Time Machine tour, US Airways Center, Phoenix, Arizona, June 16, 2011. AP Photo/Roy Dabner
Ray Wawrzyniak collection
2012–2013
PUNCHING THE CLOCK
“Marvel at Clockwork Angels for one or all of its many levels: its literary depth and steampunk cool; its creators’ unity of purpose and preternatural musical sense; its lip-curling rock grooves and girthy production. Whatever Raskulinescz is doing, it’s working. In the blue sky of this creative Indian summer and with that cultural tailwind behind them, Rush channel the impulse that made them so special all along on a modern progressive album right up there in their canon. After 40 years in a world lit only by lighters, there’s no sign they’re headed for that garden any time soon.”
—Grant Moon, Prog, 2012
GO TO WORK, PUNCH THE CLOCK … as if middle-class Canadians like Rush could resist making another big ol’ album? Perhaps it was the realization that the albums were really the band’s life’s work—or maybe a lightning bolt that there had been no full concept album yet from this unabashedly progressive and literary bunch—that convinced them they better get cracking while they can.
Clockwork Angels arrived on June 12, 2012, and reviews were effusive for an album that was heavy, experimental, progressive, and even old-school. In the recording of it, the band yearned for the organic and got it—from the drums up. Producer Nick Raskulinecz, true to the band’s admiring words after working with him on Snakes & Arrows, was called back to help egg the band on. In addition to asking for something conceptual and blessed with the magic of young Rush, Nick helped these open-minded veterans find their fifth gear.
Clockwork Angels tour, Wells Fargo Center, Philadelphia, October 12, 2012. Rex Features via AP Images
CLOCKWORK ANGELS Martin Popoff
Hard to fathom, but Rush turns in their first full-on concept album ever, and in the spirit of a unified theme from literary realms aloft, crafts a music backtrack that is their most opaque and purposeful yet, almost distractedly centered on boomy production and a jammy quality that coagulates and coalesces the tracks despite the expected vast versatility of passages and pathways on offer.
There’s a steampunk vibe to what Neil proposes lyrically, but it’s subtle and oblique, Peart building for us that crucible as more of a visual place, inside of which he tells a universal though difficult tale concerning the vagaries and wantonness of time and its tug on us toward the leveling effect of the grave.
It’s no surprise that advance singles “Caravan” and “BU2B” are the most behaved and Snakes & Arrows–like tunes of the eccentric bunch, both having been recorded a year and a half earlier and then trotted out digitally and live until we’re done with them. Sure, they fit the album’s heavy, tribal, combative totality, but the rest of it is where Clockwork Angels really heats up, evoking visions of Red-era King Crimson and classic Van der Graaf Generator as Rush immerse their listeners in a jungle of bass-dominated wattage from the back end of 1974.
Yea and verily, there’s something very English about the music, which again, fits steampunk’s identification with the Victorian era, Rush forsaking their recent short stabs at progressive origami for sprawling, wallowing journeys with illogical twists and turns, seemingly built from the relentless drums up, Peart bashing away with a sixth sense for groove missing from much of the band’s math rock catalog, especially circa Power Windows clear through to Roll the Bones.
Another Anglophile dimension to the album is its dark and complicated post-punk vibe, a rainy Manchester and moors effect found within tracks like “The Anarchist,” “Carnies,” and “Seven Cities of Gold,” each with expressive, attacking playing from Alex, but mournful of melody, and then changing (like British weather) for the next pessimistic chord pattern, if in fact, chords can express ideas like time slipping away on us, or time being indifferent at best, malicious at worst. “Seven Cities of Gold” in particular evokes the complicated relationship within post-punk between trundling bass lines leading the charge and guitar as texturizer. Some have argued Geddy’s bass is actually too loud on the record—that we can hear for the first time both lots of articulation and bass as a frequency. If so, it only enhances the warmth and power of the record, an effect also achieved by pushing his vocals back in the mix.
