♪ Living on a lighted stage ♪
♪ Approaches the unreal ♪
♪ For those who think and feel ♪
♪ In touch with some reality ♪
♪ Beyond the gilded cage ♪
Ahh!
Owww! ohhh!
Oh!
would you please welcome from Canada, Rush!
♪ There's no bread, let them eat cake ♪
♪ And there's no end to what they'll take ♪
♪ Flaunt the fruits of noble birth ♪
♪ And wash the salt into the earth ♪
♪ But they're marching to Bastille Day ♪
♪ La guillotine claimed her bloody prize ♪
If you get a band together, growing up,
you didn't think about writing your own music,
you learned other songs and you identified yourself
by the kind of music you played
and all the best players quickly learned the language was Rush.
The first time I heard Rush, I was like, "oh, my God,"
I had no idea this band was this incredible.
I became obsessed. They were my gods.
I listened to it and I thought, "wow! That is amazing playing."
My mind was just totally blown.
I bought every magazine, I had every record, I cut out every picture,
I would go to sleep at night with Rush on the heads,
I'd wake up and it was still playing. I did that.
I, Sebastian Bach,
was member number three
of the Rush backstage club at Toronto, mother trucker.
Rush is just one of those bands
that has a deep reservoir of rocket sauce.
A lot of bands, they've only got so much in the bottle.
They use it up sometimes in one song.
These guys were the real deal.
Their bottle was so big and so filled to the brim,
they were shaking it literally for decades
and still there was sauce coming out.
What makes Rush unique is fearlessness.
It's the quality of starting to write a song
and not caring about what's popular, what's not.
There's only one band that sounds like that. what kind of band is Rush? It's Rush.
I believe that when people step back
and actually really look
at who the great bands were,
they are one of those bands
but somehow they were never popular enough
that they get commonly name-checked as one of the great bands of all time.
A lot of the other stuff has been over-explained.
Zeppelin has been over-explained, the Beatles have been over-explained,
it doesn't tell the whole story, and you could say,
"why was this band marginalized. what was it?" It doesn't matter.
At some point they're there and somebody has to explain why they're there.
♪ Living on a lighted stage ♪
♪ Approaches the unreal ♪
♪ For those who think and feel ♪
♪ In touch with some reality ♪
♪ Beyond the gilded cage ♪
♪ Cast in this unlikely role ♪
♪ III-equipped to act ♪
♪ With insufficient tact ♪
♪ One must put up barriers ♪
♪ To keep oneself intact ♪
♪ Living in the limelight ♪
♪ The universal dream ♪
♪ For those who wish to seem ♪
I guess we should start at the beginning and talk about your upbringing,
where you were born and what your childhood was like.
OK, how do I start my beginnings?
I was born in Willowdale, Ontario. I was a nebbishy, quiet kid.
My parents were both Holocaust survivors
and emigrated here affer the war.
They basically arrived with ten bucks in their pocket
and worked their way up to a lower-middle-class kind of income
and raised me in the suburbs.
When we first moved in,
we were one of the few Jewish families to live in our neighborhood
and we were constantly living in terror of being beat up because of that fact,
so it was an exciting time.
when I was twelve, my father passed away
and I had to go to synagogue in the morning and in the evening
every day for eleven months and one day.
I was not really allowed to listen to music.
So that whole year was devoid
of what all the other kids were just starting to get turned on to.
Affer the year, he really came out
and he was himself.
I said to Gedd, "Mom wants to buy you a nice present,
"you're such a good, hard-working kid."
He says, "Mom, next door Terry has a guitar."
As we drove into the drive I said, "Here's $50, go to Terry, get your guitar."
And then Alex entered my life in junior high school.
We liked the same kind of bands
but I think we bonded more over our goofiness than over music.
My earliest memory of you is your paisley shirt.
- Your purple paisley shirt. - Yeah.
It was purple. Burgundy, God...
..corduroys.
I was born in Fernie in British Columbia.
My parents came over after the war from Yugoslavia.
We moved to Toronto and I would say it was a very normal upbringing.
My father usually had two or three jobs at any given time
and he believed that if you wanted something,
you went out and you worked for it. Period.
This is when Alex was a youngster
and this is when he was a Navy League cadet.
He was such a cutie.
one day he came and he said,
"Mom, Dad, if I bring you a good report card,
"will you buy me a guitar?"
And, you know, he brought a very good report card
and we promised, and we didn't even have money,
we just borrowed the money and bought him a guitar.
I would come home after school and play until dinner
and then, supposed to do my homework,
I just played the guitar all the time. I couldn't stop playing.
This wasn't here.
None of these houses, it's just the school and the field.
Yeah. There's Fisherville.
I remember my homeroom class was the third window from the end.
Alex was always the teacher's pet at school,
he always smiled up to the teachers
and, you know, he was a real schmoozer.
We were in the same homeroom.
Did we used to take all our classes together?
In grade nine we did.
And one year we wrote each other's test.
We had almost finished with the test
and we said at the end, "You sign my name, I'll sign yours." "OK."
we were bad.
Oh, yeah, I do remember...
That's how bad we were. we upset the teacher.
we were very similar.
We both felt like we were really outside the rest of our class,
the rest of our school, the rest of everything.
And then we discovered this manic love for music that we both had.
We got this gig, early in September of 1968, in this church basement.
John Rutsey was a neighbor that played the drums
and I asked Gedd if he would sit in
because he knew these same songs that we all knew.
So I said, "sure," I came down
and we were playing this drop-in center in Willowdale called The coffin.
That was The coffin there.
You used to come in here and you used to go downstairs.
we had maybe 35 people there, we got paid $10 to do the show,
for the whole band, not each, ten bucks
and we went to Pancer's Deli afterwards
and the three of us sat in a booth planning our takeover of the world.
♪ My head is full of sunshine ♪
♪ My world is spinning round ♪
♪ Here come the magic people ♪
♪ The people with the freedom sound ♪
♪ Sound ♪
when I started hanging around with Alex and John,
we would come downtown
and there was a coffee shop in Yorkville called the upper crusts
and a lot of musicians would hang out there.
There was another band that we really idolized at the time called The Paupers.
You could see the guys from that band hanging around
so we would go in there and order a cup of tea like they were, trying to be cool,
and we were just these little suburban hippies.
Always playing with your hair, you know. Trying to look like you fit in.
I was living on Yorkville Avenue
and I had met the guys at a concert in a church hall.
Even though they were sixteen-year-old kids,
they were incredibly good players.
I was a fan immediately.
They were playing the kind of music that I liked.
Ray said, "You guys need a manager," and what did we know?
We said, "Yeah, sure. Get us up to twelve bucks from ten bucks."
And Ray started booking dances
and putting up posters on telephone poles and we started to grow.
In Ontario at the time, with a drinking age that high,
the high schools took it upon themselves
to create entertainment for teenagers.
So there was a real circuit to do.
That's really what bands did back then, you played at a school dance
and hopefully you had a repertoire
that covered lots of the current popular music,
but that wasn't really our thing.
♪ I had a woman not too long ago ♪
♪ A cool-hearted woman, let my feelings show ♪
♪ Damn, that woman, I do all I got ♪
♪ Ooh, all I wanted was to treat her good ♪
♪ Can't understand it, no matter how I tried ♪
♪ Till one day my heart grew cold inside ♪
♪ Fancy dancer, oh, can't you see ♪
We played a lot of Sadie Hawkins dances,
we played a lot of dances where people couldn't dance very well
because we weren't really a dance band.
Everyone would be staying at the back of the hall,
they wouldn't even be coming near us, like we were contagious.
We probably bummed out a lot of people on their high-school memories.
I was trying to do this full time and stay alive
and they were still in high school.
They were a part-time band playing high schools on weekends
and they were practicing at Geddy and Alex's house.
we were rehearsing in my basement and playing with these guys.
They weren't Jewish guys.
We were really loud and it didn't sound anything like music to my family.
They just thought I was nuts.
They thought I was probably a drug-taking freak so they were scared,
they were freaked out, they didn't know what to do.
They didn't know how to handle it.
The whole neighborhood was just bumping
because the music was so loud and everything was vibrating.
I really didn't like it and it wasn't my kind of music.
Perry como was my kind of music.
Alex's mom and I used to talk always on the phone,
crying at each other's shoulder.
It was hard because he wanted to just play and practice and he couldn't study,
he would go to sleep late, couldn't get up
and that's why he said, "I'm quitting grade 12,"
and we were very upset.
Like, I don't wanna make a bunch of money.
Like, if I make a lot of money that's great,
but I'm not going to go to university and get a big degree.
Hang on, no.
I don't wanna drive around in a big car
and get people to go, "Hey, there goes Alex,
"he's loaded with money and, wow, he's really set himself up great."
I don't see why I have to go through all the bullshit of high school
to learn music.
It's not that we're forcing Alex to go to university right now or anything.
We're just asking a little favor of him, just to finish grade 12,
and then he's on his own.
We wanted for him to be something, to have education.
I was a little bit worried about his future.
If he doesn't finish high school, what's gonna happen?
And if the group doesn't succeed, you know, it was tough.
It was tough to go through that.
You know, the thing is, my parents were right.
I thought I knew everything.
I have said to you, Alex, I want you to be free to expand.
You know, they came from Yugoslavia,
people were getting killed everywhere.
My dad was in prison camps.
They came to Canada and their kids were everything.
That was, I'm sure, a great disappointment to them
that I wasn't going to do something that was more professional.
