Limelight: Rush in the '80s, page 9
“To say it didn’t make a big difference would probably be inaccurate, but at the same time, I don’t recall really changing that much. Yes, we got a slightly bigger paycheck, we moved into a bigger van, or into a bus, I think, from a motor home. But we still worked a lot. We were still dead tired by the end of the tour, as ever. It was great to play to full houses and to go that next level up, where you are playing larger venues and filling the place through multiple nights. That was certainly exciting. We were still so young. I’m just trying to put myself back in that time. It was really, really exciting, now that I think about it. We did some really big gigs, Texxas Jam and some of these enormous shows.
“I paid off my mortgage,” laughs Lifeson, looking for more good news. “The house we moved into, we had no furniture for two years. I had two kids at the time, so it was nice to get the start of some financial security. I bought a station wagon, I think. As a second car [laughs]. I didn’t go buy Ferraris or any of that. But you know, there were six, or maybe four, very lean years. We incurred an enormous debt in that period, touring as much as we were. Because we were losing money every night, and we were being financed by management. I mean, we went a whole year without getting paid, and that was hard. With family, apartment rental, all that stuff — in my case, we lived off our wedding proceeds, you know, wedding gifts that we got, and had five bucks at the end of the week for cigarettes and whatever. You just didn’t do anything. You walked to a park and played with the kids — that was what you did. And it was fine, I was perfectly happy, that’s just the way your life is.
“But it took us a while to reduce that debt and get on a solid footing. It really wasn’t until the end of the ’70s that we managed to reach that point. Of course, it felt great, but we were worried. I mean, I bought a house in 1977 with my first royalty check, and it wasn’t that big. I used the full amount to put a down payment on a house. We had no money other than our salary, which was quite modest at the time. And I remember we had cases with burlap boxes, cardboard boxes with burlap on it, and we had a little tiny twelve-inch black-and-white TV, and we had a couch in our living room, a kitchen table and a couple of beds. And really, that was it. Two mortgages and worrying that if anything happened, we’re going to be in a little bit of trouble. But fortunately, everything worked out fine.”
To represent how hard the band continued to tour, Vic recalls getting a pen set from the guys with a little plaque that said, “Can we come home now?” “Yes, my pen set,” laughs Vic. “They knew they had to tour, as they knew that’s what sold the albums. It was never a problem. Maybe making demands like, ‘Okay, we only want to work four days of the week instead of seven.’ You know, that’s not unreasonable [laughs]. But they were easy to work with.”
There were clues that Moving Pictures was making a big impact, according to Alex. “Well, we always had good relationships with the promoters we worked with. They became very generous around that time, and so that was one tangible thing you could see — all these gifts. And not that no one does that anymore, but the smiling faces. Crowds had changed. The fans had changed. They hung around the hotels a lot more.”
But, says Alex, the press stayed critical. “We were used to the majority of our reviews being negative. Not all of them, but the typical stuff, Mickey Mouse on helium for Geddy’s voice.”
When you talk with the guys, you really get a sense that the bad reviews ticked them off. At least for Alex and Geddy, since Neil didn’t read them. At the same time, Neil was getting into tussles with critics about politics and this very real debate: What constitutes good music? The classic example of this was his back-and-forth in Creem about the Rolling Stones. Essentially it came down to whether artists were people who tried really, really hard, like Rush, versus those who wrote songs that obviously connected (otherwise, why talk about the Stones?). In a sense, in this context, Rush was realism and the Stones were abstract art. It’s a debate that is impossible to resolve. And yet the public was clearly on board.
“I think Moving Pictures entered the charts at #2 or something?” Alex says. “Which was a really big deal at the time. And the record company was quite excited, as management was. But honestly, for us, at the end of the day, we were just on the bus going to the next gig. And that’s what counts, or that’s what we’re focused on. In so many ways, we’re still just that little band of some friends that got together. That’s what it feels like at sound check when the three of us are just up there goofing around. We might play something, whatever, before we get into the song for sound check, and it reminds me of when we were younger goofing around. That’s still that essence of who we are.”
