Rush - Chemistry

Too Much English

The Scene: A rehearsal room, somewhere in downtown Toronto. Alex Lifeson is already present, setting up equipment. Geddy Lee walks in with a keyboard under his arm, to be faced with the steely gaze of the guitarist. Geddy sees the look on Alex’s face, glances down at what he is carrying, and looks back up. GEDDY: “What?”

Let’s rock. The plan was that simple.

Despite the band’s best intentions, the stripped down musical movement was progressing faster than they were. The descent into grunge that had been started by bands such as Soundgarden and Mudhoney in Seattle a few years before, was rapidly becoming a global charge downhill, energised by the global success of Nirvana’s ‘Nevermind’. Rush had succeeded in loosening their own collars on the previous couple of albums, but compared to the angst-filled, raw energy of their newer peers Rush’s production was starting to sound a little too slick, the music too tidy and rehearsed. Far from being daunted, the band were excited – reminded of the kind of band they used to be, they felt driven to rediscover what they were capable of. “We wanted to be that energetic three-piece band we were in the past,” said Alex. “We decided to strip down our approach and bring up my guitar.”

First, however, everyone was ready for a few months’ break. In October of 1992, Geddy, his mother, brother and sister returned to Starachowice in Poland, so Geddy’s Mom could show her offspring where she had been born and bred. Meanwhile Neil went on a Cycle Africa tour of Mali, Senegal and The Gambia. Now a qualified pilot, Alex wangled a day in a CF-5A fighter jet, with Canada’s 419 Fighter Squadron. Dispatches report that Alex described the experience as “like sex, only not as messy!” He even got to keep his flight suit, which had been labelled “Captain Lerxst”!

As a warm-up before the studio, Neil and Geddy accepted invitations to guest on albums by The Rheostatics and Mendelson Joe, respectively. Having been a Rush fan in his youth, Rheostatics guitarist David Bidini couldn’t believe his luck. “As Neil commanded his kit, he painted my adolescence before me,” said Dave. Rehearsals didn’t start as well as they could in March 1993, particularly as Geddy arrived at the farm with an ‘old friend’. Geddy had already stated that it was time to move on from the keyboard sound, and had recently stopped taking piano lessons. “My life was too busy and I started losing the ability to practice the way I wanted to,” he had said, but he still wanted to use a synthesizer during the writing sessions. “Alex must have said 10,000 times that he didn’t want any keyboards on the album, so when I brought my keyboards into the studio there was an immediate atmosphere,” said Geddy. “He kept looking at them like they were really threatening. Alex was making assumptions that I wanted keyboards all over the place. It was a very volatile situation.”

It wasn’t just about the keyboards, but everything that they had come to represent. “There was a lot of stuff bubbling under the surface,” said Geddy, and it was clear that it was time for such things to come out. A heart to heart settled things, and Alex agreed to allow the keys over the threshold. Even as the keyboards were being set up however, Geddy realised that his heart wasn’t into using them. “Alex and I were sitting there at an eight-track computer machine getting ready to write and watching everybody set up the keyboards,” said Geddy. “When they were done, there was this bank of keyboards with all these computer screens. We looked at all these television screens, and nowhere could you get a ballgame. So we just went, ‘Pass.’” It is not hard to imagine the grin of relief on Alex’s face.

Writing started slowly between Geddy and Alex, as much because of the break as anything. “For the first few days it was hard to get rolling, and that’s when you worry because if things don’t get rolling naturally, there’s no way to force it,” said Neil. “But after those few days, suddenly it was like a bomb went off.” Once things got going, they really got going, recalled Neil, “Alex and Geddy would run into my room pleading for the lyrics and screaming, ‘We’re coffee achievers!’ There’s a genuine childlike excitement to the whole process.” This is not to say that things were forever smooth – it sometimes proved difficult to get the genie back into the bottle. “All we wanted to do was fight,” said Geddy. “We had some pretty darn good fights, and I felt much better. Mondays Alex and I would threaten to murder each other.”

While Geddy and Alex were working (or duking) out their relationship, with a drum machine as a surrogate Neil, the wordsmith himself was struggling with a pot boiler of concepts – about relationships. “I was thinking certainly about gender differences, and I’ve been reading Jung so I was interested in the anima, the female spirit within the male, etc,” he said. “I’d been thinking a lot about the nature of heroism and what was good and what was bad about it, and the idea of a role model, and people I’d known in my own life who were important to me as influences but weren’t important to the rest of the world.” There – put that lot together. “Duality became the only unifying theme,” said Neil, who focused in particular on gender. “I ransacked everything from Scientific American to what the great thinkers of the world have had to say about it,” he said.