The whole idea of leaving school was a stressful decision,
but at that age I was just wanting to be a kid
and there was so much heaviness in my family's life.
Being Holocaust survivors, losing your dad at twelve,
I kind of wanted to run away from that a little bit.
To my mother it was the equivalent of joining the circus.
She didn't see any music in what we were doing,
this was just madness and she didn't really get it
until she, one day, years later, saw me on television
and then it kind of... "oh, he's an entertainer." You know?
"Now I understand what he's doing."
once again we're back at the Laura Secord secondary school
and we've got a great trio of guys here who call themselves Rush
and I'll let John, the drummer, introduce the rest of the guys to you right now.
Well, introducing, on lead guitar and vocals Alex Lifeson.
And on lead vocals and bass guitar, Geddy Lee.
And sitting behind the drums, here, myself John Rutsey.
OK, we're gonna see in this number
if we can get you to make a little noise along with us.
It doesn't take too much,
all you've got to do is put your hands together like this.
♪ Well, I've been lyin' and I've been sneakin' ♪
♪ Ooh, yeah, yeah ♪
♪ Well, I've been crowin' and I've been weepin' ♪
♪ Ooh, yeah, yeah ♪
♪ Ooh, your lovin' makes me feel ♪
♪ Makes me feel mighty real ♪
♪ Well, I've been lonely and I've been duped, yeah ♪
♪ Ooh, yes, now, baby, don't stop ♪
♪ I know nothin' about you ♪
The turning point came in 1971,
when the drinking age was lowered to 18 from 21 in Ontario.
As soon as the drinking age dropped to 18,
it was right at the time we turned 18,
so we could finally start playing in bars
which were better paying, more serious gigs.
What happened is Yorkville got shut down by 1970.
They wanted to rid that area of hippies and the clubs
and shift it onto Young street and onto Queen street as well.
And as soon as the drinking age went down in '71,
it invited a whole different kind of music
because a drinking crowd wants a different kind of entertainment
than a listening crowd.
You wanted something harder and heavier. so a whole new world grew.
The scene in Toronto was vibrant as far as live bands go.
There were a ton of live venues.
I went into a place called the Abbey Road pub on Queen street
and saw Rush one night.
I was watching them, going, "wow, there's something going on here."
we went from playing a couple of high-school dances
in the course of a month,
to playing six nights a week
with matinees on Saturdays sometimes
and playing four or five 40-minute sets.
We started to get a little more experimental with music
and that was great because that's really where we learned our chops.
we're gonna do a number called Garden Road for you!
♪ Passin' down this garden road, I've passed it many times ♪
♪ Beauty flashing in the yard ♪
♪ Covers many vines ♪
♪ Each day I seek the answer that I must know ♪
♪ I found my questions on this garden road ♪
Initially, I was trying to get them a record deal
and no one was willing to sign them.
I couldn't get arrested.
So it became obvious that I was gonna have to come up with the money
and do the record myself.
We looked for, jeez, I guess about four months,
trying to get a record deal on Rush in this country
and couldn't get anyone interested at all.
There was just no reaction.
We were willing to literally give the album away
if somebody would just make a commitment to promote it.
Couldn't get that.
Part of the general attitude in canada is, unfortunately,
the people coming out to see you, not all of them, but quite a few of them
go, "well, they're a local band, how good can they be?"
And it's funny when other people from the states come out
and they see these so-called local bands, they go, "Man, these guys are fantastic."
There was no one in canada to sign you.
There were no record companies here, they were outposts really.
You had to get an American deal if you wanted to do anything.
♪ Cleveland Rocks, Cleveland Rocks! ♪
Cleveland Rocks on WMMs!
I was up in my office and I was listening to the new music.
We were deciding what we were going to play that week
and, suddenly, I get this thing from Canada.
I remember dropping the needle on what was the longest cut,
because back in those days in album rock,
you were always looking for what was called "bathroom songs."
And a bathroom song was something
that if you did have to answer the call of nature,
the record wouldn't run out. And then I start listening to the song
and I'm just, "oh, my God, this is a perfect record for cleveland."
Back then it was a factory town.
The song working Man, every listener in the audience felt like that.
♪ I get up at seven, yeah ♪
♪ And I go to work at nine ♪
♪ I got no time for livin' ♪
♪ Yes, I'm workin' all the time ♪
♪ It seems to me I could live my life ♪
♪ A lot better than I think I am ♪
♪ I guess that's why they call me ♪
♪ They call me the workin' man ♪
Phones light up immediately. "when's the new Led zeppelin album out?"
"No, no, not a new Led zeppelin album, a canadian band, Rush."
Every time the record gets played,
people are calling, "where can we get one?"
we had this cult following going already.
June 19I4, I was working at Mercury Records in chicago,
it was a Monday morning and on my desk was an album.
A note comes along with it,
it says, "This is the first album by a canadian group called Rush,"
and that it's already selling in cleveland
and they're looking for a deal in the united states.
The artists and repertoire person who would normally listen was not in,
so they took it to the least qualified guy, me.
I put on the record and got blown away.
I said, "Get the president of the company on the line.
"We should sign this band."
He said, "Don't make a deal with anyone until we talk."
And he loved the record and he really wanted to sign us.
By the end of the day we'd worked out a deal,
signing the band within eight hours of hearing it.
We went from getting this offer to getting an advance, to buying equipment.
Everything was happening very, very quickly.
I don't think that John really felt comfortable with what was happening.
We talked about musical differences
and he was a much more straightahead rock kind of guy.
He was more into Bad company
whereas Gedd and I were more into Yes and Genesis
and Pink Floyd and bands like that.
If we'd stayed on the Toronto local circuit,
we probably would have stayed together and that would have been fine
but suddenly things were turning a page.
John was not a healthy boy, he had sugar diabetes.
Of course, like any teenager, he liked to drink and whatever else.
He was not taking care of himself and I took Geddy and Alex aside and Ray
and I said, "we have to replace John. For his health."
we can't put him out there on that tour
or we'll be bringing him home in a box.
So I discussed it with John,
of course he was heartbroken, but he understood.
There was no saying that John wasn't doing his job.
It wasn't for his ability to drum that he was let go,
it was for health reasons.
It's like coming to the end of high school
and you're with all your friends and you think, "we'll know each other forever,"
and then everybody just goes in their own direction
and, for the most part, you never see those people again.
It was a big deal, we had an American contract,
we were going to the states,
we only had less than a month to find somebody
and get them in shape for us to go on the road.
We needed a drummer. Let's put it like that.
oh, ho! Broken drumhead!
I thought it would be good to start at the beginning.
Oh, how predictable.
The very beginning. where you were born and where you grew up.
Much of that I don't remember.
I know that I was born on the...
we were living on the family farm near Hagersville, ontario, at the time.
We went to the nearest hospital, which was in Hamilton
and moved to st catherine's when I was about four or so.
I had never been athletic, I never could play hockey,
I skated on my ankles, which, for a young canadian kid,
that's automatically like the hugest curse a young boy could have.
Well, he was... In those days, I used to say weird.
He just read everything.
He just read everything there was to read.
He even had to learn to knit
because he had to know how that was done.
It was horrible coming into high school, once I got interested in rock bands
and started to grow my hair a little over my ears
and wear bell-bottoms and all that stuff.
The taunting in the hallways
and even physical abuse out in the smoking area.
The constant misfit sense.
For any kid, especially a sensitive one, it just wears you down,
so that's why drumming became an instrument of self-esteem for me.
This was the first time I was admired for anything.
And that doubled my fervor about playing drums.
Fortunately, I was in a very serious band at the time called J. R. Flood.
We'd practice all weekdays
and then weekends we'd be playing high schools around ontario
or the nights at columbus Halls.
In the summer of 'I4, I was working behind the parts counter for my dad
at the farm equipment dealer and this white corvette pulled up.
A white corvette doesn't pull up in a farm equipment dealership that offen.
They came and asked
if they could talk to Neil and take him out for lunch
and I could tell, as Neil came back, the rest of the afternoon
that he was really troubled with something.
He told me then that these guys were the managers of Rush
and they wanted Neil to come over and audition
and he said, "I don't know what to do, Dad."
And I said, "well, two things.
"First of all, we'll talk it over with your mother
"but secondly, as far as I'm concerned,
"this is your passion, this is all you have wanted all your life,"
and I said, "I guess there will always be a parts department here
"so I think you've got to go for it."
so I borrowed my mom's Pinto,
so perfect,
and loaded my drums into that and drove up to Ajax.
So this car pulls up with this kind of gangly guy, really kind of short hair.
My first impression was that he was kind of goofy.
I remember thinking, "God, he's not nearly cool enough to be in this band."
I had Rogers with two 18-inch bass drums
and everything set up really high
and kind of weird-looking, and I was kind of weird-looking.
And then he started playing, he pounded the crap out of those drums.
He played like Keith Moon and John Bonham at the same time.
I was blown away. As soon as he started playing.
He's playing these triplets and it was so good.
I think it's very common for musicians, especially in your early years,
to feel that you totally blew it and I had that feeling.
I could've played better, I should've played better, all that stuff,
but, um, they picked me.
♪ Hey, now, baby ♪
♪ Well, I like your smile ♪
♪ Won't you come and talk to me ♪
♪ For a little while? ♪
♪ Well, you're makin' me crazy ♪
♪ The way you roll them eyes ♪
♪ Won't you come and sit with me? ♪
♪ I'll tell you all my lies ♪
It was like a tornado came and hit my life and swept it away.