Late in the sequence, anchor and advance single “Headlong Flight” opens with a “Bastille Day” quote before displaying an intensification of the band’s sense of arrangement possibility, of fill, of spontaneity, and then come chorus time, a recurring but weirdly dark and proggy Beatle-esque quality. Speaking of Beatles, Rush is not afraid to use strings as a weapon, the sawing away on Clockwork Angels used almost entirely to bum us out, even if closing epic “The Garden” offers much beauty, aided and abetted by the album’s biggest dose of strings (sixteen-piece, all real) o’er acoustic guitars, rare on this over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder of an album.
All told, Clockwork Angels is as true to the marriage of progressive and metal as the formulative records from Moving Pictures on back. And yet, the approach and end effect is completely different, a hot mess if you will, shaggy, ragged, relentlessly riffy, and then hammered home by a most inspired rhythm section unaware of how they’ve dominated both vocals and guitar, despite Alex’s raised quality and quantity of ideas, ideas that spill out of his bag one by one seemingly every ten seconds, like clockwork. In the end, from a band usually associated with snappy songs of bright and open architecture, Clockwork Angels is a welcome and unexpectedly enveloping experience of sonic and psychic heaviness sure to keep fans confounded and surrounded for years to come.
The band receives the Lifetime Artistic Achievement Award at the Governor General’s Performing Arts Awards 20th Anniversary Gala held May 5, 2012, in Ottawa. George Pimentel/WireImage/Getty Images
“In recent years I have been working deliberately to become more improvisational on the drums,” remarked Neil. “And these sessions were an opportunity to attempt that approach in the studio. I played through each song just a few times on my own, checking out patterns and fills that might work, then called in Booujzhe [Nick Raskulinecz]. He stood in the room with me, facing my drums, with a music stand and a single drumstick—he was my conductor, and I was his orchestra. I later replaced that stick with a real baton.”
Also on the drumming front, something so integral to Clockwork Angels, Neil’s mentor Freddie Gruber had died at the age of 84 during the making of the album. “I had quite a ride. I wish I could do it all again,” remarked Gruber in a moment of introspection, once, to Neil’s wife, Carrie; Neil dutifully pays tribute to Gruber and that comment in the epic title track to the record, the song and much of the album being a reverie on the topic of the inexorable march of time.
Addressing the record’s conceptual nature with Classic Rock Revisited’s Jeb Wright, Alex qualified: “We did a number of strictly concept pieces, but a long time ago we decided that we’d run that format through. We moved away from that in the late 1970s. At the same time, all of our records are all thematic and loosely connected; sometimes it is broader and sometimes it is narrower. Nick was really pushing for something like that; not specifically a concept but a story. We spread this one out over a couple of years and it ended up being a very nice way to work. It gave us a bit of breathing space, as we wrote in groups of songs. I think that always helps to get a little bit of variety. When you get into the studio and you record everything together, then it brings that consistency through it. I think we really achieved an interesting dynamic. We have a lot of songs that are different from each other. A lot of the songs are very cinematic and part of the story.”
Ray Wawrzyniak collection
Ray Wawrzyniak collection
Still, there was a heaviness that was missing from the album’s predecessor even though there were differing approaches to the recordings. “I used my Les Pauls and my Telecasters,” said Alex, with respect to “BU2B,” “which is a combo that I used to use quite frequently. It really was heavily layer
ed with guitars and that was the idea for that song. The rest of the album, I really wanted to get away from that and I tried as much as possible to keep it simple. I think that is one of the refreshing aspects of the record. It has a lot of space in it and you can hear the drums clearly, you can hear the bass and the guitar; everything can be loud at the same time.”
