It would be a stretch to posit that, with Bones, Rush had anticipated the sea change in ’90s rock that grunge and alternative music would bring about (and to be honest, they still seem a bit “band-out-of-time” here; in retrospect, this is not quite what you remember hard rock to have sounded like in 1991). But there is something of a reflection of the era within the tone of the album. In his lyrics, Neil Peart wasn’t only moving away from the ornate but also toward the more weighty and somber: “All the pain and suffering/who will pay?” Peart (through Lee) posits in the Cold War lament “Heresy,” while the protagonist in “Neurotica” hides in his shell “as the world goes to hell.” “You Bet Your Life,” meanwhile, charts the various descents of junkies, losers, and even the winner “pour[ing] his life down the drain.” There’s much death and discontent coursing through Bones, to be sure, and it is all rendered more forthrightly and with considerable less use of metaphor than, say, the maple and oak bludgeoning by “hatchet, axe, and saw” that ran rampant in “The Trees.”
That said, for all its verbal turmoil Roll the Bones is musically brightly hued and more upbeat than its predecessor, Presto. Slower numbers like “Bravado” and the aforementioned “Heresy” still shimmer and sparkle, and the album’s many uptempo tracks—“Face Up,” “The Big Wheel,” and the forceful yet nimble opener “Dreamline,” in particular—exhibited, at the time at least, Rush at their most rocking in years.
Indeed, Roll the Bones was another stride down a road the band began traveling on Presto—a turn away from the synth-heavy sound that characterized Rush’s post–Moving Pictures work and back toward a more guitar-centric modus operandi. Said Lee at the time, “There seems to be more of a three-piece approach again and a bit more of a hard edge to it.” And while it should be noted that, as on Presto, keyboards still have a heavy (if less domineering) presence, and the guitar tones are not quite as thick and brawny as they would become as the decade wore on, Roll the Bones was a clear line in the sand between the Rush of the ’80s and the band that they would become in the new decade. That point was further punctuated by 1989’s live A Show of Hands, which gathered a set list composed almost entirely of the band’s post-Pictures ’80s output and in effect summed up the era, and 1990’s definitive double-CD retrospective Chronicles, which served as a sort of clearinghouse for everything Rush. By the time Bones came along the slate had, in a sense, been wiped clean.
Of course, with every leap forward there’s bound to be a few missteps. And Roll the Bones certainly has a few, most noticeably in the bizarre and brittle funk-rock workout “Where’s My Thing? (Part IV, ‘Gangster of Boats’ Trilogy),” a disjointed piece that feels wholly out of place among its fellow compositions and delivers on none of the proggy promise inherent in hearing the words “Rush instrumental.” And then there’s the title track’s extended rap section, which is downright weird in all sorts of ways. For obvious starters, Geddy Lee raps, and also he rhymes zodiac with polyester slacks and, um, gluteus max. That his voice is modulated down in pitch for a peculiar and somewhat creepy effect hardly helps matters. Finally, the whole thing goes on for just way too long.
What was Rush thinking? Damned if I know. But perhaps it’s best to return once again to the title track’s chorus to glean some wisdom here: “Why does it happen? Because it happens.” Roll the bones….
Roll the Bones tour, Madison Square Garden, New York City, December 6, 1991.
“When we went in to do Presto, everybody was fired up,” Alex recalled. “There was a whole new enthusiasm. Then, while we were at dinner one night, Neil said, ‘Well, I guess we have to talk about doing a tour,’ and we all thought, ‘Oh, no!’ We all enjoy playing live, but it’s the touring that becomes boring and tedious, and it seems harder with every year. But that tour went great for us—it was by far the best tour we’d ever done. We had a really good time—the pacing was great, and the personnel were great—everything was fun again. We did a little shorter run than on some other tours, which left us wanting to do more. We could have done another month or so, but we felt the wanting of doing more and carrying that into our next record was more important than squeezing in more dates.
