During the mid-1980s Geddy endorsed Steinberger’s “headless” L-2 bass. Author collection
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Grace Under Pressure tour program, 1984. Author collection
Power Windows tour, Rosemont Horizon, Rosemont, Illinois, March 21, 1986. Both Paul Natkin/WireImage/Getty Image
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Pop producer and top arranger Peter Collins arrived in the Rush camp (and stayed awhile), aiding and abetting the exploration of modern sounds and upscale haberdashery. The first collaboration was the aforementioned Power Windows, issued October 29, 1985, a record that by Lee’s admission was the first created without any concern for the execution of the songs live as a three-piece. Indeed, the band allowed Collins to bring in keyboard technology whiz Andy Richards to program certain parts. Choirs and real strings were also utilized, with the modern attitude that if these tracks were to be played live, they could be sampled.
“You have to be very organized and decisive when recording keyboards these days,” mused Geddy, in conversation with Philip Bashe, “or else you could sit there forever. ‘What about this sound?’ After a while, you can’t hear anything anymore, just digital noise, and it can be very frustrating. I think that you constantly have to go back to the song and ask yourself what you’re looking for. Are you just jerking off—looking for a sound for the sake of a sound—or does the part really require it? That’s the hallmark of a good producer, someone who remembers that and keeps bringing you back to the song.”
“I guess it could be perceived as being uplifting or cynical, as can Grace Under Pressure,” said Neil of Power Windows, in conversation with Canadian Composer magazine. Of note, as with many interviews Neil conducted through the ’80s, he was passionate about discussing lyrics and writing in general, a hobby soon to become a second vocation, beginning this journey first through his notes for Rush tour books, then low-key, self-published travel writing followed by a veritable mountain of personal memoir and travel journalism in the early 2000s.
Power Windows tour, Rosemont Horizon, Rosemont, Illinois, March 21, 1986. Both Paul Natkin/WireImage/Getty Image
POWER WINDOWS Jeff Wagner
Rush’s eleventh album followed its predecessor quickly—the last time a mere eighteen months would separate Rush albums—which is probably why it has much in common with 1984’s Grace Under Pressure. They feel like companion albums, which you can’t say for very many other couplets of Rush albums; there are more similarities between the two than differences. The biggest difference is in production. Where Peter Henderson gave Grace Under Pressure a bright, almost airless buoyancy, Power Windows is a denser, more heavily layered affair. This was the band’s first album with producer Peter Collins, who would become the second most-utilized producer in Rush history.
Opener “The Big Money” takes what the previous album’s “Red Lenses” and “Kid Gloves” did and squishes them together: funky and pop-inflected in a way that showed Rush were now firmly ensconced in the dinner-jacketed, hair-sprayed, super-slick 1980s. And for a band that always moved with the times, it all makes good sense. The writing was still totally smart, the playing still formidable, the ideas still grand. After the bouncy fun of the opener and the almost New Wave vibe of second song “Grand Designs,” things get serious. Wide sonic spaces and stacks of synths and electronic drums mesh and sometimes battle with the more organic, traditional instrumentation. The sense that every instrument and sound is hurling out of the speakers in one gigantic ball makes mountainous songs such as “Manhattan Project” and “Emotion Detector” shimmer with the kind of majesty that defined Rush’s earlier, more epic eras. But it also has a coldness that other synth-dominated music of the time would have, something that lends this particular Rush era a kind of alien, distant atmosphere. Much of the material takes multiple listens to sink in, making Power Windows a classic “grower” of an album. Not only is it a dense sound to absorb, but the compositions don’t give themselves up immediately.
Everything about Power Windows, from sound to performance to dynamics, is utterly consistent. Its eight songs feel like eight variations on one theme, each contributing to the greater whole—the classic function of any great album’s immersive listening experience. That said, two stand above the rest: “Marathon,” with its big, key-changing chorus sequences, punctuated by some of the last truly high pitches we’d hear Geddy Lee attempt in the studio, and “Mystic Rhythms,” an exotic vista of sound that seems a launching pad for the travel songs Neil Peart would pen in the future (“Tai Shan,” “Ghost Rider,” and the entire Clockwork Angels album).
Peart’s lyrics had never been more introspective than “Middletown Dreams,” and never more concerned with the big picture than “Manhattan Project.” Their themes sit at opposite poles of the human experience: wistful nostalgia for one’s childhood versus concern for the entire human race’s existence. It’s big stuff, Peart communicating with his inimitable grace while Geddy, now comfortable in a midrange croon, delivers the drummer’s sentiment with equal panache. Alex Lifeson performs well in a more background kind of role, coloring the keyboard-dominant compositions with oddly shaped guitar-generated textures, every now and then exploding with an inspired solo that reminds us how well he adapts to any given sonic situation.
