Mountains Come Out of the Sky

by Will Romano

  Oldfield was committed to his original material. He was all but done with the Whole World, living at Branson’s newly built Manor Studio in Oxfordshire, working for the better part of six months (from the autumn of 1972 through the spring of ’73) on his composition, which was based on the structuralism of classical composing but also used rock instrumentation and amplification. The composer layered tracks and played most of the instruments himself, using an enormous number of tracks to achieve his goal.

  “Mike is a multi-instrumentalist,” says Heyworth, one of three recording engineers for the record that would become Tubular Bells. “He wanted to play everything. If he heard it in his head, he wanted to be able to play it.”

  Tracked in the days before digitization, Tubular Bells stands as a legendary feat of musical production. “It was difficult, because there were only sixteen tracks,” says Heyworth. “We didn’t have computers then. I had a track sheet, which was a roll of paper that we would roll out on the floor and was divided into blocks of a minute, or something like that, in colored crayons to mark which track certain bits of music were on. Mike would point to the chart and say, ‘At this point a bit of music starts .. .’ and then he’d say, pointing someplace else, At this point, something else starts. ...’ So, you’d have to plan it all out ahead before you got to the mixing stage. Where does everything fit? Where is everything going to go?”

  Nerves were frayed, tempers flared, and tapes were many. “I became a very adept tape operator,” Heyworth says. “It all became really complicated. There were points where we would have to mix all of the tracks down and make more space for more overdubs. We were forever overrunning and going into the next section and erasing what we had spent hours recording.”

  The Manor’s production crew was stretched to its very limits, using whatever effects and creative innovations they could to help realize Oldfield’s dream. Effects such as “taped motor drive amplified organ chord” or double-speed guitar were created in the studio.

  The production of the record became more and more nerve-racking and detailed as the weeks wore on. For one thing, Oldfield continued to insist on playing all of the instruments, from electric, bass, and acoustic guitar to glockenspiel, Farfisa organ, and grand piano. But it soon became apparent that Oldfield couldn’t play everything himself. Others needed to be contacted for contribution, such as Jade Warrior’s flautist Jon Field, Edgar Broughton Band drummer Steve Broughton, vocalists sister Sally Oldfield and Mundy Ellis, string bassist Lindsay Cooper (not to be confused with the bassoonist Lindsay Cooper, who performed with Henry Cow and Hatfield and the North—both Virgin artists), and “master of ceremonies” Viv Stanshall, of Bonzo Dog Band fame. (It’s Stanshall who introduces instruments by name as they state the lead melody, including the clanging bells of the song’s title, in the “Finale.”) “All Mike wanted was his music played correctly,” says Jon Field.

  Tubular Bells (1973)

  Hergest Ridge (1974)

  Ommadawn (1975)

  Incantations (1978)

  Five Miles Out (1982)

  Crises (1983)

  Mike Oldfield’s chilling Tubular Bells perfectly captured the mood of William Friedkin’s horror blockbuster, The Exorcist.

  After an excruciating process, Tubular Bells (one song in two parts, each spanning a single side of the original LP) was finally completed and released in May 1973, and by July it had soared to number one on the British charts.

  Meanwhile, across the pond, Tubular Bells was being imprinted on the minds of music listeners in a slightly different way, due to its inclusion in the horror blockbuster The Exorcist, released in December ’73. An edit of the massive composition and even a rerecorded section of Tubular Bells were released as singles on both sides of the Atlantic.

  Despite how perfectly the icy open bars of Tubular Bells capture the mood of director William Friedkin’s wintry and insidious film, the composition stands on its own merits—Oldfield himself didn’t see The Exorcist until years later.

  “You can say that Tubular Bells is a collection of three-minute pieces, if you want to be unkind,” says David Bedford, who later arranged Tubular Bells and conducted the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra for Virgin’s 1975 release Orchestral Tubular Bells (featuring Oldfield on guitar). “That is, just three-minute instrumental pieces, without any singing, vaguely linked together. But I did a proper musical analysis once, and the themes did progress and lead into other themes quite logically.”