“When we went in to write Roll the Bones,” continued Lifeson, “everybody was fired up again, and we had that additional step along in our enthusiasm. We really regard this record as a rebirth for Rush. Now, we don’t look at just the next record—we’re looking at three, four, or five records into the future. I think we’re going to be around a long time. Now that we’ve had a chance to record a lot of records, it’s become an art for us, really. We’re learning to do it better in terms of songwriting, preproduction, preparation … everything. We took two months less on this record than we did on the past few records—definitely since Grace Under Pressure. I mean, we’re happy if we finish a couple of days early, or if we’re on time, that’s a relief. But to finish two months ahead is just unheard of for us. I take pride in our preproduction for how efficient it’s become, so our recording has become a very positive thing. With this record, we went straight into recording after writing and rehearsing it instead of taking the time off. It wasn’t supposed to come out until January, but since we finished early we moved everything up a couple of months. Now that we feel rejuvenated and better about everything, we’re looking forward to this tour.”
Canadian Musician contest ad, 1991. Author collection
Author collection
Ray Wawrzyniak collection
Proving that there’s no such thing as bad publicity, Rush took a lot of stick for the off-the-cuff rap thrown into the break (dance?) section of Roll the Bones’ title track. Suddenly, fans were throwing their hands in the air saying that their favorite band had gone rap, with critics calling it a play for cool gone wrong. In any event, it caused much talk, as did the palpable spring in the step of driving opener “Dreamline” and Grammy-nominated instrumental “Where’s My Thing?,” which lost out to Eric Johnson, ironically Rush’s warm-up act on the opening leg of the album’s tour. Also raising eyebrows was the fact that Rush notched a platinum record this time out, while the previous two records had stalled at gold.
Was it the guitars that got people excited again? Alex could only hope. “With Presto, we decided that the guitar was going to play a more predominant role again and that the keyboards were going to go on second and it was going to be fuller enhancements for the coloring of the song rather than to play a major fanatic role,” the guitarist said. “And even more so with Roll the Bones so the guitar comes up a little bit more and I think this is probably a direction that we’ll continue because I think we’ve realized that the core of the band is drums, bass, and guitar. And that’s really what the important elements are and that’s really what should be developed. Feels better to me and it’s the same for the other guys. They all say the same thing. Having a guitar up there … I mean there’s just so much emotion in that instrument and you know, you play off that, everybody plays off that—it really has to be in that role.”
Roll the Bones tour, Wembley Arena, London, April 17, 1992. Mick Hutson/Redferns/Getty Images
1993–1997
THE ALTERNATIVE TO THE ALTERNATIVE
“I just did the stupidest interview I’ve ever done, in my whole life. It had nothing to do with the band. This guy went on about the drug scene in America and how musicians are all f****d up—he just went on and on and on. Finally I just said, ‘Look, I know you’ve got some serious feelings about this, but I’m here to talk to you about the record, if you want to talk to me about it. So can we please do that?’ It just went on and on. I wanted to smoke a joint, I got so upset [laughs].”
—Alex Lifeson, quoted by Steven Batten, Northeast Ohio Scene, 1996
THE BOYS IN RUSH WALKED CONFIDENTLY through the early ’90s, comfortable with their routines, their reduced workloads, their wealth, and their metropolitan life concerns and hobbies, expanded in rock ’n’ roll middle age to include philanthropy. Post–Roll the Bones, Neil biked once again in
Africa, Alex got a trip in a CF-5A fighter jet, and Geddy took his siblings and rock-of-the-family mother back to Poland to remember her tragic youth as a Holocaust survivor. Soon, both Alex and Neil got motorcycles and took riding lessons (Neil would fail twice!), planting the seed for one of them to become a famous travel journalist.