Continues Alex, on the new success: “We were still touring as much as we ever toured. We could now take a nicer holiday, to the Bahamas or something, with the kids. But other than that, it didn’t really change that much. It’s just that some things got a little easier.”
Alex eventually got to help out his parents as well. “I don’t really like talking about it, but you just feel, certainly with your parents, you try to give them back something. Eastern European parents coming from the war, they are always so focused on feeding their kids and giving them a good home. Money was always an issue. Money didn’t become much of an issue after that. Giving is a wonderful thing to be able to do, whether it’s a big thing or a small thing. It’s very rewarding.”
“Moving Pictures, in particular, was a godsend,” reflects Ray Danniels, clearly remembering the financial relief the album brought. “It was the right place and the right time. When I got the record, Geddy and I, and my girlfriend at the time, and his wife, went to Barbados. I had it on a cassette Walkman, and I listened to that record for a week while we were down there. And my partner and I weren’t getting along very well — he wasn’t working as hard as I was, and a lot of other things — and I listened to the record, and I thought ‘It’s now or never.’ I came back home, bought him out, and I basically had to start over again.”
“They changed,” muses Vic Wilson. “Everyone changes. What can I say? They all change. You start making money, things change! Everybody . . . it happens to everyone. They were making the money, and we were all using the same accountant. They didn’t like that, and then they got their own accountants. It was all there. Their money was all accounted for.”
According to Liam, it got to the point where Geddy started to learn accounting, implying that maybe he didn’t think the business was being run optimally. “In the late ’70s, Ged and I were sitting around a hotel room on an unusual off day. He had his bass with him and he was practicing, and I think I was just doing up my receipts for the week. And Ged approached me with a novel concept: if I was to teach him how to do the books on the road, he’d teach me how to play bass. And I thought, ‘Well, I’ve always wanted to learn to play an instrument.’ I was never satisfied with the one year of trombone I had in high school, which should have been drums but the teacher didn’t listen to me. At any rate, for a few days, I think Ged and I toyed with the idea of me teaching him a little bit about bookkeeping and he actually gave me a couple of bass lessons, but that was the end of it all.
“All three guys are that way,” continues Birt. “They’re all in some ways restless individuals and they’re always pushing themselves to the extreme. Geddy got involved more on the business end of the band. It’s partly because of a lack of interest from the other two; they’d rather not deal with it. Not truly a lack of interest, but they’d just rather let Ged deal with that side of it, you know, let him deal with Ray, let him push those buttons, just come back to us with answers we like to hear.
“Ged also likes to oversee the big picture of the tour prior to it going out, all the preproduction aspects, dealing with Howard and Alan and the filmmakers to make sure all the elements are there and that they all fit. And also dealing with the sense of humor that all three of them have, sometimes coming up with different prop ideas for the tour. Geddy’s had his dryers at certain phases, the vending machines, the chicken rotisseries. There’s always something just to make people think, and more so to make them laugh. They all kind of assign themselves roles inside the band. Neil works very closely with Hugh Syme on the album artwork and the credits and that type of thing. Alex is probably the funniest person you’ll ever meet in your life. He’s just naturally funny. He can put anyone at ease, anywhere. He’s the most approachable of the guys if you’re just a man on the street coming up to say hi. Alex will sit down and talk, and he’s very open. None of the three of them have a pop star personality, but Alex is Mr. Man on the Street, he really is. They all just take a little niche and it all blends together and it results in an end product.”
For Vic, leaving the Anthem mothership was more of a personal decision. “December 1980,” begins Wilson. “Our last child, James, my son, was born in October of ’80. The two girls, Tanya and Heidi . . . Tanya had just started school and Heidi was two and a half years younger than that. And I just made a choice — step off. Because it’s always nice to step off on a high. And that’s how I spent the rest of my life. I was there for breakfast and lunch and dinner, with my children. They grew up with their father at home. And I got to go out on all the school trips, because I had a van at that time. I would drive all the kids.