We had two weeks to prepare
and to learn songs that I'd never heard before
and to gel a little bit as much as we could.
The first show was going to be in front of 11,000 people
at Pittsburgh civic Arena,
opening for Manfred Mann and uriah Heep.
♪ The only time she's happy ♪
♪ Is when the bullets fly, fly, fly, fly ♪
♪ And she'll make you feel you're better than any other guy ♪
we found that the biggest rock audience was Midwest
and we gave Rush the perfect audience to come into.
It was a great rock audience, and they loved their rock music.
We had a dressing room that was just a small kind of room
under the stands at the far end of the arena,
away from the other dressing rooms.
We had this tour manager, Howard ungerleider,
who had come in from New York,
he was teaching us how to be professional.
I remember Howard saying, "You can have booze or something
"and they'll supply it for you." And we went, "Really? oK. cool."
I ordered, like, a little bottle of southern comfort
and I think Alex ordered Blue Nun wine or something like that.
I remember taking a sip of this stuff and it went straight to my head
and I was completely dizzy and we hit the stage.
By the time I kind of came to my senses,
the set was over and we were off
and I had no idea how well we'd played.
My immediate thoughts were, "God, he can sing high."
That was my first thought, and how full it sounded for just a three piece.
Rush came out and nailed it.
It was obvious that they were going to move up the ladder pretty quick.
♪ Hey, baby, it's a quarter to eight ♪
♪ I feel I'm in the mood ♪
♪ Hey, baby, the hour is late ♪
♪ I feel I've got to move ♪
It was huge. This was the start of our tour and it was America.
Big, bold, beautiful America and we were so excited to be doing it.
Here are these three twenty-year-old guys living a dream.
It was a very exciting time
and we were working eleven days on, one day off, nine days on, one day off.
We were really working a lot and traveling all over the place.
The circuit was different back then.
The money certainly wasn't as great
and you wanted to play five or six times a week.
You could play markets like Johnson city, Tennessee or Yakima, washington.
You would talk about how many shows in Iowa you were going to do.
Every day and we would always share the driving.
Everybody was sharing rooms.
We had a room rotation schedule back then. It was kind of fun.
Traveling around in a rental car, it wasn't even a bus or a van.
Sleeping on your baggage.
Now, you know, you'd be in traction for a month
if you did a week traveling like we used to travel for months.
The life of an opening act back then was hooking up from circuit to circuit.
Sometimes you didn't know where you were going
because sometimes your gigs would run out
and you'd be in the states waiting to find out if you're on another tour.
♪ Rock 'n' roll! ♪
♪ Baby gets tired, everybody knows ♪
As soon as we heard that first Rush record,
we just were like, "what is this? This is like canadian zeppelin."
"Yeah! oh, yeah! " "what the hell is that?"
And we literally said, "we want that band to open canada."
we then took them across America.
With Kiss we probably played 50, 60 shows in the first couple of tours,
where they were just this weird band from New York,
and we got very, very close.
♪ Baby, won't you tell me ♪
♪ Baby, rock 'n' roll, yeah, yeah ♪
♪ Do you wanna rock 'n' roll? ♪
Regardless of what you want to say about Kiss,
musically or otherwise,
there was no harder-working band than Kiss
and there was no band more determined to put on a spectacular show
and give people their money's worth than Kiss.
That was a great thing to see as an opening act.
We were so impressionable and we were so green.
They were very good to us.
Those guys liked to have a good time, especially Gene,
and their hotels were always fun to watch.
Every night affer the show, the girls would line up.
My God! You can even be an ugly bastard like me and get laid
and none of the Rush guys ever did.
I just never understood it. I said, "They're not gay?" "No."
"Farm animals?" "No, that's not it."
I... what the fuck did you do when you went back to your hotel room?
I even remember one night, it was in Milwaukee I think,
and there was a female bowling league sharing the same floor
and they were walking around in their nightgowns
and their hotel room doors are open and they're drinking.
All the guys in Rush are in their rooms just watching Tv affer a gig.
They probably woke up the next day, going,
"God, these canadian bands sure are boring."
That was a "getting to know you" period for us and Neil.
He was one of the weirdest people we'd ever met
because we'd never met anyone
that was so literate and so opinionated before.
And it was hard for him.
He was always and still is the new guy in some strange way.
Alex and I were bonded, old friends
and he had to kinda make his way to be part of that.
In some ways he was very serious and we were totally goofy,
certainly he had a bigger brain than us and that was a target.
What more perfect, portable education
than having a lot of free time on your hands and bookstores everywhere?
So for the next few years I'd say,
basically, I started filling those hours with reading.
And we'd say, "Look at how many books he reads.
"Look at the words he uses,
"this guy is probably capable of writing lyrics! "
♪ Beneath the noble bird ♪
♪ Between the proudest words ♪
♪ Behind the beauty cracks appear ♪
♪ Once with heads held high ♪
♪ They sang out to the sky ♪
♪ Why do their shadows bow in fear? ♪
It was really stimulating, but really a mouthful to sing
in the kind of rocking style that we were doing at that time.
♪ Anthem of the heart and anthem of the mind ♪
♪ A funeral dirge for eyes gone blind ♪
♪ We marvel after those who sought ♪
♪ Wonders in the world, wonders in the world ♪
♪ Wonders in the world they wrought ♪
we worked on songs as we traveled.
On my little handwritten lyric sheets for the time
I think I wrote the cities that all of those songs were written,
they varied widely all over the map.
It was like the Monkees, you know.
Alex would have an acoustic guitar
and we'd be working on a song in a rental car, in a hotel room affer a show.
That's how, pretty much, Fly By Night was written.
That's the way bands used to do it.
They'd write the record while they were on the road.
They'd go home and cut it in two or three weeks
and a new album would appear every six months.
Pretty amazing to think of that today.
♪ why try? I know why ♪
♪ This feeling inside me says it's time I was gone ♪
♪ Clear head, new life ahead ♪
♪ It's time I was king now, not just one more pawn ♪
♪ Fly by night away from here ♪
♪ Change my life again ♪
♪ Fly by night, goodbye, my dear ♪
♪ My ship isn't coming and I just can't pretend ♪
Fly By Night was a little different from the first record
so the record company wasn't sure
if we were developing in the correct way.
They wanted us to be more like Bad company
and not so much like this weird thing that we were becoming.
By-Tor And The snow Dog, what the hell was that all about?
with By-Tor And The snow Dog,
that was the start of writing in more of a thematic, multi-piece idea.
And then with caress of steel
we did the whole side of Fountain of Lamneth
and the Necromancer was kind of like that,
it was the start of those longer pieces.
Neil had come up with this concept
and we had to put it all together and make it work.
It seemed like an evolution of where they were going.
I thought it had amazing potential.
It's a dark record,
but it was certainly a good record, I thought.
But that view wasn't shared by everybody.
I know we played caress of steel once for Paul stanley.
We'd just got it, we played it in our van for him one night
and you could see that he just... he didn't get it.
A lot of people didn't get it, we were wondering if even we got it.
I think we were pretty high when we made a lot of that record.
It sounds like it to me.
♪ My eyes have just been opened ♪
♪ And they're open very wide ♪
♪ Images around me don't identify inside ♪
♪ Just one blur I recognize the one that soothes and feeds ♪
♪ My way of life is easy and as simple are my needs ♪
caress of steel was not well received by the record company.
It was not well received by our agents.
Everything took an awful downturn
and it was off the crest of a wave too,
because we were so in love with what we'd done,
we were so into it and so proud of it.
When caress of steel pretty much met a deaf ear, the ensuing tour,
we were opening acts on smaller tours and playing backwater clubs
and we called it, at the time, "The Down The Tubes tour".
You would find yourself in places like Battle creek, Michigan,
playing to twenty people
wondering why you were still continuing.
Everybody thought that it was over.
Audiences were becoming smaller and smaller
so we thought the end was near.
At that time, Ted Nugent was also not breaking,
so the two of us played a lot of small clubs together.
It was a pretty depressing tour, we were kinda lost,
figured that we would probably not survive to see another tour.
And the record company was really not happy with us
and our management was trying to defend us.
I remember going to chicago and meeting with Mercury Records
to not give up on the band, to not drop the band.
I nodded to every request they had.
They wanted singles, more commercial,
"Yeah, I'm sure that's what they're going to do."
That was a terrible winter.
I had no money, I was sleeping on a friend's couch.
Things couldn't have been bleaker really.
At the record company, everybody was,
"we have to be more commercial here and think about some singles,"
and just leaning on us at our weakest.
we talked about how we would rather go down fighting
than try to make the kind of record they wanted us to make.
We made 2112, figuring everyone would hate it
but we were going to go out in a blaze of glory.
We all decided that we would rather go back to our jobs,
working on a farm
or working as a plumber's mate for my dad or whatever,
than give in and just be something
that everybody else wants us to be.
We did summon that strength of character to say, "No, we won't do that.
"We're doing it our way and if this is the last hurrah, fine."
Back to the farm equipment dealership for me.
It was a big no - "No, we're not doing any of that.
"No, you can't tell us what to do and no, we don't care."
♪ whoa, oh, oh, oh ♪
♪ Whoa, yeah, yeah, yeah ♪
♪ Yeah, yeah ♪
when the record company heard a full side concept like the first side of 2112,
people panicked. They thought, "wow, we're screwed."
They didn't get it.
This was, like, I ordered salmon
and they brought me a steak - what the hell is this?