“We don’t live in a very ‘music business’ environment,” mused Lee, in conversation with Raw’s Darrell Shoults. “The main reason why we aren’t seen around is due to time. We keep getting offered a lot of stuff, but we made a decision seven or eight years ago that time that wasn’t ‘Rush time’ was our own time. It would be no holiday coming out of a Rush project and bouncing straight into another one with other people. I need time for family, for personal travel, all kinds of interests outside of music. I don’t know if that means we’re less obsessed about music than most musicians or that we just get enough of our ya-yas out in Rush. But, like most things Rush, that’s just the way it is.”
Test for Echo tour, June 1997. Steve Trager photo/Frank White Photo Agency
Counterparts tour, Madison Square Garden, New York City, March 8, 1994. Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images
Author collection
Back in a music industry in which Rush was now viewed as staid seniors, trends continued to come and go, many of them not lost on a band who gladly picked and chose from them, “walking on the shores of the mainstream,” as Alex was wont to say. Yet perhaps too much has been made of the influence of grunge—or of bands like the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Live, and Primus—on Rush and where they would go next. After all, it’s messy. The party line was that guitar rock, produced rough ’n’ raw, returned with grunge, which, depending on how deeply you were into music, appeared in 1988 or with Nirvana’s breakthrough album Nevermind, issued September 24, 1991, three weeks after Roll the Bones, sonically speaking, the last Rush album of the ’80s.
Yet listen to advance single “Stick It Out” from Counterparts, Rush’s fifteenth studio album, issued thirteen months hence, and the impression quickly floods over the frustrated Rush follower of the ’80s that what he or she was hearing was the band’s crunchiest metallic rock since select cells from Moving Pictures.
“We’ve kinda shifted the interest back to the guitar,” said Alex, repeating a promise made with every album since Presto. “We’ve been talking about moving in that direction for quite a while, but certainly with this one we made a concerted effort to do that. The keyboards are much deeper in the mix. It was to sort of capture an energy that we used to have when it was more of a concentrated three-piece. I recorded all the guitars in the studio, which was a change. I hadn’t done that in a long time, and I really got off on it. It’s not a particularly efficient environment, but that’s the whole point why you should do it. You get out there and the guitar is vibrating, and it’s tough to control the feedback. And it’s really loud, and your headphones sound terrible, you can’t hear anything because the guitar’s so loud—it’s fantastic! You just really get a great buzz from it. I was very uncomfortable with the recording for the first few days. I didn’t feel that I could get the kind of performance I wanted to, only because I had so much trouble monitoring what I was playing to. But once I settled in and had certain things right—the bass drums and snare, for instance, were up really loud, and I’d gotten a very strange kind of balance, but a good working balance—then I got right into it. And it was very inspirational. The fact that you feel the guitar vibrating against your body makes you feel that you’re really connected to it.”
Ray Wawrzyniak collection
Counterparts tour book. Author collection
Counterparts promo flat, 1993. Author collection
Frank White collection
COUNTERPARTS Martin Popoff
As history gets rewritten folding in upon itself, serious Rush fans get increasingly irritated pondering Counterparts, acknowledging its high rating and then calling it overrated. The storyline, ossifying within the band and perpetuated toward quasi-myth, is that the album is a return to clanging (rather than, ahem, chiming) guitars, and that is due to the boundless Neanderthal enthusiasm of Kevin “Caveman” Shirley, who gets a “Recorded by” credit, the actual producer, Peter Collins, often getting lost in the hype.
But there’s some validity because the band does get animated when talking about Kevin, how he pressed take and gear decisions on the band, voicing his opinion that the band needed to be jogged out of this tinkling sound they’d been tinkering with like Tinker Bells.
Push and pull, positives and negatives, it’s a bit to Rush’s discredit that the delta force from the generally and sensibly derided Presto and Roll the Bones period would be modest and incremental. But to their credit, the result is the band’s first full-blooded, “correctly” recorded album since Signals, that is to say, guitars that participated in something beyond post-punk, accompanied by a thump all the way down the spectrum to Neil’s bass drum. Those who call this highly rated album overrated bray that the band didn’t go far enough, and that the sound is still quite corporate, far from what the Caveman might have wished for, but just bold enough for these conciliatory yet conservative Canucks, as much as they could handle in one step.