Before long, the collective knew, they had to find a producer again – preferably someone from the US this time. “We listened to some of the records that have been made in America over the last few years, and they had a bigger, bolder, more exciting sound,” said Geddy. “At the same time we didn’t want to work with a producer who wasn’t a song person.” Nobody really seemed to fit the bill, so they called up old friend Peter Collins: as it happened he’d moved to the US to record with a number of heavier, stateside bands, such as Queensrÿche. “My taste had moved away from British pop music quite significantly,” says Peter. Peter’s new sensibilities offered an intriguing prospect for the band, who quickly decided he was the man for the job. “It was kind of like an instant, ‘Let’s do this record together’,” said Geddy. “He agreed with the vision of what we saw; and his comments, criticizing the last couple of records, sonically anyway, were very much in line with the direction we wanted to go.” Peter was delighted, particularly as his experience with heavier bands had led him to have a better appreciation of the older Rush. “We had done the more high tech sound, and it was now the time to combine some of those things and get back to a more organic, analogue sort of sound,” he says.

Peter picked up where Rupert left off, once again proving he was appropriate as much for his role as mediator. “If we are not sure about a part or about a performance, we can bounce that off him,” said Alex. “He’s an extremely responsible person in the studio. It’s great to have that; you don’t have to worry about anything because you know Peter’s there for it.”

More of a challenge was finding an engineer, as Peter’s old cohort Jimbo Barton was now a producer in his own right. “We listened to literally dozens of engineers, knowing that we had to find the right guys,” said Neil. In the end, Peter suggested Kevin ‘Caveman’ Shirley, renowned for his somewhat direct approach. “He was very cocky on the phone, which was a somewhat endearing quality for me, because I like people with strong opinions around,” says Peter. When Caveman was invited to Toronto for an interview, he didn’t hold back in his critiquing. “We played some stuff that I had done and Rupert had done and he was just brutally critical,” says Peter. “He was extremely opinionated, so we hired him!”

Recording started in April, and the new team got to work. Kevin was true to form, his minimalist attitude and infectious energy pervading everything he did. “We were after bold and organic sounds, and he was the man for the job,” said Geddy. “He has brilliant miking technique and a great ear for natural recording.” Not only that, but he refused to take anything for granted. “Why do you do it this way?” he would ask, challenging any linkage with the past. “He’s a kind of character that had very little respect for a lot of music that’s been made,” said Geddy.

First to be configured were the drums, which Kevin had guaranteed to have up and running in 20 minutes. “Caveman’s opinion of drums was that they should not be all separated out, but sound like one instrument, and Neil kind of bought into that idea,” says Peter. “I believe Kevin got the sound pretty much together within half an hour.” Neil was delighted with the results – he wanted drums to sound like drums, and they did. “I didn’t want the engineer to process them into something else,” said Neil, but there wasn’t much danger of that – rather than trying to pin down the sound by moving the knobs on the mixing desk, Kev spent time on the studio floor, shifting microphones.

Having dealt with Neil, and having watched a trifle incredulous as Geddy’s complex rig was configured, the Caveman turned his attentions to the bass. Kevin had spotted a defunct, tube-based Ampeg bass head, in the basement, apparently dumped by a previous occupant of the studio. He tested it and found it was old, and cranky, and raw – in other words, perfect. “He plugged it into some Trace Elliot cabinets I had, and went out there and insisted on EQ-ing the amp himself, he cranked the shit out of it and miked the cabinets in a way only he knows,” said Geddy. “He plugged it in to all these speakers, and he turned it up to like, 15… I thought it was going to explode. So, we used a combination: my regular DI setup, my regular setup, and this exploding amp setup. It sounded great, I had a tremendous amount of energy, and all the explosion sounds of it kind of disappeared in the track, so you’re not really aware of the fact that it’s an amplifier on the verge of death.” Caveman also twisted Geddy’s arm to go retro with the guitar. “He had me use my early-70s Fender Jazz bass, which I hadn’t played in years,” Geddy said.

