Mountains Come Out of the Sky

by Will Romano

  Inspired by the likes of Peter Gabriel, Ultravox, Japan, Talking Heads, and a host of British New Romantic bands, Rush set upon a new course with Permanent Waves, the title of which was itself an expression of the band’s need to create more song-based material (i.e., music that was built to last). Toward this end, Rush had bandied about recording another epic, this time based on the Arthurian tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. But an extended work was not in keeping with the band’s new aesthetic.

  Instead, the boys spliced and diced “Sir Gawain” to arrive at the nine-minute multisectional song titled “Natural Science,” concerning the delicate balance between nature and science.

  Other songs speak to individual choice (“Freewill”) or the commercialism of music and the ever-encroaching hand of marketing in art (“The Spirit of Radio”), a theme that’s echoed in the closer “Natural Science.” “Jacob’s Ladder” is an almost spiritual concoction of odd times on the subject of inspiration. Then there are the deceptively difficult little tunes about relationships, “Entre Nous” and “Different Strings” (those are Lee’s lyrics and that’s illustrator Hugh Syme on piano).

  The use of studio technology helped Permanent Waves become one of the band’s cutting-edge productions. “There were no big surprises in making Moving Pictures and Permanent Waves,” says engineer Paul Northfield. “Permanent Waves was a twenty-four-track session, and Moving Pictures was one of the first forty-eight-track sessions I did, so you could use more tracks. You could have maybe ten tracks for your drums, where in the past we would have used seven tracks.”

  Permanent Waves went to number three on the British charts, soared to number four on the Billboard U.S. Top 200, and reached platinum status in Canada (striking gold in America) within three months of its release. It set the stage for the band’s most popular work: Moving Pictures.

  Hemispheres (1978)

  MOVING PICTURES

  “You could feel it in the control room,” Brown said. “There was magic going on. Those two records—Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures: The energy coming out of the studio and onto the tape was just magic.”

  “The atmosphere of Le Studio [in Morin Heights, Quebec] was pretty special because it was an idyllic spot,” says Northfield. “It was overlooking a lake and was one of the first successful residential studios in the world. That contributed to it being a great experience. Moving Pictures was on another level because [Rush] came in very organized, with everything worked out and demos done. They knew exactly what they were going to do.”

  “We took a couple of months to record Moving Pictures,” remembered Brown. “We did Fly by Night in three weeks—start to finish. Time to make records progressed as they moved forward through their careers.”

  Some of the band’s most revered compositions appear on Moving Pictures. It might be difficult for people to relate today to how shocking it was to hear the distinctive synth sweep opening “Tom Sawyer” for the first time. This mixture of heavy rock (approaching metallic) with an aggressive keyboard riff was truly groundbreaking when it was appeared.

  “Geddy had the Oberheim [polyphonic] that could play a high string line through a Minimoog,” Northfield remembers. “The OB-X is what Geddy used for that big sweeping sound in ‘Tom Sawyer.’ That was made with an OB-X cross-modulation sound.”

  Aside from being the band’s most fruitful collaborative effort (between Max Webster lyricist Pye Dubois and Peart), the rhythmic meter of the lyrics and stark imagery are as powerful as the musical elements in the song.

  Just as important to the enjoyment and longevity of the tune are its thundering and now-legendary drum parts and drum breaks, fluttering between time-signature changes (4/4 to 7/8).

  Moving Pictures sharpened and perfected the music of Hemispheres and Permanent Waves by presenting challenging, literary-based, muso-friendly songs such as “Limelight” (on dealing with fame); “Red Barchetta” (based on the futuristic geo-socio-politico-industrial short story by Richard S. Foster), “A Nice Sunday Drive,” which uses a vintage car (a red Ferrari Barchetta) as a symbol for personal freedom and the fight against government-imposed regulation); and “The Camera Eye” (inspired by John Dos Passos’s trilogy of novels The 42nd Parallel, Nineteen Nineteen, and The Big Money—a cacophony of American voices captured at the turn of the twentieth century). Despite “The Camera Eye’s” length (eleven minutes), its economy of words and music lightens the song. It feels breezy, unburdened—qualities that may have been elusive in the band’s music prior to 1980.