Power Windows is a slow burner, but once it catches there are myriad discoveries to make. Hidden in the dense production are a variety of sounds that even the fussiest audiophile can appreciate, despite some of the synths sounding impossibly dated. Ultimately Power Windows, along with its successor, Hold Your Fire, is a grand authoritative stamp on yet another Rush phase. The band remained successful well into the ’80s by keeping earnest in their mission, never totally surrendering to trends while still absorbing the tastes and tactics of the times.
“A lot of people listen to ‘Middletown Dreams’ and in their interpretation of it, all those people fail,” he explained. “And it has been reviewed as a song of bitter cynicism because I’m writing about people who are imprisoned in small towns and who will remain there all their lives. But that’s the total opposite of what my meaning was. It was written in the spirit of tremendous compassion and with tremendous sadness and futility about human nature, and what was going on at the time, especially with the people who were close to me—watching the number of people who were out of work, the number of people who had problems with their health and their personal lives; people whose sensitivity was disciplined by their environment. A lot of stuff in there was ingredients of life as seen through the eyes and values of those people. I have to be realistic and I have to see the world as it is. So it’s perhaps a cynical view of people while remaining idealistic about life. That’s a hard line to walk, and it’s hard to get those two views to coalesce. But it’s the only way I can keep the values and the goals I want in life and maintain the way of living that I want, while at the same time [stay] in touch with reality and reconcile with what’s going on in the world.
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“In ‘Marathon,’” Peart continued, “which is about the triumph of time and a kind of message to myself—because I think life is too short for all the things that I want to do—there’s a self-admonition saying that life is long enough. You can do a lot—just don’t burn yourself out too fast trying to do everything at once. ‘Marathon’ is a song about individual goals and trying to achieve them. And it’s also about the old Chinese proverb: ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.’ I try to keep a linear process of growth in a lot of different directions in my life. A few years ago, when things were kind of overwhelming, I had a sense of just treading water—trying to keep afloat in all of what people were expecting me to do. Lately I have taken a lot more control of my life. And I keep progressing steadily along five different avenues, instead of trying to go off like a skyrocket in one direction.”
Neil admonished writer Nick Krewen when he asked whether the band would
ever return to its primary, basic sound. “What for? The last thing I’m interested in is going back. I think that’s a terrible thing. To get nostalgic about other people’s music, or even about your own, makes a terrible statement about the condition of your life and your prospects for the future. I have no patience with that kind of attitude, whether it’s on radio or among friends. For instance, I think that anyone who thinks that 1970 was the best year in the world has a problem. For me, the older stuff just doesn’t have that nostalgic appeal at all. I never have that feeling of, ‘Gee, I wish we could recapture those magic moments,’ because those magic moments weren’t all that magic, if the truth be known.”
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Power Windows tour, Rosemont Horizon, Rosemont, Illinois, March 22,1986. © Gene Ambo/Retna Ltd.
Power Windows, fueled by the bright, percolating strains of “The Big Money,” would perpetuate the band’s flow of certifications, the album going gold then platinum in the space of three months, a success not attained by the record’s follow-up. Hold Your Fire, issued September 8, 1987, stalled at gold, where it still sits today. And as with Power Windows (which cost $325,000 to construct), Rush spared no expense on what is perhaps their most keyboard-drossed album. Hold Your Fire was a belabored affair similarly recorded with Peter Collins at The Manor in England and at Air Studios in Montserrat, a money-burner of a locale made extinct in 1989 by Hurricane Hugo.
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“I guess in our own minds we can afford that kind of luxury to keep ourselves fired up, you know, tuned up,” figured Geddy, speaking to Off the Record’s Mary Turner. “Every three weeks we went to a different studio, and the first two studios were in England; the next one was in Montserrat, the Caribbean; the next one we went home for the first time in maybe ten years; we recorded three, four weeks in Toronto and we mixed the album in Paris; and, through all that time we were very stimulated and very interested in the record. It kept everybody fresh and I think it kept giving us a new outlook on the album; and we kept coming in contact with different responses and for us at this stage I think it works really well to do that, to move around. It is more expensive than your average way of recording, but we’re very conscientious and I think the money we spend doing that we save in other ways. I think it gave us an international flavor; I don’t know if the album, you know, smells of it or not but it certainly was great for us because it turns the work experience into a whole full living experience which I think is more necessary for us at this stage. You know, fifteen-odd years or whatever it’s been in Rush, I think you have to stop looking at it as separate from your life because it’s part of your life. It’s what you do, so you don’t wanna just go, ‘I’m going to work and then I’ll live.’ That’s the necessity for saying, ‘Well, I could either mix at home or I can mix in this cheap studio around the corner; or I can go to Paris, spend a few extra dollars and have a wonderful new experience mixing, so I vote for the latter, you know? Let’s have some fun.”
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Amplifying the complications with Hold Your Fire (from the electronic drum-generated rhythms to the myriad synths ’n’ samples, to “Tai Shan,” a song based on traditional Chinese music), was the fact that Neil was even writing lyrics on one of them new-fangled “personal” computers!