Finally, there was Alex. Kevin’s advice was simple, and profound: if you want to get back to basics, you’ve got to get out of the control room. “His theory was that the sound from the speakers goes into the pickups of a guitar and creates a different sound,” explains Peter. “It is not the same sound you get when you run a cable from the guitar out of the control room into the amp in the studio.” Great theory, but the guitarist hated the idea – the control room had been his home since ‘Moving Pictures’. “In the control room you have a sense of control,” said Alex. “There’s immediate communication; if you want the monitors down they can go down, if you want them up they can go up.” The other concern was that it might affect his signature sound. “I have been very resistant to this kind of an approach to recording the guitar,” he said. “I always thought that we could get power and size and tonal depth in a number of other ways.” Perhaps – but in the end he relented.

While there had been many changes in the set-up, the Peter Collins-patented process of production was much the same as it had been since ‘Power Windows’. Neil did his bit first, then Geddy, and all the while (having learned the trick from Rupert) Alex would hide himself away with his Alesis 8-track to come up with something special for the solos. “I tend to be a perfectionist, but I’ve come to realise my best work is spontaneous,” he said. “An unrehearsed solo may not be particularly in time or in tune, but it can possess an emotional quality that’s very difficult to recapture. I’d rather live with some technical imperfections.”

The key for everyone, not just Alex, was to work on the spontaneity. Once again, Neil left gaps in his perf- ormances, to force himself to make something up on the spur of the moment. Not that he was under-rehearsed, particularly as some technical problems in the writing stages had once again reduced his recording window. “Neil was under the gun to get his parts together,” said Geddy. “He went through a massive rehearsal period; he works tremendously hard and it’s incredible to witness.” Peter helped with both speed and spontaneity, rarely letting Neil go back and do something again if it had “worked”. “The risk factor does transmit itself through the music, so Peter would sometimes try and grab the second run-through before I think it’s even a take,” said Neil. “When I’m just running it down for the engineer, he’ll say, ‘Okay, that’s it’. ‘But… wait a minute!’”

Geddy was also fighting his desire for technical perfectionism, letting his gift for simple melody take control whenever it could. “There are still the same number of notes per bar, but there is less of a variety of notes per bar,” he said. “I felt like I was learning something all over again, and I was able to use things I already knew but applied in a different way.” Most of all, he wanted a bass section that had groove, and he worked with Neil to deliver it. “We’ve been trying to make music that has a little soul to it,” he said. “I view my role as smoothing out any rhythmic things that are uncomfortable – to make the rhythm section sound more fluid and glued-together.”

Some of Kev’s suggestions were discomfiting to say the least, especially that he refused point blank to add any reverb to the raw cuts. “He wanted a purity of real sound, which was a unique way of working for us,” said Neil. This was tricky: reverb was a handy tool, not least to smooth off any rough edges in the performances. “Holding back on the reverb made this record a bit more difficult because the flaws were so apparent. If there was a ‘bark’ on the snare drum or a ‘grunch’ in a guitar note, it was obvious.” Any errors were kept in right until the end – and when rough mixes were made, they sounded exactly that – rough. The band was mostly delighted with what Kevin was bringing to the table. All the same, while nobody stated it outright, people started to wonder whether Kevin was just a little too raw. At least it wasn’t put in those terms – all agreed that there was a core “Rush sound” that wasn’t to be tampered with. “It’s not a total retromovement, you know, we don’t want to throw away – you don’t cut off your nose to spite your face,” said Geddy, referring to Kev’s clean slate approach. “But having someone that challenges you to make sure you’re doing things the way you should be doing them is great.” One thing they did accept, was to leave spaces in the songs without trying to fill them with music: “dry and empty” was good.

The uncertainty came to a head when Alex returned from his bedroom, armed with a fistful of solos. As he plugged in right next to his amp, without the clarity of the control room to help him, his inability to hear himself play was discomfiting in the extreme. This didn’t last however, as he realised he could feel his way, rather than hear it. “As long as I could hear the snare and kick drums loud enough, I knew where I was,” he said. “I could feel the guitar vibrating against my body, and it was easy to pick up feedback. The amps were really singing.” His smile broadened still further as he realised another, unexpected benefit – his guitar was not the only thing he couldn’t hear. “I was the only one out there,” said Alex, who found himself unencumbered by the well-meant criticisms of his colleagues. “It was just me and my amps humming happily in the corner.” That was that – for Alex, everything clicked. “God, I felt young! I really felt energetic. I had a ball, I had a great time.”