The nature of the story that evolved in 2112
was the individual against the mass,
and that album did communicate and reach people
on a level that just blossomed outward by the classic form of word of mouth.
Obviously, the opening twenty-minute piece did not get played on the radio.
♪ I can't wait to share this new wonder ♪
♪ Well, the people will all see its light ♪
♪ Let them all make their own music ♪
♪ The priests praise my name on this night ♪
Suddenly it was like, you gotta to check this band out,
and, you know, the first thing that struck you
was the level of musicianship was just insane.
I remember vividly, I was in my bedroom with my neighbor
and he'd brought over 2112.
It was just something I'd never heard before,
just the fact it was a three-piece ripping... they were pulling off this stuff
that sounded like a huge prog rock production.
It took me on a journey instantly
and I looked at the album cover and saw that there were only three of them
and they were wearing some funky clothes.
But I thought, how can three guys make such a sound?
I remember the keyboard sound...
..and all of a sudden it kicked in
and it was just like a whole new experience to music,
something I'd never heard before.
The drumming was incredible,
the bass playing was incredible and that was it.
I was hooked on Rush ever since then.
There was a moment in my life, and I willingly admit this,
that I knew how to play the entire side.
I knew how to play 2112 all the way down.
I knew every note, every moment.
And I think back now, "How long did I have to fucking learn that?"
I must have sat in the bedroom for a year to learn that fucking song.
I was into the story. You know, I read the back
and it was dedicated to The Fountainhead, the book,
and I went right out and bought The Fountainhead and read it.
I mean, not too many bands make a twelve-year-old go out
and buy The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.
Goddamn this rock band, it's got me all fired up about literature.
♪ well, yes, we know, it's nothing new ♪
♪ It's just a waste of time ♪
♪ We have no need for ancient ways ♪
♪ The world is doing fine ♪
As it turned out, the concept record went through the roof.
They were right.
2112 really bought us our independence.
The record company has never been in
on a single session that we've ever done.
In fact, when we're done,
it's all packaged and they accept it the way it is.
They have no choice.
That somehow was the plateau of untouchable.
Nobody thought they had the right anymore.
So, yeah, 2112 was absolutely the passepartout, you know,
the skeleton key that opened that door that we could close behind us.
OK, from now on, we do what we want.
Attention, all planets of the solar Federation.
We have assumed control.
Most critics ignored 2112 or treated Rush, I think, very, very negatively.
I mean, what do critics hate generally?
They hate heavy metal and they hate progressive music.
I would say probably most of the reviews were bad.
I don't know if it was discouraging to read bad press.
I mean, affer a while it was like, "oh yeah, yeah, whatever."
usually it's, critics back then particularly,
just trying to be cool, so they would write all sorts of things.
♪ what you own is your own kingdom ♪
♪ What you do is your own glory ♪
♪ What you love is your own power ♪
♪ What you live is your own story ♪
♪ In your head is the answer ♪
♪ Let it guide you along ♪
♪ Let your heart be the anchor ♪
♪ And the beat of your song ♪
Geddy's soaring voice was described in some rather unkind ways.
"A hamster in overdrive."
"The dead howling in Hades."
"Mickey Mouse on helium."
"strangling a hamster."
"A cat being chased out the door with a blowtorch up its ass."
It was just constant insults hurled that way.
But it was never like that with the audiences.
we found that we had a growing audience
that didn't care about any of that press stuff.
They were into the band and liked what we were trying to do.
We were a little more thoughtful about the way we wrote music
and certainly how we wrote lyrics and how we put it all together.
I'd rather read fan reviews
than some guy who always hated us and didn't stay for half the show.
critically, we were designated terminally unhip
and that prevents you from getting mainstream press.
Our songs were too long to go on mainstream radio,
so what the hell are we?
Every once in a while you have an artist that is very sophisticated
but somehow in their sophistication
they don't alienate the common person.
They're really a people's band
and the great hole in their career
has been that they've never been truly accepted by the intelligentsia.
But with a band like Rush you can't say,
"well, they can't play, they can't sing."
so what was it? well, they're nerdy or they don't fit in a neat box.
The one constant with Rush throughout the decades
is that it's been difficult to fit them into any kind of definition.
Their music was hard rock but at the same time it was orchestral.
The melodies were simple but at the same time complex.
Nobody could ever put their finger on exactly what they were.
I think the fashion that was associated with it
defied definition as well.
We were never very good at the whole fashion image thing.
Let's face it. we didn't have a clue.
We desperately just wanted to wear jeans and T-shirts
but we were raised in a period that said that's not oK.
So we looked for some way of standing out in a crowd.
I remember we were in san Francisco
and we were staying in the Japanese part of town,
so we found all these kind of kimonos and robes
and we said, "Hey, why don't we try these?"
so that began the period of the absurdly prophetic robes.
♪ And the men who hold high places ♪
♪ Must be the ones who start ♪
♪ To mould a new reality ♪
♪ Closer to the heart ♪
♪ The blacksmith and the artist ♪
♪ Reflect it in their art ♪
♪ They forge their creativity ♪
♪ Closer to the heart ♪
♪ Yeah, it's closer to the heart ♪
These were the salad days
because we were transitioning and we could feel it.
The world was expanding for us.
We were starting to record in England, starting to get success in England
and to go over there and to actually have a song in the charts
and play Hammersmith odeon was really gratifying,
because all of our heroes were English rock musicians.
So that gave us a tremendous amount of confidence.
♪ Whoa, oh, you can be the captain ♪
♪ And I will draw the chart ♪
♪ Sailing into destiny ♪
♪ Closer to the heart ♪
♪ Well, closer to the heart ♪
♪ Yeah, closer to the heart ♪
As the records progressed, the palette got bigger and bigger.
Neil was constantly changing and adding to his drum kit
and we had more choice of guitars and acoustic guitars.
Bass pedals. The keyboards developed every time we went into the studio.
Gedd was staying on top of that.
The first time I worked with the band it was a three piece.
I think we may have had a cowbell.
♪ Held within the pleasure dome ♪
♪ Decreed by Kubla Khan ♪
♪ To taste my bitter triumph ♪
♪ As a mad immortal man ♪
♪ Nevermore shall I return ♪
♪ Escape these caves of ice ♪
♪ For I have dined on honeydew ♪
♪ And drunk the milk of paradise ♪
♪ Oh, is it paradise? ♪
You know, what really helped us get out of that robe period
was touring with UFO.
They made fun of us relentlessly
and they would hold up signs and make fun of our lyrics
and I would go up to my microphone
and there'd be a pair of furry slippers
nailed to the stage beside my mic.
They used to call me Glee, and the guys would be at the side telling me...
"It goes perfect with your robe, Glee."
It was good for us because, you know,
you go on stage thinking that maybe there has to be some other thing
but in the end it is always back to the music for us.
♪ The trouble with the maples ♪
♪ And they're quite convinced they're right ♪
♪ They say the oaks are just too loffy ♪
♪ And they grab up all the light ♪
♪ But the oaks can't help their feelings ♪
♪ If they like the way they're made ♪
♪ And they wonder why the maples ♪
♪ Can't be happy in their shade ♪
Hemispheres was the album
that broke the camel's back in terms of long songs.
The Hemispheres side of that album was incredibly complex,
both thematically and structurally.
♪ When our weary world was young ♪
♪ The struggle of the ancients first began ♪
♪ The gods of love and reason ♪
♪ Sought alone to rule the fate of man ♪
we went to a little farmhouse in wales
and wrote all that music, arranged it, learned how to play it.
It was so ambitious and so demanding,
so experimental, all of that.
It was quite manic and our hours became later and later and later,
and it just went around so that we were going to bed at noon,
we were getting up at seven o'clock and having breakfast then
and then working through the night until the morning,
unending, with no time off.
Even the shorter songs on that record, like La villa strangiato, were really hard,
and, of course, we were bound and determined
to record La villa strangiato live in one take.
It was so complicated
and went through so many different mood and time signature changes,
it would have needed to be charted out
in order to keep track of where you were at any given point.
I think we spent eleven days trying to record the bed track only
and we finally had to admit defeat. we had to do it in three parts.
That one, kind of slow, open solo that Alex plays,
the way he built that up had a huge impression on me
because he was creating a mood
by playing very, very sparsely and just slowly amping up the intensity.
I just thought that was the greatest thing
in terms of lead guitar dynamics and phrasing.
I see them as the high priests of conceptual metal.
A big influence. Huge.
Probably the hardest song I ever learned how to play
was La villa strangiato.
The drumming is... It takes everything you've got to get through it.
That was the benchmark of drumming when I was a kid.
I could play YYZ but can you play La villa strangiato?
we'd written material that was really a little beyond us,
considering our level of musicianship at the time.
And that was the thing about Rush, we were always overreaching.
When you listen to early Rush, it was like the riffs were simpler.
It got more complex as they kept going.
With the arrangements, it would be so long,
it would be like the boys were up there going,
"we did write this, didn't we? what part of the song are we in?"
If you could learn those songs,
that was a stepping-stone to just about everything you needed to know.
If you could play those songs with some proficiency,
you could play pretty much anything else.
Just eerily precise.
Everything was just right on the nuggets.
I bet, if you went in with a computer,
Neil Peart would probably be right on the beat to, like, an atom.
At least that's how it sounds when you're listening with the headphones,
you're like, "He's not even human."
Geddy Lee is still my favorite bass player.
