neil were becoming regular recipients of awards, Alex had yet to pick up a gong. As others were quick to note, he was always coming second to Eddie Van Halen, which grated more than a little.
As the tour proceeded, the band realised they were being treated as fully-fledged rock stars, for better or worse. “We’d see all these people at our shows who had no idea why they were there or what we were doing,” said Neil. “For some reason we were in that year. That record and that tour did twice the business we did before or since.” Backstage there were accumulations of hangers-on; stage front was packed with people who dearly, dearly wanted to achieve some sense of proximity with their heroes. The band did the best they could: Nick Kotos, who was tour manager by this time, watched the band’s valiant efforts. “I never saw any big gap between the band and their fans,” says Nick. “To the contrary, the guys in Rush would always stop and talk to their fans, regardless of my attempts to get them into the gig to start their soundcheck.” Fair enough – those very people formed the backbone of the best audiences the band had ever entertained. All the same, outgoing Geddy and Alex started to feel the strain. “We had to get a little more insular,” said Geddy. “We had, I guess, a midlife crisis.” As for Neil, he coped – just. “Things were kind of overwhelming, I had a sense of just treading water, trying to keep afloat in all of what people were expecting me to do,” he said. “The more fame we got, the more uncomfortable I became, until I had to overreact and refuse to have pictures taken or anything to do with the machinery because it was taking over.”
Cracks even started to appear between the band and their long-standing, loyal crew. “Exposure gaps became inevitable,” says Nick Kotos. “As the production grew, the crew would start working at 7:00 am and finish around 1:30 am, Tour Management had more demands for financial reporting, the band had more demands on what little personal time they had, and we all got a little bit older.”
Almost inevitably perhaps, the success story was not without its casualties. In April 1981, co-manager Vic Wilson decided to throw in the towel and follow his other interests, selling his share of SRO to Ray. “He had other things that he wanted to do with his life and he wanted to get out,” says agent Neil Warnock. “He was tired with the business and I don’t think he got any satisfaction out it.” Also in April and without warning, Kim Mitchell (support band Max Webster’s vocalist), packed his bags and left the tour. Later he explained that his decision was in part due to feeling that the Websters hadn’t been promoted as well as they could be by SRO – a consequence of Rush’s runaway popularity. On the upside, FM stepped in to replace Max Webster, the band including esoteric instrument player Ben Mink.
There were plenty of highs. Geddy, Alex and Neil had the opportunity to jam around in soundchecks just like in the old days, the output of which (recorded for posterity by soundman Jon Erickson) was the starting point for the aptly named ‘Chemistry’; another song captured was ‘Tough Break’, which had started as a jam between Neil, Tony Geranios and fellow crewman Skip Gildersleeve. On occasion the band showed that it did know how to party – “Once or twice in the course of every tour, there is a night of blessed excess,” said Neil as he described one such event, at the Italian Village in Chicago. “All around, there is ceaseless laughter, and the constant roar of shouted conversations. People are at the tables, on the tables, and under the tables!” Neil wrote a daily diary on the tour, with the intention to release it one day. “If I could complete one good short story, I’d feel like a real writer,” he said. “But to do a novel or a series of short stories takes a 100% commitment, and I don’t want to compromise what I’m doing as a musician by any means.”
As the tour closed on 5 July 1981 it was finally deemed the moment to put a live album together, to capitalise on the moment as much as anything. After sifting through tons of reels of tape, the band agreed to a double album based on the Glasgow and Canadian dates of the ‘Permanent Waves’ and ‘Moving Pictures’ tours respectively. Recording a live performance is not as simple as it sounds – the knowledge that every false move will be captured for posterity can be a great way to freeze up what would otherwise be a fluid performance. All the same, “They were not panicking when they played,” says live recording engineer Guy Charbonneau, who had seen much worse. Terry Brown got on with most of the production at Le Studio and the boys came to add some overdubs – re-recording any bum notes and missed cues. For a bizarre reason all agreed to minimise the input from the crowd. “We were trying to keep every hair in place,” said Geddy. “We were being naïve and missed the point.” As Terry did his thing, the players started to hunt around for other things to do. Neil found a set of thin-shelled Hayman drums in the basement of Le Studio (which initiated conversations with Tama about releasing a thin-shelled model of their own kit), and the threesome started to play with more ideas for the next album in the smaller studio room, developing what would become ‘Subdivisions’. The song claimed the dubious distinction of being the first song Geddy had written completely on keyboard.
Pegi Cecconi, who had taken over a number of Vic’s publishing roles, got to work with Hugh on the live cover, a collage of the band’s previous output. The theatre scene was captured at Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre, which had been closed since 1928 and had fallen into disrepair6. The plan was to use the original people from previous album covers, which caused no end of problems. “We discovered the perils of having people waiting,” says Hugh; worse, some had unexpected expectations. “Paula Turnbull became a noted model in Europe – enough that when I brought her back, she was appalled to know that I didn’t have a trailer for her.” Josh Anderson, the original “king” on ‘A Farewell To Kings’ couldn’t get there at all: his plane was delayed due to the weather.
With a final, composite image incorporating a stage shot taken on tour in Buffalo, ‘Exit… Stage Left’7 was released October 1981. As a humorous aside, the cover was intended to include the tail of cartoon character Snagglepuss – that’s it, just the tail. Clearly it was a cat’s whisker too many. “Forget it!” said Neil. “They wanted all kinds of legal hassles and tons of money.” Unexpectedly, a few months before the release of ‘Exit… Stage Left’, Mercury’s German office issued a single greatest hits album – ‘Rush Through Time’. The band and SRO were not best pleased, and it resulted in another black mark against the label’s European operations. Remarked Neil, “It certainly contains nothing of any interest – not even the cover and certainly not that title. Have you noticed that everyone puns with our name except us?”
Of course, having released the album (or even, both of them), it was necessary to tour. Ho hum – at least it offered an opportunity to road-test ‘Subdivisions’. Off they went for the last two months of 1981, starting back at Stafford’s Bingley Hall in the UK. The fans continued to stamp their mark: the trio needed a police escort when they landed to play at the Royal Highland Exhibition Centre in Scotland, and on November 28 at the Hollywood Sportarium in Florida, Neil learned the lesson of being late to a gig. Following the unfortunately named support act Riot, the fans started a riot of their own when the band failed to come on stage on time. It would have to be Neil, who was travelling back from a visit to the Virgin Islands.
More feeling “trapped by” than “the trappings of” fame, the drummer found himself fighting ever harder for his right to be normal. He wrote a heartfelt riposte to an article in the Daily Texan newspaper in which, based on a lecture entitled ‘No-one gets out of here alive’, Rush was a named example of a band of “satanic rockers”. Ouch. “I can certainly assure you that my lyrics contain no ‘demonic’ secret messages or cleverly concealed mystical commercials,” he wrote. “It is not only absurd and pathetic, but it is also totally incompatible with my philosophy, my work and my beliefs.”
Incorporating the acoustic piece ‘Broons Bane’, ‘Exit… Stage Left’ sold better than anyone had expected, reaching #10 and #6 in the Billboard and UK charts respectively. Together, the live album and ‘Moving Pictures’ achieved two out of the four Juno nominations for 1981, in the Best Album category. Neither won, but nobody was too disappointed – there was no shortage of new gongs on SRO’s shelves. After the tour, life went on: Neil accepted a post on the advisory board of Modern Drummer, and Alex was building a studio in his house with a 24-track analogue desk. Onward and upward.