Alex used his new-found freedom to immediate effect – constructing a quite deliberately “ugly” riff for ‘Stick It Out’, adding Celtic and Eastern influences to ‘Leave That Thing Alone’, and going back to a straight clean Telecaster sound for ‘Cold Fire’. The latter song was mostly written when it came to Alex’s turn, but Peter was able to prise it open again and make room for Alex to do his magic. All the same, he confessed a certain boredom with solos. “Soloing is fun, but I’d rather hear 60 or 70 percent less soloing on this record than is on it. To me it’s a dated kind of thing,” he’d said. The other members of the band didn’t agree – particularly while he was doing so well.

The whole process was fast, dirty and not always pleasant for the players. “It was a quicker record than I had ever made with them before,” says Peter. “Caveman was not a detailed kind of person, he just wanted to catch a vibe and move on.” Alex was increasingly finding his voice, in more ways than one – the arguments continued with Geddy, who felt he had to make too many compromises. Many of these had been brought in by the Caveman – most of all perhaps, he’d not been afraid to challenge the boys, and their beliefs, head on.

As the mixing stages approached, Kevin had to be informed that he was to be replaced with a fresh pair of ears. “They were insecure about having Caveman mix it because they didn’t want to go quite that far into the analogue world,” says Peter, who proposed Australian engineer Michael Letho. “He brought a certain amount of refinement to the proceedings,” said Neil. “If we had just used Michael, the record might have been too refined. Had we just used the Caveman, it would have been too raw. So we had the best combination of influences.” As in the past, Peter was keen to get other “specialists” involved, though in a lower key way to fit with the album. John Webster of Suicidal Tendencies added some keys and Michael Kamen, who had worked on Pink Floyd’s ‘The Wall’, arranged and conducted the orchestral pieces for ‘Nobody’s Hero’. “John Webster was still fairly minimal,” says Peter. “He was like the North American equivalent of Andy Richards to me.” As things drew to a close, the last thing refusing to play was the title. “I started free-associating through the lyrics and I pulled the word ‘counterpart’ out of the song ‘Animate’,” said Neil. “When I looked it up in the dictionary and saw how complex its meaning was, that it meant both an opposite and a duplicate, I thought, A-ha! That’s what I’m writing about here, that’s racism, culturalism, men and women, gays and straights, all of us, we’re counterparts because we’re the same but we’re different.” With the word ‘counterparts’, Neil had also stumbled on the idea of what it meant to be Rush, as illustrated by the very process of putting the album together. “It is a metaphor for the three of us,” said Geddy. For better, for worse. The album was finally released on 19 October 1993, with the cover incorporating a variety of juxtaposed images, not least the band’s alter egos, the Three Stooges. Singles ‘Stick It Out’ and ‘Nobody’s Hero’ were released for radio promo in North America, for what it was worth.

Whatever they’d spent time doing, it had worked in the eyes of the wider public. ‘Counterparts’ reached Number 2 on Billboard, making it the most successful album they’d ever made. If the band’s intentions had been to get with the times, with the help of Peter, Kevin and Michael they’d succeeded: according to Geddy, ‘Counterparts’ was “a very drastic change in the band’s sound, resulting in one of the best-sounding Rush albums in a long time.” Anyone who thought any problems had been put in the past however, would be wrong.

What was it all for anyway? What is anything for?

To Alex, and despite his initial reluctance to break with his own habits, ‘Counterparts’ didn’t go far enough. “Just about every song could have been better than it was,” he remarked. Having started to fight his own battles, Alex had begun to realise that there were some things he would never be able to achieve with the rest of the band, where compromise was essential. Now that the keyboards were largely out of the equation, if Alex was still not happy there was little else to change.

For Geddy meanwhile, he’d just had enough. ‘Counterparts’ had been a string of compromises, a huge strain; he’d given all he could, and had nothing left to offer. Geddy was feeling “a little fried” by the whole band thing. “I was fed up to here with it,” he said. “I needed to get away from Rush, I needed to get away from music period, and just re-examine my life and make sure I was living the kind of life I wanted to live, and enjoying all the domestic things that a lot of people take for granted every day,” he said. Geddy needed something else to think about for a while, and the imminent prospect of becoming a father again, gave him a perfectly appropriate reason to act. “When I found out that another child was coming, I was adamant that I would be around more for that whole experience, for the sake of my child, for the sake of myself.”