  When Bedford tackled the Orchestral Tubular Bells project (a record that he admits was Richard Branson’s attempt to “milk the ‘Tubular Bells’ phenomenon”), he learned just how complex the piece is. “I had to listen to all the tracks to replicate them in the orchestra, and I’d discover little themes that changed throughout the piece,” says Bedford. “The piece was never written out before. Oldfield may have written a few chords down, but it was nothing like this. I probably know the actual notation of the piece better than he does.”

  Despite its complexities and subtleties, critics scoffed that Tubular Bells was little more than a pale, boring pastiche of greater, more serious works by such composers as American minimalist Terry Riley. Admittedly, Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, with its repetitive and cyclical aspects, and even Steve Reich’s Piano Phase (for two pianos) from 1967 seem to be forerunners to Tubular Bells and other long compositions such as Ommadawn and Incantations.

  Audiences couldn’t have cared less one way or another. “Tubular Bells,” a three-minute edited version of the composition (under the title “Now the Original Theme from The Exorcist”), reached number seven on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (and took up residence there for ten weeks), and the album of the same title hit number three on the Top 200 Albums chart. (The record went gold in the U.S. in March 1974 and to date has sold more than thirteen million copies across the globe.)

  Tubular Bells catapulted Oldfield to stardom and was the foundation stone in Virgin’s industrial complex, one that willingly supported experimental music through the mid-1970s by signing bands such as Hatfield and the North, Gong, and Henry Cow.

  (Richard E. Aaron/Getty Images)

  RUSK

  Modern-Day Warriors

  YOU RARELY SEE THEIR NAMES in the tabloids. They don’t aspire to live the Hollywood life. Or crash parties or cars, or trash hotel rooms. They retain a measure of anonymity while successfully inspiring excellence in themselves and their devotees.

  They’re not American. Or English. They’re Canadian. In other words some of the most un- rock ‘n’ roll rock ‘n’ rollers in rock ‘n’ roll.

  But as much as any British progressive band featured in this book, Rush are the personification of the idea that the music is all that matters—moving with the times (not came from. The band’s follow-up record, Caress of Steel (dedicated to Rod Serling), is liberally sprinkled with sword-and-sorcery imagery. For one thing, the layered menacing electric guitar tracks evoke images of dark forests, expansive otherworldly landscapes, evil wizards, and wispy specters.

  1975’s Caress of Steel: once the property of the hardcore Rush fan.

  What Caress of Steel is best known for is the band’s long-form compositions. The closing track of the original LP’s first side is a three-part composition, “The Necromancer,” which runs nearly twelve and a half minutes and tells the tale of three travelers—men from Willowdale—who journey into “dark and forbidden” lands of the title’s namesake.

  Caress of Steel remains a signpost along the highway of the ever-evolving progressive hard rock movement that valued wizards and warriors as much as wah-wah pedals and whammy bars.

  Rush stood at the gates, perhaps even opened the gates to a new breed of musician. Funnily enough, their most progressive (i.e., most ambitious) material was written just prior to or during the punk era, making them a harbinger as well as a throwback to the British progressives of the decade’s early years.

  Unlike some other progressive rock bands, Rush survived and even thrived in the
punk era, thumbing their noses at the critics and the haters. (Perhaps the band’s hard rock cred helped to insulate them a bit?) Rush would change musical direction, but by then punk would be long over and the band would have brought along a fan base that had grown up on epic scores from 2112, A Farewell to Kings, and Hemispheres. By then, they had nothing to prove to anyone but themselves.

  DOWN THE TUBES

  Caress of Steel may have been a proclamation of progressive hard rock and a success on one level, but it missed the mark on others. Actually, it flopped.

  “In terms of creative and psychological survival, [Caress of Steel] changed us,” Geddy Lee told the author. “I mean, Caress of Steel wasn’t difficult to make. It was just ... a weird-ass record. ... There was just a lot of negativity around how the record was received.”