“Caravan” and the aforementioned “BU2B” were recorded at Blackbird Studios in Nashville fully a year and a half before the rest of the album, which was captured at a one-year-old studio on the east side of Toronto called Revolution Recording. It was here, in a gorgeous and open wood-paneled room, as fall turned to winter 2011, that the band spent three months with the mercurial Raskulinecz nailing down the album’s sprawling, monster tracks. After mixing at Henson in Los Angeles, it was up to longtime Rush visualist Hugh Syme to work closely with Neil on the various dimensions of the artwork, including the incorporation of alchemical symbols (Neil had seen them in Diane Ackerman’s book, An Alchemy of Mind) and the expected in-jokes, such as setting the cover’s clock at 9:12, or 21:12 in military time.
Despite the steampunk theme and the thread of a storyline (greatly expanded upon in a book form extension of the album by Kevin J. Anderson), the lyrics to Clockwork Angels are kept abstract and poetic enough so that the listener only gets a taste of the tale, coming away intrigued and possibly a tad perplexed. Noted Geddy, speaking with spin.com, “The one thing that I wanted to avoid on this record was being a slave to the libretto. I didn’t want the details of the story to start weighing down the individuality of any one song. I wanted the songs to be a collection that could stand on their own, outside of context of the whole story. When you look at a collection of songs like those on the Who’s Tommy, you could pull ‘I’m Free’ out of that and it still stands on its own. But in connection to the story, it takes on another interpretation. So there was a lot of discussion about that. I think at one point, Neil was a little frustrated with my determination to keep the story line minimal in a sense.”
But make no mistake, Clockwork Angels is definitely highly literary, Neil drawing influence from the likes of Voltaire, Michael Ondaatje, John Barth, Cormac McCarthy, and Daphne du Maurier. Neil’s intellectual efforts are supported by similarly high-minded music. Clockwork Angels, although arguably the heaviest Rush album since perhaps Counterparts, is almost symphonic at times. Not only is there a David Campbell–conducted sixteen-piece orchestra on five tracks, there is also an elegant piano passage in “The Garden,” courtesy of Jason Sniderman. As well, both Alex and Geddy contributed keyboards to the album in a manner that is much more about early Emerson Lake & Palmer than it is Hold Your Fire.
Noted Alex in conversation with Mick Burgess, “We put down keyboard, sample strings and we really liked it but we thought rather than use sampled strings we’d bring in a real orchestra and Geddy and I were the catalysts for that. He’s a real sucker for those sort of things. David Campbell did a great job on the arrangement. That really tugs at your heart. I think there’s something that’s really classic about that arrangement and really heartfelt. The song works really well as a closer, the final chapter of the story. That single cello note at the very end is very poignant.
Clockwork Angels tour, the Palace, Auburn Hills, Michigan, September 18, 2012. Chris Schwegler/CORBIS
New York Times ad, April 22, 2012. Author collection
Clockwork Angels tour, Air Canada Centre, Toronto, October 14, 2012. George Pimentel/WireImage/Getty Images
“With this record, we really wanted to play and wanted to stretch out a little bit,” continued Alex, referring back to the hard-hitting side of Clockwork Angels, which is most of it. “We wanted to have fun playing and also to strip things down a little. I think Snakes & Arrows, in retrospect, was a little bit dense because it was written on acoustic guitar, which played a major role in the production. We layered a lot of acoustics and electrics and I think we got just a little cloudy at times. I really like the record but with hindsight of living with it for a while we realized that we kind of overcooked it a bit. We really wanted to strip it down and have more of a three-piece feel to it. There’s no rhythm guitar during the guitar solos and such like, which are things you end up doing as you like the sound of it because you like all the colour, but it’s not always necessary and I think the album comes across as a lot more powerful as a result.”
And power is what it has always been about with Rush. If at times throughout the years, the music strived for and achieved more of a sense of subtlety, the power could and would shift to the strident drama of the band’s hi-tech stage visuals. And always there was the power of Neil Peart’s hard-polished lyrics, lyrics that year after year possess the power to inspire and sometimes even instruct.