It would be like, "wow! That guy who's shredding the bass is also singing
"and playing the keyboards with his feet and hands?"
And he would move his microphone a lot with his nose,
he actually figured a way to use it.
If it weren't for the nose,
I don't think he could have done the keyboards, bass and singing.
I really don't. I think the nose was what enabled him
to get the microphone where he needed it to be.
He has a big nose. Props to the nose!
we knew at the time we were overreaching ourselves
and we agreed among ourselves in 1978 when we finished Hemispheres,
we're not doing this again, we're not making this kind of record again.
We knew that was the end of that era, of the epics.
You've been touring now for how many years?
Well, professionally,
in the united states and around the world, about five years.
About five years. How many concerts do you average a year?
About 200, maybe more.
200 concerts a year for five years.
How long can you keep that up?
As long as we can. As long as we're still standing.
we were working all the time.
I remember at one point we counted 1 I one-nighters in a row.
We were getting fried and getting stupid.
Not taking care of ourselves, just burning out.
We didn't like what we were becoming as people.
In my personal life I was getting alienated from my wife,
we were just starting to have kids
and once you start introducing children into your life,
you can't be so selfish. You just can't.
I think we all cherish the fact that we're pretty normal guys.
I got married when I was young. I had a family early.
I introduced Geddy's wife to him when we were teenagers.
Family was the most important thing to me in my life.
we were trying to remember
music is just one of the things we had chosen to do with our lives.
Not everything.
If we'd kept going like that, we would have crashed.
Something started to break.
I think the heaviness of Hemispheres
made us want to run away from that kind of album
so we ran from Hemispheres straight into spirit of Radio.
♪ Begin the day with a friendly voice ♪
♪ A companion unobtrusive ♪
♪ Plays that song that's so elusive ♪
♪ And the magic music makes your morning mood ♪
Permanent waves was a joy to me.
We were in canada, you know, our families were close,
that's when we discovered Le studio
and the songs just came together. Just boom, boom, boom.
oK, the new album.
There are a number of new things, new approaches to the album.
Tell me what's new about it.
You tell him.
Basically, its newness derives from experiments
we've conducted over the last couple of albums.
Through Hemispheres and Farewell To Kings,
we were experimenting with a lot of new instruments and sounds
and rhythmic approaches and so on. This time we found ways
to put those directions into a single stream and consequently, I think,
the album probably has a more direct feel to it.
The whole music industry is going primitive,
new wave, minimal, rock-'n'- roll. Do you care?
There's gonna be some bands that have gone back to basics,
but those bands can't do anything but play basics.
But all the real interesting new-wave bands
seem to be developing and progressing
into more interesting styles.
- Who do you listen to at home? - All kinds of people.
Recently been Talking Heads on the turntable a lot.
The Police.
I was a huge fan of The Police, ultravox and all these new English bands.
I loved them. It became a part of our sensibility.
Permanent waves still had a couple of longer songs on it
but The spirit of Radio was the emblematic song of that period.
The mix of sounds in it, the approach to electronic music and reggae,
that's all the stuff I was listening to.
♪ For the words of the prophets were written on the studio wall ♪
♪ Concert hall ♪
They seemed to have that knack
of being able to use time signatures at will
and yet make them feel seamless.
If you're changing time signatures
and your audience aren't really aware of it,
then you've got something special.
Rush find a real interesting way
of drawing a straight line through the song,
whether it's melodically or rhythmically.
And when you put together the sound of the band being so recognized
and their ability to make sure there's a lifeline for people out there
who can't quite tap their foot to an odd time signature,
that makes what Rush does genius
when it comes to still being able to be played on the radio.
♪ we are secrets to each other ♪
♪ Each one's life a novel no one else has read ♪
♪ Even joined in bonds of love ♪
♪ We're linked to one another by such slender threads ♪
I think Permanent waves was, in a way,
the most important stepping stone
because, just like caress of steel is to 2112,
there would be no Moving Pictures without Permanent waves first.
As I define it, that's when we became us.
I think Rush was born with Moving Pictures really.
♪ A modern-day warrior, mean, mean stride ♪
♪ Today's Tom sawyer, mean, mean pride ♪
It represents so much that we learned up to that time
about song writing, about arrangement.
That's when we brought our band identity together too,
how we like to play individually and as a band at the same time.
Now when I look back on those songs,
I'm glad to say to people that I will never get tired of playing Tom sawyer
because it's difficult to play right, and any time I do play it right, I feel good.
♪ No, his mind is not for rent ♪
♪ To any god or government ♪
♪ Always hopeful, yet discontent ♪
♪ He knows changes aren't permanent ♪
♪ But change is ♪
suddenly we were on the radio everywhere that summer.
Our concert audiences doubled.
You could picture it in the high-school halls, "Are you gonna see Rush?"
"oh, yeah, man. I'm going." we were that band that year.
we were playing 120, 130 cities in America.
We were going back to places where,
if we were a theatre act at the start of that tour,
by the end of that cycle
we'd gone back to those places and we were in the arena.
Their latest release, Moving Pictures, is number one on Toronto's album charts
and they're close to selling out an unprecedented three nights
at the full Maple Leaf Gardens.
Here's a cut from Moving Pictures,
platinum after only four weeks of release.
♪ suddenly ahead of me ♪
♪ Across the mountainside ♪
♪ A gleaming alloy air-car ♪
♪ Shoots towards me, two lanes wide ♪
♪ I spin around with shrieking tires ♪
♪ To run the deadly race ♪
♪ Go screaming through the valley ♪
♪ As another joins the chase ♪
♪ Drive like the wind ♪
♪ Straining the limits of machine and man ♪
♪ Laughing out loud with fear and hope ♪
♪ I've got a desperate plan ♪
♪ At the one-lane bridge ♪
♪ I leave the giants stranded at the riverside ♪
♪ Race back to the farm ♪
♪ To dream with my uncle at the fireside ♪
Moving Pictures was a mixed blessing to me, in retrospect,
for me, personally in my life.
A lot of strange people came out of the woodwork.
There was so much attention on us at that time, that was transitory.
Generally, we were pretty private
and I think Moving Pictures was the turning point
when there was a lot of pressure from fans wanting a piece of you
or believing they were connected to you in some other way.
There was a time when we first started getting recognized
that I got a little touchy about it
and I remember I started thinking about this thing,
about fame and how you deal with it.
That was kind of an epiphany
and I said to myself, "I'm gonna go where I want to go
"and if somebody comes up to me and is nice and wants an autograph,
"I got time for them. It's no big deal."
Geddy, right?
That's right.
Oh my God, that's Geddy?
Yeah!
- Just making a video of them. - No problem.
- One is to... - sorry.
- One is to shawny. - Didn't mean to get in your way. sorry.
The first one is to shawny.
And the next one's to Troy.
Thank you. That's it, I promise. I'm so sorry...
You want his too? He's the leader of the group.
I can walk around the city and get recognized from time to time,
Geddy more so. He's got a very distinctive look about him.
But generally people are very polite, they don't want too much from you.
I understand that these are your fans that just love what you do.
There's been a moment in their lives
where your music has been so important to them
that to take a couple of minutes and just chat,
shake a hand or hug or something, it's not a big deal.
I remember when I met them,
I was just struck by Geddy Lee and Lifeson's friendship,
it seemed like they had a real deep bond.
Real playful and sort of goofy,
it just seemed like there was a lot of joy there, a lot of genuine fun.
And then I turned the corner and then I saw the master, Neil Peart.
He had, sort of, a different vibe going,
just as focused but a brewing intensity.
Little wisps of darkness.
Neil has a real struggle with fans and it's not a personal thing.
It's a shyness thing.
He's not able to be as relaxed around strangers as Alex or I am.
You know, he doesn't mean to hurt anyone's feelings by it,
he's not trying to be rude, he's just not comfortable.
OK, I was the world's biggest who fan as a kid.
I never dreamed of trying to find their hotel and knocking on their doors
or interfering in their lives in any way, that I don't understand.
I love being appreciated,
being respected is awfully good
but anything beyond that just creeps me out, you know.
Any sense of adulation is just so wrong.
I got a chance to go meet Neil Peart
and I got brought into a room and I started to tell him, "Hey, I'm the hugest fan ever,"
and I got, sort of, "the Neil Peart cold shoulder"
and the security guard removed me from the room.
It was a weird uncomfortable situation.
I love Neil Peart even though he totally blacklisted me.
But I don't know, if I was Neil Peart and I walked in the room,
I would probably want to remove me too.
Neil was great. A very intense man but very... you know.
His line, "I can't pretend a stranger is a long-awaited friend," that's Neil.
When people have a fantasy, I don't want to trample on it,
but I also don't want to live it
and people can think that I'm antisocial or a sourpuss, it's really not.
It doesn't make me mad, it embarrasses me.
The other guys are obviously comfortable with it
and they do the meets and greets every night
and that's fine, they can do it.
one, two, three...
Thank you. It's lovely meeting you.
I am so appreciative of our fans.
I bless their hearts every single day,
but they're hard to analyze as a group
because they're so different.
We have hard-core fans.
The old fans that have been there from the beginning,
they're usually male and they are really intense.
In the early stages it was very young, almost 100% male.
And then, as the years went by,
it remained 100% male.
chicks did not really dig it, you know.
I still don't put on caress of steel that otfen with my wife around.
Whoo!
Tonight is my 113th Rush show.
The last time I missed a show anywhere in Europe was on the signals tour.
Tonight will be the seventh on this tour.