  Suddenly, Rush were everywhere: On MTV. On radio. In magazines. (Moving Pictures has gone platinum four times over in the U.S. alone, and reached number three on the Billboard and British charts after its release in 1981.) Rush were hailed as musical heroes for extolling the virtues of technique and songwriting, much in the same way Yes, ELP, Jethro Tull, and Genesis had been before them.

  “Moving Pictures just blew them up,” Val Azzoli, former cochairman and co-CEO of the Atlantic Music Group, said in a 2002 interview I conducted. (Azzoli worked with Rush manager Ray Danniels booking Rush, among other operational duties, from the late 1970s through the late 1980s.) “They had all these critically acclaimed records—2112 was one of them. They became a very successful touring band but never sold a lot of records. They were playing small clubs like Cobo Hall in Detroit opening for every band in the world. When Moving Pictures came out, they started playing bigger arenas—Madison Square Garden for three nights.”

  The band solidified its global domination with the live double album Exit ... Stage Left (a platinum-certified release in the U.S. and a Top 10 entry in the U.K.), featuring the second-most-copped drum solo in rock history (the first being John Bonham’s in “Moby Dick”).

  But success is a funny thing: Some progressive rock fans are wary of formulaic music but, at the same time, want their favorite bands to continue to create a familiar brand of music. This became abundantly clear when Rush recorded and released Signals, the follow-up studio album to Moving Pictures.

  Signals was a clear shift in musical direction, and the band’s move toward a more keyboardcentric sound confused longtime listeners. “Subdivisions” (that’s a Minimoog Lee’s using in the extended instrumental sections), “New World Man” (a Top 30 U.S. hit and a nod to the minimalistic, reggae-rock stylings of the Police), “Countdown” (describing the excitement of a space shuttle launch—“space rock” for the ’80s generation), “The Analog Kid,” and the four-on-the-floor quasi-dance track “The Weapon” all demonstrated the band’s desire to write tight compositions. Perhaps none of these were fully understood or appreciated at the time, even by those close to the band.

  “There was a lot of changes going on in [musical] direction then,” Brown said, “which I really wasn’t enthused about. The band was moving toward electronics, keyboards, which I really didn’t hear as part of the band.... I didn’t understand enough about [electronics and keyboards] or feel it was something I could participate in.”

  “[W]e need to move onward,” Lee told writer Geoff Barton of Sounds in May 1983. “Come the first inkling of stagnancy and we’re off and away again.”

  Indeed. Despite the fact that the band had used keyboards in the past, it’s hard to imagine “Between the Wheels” (from 1984’s Grace Under Pressure), the rolling undercurrent of syncopated rhythms in “Middletown Dreams” (from 1985’s Power Windows), the evocative piano tones and wispy sonic orchestration of “Second Nature” or the Vivaldi-esque atmospheric feel of “Mission,” both from 1987’s Hold Your Fire, without the appearance of Signals.

  With ever-increasing frequency, keyboards (and synthesizer programming) shaped the structure, form, and production of the band’s music. Coupled with the material’s stark qualities and the austere characteristics of the many synths used by Lee (and guests), the shift left many fans in the cold.

  Some were in disbelief: Where did their Rush go? Gone were some of the band’s hallmark traits: the grinding (“Limelight”), chorda
l/arpeggiated (“Fly by Night”), and wah/flanging effect-inflected (“The Spirit of Radio”) guitar riffs of yore.

  Rush were simply going in other directions, curtaining their progressive rock tendencies and getting with the keyboard technology of the 1980s. The playing followed: Peart’s style became uncluttered, not quite as busy (though he tapped into an electronic percussion craze led by, for one, King Crimson’s Bill Bruford), Lifeson’s axe pickin’ evolved texturally and emotionally, and the bass came to the fore, filling the role of a lead instrument with an economy of notes.

  Fans who didn’t come along for Rush’s 1980s synthesized ride perhaps didn’t comprehend the mission of the music from the get-go: to progress.