  Peart claimed that the band was “playing all of these divey bars” just on the outskirts of major cities for the tour, and it began to set in that they were on their way down, not up. (Rush also opened for Kiss, Nazareth, and Mott the Hoople during their lengthy North American tour for Caress of Steel. Not every gig the band played was at a hole-in-the-wall—some were arena venues.)

  Supposedly, morale got so bad among the band and the road crew that they adopted a black humor, dubbing their jaunt through the U.S. the “Down the Tubes” tour. Rush had one more record to make for Mercury, and (they thought) one last shot to make it.

  The “Down the Tubes” tour was good for one thing: Rush began to piece together and perform bits of the title track for their next record, 2112, onstage.

  2112 AND A FAREWELL TO KINGS

  Nineteen seventy-six’s 2112 was a watershed moment in the band’s history. “2112 was a much more commercial record than Caress of Steel,” explained Brown. “In fact, we’d gotten a bunch of ideas together while were doing Caress of Steel that were carried through into 2112.”

  Once again, Rush took inspiration from Ayn Rand’s concept of individual freedom versus the will of society /ruling government (specifically, the novel The Fountainhead and its main character, architect Howard Roark) to fashion the basis for the record’s title song.

  The side-long epic “2112” was composed of several movements and involved an idealistic young dreamer and a futuristic, authoritative government and its prohibition of art of all kinds. In simplest terms, the priests of the Solar Federation, from their temples, run a nanny state via monstrous computers and plan and supervise all human activities, stunting personal ambition and free thought in the process. The hero sees—or dreams of—how man’s creativity once touched the sky in a world time forgot. It’s a paradise for him and it soon becomes clear to the dreamer: He either lives free or dies in the hopes of entering that dreamland.

  2112 is an example of the band’s fusion of the ancient and modern, as well as its ability to juxtapose these two motifs for effect: Priests and temples; atmospheric domes and “Templevision”; supercomputers and ancient seers; electric guitars and “ancient miracles”; a Tchaikovsky reference and soaring sci-fi sound effects all appear in the 2112 “Overture.” It all seems so natural. Everything fits together.

  “We fought back with 2112,” Lee said, “which was probably the most important record we ever made. Without a doubt. Other records may have been more popular and sold more, but that record saved us.”

  Because of the buzz generated by 2112 (the record hit number sixty-one on Billboards Top 200 Albums chart, and songs “The Temples of Syrinx” and “A Passage to Bangkok” became live favorites) and a follow-up live album, All the World’s a Stage (which hit the Billboard Top 40), and owing to the newfound enthusiasm in and around the band, Rush and Brown couldn’t wait to get back into the studio to make the next record.

  A Farewell to Kings, recorded at Rockfield Studios in June 1977 in Wales (the destination for many progressive /pomp/space rock bands in the 1970s, including Van der Graaf Generator, Queen, and Hawkwind), presents another strange duality of the Rush catalog. Despite the record’s title, Rush—as many prog rock bands had done before them (and as countless others would do after)—looked backward for inspiration.

  The album’s centerpiece, “Xanadu” (arguably one of the high points of the band’s most progressive period), an eleven-plus-minute descent into madness, is based on the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s meditation on immortality and paradise, “Kubla Khan.”

  Musically, the terrain of “Xanadu” mirrors the layered topography of Coleridge’s poem. The song opens with bird chirps, wind chimes, volume-controlled guitar, and buzzing, droning synth tones recalling nature and capturing the expanse of the stately pleasure dome of Xanadu. Lifeson’s snaky 7/8-time guitar riff slinks in softly and grows in venom and potency (and volume) as the bass and drums erupt underneath it. Wind sounds, most probably made by synth, whip around the speakers and perfectly capture the blizzard conditions surrounding the “frozen mountaintops” of Xanadu/Shangri-la.

  Other tracks include the title song, “Closer to the Heart,” “Madrigal,” “Cinderella Man,” and the album closer “Cygnus X-1, Book One—The Voyage,” based on the binary star system (the first black hole scientists ever recorded).