I've been to two in America, one in canada, did all six on the last u K tour.
My name's Pete, I'm from cleveland, ohio.
I just had my 100th show in stockholm.
♪ You can choose from phantom fears ♪
♪ And kindness that can kill ♪
♪ I will choose a path that's clear ♪
♪ I will choose free will ♪
Rush fans are like Nascar fans. They ain't going anywhere.
They're brand loyalty. They are a cult band.
When you go to a Rush concert,
there ain't anybody leaving it till the song is over.
They're waiting for their favorite part, they're nudging their friend,
they're going, "Look, he played it perfect." They're riveted to the band.
The band have that relationship with their audience,
where their audience really feel like the Rush lyrics communicate to them,
make them feel like their experience is heard.
I have this memory of sitting in the basement with my mother.
I actually said to her, "I wanna play you a song."
And it was very hard to ever get my parents' attention or anything
so it was, like, a big deal.
"Will you please sit here and I wanna play you a song."
And I played Entre Nous
and I gave her the lyric sheet because I wanted her to understand
that this song was connecting with me on some level.
When I was sixteen years old, I wasn't as emotionally open.
I was very withdrawn,
so something about that song allowed me to say,
"somehow this song is almost like it's written for me."
Music, when you're growing up, is such a strong part of like...
"what do you like? what's your identity?"
Rush seemed to be just a complete added dimension
of not being obsessed with girls and hair and shit like that.
They seemed to be kind of smart and, fancying myself as a really smart kid,
I was like, "oh, that's my deal."
♪ Not so clearly charted, it's really just a question of your honesty ♪
♪ Yeah, your honesty ♪
♪ Glittering prizes and endless compromises ♪
♪ Shatter the illusion of integrity, yeah ♪
Dum, tss, mm!
I mean, when you're hearing lyrics like that
that are so earnest and sincere, talking about honesty in art
and asking some of the tougher intellectual questions,
with that great music behind it,
they really offered something in rock that was in short supply.
And plus they sang in French on circumstances.
"Plus c'est la meme, plus c'est la meme chose."
That was pretty tricky, you didn't hear that on any Kiss records.
It's like, the dude is singing in French now.
I can't even figure out his English!
It wasn't for everybody, and it wasn't necessarily cool.
You were kind of like a Rush geek, a music nerd, a kind of nerd,
and it was sort of nerdy music I suppose.
♪ Growing up, it all seems so one-sided ♪
♪ Opinions all provided ♪
♪ The future predecided ♪
♪ Detached and subdivided ♪
♪ In the mass-production zone ♪
♪ Nowhere is the dreamer or the misfit so alone ♪
You listen to subdivisions and it just seemed like, exactly my life.
You know, I was that kid who was watching the car
drive away with all the cool kids
going off to a party that I wasn't invited to.
It was just nice to feel like there was a rock song out there
that spoke to my experience of trying to be cool
and worrying about being cast out of a group of friends if you weren't cool.
I wasn't very cool,
but luckily I had a group of friends that was equally not cool.
I lived in a housing development, suburbia backyard barbecues,
a lot of the stuff that, I think, most American kids can relate to.
I remember watching the video,
and I'm like, "Damn, that represents me, right there."
This one person walking around, not really being in a group,
it seemed like it was this person that nobody really could relate to.
- ♪ Subdivisions ♪ - ♪ In the high-school halls ♪
♪ In the shopping malls ♪
- ♪ Conform or be cast out ♪ - ♪ subdivisions ♪
The thing I loved about Neil
was he took very complex, metaphysical themes
and he was able to put them in a way that everybody could understand.
And whether he was ripping off shakespeare
or he was quoting his own heart,
he was able to do it in a way that never felt snobby.
It always felt like he was in the room talking to you.
words can carry different freight for different people, of course.
But those who do have the sensitivity
to pay the kind of attention to lyrics that I put into them,
it's wonderful to connect that way,
to feel that you're not playing down to anyone.
We always had the impression that people are just as smart as we are,
so if we can figure this stuff out, they can too.
And we're not being that terrible, damning word, pretentious.
We're not pretending anything.
This is really what turned us on this year.
Lyrically, it's always been a reflection of my times and the times I observe.
But everyone is a reflection of me.
we could have gone in and done Moving Pictures all over again
but we're too curious, we're too dissatisfied with where we're at
and just because we got successful doesn't mean we're going to stop.
And that's the motivation. we have to find the better Rush.
There was a big shiff happening on signals,
the keyboards were becoming more and more important,
from Geddy's standpoint that is.
And also, one of the biggest things at that point for me
was Neil getting into the electronic drum kit.
It didn't really appeal to me.
I wanted to still have that element of the basic acoustic band.
we'd been working with Terry for ten years at that point
and we really felt the need to expand
and see what it was like to work with other people
and it was a very tough transition because we were so close.
Terry was like the fourth member of the band.
It was Neil who broke the news to me on the bus and he said,
"Just think of it like a boyfriend and girlfriend,
"they want to split up for a while, have a break from each other."
I was surprised
because I figured we would figure it out and we'd move to the next level.
But it was time for a change
and I didn't really want to do an electronic band,
which is where I thought it was going.
♪ An ill wind comes arising ♪
♪ Across the cities of the plain ♪
♪ There's no swimming in the heavy water ♪
♪ No singing in the acid rain ♪
♪ Red alert, red alert ♪
♪ Red alert ♪
To be honest with you, I'd never really heard of Rush in England.
I was a pop producer,
so I was kind of bemused
when I got the call to come and produce them.
I was coming from that whole British '80s music scene.
I was trying to bring them into line
with what I perceived to be the contemporary, modern pop music,
the new technology, the new keyboard sounds.
We all loved the music of that time.
We were young enough too,
and we didn't have any protective nature of what Rush was
that they could never be allowed to be influenced by new-wave music
or could never use an African rhythm.
There was no such thing as "That doesn't suit Rush."
Those words have never been uttered.
♪ Ragged lines of ragged gray ♪
♪ Skeletons, they shuffle away ♪
♪ Shouting guards and smoking guns ♪
♪ Will cut down the unlucky ones ♪
synthesizers and technology became a way of sparking your creativity.
I liked it because my need to write melodies
is more satisfied writing on a keyboard.
As a songwriter, you're always looking for an angle
to give you something fresh.
Coming from a trained keyboard background,
you always felt kinda left out in the rock world
because keyboards really weren't that cool.
Rush was one of those bands
that the way they started integrating synths
seemed wildly exciting to me.
Wow, this can actually fill the role of what a guitar player would have done,
eats up the mid-range rhythm-section space.
I'd be hard pressed to think of another...
someone else who's done it like that.
Once the keyboards and the shorter songs became more of their sound,
that's when I kind of moved on to other things.
I didn't like it and I still really don't like it that much.
And Geddy would spend a lot of time on the keyboard
and, as a bass player, I love the bass,
and so when my favorite bass player's playing the keyboards,
I'm not that psyched about it.
I loved the idea of the keyboards when we first started.
I think as that part of our sound developed,
there were times where we just got on the wrong track.
Alex and I had some real disagreements
about how profound the keyboard should be.
But Power windows is a really important record
because it was the final and essential blending
of keyboards and guitar to me, for Rush.
with Power windows, I found it really, really difficult
to work around the way the keyboards were developing.
Why am I looking for a different place?
I shouldn't be looking for a different place.
What's going on with these keyboards?
You know, they're not even real. It's not even a real instrument.
♪ The more we think we know about ♪
♪ The greater the unknown ♪
♪ We suspend our disbelief ♪
♪ And we are not alone ♪
♪ Mystic rhythms ♪
♪ Capture my thoughts ♪
♪ And carry them away ♪
I love the synthesizers and I think it's as important as any of their other work.
The ultimate thing that people were saying
was they kind of moved somewhat away from the rock
and they got a little bit more in the middle of what they did.
To me, Rush middle of the road is still somebody else's left field.
Certain periods of Rush are more universal than other periods.
Now, you could say on the one hand that maybe they're better records.
Maybe that's the best Rush.
Moving Pictures got us into a much broader world of rock fans
and when there was a shift, we lost some of those people.
But we realized after time that there was a core of our fan base
that was as curious as to where we were going as we were.
Those are the ones that have sustained us through all these years.
I can't fault them
for not wanting to be a prog rock band for another 15 years.
They had different periods, that's what makes them interesting.
♪ Time stand still ♪
♪ I'm not looking back but I want to look around me now ♪
♪ Time stand still ♪
♪ See more of the people and the places that surround me now ♪
♪ Time stand still ♪
Hold your Fire was the record that told me
that there was a shift in the way we were writing,
pushing us away from rock.
It was starting to move into a jazzier, softer kind of tonal area.
Things can go too far in any one direction and we correct ourselves and eventually go,
"we tried to go along this way but it's too much."
That was the first thing I said on the first meeting.
It seems absolutely crazy to me
that one of the few remaining power trios on this planet,
guitar, bass and drums,
are smothered in keyboards.
And I said, "My interest is to get you back to being a power trio, but a modern take.
"We'll just find out what that contemporary definition of power trio really is."
Alex particularly wanted to assert guitar more
as the dominant instrument and push the keyboards aside
and Geddy and I went, "OK, we can do that."
Alex was pretty...
"Let's have a concept, let's not have keyboards."
And I went along with it.
I was a little bit sad.
Presto and Roll The Bones for me were very much indicative
of what was going on in the '80s.