“But I was a lot older than them too,” continues Vic. “I had just had enough. I told Ray I was leaving. So we sat down, hashed out a price and that was it. I left. Got in my car, drove home. Left all my furniture there. Not difficult for me at all. It was a business decision. Family decision, I would say, a personal decision. Not many people can do that. And I was fortunate enough to be in that position.”
As for how Ray reacted, Vic says, “He had everything then. How would you react? [laughs] He had to get the money together.”
Now Danniels was running the show himself. Ray says, “Listening to that record, it was obvious that this was a hit. I was so blown away by that record — as a fan and as a manager, I just knew it. I can’t say I knew 2112 would be as big as it was, but I knew Moving Pictures was going to be huge. And rock radio had gotten to the point where, for a band who had to fight to find a station in every market, suddenly that was the dominant format in the early ’80s. And to use Toronto as an example, there were two stations like that, plus one just outside the city. And in other markets there were two, sometimes three stations we could get played on at the time the band delivered a record that would have ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Limelight’ and some of the most successful songs they’ve ever written.
“And we’d started to get out of the debt from the 2112 era,” continues Ray. “It got better, no question; it was night and day. We could do arenas. Rush was not a mainstream act, but Rush was starting to become big enough that there were other acts that wanted to sound like Rush. And there are younger bands coming up that are citing Rush as one of their favorite bands, or one of their influences. That starts happening around that era. So you see a shift. You’re not in your late teens anymore; you’re suddenly closer to thirty, and you are a man, not a boy, and you’re starting to get back some of what you used to get as a fan. You’re getting it back from young guys now.”
On the other hand, Neil was not as confident as Ray that the album would be a hit. “We didn’t expect it to be any more successful than the others,” he figures, looking back at Moving Pictures. “You never do, you know? Like I said, we loved every record we ever made, but it doesn’t mean other people are going to. You hope they will, and you put all that into it, thinking, ‘Well, how can people not?’ You know, we love this so much, other people should too. You really do tend to see it that simplistic. The upshot of that is, well, when people don’t, you don’t ever take that for granted again, and honestly I still don’t. But the bloom of popularity: where previously if we had done one night in a city, suddenly we were doing two nights in the arena.”
Neil essentially makes the point that in 1980 and 1981, Rush was sort of the “it” band, the band everyone was talking about. And it’s kind of true. The tail end of the ’70s had been kind of fallow for rock and prog — the old decade becoming the new really did represent some kind of demarcation. On the rock side, Van Halen was keeping the flame, AC/DC was renewed and doing well and suddenly, improbably, so was Ozzy Osbourne. There was also the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM), and where Rush fit in this was weird. In essence, they’d run completely the other way from it in terms of influence. But for now, as Ray alluded to previously, they became a prime influence and a beloved legendary precursor.
In prog, Genesis was doing good business, but Yes was in transition and would not make a strong return until 1983 and 90125. But both Yes and Genesis would modernize drastically — maybe prog really was dead. Asia wasn’t particularly prog, and out of the new wave of British progressive rock movement, only Marillion made a dent. Running parallel was the founding of MTV in 1981, and then a couple of years later, a massive uptick in heavy metal’s prospects with the rise of hair metal and thrash, primarily in California. Rush would run away from all of this (save for MTV — in this they would participate), even if what they were about to embrace possessed its own ’80s tropes.
Continues Neil with respect to the band’s moment in the limelight: “It really was only those couple of years, as it kind of dwindled away with Signals, a record that people didn’t like so much because that was a keyboard experimental album with a lot of bizarreness on it. And from there to Grace Under Pressure, which is even more of a polarizing album. But Moving Pictures just hit the right summer with the right kind of music. And I remember being all kinds of places and hearing ‘Red Barchetta’ on the radio and thinking, ‘That song’s on the radio?!’
