Rush

by Martin Popoff

  1989–1992

  POP GOES RUSH

  “It becomes a series of experimentations, and like all experimentations, there are failures and there are successes, and looking back, I can judge them objectively. But all of them went somewhere. Even the failures taught us something as far as what not to do, in terms of the band anyway. It wasn’t like we were sidemen trying to please someone else. I wasn’t working in the studios doing jingles.”

  —Neil Peart, quoted by William F. Miller, Modern Drummer, 1989

  AFTER THE TIME-HONORED SYMBOLISM of closing out a creative phase with a live album—namely January 1989’s A Show of Hands—Rush underscored the shift to new climes by quitting Peter Collins, their producer of two records, and opting for an equally incongruous choice in Rupert Hine for what would be the band’s thirteenth album. It was essentially a mutual downer for Rush and Collins. The latter felt that, given Hold Your Fire’s anemic sales, he’d let down the band and felt for the sake of his own career and for Rush’s, they should get someone else. Geddy could only agree.

  Change of a more abstract nature was afoot as well. The six-month tour for Hold Your Fire almost did the band in. Geddy was sick most of the time, family relations had suffered, and the increasing technological challenge of carting around so much gear had each member of the band quietly daydreaming about a life without Rush.

  Roll the Bones tour, Shoreline Amphitheater, Mountain View, California, May 31, 1992. Tim Mosenfelder/ImageDirect/Getty Images

  Neil photographed circa 1990. Mick Hutson/Redferns/Getty Images

  Rush would be saved by a well-earned six months away, a time in which, as Neil put it, the guys “got to know ourselves and our families once again.” Part of the reason this could happen was that A Show of Hands was the last record the band owed to Mercury, with neither the label nor band all that enthused about renewing the partnership. Cliff Burnstein was long gone, and no other prominent champion of the band had stepped to the fore to help sell the Rush of the ’80s. Val Azzoli had left SRO for Atlantic, commandeering the band over to the much larger imprint. Rush was partly won over by the charm of legendary company head Ahmet Ertegun and by the label’s reputation as artist-oriented despite its size.

  Recording what would become Presto was a summer-long affair, again at Le Studio, with the album emerging November 21 of that year. Rush had in fact first expressed interest in working with Rupert Hine back in the scramble to replace Steve Lillywhite on Grace Under Pressure, Neil in particular being a champion of Rupert’s three solo albums from that period. When Hine heard the band for the first time in rehearsal, he struggled to see what he could add to the detailed, almost finished new songs. However, he did express surprise that one of the greatest power trios of all time had been so “smothered” in keyboards as of late. All four vowed to correct for this in the upcoming sessions, which went quickly, the band whacking the album together in three months from June through August 1989 (after having booked the studio for six), followed by a mix in England. Keyboards were nonetheless still part of the palette, to the particular consternation of Alex, who endured the nitpicking analysis of his guitar parts by both band mates throughout the Presto sessions.

  The live set A Show of Hands was the last record the band owed Mercury, with neither party all that enthused about renewing the partnership.

  “It was kind of a reactionary record for me,” mused Geddy, shortly after the album was done and the band was on the road for what was to be a short tour by Rush standards, mid-February through the end of June. “This record was a reaction against five years of being involved with synthesizers and drum machines and computer writing tools, and sequencers and samplers. I think we were kind of, like, up to our eyebrows with all that technology, and by the end of the last tour, I felt like I was kind of trapped, a victim of my own design. Alex felt a bit of that too, because so much of my keyboard responsibilities were overspilling to his side of the stage. He was having to do more and more to give me a break, so I could play more bass. He was doing more keyboard stuff. We became so locked into this thing that when it came time to take a break from it, we took a good long break after releasing the live album, and I really think we reacted against it. We didn’t want to put ourselves in that trap again. We had this rebellious kind of spirit and a little anger, which is really healthy. We said, screw it, let’s do a rock record. Let’s try to do a record that pulls the trio back into focus, and have more fun with it. I think that was really the goal, and the first song that we wrote for the record was ‘Show Don’t Tell.’ It really set us off, because it was exactly what we talked about doing. That song accomplished exactly what our frustrations led to. We said, ‘OK, here’s this track,’ and we went with it, and we got off so much listening back to it, that we just kept going in that direction. There were a couple of tunes that, for variety’s sake, we started falling into saying, ‘Let’s throw a few more keyboards here; let’s not be ridiculous. We know how to use all these colors; let’s have some in this song.’ So we didn’t completely ignore it, and I think for dynamics it’s good to have that, to be able to go to it, but generally the attitude was, let’s keep technology and use it to make backdrops for us, and let’s keep the trio a little more up front.”

  Ray Wawrzyniak collection

  Both author collection

  PRESTO Martin Popoff

  Most memorable from Kim Mitchell in the Rush movie Beyond the Lighted Stage was his sticking up for the “pretty Rush,” and by that he meant all these maligned miniature origami pop songs from sort of Hold Your Fire through Roll the Bones.