  In “Cygnus X-1,” the menacing wash of synthesizer and the sustained ringing of gamelan-like bells echo in the chasm of deep space. The roaring, whooshing noises call to mind a rocket ship shifting into hyperdrive. The atmospherics come to a calm, as though we’re floating through the weightlessness of space, when a focal point—a bass line—slowly grows in loudness and clarity in the stereo mix, as if we’re viewing the rocket ship Rocinante’s lurch toward the massive Cygnus X-1 system.

  Throughout, Rush play choppy, quirky, heavy rhythms, even an aggressive 11/8 rhythm toward the end of the track, suggesting the unpredictability and chaos within a black hole, perhaps mirroring the extreme physical distress and mental anguish the rocket ship operator/speaker experiences upon discovering, and then passing into, the black hole of Cygnus X-1.

  A Farewell to Kings is a prog rock success on many levels—it showcases the band’s ability to synthesize a number of distinctive elements and regale its audience with epic tone poems. The band capitalized on their growing appeal when “Closer to the Heart” reached number thirty-six on the U.K. charts in February 1978, just as A Farewell to Kings soared to number thirty-three in the U.S. (and number twenty-two in Britain).

  What’s more, the music circumvented the critics, making the press irrelevant. While some critics tried to understand the band’s appeal (John Rockwell, writing for the New York Times in January 1979, recognized that Rush answered a “need”), ultimately, fans found their way to the music without the help of the press.

  “In a lot of ways, [critics] have the last word,” Lee said. “But I think a good record will cut through that.”

  HEMISPHERES

  How do you follow up a successful prog rock album? By going even bigger the next time around. Rush’s 1978 effort, Hemispheres, is, in some ways, far more ambitious in scope than its predecessor, A Farewell to Kings.

  The opening track, “Cygnus X-1, Book II: Hemispheres,” which encompasses the entirety of side one on the original LP, continues the saga of our traveler from “Cygnus X-1, Book One.”

  Using the metaphoric schism between passion and intellect (partially inspired by a reference in the 1975 book Powers of Mind, by financial markets writer Adam Smith), “Cygnus X-1, Book II: Hemispheres” is a good measuring stick for the band’s growing songwriting confidence.

  Arguably, outside of “Xanadu,” “Hemispheres” is the band’s most heady, complex and smooth material. Its eighteen minutes whiz by you in a flash. Although he’s not introduced until later in the piece (part three, “Armageddon”), the Rocinante pilot mysteriously returns from the void, having been flung from the black hole/interdimensional time warp to a place of the gods, where Apollo and Dionysus are in battle for the very souls of human beings. As they did in “Book One,” Rush successfully combine ancient mythology and sci-fi imagery into one
narrative.

  Despite the sleek veneer, “Hemispheres” was a bit of a bitch to get together. Lifeson spent a lot of time achieving his guitar tones, perhaps more than for any Rush record had in the past. “It was harder to record the guitars with Hemispheres,” said Brown. “It was harder to nail performances. It certainly wasn’t coming as easy as A Farewell to Kings.”

  The band was in England, first in Advision and then Trident, for three months in 1978 for the production of Hemispheres. By the time final vocals needed to be tracked, Rush were behind schedule—the vocal melodies hadn’t been written. (They would be in Rockfield Studios.) Because the compositions were in keys that made it difficult for Ged to sing, the process was further slowed.

  “Ged was fit to be tied,” Brown said. “It was hard work for Ged. Hard work for everybody. You didn’t have the kinds of tools available then to lower a track that you have now. The only way you did it back then was to slow the tape machine down. You were stuck. You either cut the track again or you persevered. [Rush] are all perseverers. They all want to go farther than they can actually handle. [Hemispheres] was the start of all that happening.”

  PERMANENT WAVES

  Just as our space-traveling hero achieved balance in “Hemispheres,” so did Rush by the end of the 1970s. Arguably, the band’s three studio records following Hemispheres— 1980’s Permanent Waves, 1981’s Moving Pictures, and 1982’s Signals— to varying degrees married their progressive tendencies with the order of the day: new wave.