“I guess it’s that same synchronicity. 2112 happened to be the summer of Star Wars, and Moving Pictures happened to be at the right time too. New wave came along, and that killed a lot of bands. Just like the late ’60s killed a lot of bands from the early ’60s, an awful lot of bands that we started out with in the mid- to early ’70s did not survive that attrition. Because the only word is adapt — or perish. We were light on our feet because we had no preconceived notion of what we were supposed to be. We were not a hard-core rock ballad band or something, and our hair was subject to change — all of that.
“So many of the bands of the ’70s, they were all what they seemed to be in the true sense. And if you take that away, what were they going to do? That’s the trap they found themselves in. They couldn’t pretend to be a punk band. Well we couldn’t either, but we could pretend to play the music we loved. And that was why we could adapt through that time when so many other bands didn’t. We did manage to tiptoe through all the changes of the ’80s. We were very unfashionable, but maybe as a side note to this idea of us tiptoeing along the mainstream, the mainstream is what’s fashionable and enough of that crept in to keep us and probably also a certain fringe audience entertained, people who were walking along the median of the mainstream, as it were.”
Neil makes a good point here with his reflection on where the band exists relative to the mainstream. But it takes on different connotations depending on which arc in the trajectory we’re looking at. At the time of Moving Pictures, Rush records were being bought by a teenaged male hard rock crowd. But as Neil articulated, that demographic was joining the band on the edge of the mainstream, with Geddy, Alex and Neil politely prodding them to read more, care more about craft and get a little progressive in their lives. And if they aspired to be musicians themselves, well, the guys were enthusiastically offering up a clinic, showing kids not only where hard work will get you but also how purely fun it is to play “YYZ,” “Limelight” and “Tom Sawyer.”
Chapter 3: Exit . . . Stage Left
“I think we recorded a fairly sterile live record.”
Perhaps another marker of increased success for Rush and their suddenly solo-flying manager Ray was that in advance of their Moving Pictures campaign, they would set up at Wings Stadium in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for three nights to rehearse their bigger, broader show, before presenting it there on a fourth night. A month into the tour, the guys would return home to Toronto for a triumphant three-night stand at Maple Leaf Gardens. Directly after, the trucks would roll up Highway 401 for six hours to Montreal, where the show would be recorded for use on the band’s second live album, Exit . . . Stage Left, issued October 29, 1981. Also making the album would be material from the band’s two nights in Glasgow, Scotland, June 10 and 11, 1980.
In between Glasgow, which was part of the Permanent Waves campaign, and the subsequent Moving Pictures tour, Rush would do a handful of isolated dates in September 1980 to limber up before entering the studio to work on Moving Pictures. These were U.S. eastern seaboard shows supported by NWOBHM up-and-comers Saxon. Featured would be pre-LP versions of both “Limelight” and “Tom Sawyer,” neither of which differ much from the eventual finished product, right down to Neil’s fills.
The reason the material on the record reached back so far was that the band had been recording the Permanent Waves tour for use on a live album that was supposed to come out before Moving Pictures, something the guys often spoke about in interviews at the time, offering that it would comprise performances from Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle and the Hammersmith Odeon in London, and musing about making a sort of rock documentary at the same time.
“Our first tour in America was supporting Rush,” explains Saxon bassist Steve Dawson, offering fond memories of playing with Rush. “Fantastic, brilliant. I mean, can you imagine me, from a little town in England, opening up for Rush, with probably the greatest bass player who’s ever lived, Geddy Lee? He came over when we were doing sound check. They had done their sound check and we were doing ours, and he just came over and talked bass, if you know what I mean. Because I was fascinated with his sound. Because he plays with his fingers like me. He doesn’t play with a plectrum. He plays with his fingers, and I was amazed at the sound that he got. And I was asking him how he did it. And Neil was just a quiet guy, kept to himself, and the guitarist spent all the time in his dressing room making model aircraft [laughs]. So we basically didn’t have a lot to do with the other guys, but Geddy was really friendly, a good guy. And in fact, we talked a lot about UFO, me and Geddy, because UFO supported Rush just before us, and so we were swapping Pete Way stories. You can pass a lot of time because there’s an awful lot of stories.”