  Presto represents the best—or worst, depending on your level of angry metalhead-ness, mine being sky-high—example of the band’s pursuit of pop structure, accompanied by histrionic, high-tuned drums, rainy guitars, clarion keys, and up-front, plainly stated singing from Geddy, who does indeed call this a Rush album with uncommon attention to singing. By that he must mean using the low, comfortable end of his range so that he can in fact do something closer to singing, rather than hard rock howling and yelping (which is here in large quantity, again, for better or worse).

  Aiding this aim is the curious production knobjob of one Rupert Hine, far from an obvious choice to produce a Rush album. But since breaking with the best, Terry Brown, Rush has constantly bestowed upon producers the role of spurring them on to change, variety, oddity, often for change’s sake and not necessarily for successful creative results, as is generally agreed upon up in regard to Presto by most fans and, heck, by Neil himself.

  Hine was brought on because Peter Collins couldn’t or wouldn’t do it. The results are pretty much what Peter would have given them anyway. Sure, the idea was to put keyboards aside, but that idea flew out the window (for all their pride in change, Rush changes incrementally and with trepidation), and the result was really very little material difference from a Peter Collins Rush record.

  Presto’s biggest songs were “Superconductor,” “Show Don’t Tell,” and “The Pass.” “Superconductor” is one of those frustrating Rush songs written heavy enough, but then so botched by production and mix that you wind up just not caring. Still, when it hit radio, we angry metalhead Rush fans found ourselves politely clapping because there was a riff, plus a chorus that was brisk and bracing like those slaps of aftershave on TV commercials of the ’70s. “Show Don’t Tell” was also a radio staple, the band managing to make a convoluted jammy instrumental passage into a true hook, something hard to get out of one’s head, especially if that hooked fish was a drummer. The whole thing was, in fact, an interesting song wracked with an eccentric, dynamic arrangement, ultimately a track worthy of kick-start position on this weak tea record.

  “The Pass” represents a weird situation in which Geddy keeps telling us how good it is, so the band plays it a lot live, and now it just can’t be ignored. Looking for the positive, it’s a pretty passionate stacked set of melodies for Rush, resulting in a song that is hooky for the usual reasons.

  Elsewhere, m
an, what is left are just a bunch of generally forgotten catalog songs that the band painfully kills with trendy sonics, from Alex’s acoustic and only lightly electric strummery, to the worst of dated keyboard sounds, right down to performances from Neil that seem too busy for such malnourished skeletons.

  Sharp-edged, twee, Fixx-ed to the point of INXS, Presto is the work of a band desperately wanting to participate in an arty post-punk zone, bored and fatigued by too many years mining hard rock an’ progressive rock. And yet … it’s a good couple or three records into that idea, so in effect, they are just persisting in something started, dang, halfway through Grace Under Pressure. Takeaway from all this, then? Well, maybe it’s the idea that the band are hammering away at more of the same, problem being that the guys, with their specific range of talents, weren’t exactly suited to swim in these waters in the first place. Of course, Rush, with all that restless creative ambition, couldn’t care less. If they are excited about a type of music, they’re pretty much unafraid to learn on the job, and Presto is definitely the work of a band still learning how to write pop, which in and of itself is not as worthy a cause as they may have thought at the time.

  Presto tour, Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, New York, April 22, 1990. Steve Eichner/WireImage/Getty Images

  But from flash single “Superconductor” and “The Pass,” durable, poignant, and long a band favorite, to “Chain Lightning” and “Red Tide,” Presto proved itself the work of a “power” trio immune to the idioms of metal, metal being one logical result of a band comprising bass, guitar, and drums. Geddy’s playing is taut, midrange-y, and clacky, whereas Alex is alternately acoustic and wiry of electrics, Lifeson at least famously vowing to stay away from the chorus effect. Neil’s playing was similarly perky and poppy, his language expanded to include further explorations of ska plus some of the rhythms he had soaked in during his bicycle travels in Africa from the last long break, travels that resulted in his first published book, Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa.

  In general terms, yes, Presto was a reaction against too much keyboard, but it has also been framed by Geddy as an album more about vocals, Rupert requesting of Geddy, as a condition of taking the project, essentially to croon in lower registers across the board and leave his heavy metal squeak at home. “A lot of the music was melodically written, and the vocal melodies came first on a lot of these songs,” confirmed Lee. “The bass nuances were one of the last things in the rhythm section being put together, so, I had no idea what would happen when it came time to reproduce all those things.”

  Presto was also a record about the tasteful architecture of smart songwriting, and not so much time-honored Rush characteristics like odd time signatures. “They’re still in there,” noted Geddy. “There may not be as many. I think the transitions are a lot more subtle now, so that we can slip into it without it sounding awkward. It’s funny to hear people react to a song like ‘Superconductor.’ The verses are all in seven, but it doesn’t feel like it, because Neil plays across the seven. We’re so comfortable with some of those time signatures that we can just slip into them, or slip into them for a moment. But, there’s probably not as many as there used to be. They’re probably not as obvious. We used to try to be very obvious when we went into a time change. We would announce it musically, somehow. ‘Here comes the time change’—boom! ‘This is hard to play’—here! And now, we just worry about making the song work, and if it feels good in a seven, then we’ll play it in a seven. As long as it feels good. It’s actually a shift in priority. We’re not so determined to prove anything. I guess we got a lot of that out of our system. I still think of it as a kind of personal victory when a song gets touted as something that the masses may like and I know there’s an odd time signature in there. It was like when ‘Spirit of Radio’ got a lot of airplay, years ago, and there’s a couple of passages of seven there. I think that’s great. If you can sneak an odd time on the radio, that’s really a good thing.”