Geddy agreed with the others to play a shorter tour, to ensure he could be there for the birth. In addition, he stated that he wanted to spend some time with his family – initially three months. This was ostensibly to be around for the new baby, but everyone knew there was more to it than that. While Geddy needed his break and Neil would always grab the opportunity to take on other challenges, Alex was thinking of calling it a day altogether. “I don’t think that it really mattered to us; we were taking the time off regardless,” said Alex. “If it meant that it was over, then so be it. We needed to take a break after 20 years of this continuous touring. We needed to touch base, get a little more anchored, and have the opportunity to experience other things in our lives.” Of any of the relationships, the one between Geddy and Alex was the most intense, and also the most claustrophobic. With Neil, this was far less an issue. “With Neil it’s a little different,” explained Alex. “The tour ends, and I might get a fax from Neil on my birthday, and then that’s about it for a year.”

When Geddy made his declaration, Alex’s mind immediately filled with one thing: Solo Project! “It was time for me to do something like that for myself,” said Alex.

With all this going on, it took quite an effort to focus back on the impending tour. Contrary to rumour, Neil wanted the tours to continue, but it was never an easy decision. “Ultimately my subconscious makes up my mind for me, and one morning I wake up and realise, Kid, you’ve got to do it,” he said. Neil saw touring as a necessary evil, and a triumph of discipline over desire. “I always tend to push for continuing to tour because I think it’s so important a part of a vital band,” he said. “I think for the risk-taking aspect, for the discipline of playing at 100 percent night after night, playing live takes you to a level that you would never willingly drive yourself to.”

Of course they had to tour – preparations had been underway for months. Howard, who was now back on the lighting, had been basing his visual set on the snippets of information he’d picked up when he visited the band at the studio. During rehearsals the band sent live tapes to Howard, who was configuring his own setups at a separate venue. “I book ten days for programming,” says Howard. “It’s about choreography, my job is to make the lights fit the lyrics and music.”

With decisions made and a yawning hiatus to follow, the rehearsals themselves became rather relaxed – like working a notice period, which was pretty much what was happening. Geddy’s memories were of, “a few fun-filled weeks, vibing together in a lovely suburban warehouse motif, hidden in a scenic stretch of strip malls in East Toronto!!” Everything was up for grabs, and the band felt comfortable enough to mess with arrangements, rather than sticking too closely to the album versions. In addition, Neil was planning a drum solo that stood up in its own right. “I wanted a free standing piece of music with its own dynamic structure,” he explained.

Following a couple of days of dress rehearsals, the tour started on 22 January 1994. Although Rush had been in the game for nigh on twenty years, they still felt they owed something to newer bands that needed the exposure. “If we hadn’t been able to open shows for four years without radio and without press support, we would have nothing, no avenue of exposure,” said Neil. On tour once again were Primus, and supporting one date was the band I Mother Earth, with vocalist Edwin. Alex liked the singer and filed his name away – never know when he might come in useful.

As the synth stacks came back out again, even Alex started to feel a little nostalgic, playing a keyboard piece on ‘Time Stand Still’. “It’s kind of fun to have the keyboard standing there, for that, little moment,” he said. Geddy was thoroughly fed up with the whole thing however. “Trigger that, step on this, play this here… it’s ridiculous!”

It was so much like old times, not just because the trio were kicking out: the usual number of dates were being squeezed into two months, leaving fewer rest days. There were no dates outside North America at all – indeed, only two dates in the home country, including a nightmare gig on the last night in Toronto, according to Alex. “It’s insane, you get ticket requests, you know from people you haven’t seen in 20 years.” It was exhausting – the band weren’t used to such an intensive tour, and they weren’t as young as they had once been. It didn’t help that there were bugs going round, resulting in the cancellation of one date, at Hampton. “50 guys living together all the time, it’s very easy for these sort of things to go through everybody like wildfire,” said Alex. “We were playing in Washington to 15,000 people and Geddy’s voice was cracking up after the third song, and that’s pretty tough for him, it’s frustrating, it’s embarrassing.”

As the tour ended, everyone was just a little unsure of whether there was something to celebrate. It had been twenty years, and despite the intention to do something special, the band knew they wanted to do something apart. “We can’t think of another group which has survived for so long with the same individuals, and since those individuals are us, we think the occasion deserves some tribute,” said Neil. “We are thinking about the possibility of retrospective shows, live recordings, and videos. Later in the year we will have a clearer idea of what, exactly, we’re going to do. But we’re going to do something – at least have cake!”

Perhaps – but apart from the cake, all that would have to wait.