  PROGRESSIVE

  After parting ways with Brown, the band hit a streak of bad luck in finding an appropriate producer. Brown had worked with Rush very nearly since the beginning of their recording career. How could they replace him? But that was just it: Brown was the past, and Rush weren’t looking for a replacement as much as someone who could help guide them through their new direction.

  After months of searching and preproduction (writing, arranging, demoing scratch recordings), producer Peter Henderson appeared. That’s when the fun began. “It was a long, involved project that just wouldn’t end,” Lee said in 2000. “The recording process applied a lot of pressure on our families and personal lives, and it was a pretty tense affair all around. It was thirty-five degrees below zero and it was snowing and I hadn’t seen my family in ages. And we never took days off. We were working insanely. I could never make a record like that again. Never.

  “It was one thing to have a million opinions when you know that you have one guy sitting there, who you trust, who is a father figure, who ultimately you trust to say ‘yea’ or ‘navy,’” Lee continued. “But when he’s not there, and you’re in the floating world for the first time, you have to step up and make those decisions [yourself].’”

  “they bit off a big chunk with Grace Under Pressure,” said Brown. “It was the first record without me for a long, long time. I think it caused some stress and was aptly named.”

  The intense production cycle was evident in the music: “Distant Early Warning,” “Red Lenses,” and “Between the Wheels,” late Cold War–era songs, speak of international and interpersonal concerns, as well as the necessity to stem environmental erosion, political polarization, and global disaster.

  Grace Under Pressure hit the Billboard Top 10, but its icy synth tones convinced some that it was merely a continuation of the direction the band had carved out with Signals. Unfortunately for a portion of the Rush fan base, more of the same followed—Power Windows and Hold Your Fire are either terrific examples of the band doing what it wants or cluelessly heading down the wrong path.

  Adjectives used to describe records in the wake of Signals—Grace Under Pressure, Power Windows and Hold Your Fire—range from slick and sleepy to limp and timid. It is unpopular to say or even suggest so, but this type of opinion is unfortunate and perhaps uninformed: Music on these ’80s Rush records can be quite powerful and inventive.

  By the close of the 1980s, Presto appeared to redefine the band’s sound yet again. Producer Rupert Hine, whose name had been bandied about by the band earlier in the ’80s (Hine said he was asked to produce Rush prior to working with them in 1989 bring Lee’s voice down from the upper stratosphere and get him singing in the lower registers in an attempt to smooth out the band’s overall sound.

  “I talked to Geddy very much about [his voice] during the final meetings for Presto,” Hine intimates. “I just really don’t like those voices up on the ceiling. That was always the reason why I passed [previously]. You know, how could [you] produce an album if you don’t like the singing? .. But I did talk to Geddy and I said, ‘In order to do this, I need to get this off my chest’—and I did. Geddy said to me, ‘So, what would you do about [my high singing]?’ I immediately, without missing a beat, said, ‘Well, for starters I would lower your voice an entire octave. I wouldn’t even bother to change the key. I would drop it an entire octave, because then we would hear Geddy Lee the human being. We’d actually hear you. And we can get a sense of what you are like as a person. There is a good chance that your character and personality will come through in a conversational range rather than . . .’” [Hine squeals and shrieks some nonsense vocals.] “‘None of us have a clue who this person is,’” Hine continues. “‘He just sounds like a bit of a freak. When you want to go up high, you can’t because you’re up there already.’ He chuckled and laughed when I told him this, so graciously, and soon I was to get to know Geddy very well and understand him a bit as a person.”

  Still, hanging onto anything that would identify the band with the vintage ‘70s might have been just as perilous as trying something completely new. “Rush had already done the heavy stuff in the ’70s and [made] the more Police-like sonic change in the early 1980s, and they were in a dangerous place,” Hine says. “Atlantic wanted them to do a big record, and that change in production was me. One of my goals was, ‘We need you to get back to being a power trio: guitar, bass, and drums, but not in a retro way. Not revisiting old Rush. Not going back to the Police era or the more medley ’70s.’ Just doing whatever happens between the three of them. Although there were some little splashes of keyboards, a lot of the slightly more atmospheric sounds were in fact things I did with Alex. So they served a similar purpose of wash or sustain but were born from guitar origination, creating more air and less density than you tend to get with keyboards.