  Extensive bicycle travels in Africa resulted in Neil’s first published book, Masked Rider: Cycling in West Africa.

  Neil’s lyrics are well matched to Presto’s immediate, succinct musical mien, a vibe perfectly captured by the name of the record, one that was voted down as a good title for the double that became A Show of Hands. “So I went and wrote a song called ‘Presto’ and knew at that point that we had at least an album title to work with,” noted Peart. “I was conscious that maybe a couple of the last albums were a little on the heavy side, lyrically speaking. With Presto I took a little looser approach to things. These songs have their own stories and messages without necessarily being linked by some overall theme. If there is an identifiable lyrical trait here, it’s my use of irony, which is injected by acting a character out through the lyrics. For example, in ‘Hand Over Fist’ there are two people walking down the street arguing, and the lead character is saying things which are supposed to be ironic.

  “We can’t be more creative than locking ourselves away in a farmhouse,” continued Peart, referring to a methodology that had become dependable over the years, as far back as Hemispheres. “I know there is such a thing as inspiration, but I know how to take advantage of it. When we’re not rehearsing or writing, I collect ideas and prepare myself for when we do start writing. By the time we’re ready to work on a new album, I’m fully prepared. I’ve got pages and pages of notes to work from. Call us efficient, call us mechanical. The point is, when we have to get something done, it’s done. That’s the only way we know how to work. Maybe we’re exceptional in that way. To our mind this is simply being professional.”

  All Ray Wawrzyniak collection

  Presto tour, The Spectrum, Philadelphia, April 27, 1990. Steve Trager photo/Frank White Photo Agency

  Roll the Bones tour, Madison Square Garden, New York City, December 6, 1991. © Frank White

  Three moderately successful singles—“The Pass,” “Superconductor,” and, most famously, prog-inflected album opener “Show Don’t Tell”—helped Rush take their first Atlantic album beyond gold status and to a No. 20 position on the album chart. But one can’t help think that the band’s life-balancing decision toward less touring—Presto marked the fourth tour in a row with no European dates—held the record back, not that the band (fully aware of what they were doing) particularly lamented the result. One wonders if they would have stayed on the road longer had they gone through with very serious plans to add a touring keyboard player, a happenstance that would have uncluttered Geddy’s mind considerably.

  Still, the happy tenor of Rush’s next project is illustrated by the fact that the band eagerly ended a break to start working on ideas for their next record, another Rupert Hine production and another that made use of Chalet Studio for writing sessions and Le Studio for laying down tracks. Punctuated by beer-fueled late-night volleyball games cheered on by the lake’s voracious mosquito population, the album got made quickly, Rupert finding ways to keep Alex spontaneous in his soloing, even if it meant Frankensteining the demo tracks onto the finals.

  Presto tour, Los Angeles, 1990. Artist: Michael Dole

  A Show of Hands may have been the last record the band owed Mercury, but it was far from the last Rush album issued by the label. The compilation entitled Chronicles was assembled without the band and released in September 1990.

  Courtesy Wyco Vintage/www.wycovintage.com

  Author collection

  Roll the Bones, issued September 3, 1991, also benefited from a vigorous conceptual base, the role of chance in life, as well as a cool album cover by Hugh Syme interpreting the “roll the bones” theme in his typically austere and upmarket manner.

  “It just came out of nowhere, honestly,” explained Neil, on the record’s thematic thrust. “Suddenly, it struck me. Then I started thinking about it more and realizing how many wildcards there are in each of our lives and how you’re faced with a choice—just like in a card game. You can be dealt the wildcard and you can turn it down—or you can jump on it. That’s part o
f the ‘roll the bones’ aspect, too. When opportunity knocks, do you answer or do you pretend you’re asleep? Even when luck comes your way, you have a choice how you respond to it.”

  “Roll the Bones is the perfect title,” Neil further explained during a separate chat at Anthem headquarters, “because through all the thoughts that I go through on the album about all these nasty things that happen and all these terrible things that could happen to you—a drunk in a stolen car could run over you on the way home tomorrow night and you can have the best laid plans in the world for what you want to do, but there’s still that element of chance that it could all go wrong. But the bottom line of that is to take the chance, roll the bones. If it’s a random universe and that’s terrifying and it makes you neurotic and everything, never mind. You really have to take the chance or else nothing’s going to happen. The bad thing might not happen, but the good thing won’t either, so that’s really the only chance you have.”

  ROLL THE BONES Richard Bienstock

  “Why are we here? Because we’re here,” asks (and answers) Geddy Lee in the chorus of the title track to 1991’s Roll the Bones. It’s an uncharacteristically plainspoken sentiment from a band not generally given to the succinct or straightforward in lyric or music. But Roll the Bones was Rush at the dawn of a new decade and captured a band in transition.