So Counterparts is a compromise, but the end result is indeed a welcome, heavier Rush, as evidenced by groovy, drum-begun opener “Animate,” a song smart of architecture, welled up with passionate melodies, a super success, maybe the album’s best song. But not the first song. A black cloud we like to call “Stick It Out” was trotted out as an advance single, and it’s very heavy, almost Voivodian, fully deceptive as to what would be contained in the tin, but slaked greedily by those who were looking for a beating about the chest, neck, and head area of a Rush energized by grunge (another rote plot line).
“Cut to the Chase” contains some sawing chords, a harbinger of what is to come on Test for Echo, and we are making note of a theme wrapped around an approximation of hard rock. The fact that “Nobody’s Hero” wasn’t hard rock annoyed no one, ’cos this single deserved to be a single, Peart writing a succinct and smart treatise on who really deserves to be called a hero, buttressed by sensible folk architecture—great song.
“Between Sun & Moon” gets back to supporting the rocking premise, Peart working with eccentric genius Pye Dubois of Max Webster fame on a typically obtuse lyric, one that poetically and in slanted, enchanted light supports the album’s theme more darkly stated elsewhere, namely the difficulty of human relationships. But again, while Alex rocks fairly electric, Peart is recorded in full spectrum hi-fidelity and responds with some joyful bashing like his hero Keith Moon.
“Alien Shore” is jumpy and easily forgotten, whereas “The Speed of Love” is full-on dour and unproductive like much of the previous two albums. But come the King Crimsonian “Double Agent” the band perks up, Geddy speaking and peeking through gnarled patterns from Alex, while Neil applies a tribal hiccup of a beat. This one gives way to a completely catchy and close-to-funky instrumental called “Leave That Thing Alone,” which got Rush another Grammy nomination in the rock instrumental category, as if any of this made sense. Frankly though, hooky as the track is, Alex as the texture utility man from the past few records … well, I welcome the return to the imposed-upon rock premise, which does in fact bound back into view come “Cold Fire,” the third single from the record, which features another mature, complex relationship lyric perched upon a chimey verse that cannily serves the song’s powerful, emotional chorus. It’s a song of unsettling ennui, and a late-of-sequence high point from an album that has now fully earned its reputation as a receptacle of gravitas after too much white-suited quaintness from Rush.
“Everyday Glory” is crap. The end. But in summation, what has occurred is a record that is, first off, a joy to get pounded by sonically, and then full-up with all manner of event capable of getting tongues attached to the Rush cognoscenti wagging … some metal, some groove, the occasional inspired wall of sound, frank man-woman talk of disappointment, each
firm proposal delivered with the confident, purposeful, straight-ahead stare of manly men body-rocking harder than Sting.
Counterparts tour, Madison Square Garden, New York City, March 8, 1994. Ebet Roberts/Redferns/Getty Images
Reiterating the embracing of real riffery one hears on “Animate,” “Cold Fire,” and “Cut to the Chase,” Alex said, “This is, I guess, the first time in probably over ten or twelve years, since Moving Pictures, that it was a decided effort that the guitar would carry the weight and play the more predominant role. There’s an immediacy about this record that you feel comfortable with right off first listen. Our other records take a few listens to get into the essence of them—musically, lyrically. It really takes a required effort. Whereas with this record, you put it on and there’s something about the way it sounds, the way the songs are, the melodies, maybe the riffs, that draws you in immediately. Roll the Bones sounded so much tougher live than in the studio, which is what we really wanted to capture with these songs—to make sure it had that kind of impact. Just by the nature of the way we recorded it using an engineer whose particular style is very straightforward—I mean he just stuck the mics up and hit the record button in a very straight approach in terms of signal path from the instrument to the tape. That really helped us to capture that size and style.”
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