“Neil used it quite a lot,” explained Geddy. “He wrote all his lyrics, or some of his lyrics for this album on the Mac; he finds it easy because he can then play with words, cut and paste and drop them out and look at it this way and print it out and look at it and see what works and what doesn’t work. I found it difficult when he was starting to give me lyrics that were printed out of his computer because I’m so used to his little handwritten lyric sheets that he gives me, ’cause they’re always so cool and he draws these little pictures on the top of them and stuff; he has, for like thirteen years now. So, I think it was ‘Prime Mover’ or ‘Lock and Key’ on this album, which was the first one he actually handed me this, you know, printout of the lyrics and it was so weird, it felt so cold to me; it’s like, ‘I feel uncomfortable with this’ and I think he just looked around for different fonts until he found one that was a little warmer and it was more attractive to me. Makes his job much easier.”
And the title Hold Your Fire? “I think it relates to the creative process,” said Geddy, “the burning desire to do something and how important it is to keep your fire lit, and to keep it going regardless of what you have to persevere, regardless of circumstances. I think it’s important to hold yourself together or stick to your guns basically. It’s more relating to the personal inner flame—you know, hold it—as the beginning of the song ‘Mission’ sort of explains. That was the intent and the concept of that particular song and the title of the album.”
“I think we believe that every album is gonna be the one that’s gonna die on us,” said Neil. “Something like Power Windows was an especial risk because we used Peter Collins to produce it and also adopted quite a different set of aesthetics than previously. We threw open a lot of barriers and overproduced it like crazy. It could have died. Even Hold Your Fire wasn’t something we felt sure about, because you can so easily get disappointed.”
Hold Your Fire would be Rush’s first album since Hemispheres not to crack the Top 10, losing momentum at No. 13, still a respectable showing no doubt fueled in part by the success of the pop-shimmery “Time Stand Still,” Aimee Mann guest vocal and arch-’80s music video notwithstanding. Hold Your Fire would also be the last album under the band’s deal with Mercury. Larger rival Atlantic would take over on records controversial enough to cleave the fan base into armed encampments based on the eras or phases that supposedly represented “the real Rush.”
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HOLD YOUR FIRE Jeff Wagner
Rush’s twelfth album was the final in their third cycle, a cycle that might as well be called the digital years. Despite a plethora of synths and other artificialities, Hold Your Fire has a kind of warmth not present on predecessor Power Windows. It’s also got a friendlier, more welcoming tone. Hold Your Fire is basically the Power Windows template improved and refined. In retrospect, it sounds much less dated than its predecessor, although a couple of band members’ haircuts during the period were still questionable….
Where the synths on Power Windows were brittle and cold, one year later they’re glowing and lush, woven into the band’s guitar/bass/drums framework with a fine seamlessness. And where the drums themselves are concerned, this album is not only remarkable as one of Peart’s most inspired performances, but as his best-sounding digital-era album, the drums less plastic than on Power Windows and fuller than they would be on successor album, Presto.
Song-wise, Hold Your Fire runs the gamut, offering the bouncy pop of opener “Force Ten” and the even brighter shine of “Time Stand Still” (given extra dimension by the vocals of ’Til Tuesday’s Aimee Mann) to more complex material “Open Secrets” and “Prime Mover” to highly textured, moodier pieces such as “Mission” and “Tai Shan.” Quintessential Rush (quintessential for their digital years, anyway) comes in the form of the instantly likable “Lock and Key” and the hopeful “Turn the Page.”
And Hold Your Fire’s most impressive aspect? Alex Lifeson and his Wacky Arsenal of Stealthy Cosmic Guitar Weirdness. Since Signals, Lifeson had been searching for his musical voice in a Rush whose synths had become both the compositional and aesthetic focus. Three albums later he manages to apply an almost avant-garde approach to what are basically tightly written tunes, some of them Rush’s simplest up to this point (but even in this guise, Rush’s simple stuff was more complex than most bands could manage). His leads in songs such as “Open Secrets” and “Lock and Key” are sheer “How did he even think of that?!” squiggles of wonder, while his
rhythm work is beautifully stealthy, performed by a guitarist who understands that playing to the strengths of the song is infinitely more productive than showing off his talents.
A band in perpetual flux will eventually offer albums like Hold Your Fire, albums that don’t win over their audience immediately, but may take several years for people to understand. It was their first album since 1975’s Caress of Steel not to sell platinum shortly after release. Clearly some fans weren’t ready for Rush 1987, a Rush that didn’t have much in common with days-of-yore stuff like 2112 or even Permanent Waves, other than the three adventurers who created it. Over time, however, Hold Your Fire feels like one of the great sleepers in the Rush catalog, one that many fans are finally ready to absorb for what it is rather than what they wanted it to be. Many of the album’s songs take a long time to catch, but once they do, they’re inescapably infectious. Hold Your Fire, in all its brightness and optimism, remains Rush’s most multicolored presentation from their digital period—really nothing like the bland, monochromatic smear of red on the album cover.
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