“The thing is when you’re on this side of the fence, life is pretty normal,” said Alex in closing, reflecting on the band’s longevity and really quite good shot at survival for many years to come. “What you do is nothing particularly special. We set high standards so we always try to do our best and play our best. All of that percolates through to the rest of your life and how you treat other people and how you live with your family. You have the mark that you want to leave. Youth is a very volatile thing. When we were younger we set a very high standard for ourselves and we always wanted to reach our goals. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves and worked very fast. We generally had very little time to work on our records because we were touring so much. Everything that we ended up doing had this really giant ball of energy attached to it. Today, we feel a very relaxed confidence about our music, our songwriting and also about our playing. We absolutely respect and trust each other now, more than we ever have. I think that’s a very important aspect working the way we work and how we put records together. You have to be able to trust each other and not hold your own ideas as the most precious. We all try to do the best work we can do as a band—there is no one person more important than the whole. We’ve learned over forty years that this is the key to our success and our integrity.”
There’s no question that the sonic mayhem rifling through the songs of Clockwork Angels made for an action-packed and powerful tour behind the almost universally beloved new album, especially with the band visually expanding beyond the Time Machine tour in their use of steampunk heavy metal chaos with their new stage show.
More notably, just as the main leg of the Clockwork walk came to a close, with the band breaking for Christmas 2012, an early present arrived with news of Rush’s long-awaited Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction. Yes, indeed, the chorus of boos, catcalls, protests, and exhortations over the years from the Rush faithful—and they never got it louder from any band’s clanging fans—has resulted in the most just of capitulations. Not that the boys cared a Canadian snow owl’s hoot about previous snubs, but there it was, announced December 11, 2012—Rush had joined the hall, along with Heart, Public Enemy, Albert King, Randy Newman, and Donna Summer.
Geddy considerably bit more gracious than most fans, telling Rolling Stone’s Andy Greene that the announcement “made my mom very happy, so that’s worth it.”
But given the healthy attitude and admiration shared among Geddy, Neil, and Alex, there’s no reason to believe at this juncture that the Clockwork Angels tour, with the attendant and long-awaited RRHOF induction, constitutes some sort of victory lap. As they always have, they’ll punch out again to spend time with family, to reflect, to summer, and do all the things that make them rounded human beings. But before long they’ll be punching the clock again, itching to build a contraption that runs faster and louder than Clockwork Angels. It’s why they get up in the morning, and it’s what’s kept fans on the edge of their concert seats for more than 40 years.
Various Rush tribute albums.
SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY
A few notes on this discography. I’ve decided to provide the greatest level of detail for the studio albums, then less for live albums, compilations, etc. I figured producers and track timings for that stuff
are not of crucial importance. As well, this is a U.S. discography, with U.S. chart placements, U.S. certifications, and, when we get to singles, official U.S. singles only (save for the all-important indie debut).
Side 1 and Side 2 designations are provided for everything up to Presto, the last Rush album before the pronounced shift from LP to CD. Where possible, I’ve endeavored to reduce repetition, for example, for live albums that were issued both in audio and video format. Catalog numbers are the originals, as are the “issues,” that is, I’ve not gotten into first and second and third appearance on CD, remasters, audiophile recordings, or the like. Summing up, the general idea was to limit this to the core, relevant discography (and, yes, videography), due to space restrictions but also to diminished returns in terms of interest level and sheer readability. Anything that came out only as digital is also not included. Also, I’ve skipped chart placements for videos and DVDs, arguing that the only chart measure that carries enough significance to warrant mention is the Billboard 200 for albums. One final thing (and I’m sure there are a few more of these gremlins): originally and then occasionally, it’s “Freewill” and other times it’s “Free Will.”
Studio Albums
Rush
Label: Mercury
Catalog No.: SRM-1-1011
Release date: July 1, 1974
Peak U.S. Billboard: No. 105
U.S. RIAA certification: Gold
Producer: Rush
Side 1: 1. Finding My Way 5:03; 2. Need Some Love 2:16; 3. Take a Friend 4:27; 4. Here Again 7:30
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