  “Rush are a glorious example of a three-piece,” Hine says. “That’s in common with the most progressive of rock bands, going back to Hendrix and Cream. There is so much room with a three-piece.”

  Presto was a breath of fresh air and a a reminder of the band’s guitar-based legacy—something fans were waiting for.

  “During that record, we were thinking in a sort a sort of cinematic toward the soundstage,” Tayler says. “I tend to mix as if the band were laid out in front of me and there’s a depth to the music. I think with Presto and Roll the Bones I was trying to create this panorama in front of you. I’ll often record things on different combinations of microphones, with close and ambient [room] mics, and those get switched in and out a lot during the mix. Sometimes by doing that you can make certain aspects of the mix bigger and louder.”

  SOLIDIFYING THE LEGACY

  In the early 1990s, when the so-called alternative and Seattle grunge sound changed the way record labels did business (as they searched high and low for the “next Nirvana”), an explosion of indie bands using distortion, tortured lyrical imagery, sloppy playing technique, and sonic dissonance conjured the punk revolution of the 1970s.

  Rush weren’t killed off during the first go-around of the underground music assault in the ’70s, and they were too well established to disappear. More to the point, in many ways, they could relate to the emerging indie phenomenon. After all, Rush were an indie band, having recorded on their own independent label, Moon Records, before Mercury released their debut album. (Rush have maintained a kind of independent status ever since: In 1977, SRO Management, Rush’s longtime representation, founded the label Anthem for Rush and a few other acts, most notably, Max Webster. The label is still around and in good shape as of this writing.)

  Neil Peart’s titanic technique, colossal kit, and ability to compose intelligent drum parts have inspired countless drummers. (Fin Costello/Getty Images)

  All that youthful energy certainly motivated Rush. In the wake of the grunge revolution, Rush released their most hard-driving, groove-based record in years, Counterparts, which recalled pre-punk, shit-kicking Brit rock bands such as Cream and the Who. The result was a kind of metallic, progressive R&B album—yet another new creative avenue for Rush.

  Rock radio responded in kind, spinning songs like “Cold Fire” and “Stick It Out,” placing them in heavy rotation alongside popular music of younger “alternative” and metal artists—the L
ollapalooza generation—such as Tool, Soundgarden, Marilyn Manson, Smashing Pumpkins, Primus, Alice in Chains, White Zombie, Danzig, Helmet, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam, some of which were influenced by Rush.

  The band had been validated, their approach revered and recognized as being relevant in the decade of feedback and distortion. “The era that begat Rush appreciated players,” says bassist and band friend Jeff Berlin. “If the band [came] on the scene now, they would disappear after six weeks. Emerson Lake and Palmer or a U.K. or Asia or these progressive rock bands of that era would die a horrible death today.”

  LIMBO

  Rush were MIA for five long years, in part due to the crippling double tragedies Peart experienced at the end of the 1990s. After a tour to support of their 1996 record Test for Echo, Peart’s daughter, Selena Taylor, was killed in a single-automobile crash (her Jeep overturned) on an Ontario road near Toronto in August 1997.

  “That was a very difficult period,” Lifeson told the author in 2002. “Peart and his wife left Canada for a while. Geddy went over a few times to spend some time with them. I went over and spent some time with them....”

  Then the unthinkable grew worse: Less than a year later, Peart’s wife Jacqueline Taylor succumbed to cancer. “It came upon her very quickly and she was gone in five months,” said manager Ray Danniels in 2002.

  It was a crushing blow, a devastating experience for anyone and everyone who’d touched Peart on a personal level. “I would say for a long period of time no one was capable of functioning properly,” said Lee. “It was a heartbreaking time for everybody. It’s a very sad part of my life. My heart still breaks for what Neil had to go through. His losses are incalculable...

  . He essentially lost everything that was important to him.” “His life revolved around his daughter and wife and touring,” adds Paul Northfield.