They were thin-sounding records, they didn't have any balls to them.
So when I got in there I was kind of hell-bent on making a heavy record.
The caveman pushed us.
He wanted me to use my Fender bass, go through old Ampeg amps
and record it old school. Everything was old school.
There were battles, because every engineer wants Alex to play without his pedals
and all his own synthesizers that he plugs into.
Alex would ask for his fridge of effects and I would say, "No."
And he'd say, "I want reverb," and I would say, "No."
He'd say, "I fucking want reverb! If I want reverb, then I want reverb."
I'm like, "No, you sound terrible with reverb, you're not having any reverb."
so we ended up going to a bar and drinking about five bottles of scotch,
had terrible hangovers the next day, but we ironed it out.
We had a lot of "few drinks together"
and I know what Kevin was going for and he's right.
Counterparts turned out to be
the record that we envisioned when we first started working on it.
The songs were thicker and more hair on them.
That record was a big turning point
in reconnecting with the kind of rock-and-roll guts of Rush.
♪ compensate me ♪
♪ Animate me ♪
♪ Complicate me ♪
♪ Elevate me ♪
The opening song, Animate, I think is one of our all-time best.
I love the drive of it, I love the arrangement.
But I was starting to get conflicted about my own drumming at that point.
I'd been working so much with sequencers
and with click tracks for so many years,
and I had developed really good precision of time,
but I felt a stiffness because of that metronomic need.
I didn't have the looseness that I wanted to hear
out of my own playing.
After so many years of being an amazing player,
Neil could have clearly just decided not to play drums
until it was time to go play a Rush show.
But instead, he cared enough about what he did
to try and break down his current technique
and work with Freddie Gruber and, sort of, reinvent his playing style.
I was in New York doing a Buddy Rich tribute recording.
Over that recording session in New York,
I met Freddie and had dinner and got curious...
what would it be like to study with a guy like that?
And I had the time so I thought, "Yes, I'm gonna try this."
Not to make it sound easy, because when I studied with Freddie I asked myself,
"can I really do this? will I have the discipline?"
It's a huge commitment.
can you tell me about when you met Neil? Your first impressions?
He was easy because he wasn't nuts.
And I was, you know, and it was, like... it was fun.
Didn't have to go to some strange land.
We never played the drums.
We talked about motion
and told a lot of stories and did some dancing...
we were behind a set of drums
because the approach to what you do results in what you get. You understand?
Freddie is all about the motion
and it was all about the motion of the hands and feet that contributed to a dance.
One of the first things he did
was stand up and do a little soft-shoe dance for me and saying,
"when you're doing that, is that dance happening on the floor?
"No, it's happening in the air."
so these were revelations to me
to start thinking about not just the hit but the motions between.
- Time is linear, it's not... - Dah! Pah!
It's like a pogo stick, you know.
A lot of pop music is played like that.
It's extremely vertical.
It's like people slapping water when they swim.
- Mm. Yeah. - It doesn't...
- Inefficient motion. - .. breathe.
Put it this way, you could have a beautiful body and look marvelous...
Thank you.
.. but if you're not breathing, it's not alive.
You know, so you got to at least put the breath in there, huh?
I can play a simple beat now completely different
from how I would have played that simple beat 15 years ago.
Not that.
There you go.
It takes a lot of courage being a drummer the stature that Neil Peart is
to be able to say, "I can improve."
And when he came back out,
and made his appearances after working with Freddie
and he turned his grip around, his traditional grip,
he had a different approach, was so much more relaxed.
That was the most refreshing thing you could have seen,
is that your hero could also still learn,
that they weren't just done.
when I worked with my band mates right after that,
on the Test For Echo songs, the other guys would say, "It still sounds like you,"
at first I was disappointed, but then I thought "of course it does."
They thought it sounded the same
but when they went to play with me, there was a different clock at work now.
♪ Driven day and night in circles ♪
♪ Spinning like a whirlwind of leaves ♪
♪ Stealing in and out of back alleys ♪
♪ Driven to another den of thieves ♪
♪ It's my turn to drive ♪
♪ But it's my turn to drive ♪
♪ Driven to the margin of error ♪
♪ Driven to the edge of control ♪
♪ Driven to the margin of terror ♪
♪ Driven to the edge of a deep, dark hole ♪
In mid-August of '97,
we'd finished the Test For Echo tour earlier that summer
and there was a message to call the office and it was urgent.
One of the girls told me what had happened.
Neil's daughter was in a terrible car accident and lost her life.
I mean, it was just such a horrible shock.
It was, and I still feel it today,
it was the start of a whole lot of emotions that we'd never felt before.
I had not had a friend who'd gone through anything like this.
Ray called me and told me about the accident
and I was just in shock as everyone was.
You're just so unprepared for how devastating it is
and you just don't know what to do or how to help or any of that.
He could be such a private guy
and when news like this hits, you don't want to do the wrong thing.
You don't want to try to comfort them
and find out you're only comforting yourself.
Everything to do with the band ended at that moment.
It just didn't seem important.
It was not something you even thought about thinking about.
They didn't know what to do with themselves
so they left Toronto and got away from all those reminders.
And then Jackie got sick.
After she passed away, he was lost and so he ran.
He got on his motorcycle and ran.
When his wife died, he had to do what he needed to do
to just find some kind of peace.
He embarked on a long, very, very painful journey,
just going and going and going and going.
Everybody was so worried about me,
there was a network among my friends and loved ones,
"I heard from him today," "I got a postcard" or "He called."
They would all reassure each other.
Anything could have happened to me even by accident, let alone by design.
Fuck, we were so worried about him, I just...
But he...
you know, he was at arm's length.
Neil needed time but, to be honest,
I had no real interest in music for about a year.
I hardly played... I hardly listened to music.
We were on sabbatical. we were shut down.
We're talking about a journey that stretched 55,000 miles
starting from Quebec and going up to the Arctic
and around Alaska and onto Mexico, across all of Mexico
from Baja across the whole Mexican mainland down to Belize.
I'd go to small towns and the back roads,
generally stopping for the night in hotels along the way
and I don't think in that whole 55,000 miles,
I don't know if I was ever recognized once
in a little town, at a gas station or a motel or a diner,
because I'm just a guy sitting there with a hat on reading a book.
A lot of times I can just slip around and be a guy.
That's all I want from traveling.
I just want to be a guy and that's life enough for me.
♪ The way out is the way in ♪
♪ The way out is the way-ay-ay in ♪
Travel has always been known as a soothing balm, and even motion,
from the time we're little babies, we want to be rocked and if the baby's crying,
you can take it for a drive in the car and it calms down.
That's the way I described it to myself at that time,
I was so stirred up, my little baby soul would only be soothed by motion.
I traveled out of the darkest place a human being can come from,
and it was landscapes, highways and wildlife that revitalized me.
It was the timeless landscapes.
It gives your tiny existence a new perspective
when you're among things that are millions of years old.
♪ The way out is the way in ♪
♪ The way out is the way-ay-ay in ♪
I remember getting postcards from him from wherever
and he was using different names.
We have, like, about 6,000 nicknames for each other
and so I would get a postcard with that nickname on it,
so I knew who it was from.
They were lifelines, those little contacts.
He knew we were there, somewhere,
and he knew that we would be there if he wanted us to be there.
All he had to do was reach out.
As far as the band was concerned, as things went on,
it seemed less and less of a possibility that we would get back together
and it looked like the band was -
basically, it was four years - ..that the band was done.
Oh, I thought it was... I thought it was over.
Alex and I would talk about it once in a while but there was no point.
I don't want to play in Rush without those other two guys.
You know, there's no replacing anybody in this band,
it's just not possible.
It is the band, the three of us, you know.
Even though he's the new guy, he's just as important.
Those two guys were the most stable thing I had.
My family and loved ones and those that dared to stay around me through that time,
and so hard to... I would have walked.
My concern was just that he would be OK
and I thought it was pointless to think about it beyond that.
After a year and a half, whatever, two years,
I sensed that he would do it again, that he would be OK.
I don't think he worked that hard
to be what most people consider as the best in the world at something
and not go and do it again one day.
I didn't know if it meant that it would take five years or ten years
but I thought that one day he'd have to do that again.
When I stopped riding... .. I was ready.
Traveling all that time, it was when I came to rest and I came out to California
and met my wife-to-be and I got some stability there
and, with Carrie's help, then realized that I was wanting to work again.
That's basically what it took, but I had to stop moving first.
He was a little apprehensive and thought that perhaps maybe
we might try to talk about perhaps trying to maybe think about
possibly getting back in the studio to record a record.
It was really like that. It was quite a fragile, delicate proposition.
I don't think he knew if he could do it.
He hadn't played his drums in a hell of a long time.
He's such a perfectionist, such a fucking monster musician.
I think he was afraid of not being as good as he once was.
It was an unsureness. "can I do this?
"Can I write rock lyrics like it's the most important thing in the world?
"Can I slave over and over on a drum part,
"refine every detail like it's the most important thing in the world? I don't know."
we basically booked the studio, 7 days a week, for 14 or 15 months.
Everything had so much weight to it
and for him to get back his chops was really a slow process.
I could hear my state of mind in my drumming -
anger, obviously, but confusion.
The state I was in... It's in the lyrics too, of course,
so many of them had to deal with... I could not sidestep all of that stuff.
But there was something that was so pure and truthful
about the energy on vapor Trails.
It really is a representation of that time, of the coming back of the band.
♪ Horizon to horizon ♪
♪ Memory written on the wind ♪
♪ Fading away like an hourglass ♪
♪ Grain by grain ♪
♪ Swept away like voices in a hurricane ♪
♪ In a vapor trail ♪
coming back to the stage is way more difficult
'cause the essential existence of a band is on a stage.
One of the things that keeps me from quitting touring all the time
is that's what a band does.
So coming back to the stage was the biggest recovery possible.
Thank you.
And good evening, Hartford, united states of America,
nice to be back here.
It's been quite long enough, I think.
That was in Hartford, Connecticut on the vapor Trails tour
and it was such a dramatic thing after all this that we'd gone through
that here we were, at our first gig, back on the road
and we never even thought we would work again.
I think that was one of the few times we've had a group hug before the show.
It wasn't lost on us that... getting to that point...
was almost impossible.
So we looked at each other, gave each other a hug and said, "oK, let's go."
♪ For the words of the prophets were written on the studio wall ♪
♪ Concert hall ♪
The crowd was amazing. They welcomed us back, really warm.
And Neil was really nervous,
so I figured my job is to go over there to make him not nervous
so I kept checking on him, throwing him some shapes
to make sure he was smiling or laughing.
That's what that night was like. I was completely folded into the job of performing,
but there were moments when the three of us connected visually
and we knew what we were doing and I remember saying to Ray afferwards,
"It would have been a shame if that never happened again."
It was amazing. And it was amazing to see how happy he was after the show.
Some demons were gone that night.
Part of the rebirth of the band was suddenly a willingness to go where we hadn't gone
and to see these legions of fans was such a positive effect on us.
It was like, "This is a second chance for us to go back out and play some new places."
we had no idea, going to Brazil, of any popularity that we might have
and then the Säo Paulo show was 60,000 people.
By far the largest audience we singularly had ever played to.
There was a sense of wild tumultuous impossible masses of people
but so locked in a unifying way that it was just magical. we elevated.
Having gone through that whole tour,
being in this place where we had people going totally mental,
playing one Little victory,
it was a huge victory that we'd survived the previous five years.
Finishing on such a high note was quite a trip.
The newness of touring was over...
and I think we had successfully returned.
oh yeah!
♪ Modern-day warrior named Tom sawyer ♪
♪ He floated down a river on a raft with a black guy ♪
♪ Doo-doo doo-doo ♪
♪ Doo-doo doo-doo-doo-doo-doo... ♪
Hold on! Hold on!
Hold on! stop! stop! Those aren't the right lyrics, fat ass!
I am Geddy Lee and I will sing whatever lyrics I want!
There's a lot of people who were 18 in 1978,
guys who were crazy Rush fans.
They're in positions of relative power now.
They're raising their hands and going,
"Yeah, I want to be on this bandwagon now. I always was there."
Now they had the ability to bring it to more people than ever before.
My guests tonight have 24 gold and 14 platinum records.
Please welcome Rush!
Geddy, Neil, Alex, thank you so much for joining us.
I just wanna remind everybody
that this is your first appearance on American television in 33 years.
- Correct? - Yeah.
I think one of the greatest things to happen to the collective community
that has very much enjoyed Rush for many years,
was their appearance on the colbert Report
because I've seen these guys get beaten up
by the supposed cool people for a long time.
And then, in one fell swoop,
stephen colbert puts them on their show and gives them the hand of coolness.
You're known for some, sort of, long songs.
Have you ever written a song so epic that by the end of the song
you were actually being influenced by yourself at the beginning of the song...
.. because it happened so much earlier in your career?
You are yet to be inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
Is there any chance your next album will be called That's Bullsh...
You could get into sociological and cultural reasons
why a band like Rush was publicly marginalized.
You can say, "what was it? They were too weird? Geddy's voice?"
I like to think that, at the end of the day, people will step back
and all those labels fall away because the body of work is significant.
To me, they remain one of the top bands in the world.
Whether some guy at Rolling stone decides they are or not,
is completely irrelevant because, at the end of the day, rock is a people's game
and the people have generally and consistently voted for this band.
A generation of rock critics have kept them from being in Rolling stone
and from being a part of that conversation.
They were on the other side of this divide we're talking about,
back when they were held in corners by Rush fans at parties going,
"But you don't understand! "
They liked Elvis costello or David Bowie or something more critically accepted.
Now, it's like we're all so old that even if you hated Rush in the '80s and '70s,
you gotta give it up for them, you just got to, or you're just being an old dickhead.
I think that, in many ways, you're served better
if you're not quite as successful.
If you never become a pop star, if you don't have top 40 hits.
Then what you have is a pure memory for people.
They don't think you ever sold out.
Virtue is actually rewarded, I believe.
The thing with us is, we've always walked along a shore of the mainstream
and we've been attached to it and connected ourselves to it, time and again
but we've always been a bit outside of it.
We had our own stream and it wasn't the main one
but it was not too far away from the main one.
I always like to consider us the world's most popular cult band.
The Rush fan, while it's a stereotype that it's mostly guys who like heavy metal,
there are many devoted female fans. It's kind of like a giant club.
People turn on their kids to Rush, who turn on their kids to Rush.
It's amazing that the music's been able to go
from this generation to this generation and even a younger generation.
Their fans have stuck with them through all of it.
All their shows are sold out still.
When snakes and Arrows came out in 2007,
it charted really well for quite a while
and it was some of the biggest shows they've ever played.
It's just amazing for them to come back really strong like that.
It was just like it took off! It took off again all of a sudden.
It seems like they're bigger now than they've ever been, which is fantastic.
There's a comfort in knowing those same three guys are out there.
It's also spectacular to see three guys that could tolerate each other for all these years
and still make music, make good music.
How many more times?
Here's that thing you ordered.
It arrived today, this thing you ordered.
Thank you, Lurch.
- No sweat. - It's that special thing!
could you turn that off while I use it?
The Three stooges all at once.
They're just such a unique and weird concoction
and I get the sense, and I always have from Rush,
that they're on a righteous path.
There's something there that's really pure, sincere and honest.
At the root of all of it, it's also really good, you know.
That matters more than anything else.
There's a magic and a coolness to them that continues to this day
and that's a testament to the music's power.
That's how you know, it's the only way you know.
You check in after 25 years. "Is it still resonating?"
"Yeah." It's the only true test.
The test of time.
- Right, shall we? - Now? what, now?
You mean now?
You mean right now? Now?
I can't go on now.
I've got things to do.
♪ Pariah dogs and wandering madmen ♪
♪ Barking at strangers and speaking in tongues ♪
♪ The ebb and flow of tidal fortune ♪
♪ Electrical changes are charging up the young ♪
♪ It's a far cry from the world we thought we'd inherit ♪
♪ It's a far cry from the way we thought we'd share it ♪
♪ You can almost feel the current flowing ♪
♪ You can almost see the circuits blowing ♪
♪ One day I feel I'm on top of the world ♪
♪ And the next it's falling in on me ♪
♪ I can get back on, I can get back on ♪
♪ One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel ♪
♪ And the next it's rolling over me ♪
♪ I can get back on, I can get back on ♪
♪ Whirlwind life of faith and betrayal ♪
♪ Rise in anger, fall back and repeat ♪
♪ Slow degrees on the dark horizon ♪
♪ Full moon rising, lays silver at your feet ♪
Maybe you could tell us where we're going tonight?
We're going to meet with Neil. we're gonna talk about stuff, I guess,
drink some local wine.
Will there be any discussion of the next steps for the band?
We don't really want to hang around with the guy, so yeah, we'll talk about that stuff.
This is just a business meeting.
- Do we ever have business meetings? - This is the first one.
This will be your 24th record.
What's the motivation to keep doing it?
Chicks.
OK, I call this meeting to order.
Do the thing. It's so great to drink wine.
It tastes fantastic
and it makes you feel funny.
- Didn't I ever tell you Lurch was a genius? - You never had to tell me.
- He's a genius. - He manifests it every single day.
- Why don't we write some songs? - Right now. Let's start.
- I got a notepad here. - Are you gonna write lyrics?
- I can write things down. - what I thought...
what if we do something on the Frankenstein theme we were talking about?
Like, the life of Frankenstein.
- A concept album? - I'm getting an inspiration.
- That's a bolt... Perfect. - Hey, yeah! You know something?
- You got a couple of bolts... - That's what I'm thinking.
It's a miracle really that we've ever had a conversation.
Let's not start now!
You know they say if you put 100 monkeys in a room with typewriters
they'll eventually produce the works of shakespeare?
Who's going to clean those typewriters?
- We're getting into a weird area here... - Monkeys, you know, defecation.
I don't know you anymore.
It's like working with a whole new person.
- This relationship is... - I'm so sick of you guys.
This is really helpful for me.
I'm working through something emotionally and psychologically and this helped a lot.
Yeah, and I quit the fucking stupid band. I'm out of here.
OK, take your smokes and go then.
As soon as I can get over there, I'm gonna rise to my knees and kick your ass.
Rise to your knees. That sounds like the new Rush album title.
That'll be the day.
Oh my God, we are geniuses.
- We're gonna do hockey nights in canada... - Hockey, hockey!
..With the drum solo with the Latino stuff in it.
Boy, that's gonna be one great album. That's the next album, guys.
We've got it sorted out.
I think we've been successful in destroying these people's film.
I will remind them that I said you would regret it.
I just wanted to say that.
I said, "Don't be surprised when you discover how boring we really are."
cut!
Now I like Rush.
The louder the better now.