FROM: INTERNET:temples@syrinx.umd.edu, INTERNET:temples@syrinx.umd.edu TO: Darin D. LaGarry, 73054,3055 DATE: 10/16/93 12:26 AM Re: Digest #783 Part 1 of 3 Sender: temples@syrinx.umd.edu Received: from syrinx.umd.edu by dub-img-2.compuserve.com (5.67/5.930129sam) id AA03469; Thu, 14 Oct 93 00:33:19 -0400 Received: by syrinx.umd.edu (5.57/Ultrix2.4-C) id AA08649; Sat, 16 Oct 93 00:24:34 -0400 Date: Sat, 16 Oct 93 00:24:34 -0400 From: temples@syrinx.umd.edu (Rush Fans Digest Mailing List) Message-Id: <9310160424.AA08649@syrinx.umd.edu> To: 73054.3055@compuserve.com Subject: Digest #783 Part 1 of 3 Errors-To: rush-request@syrinx.umd.edu Reply-To: rush@syrinx.umd.edu Sender: rush@syrinx.umd.edu Precedence: bulk From: rush@syrinx.umd.edu To: rush_mailing_list Subject: 10/15/93 - The National Midnight Star #782 *** Special Edition *** ** ____ __ ___ ____ ___ ___ ** ** / /_/ /_ /\ / /__/ / / / / /\ / /__/ / ** ** / / / /__ / \/ / / / / /__/ / \/ / / /___ ** ** ** ** __ ___ ____ ** ** /\ /\ / / \ /\ / / / _ /__/ / ** ** / \/ \ / /___/ / \/ / /___/ / / / ** ** ** ** ____ ____ ___ ___ ** ** /__ / /__/ /__/ ** ** ____/ / / / / \ ** List posting/followup: rush@syrinx.umd.edu Administrative matters: rush-request@syrinx.umd.edu or rush-mgr@syrinx.umd.edu (Administrative postings to the posting address will be ignored!) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The National Midnight Star, Number 782 Friday, 15 October 1993 Today's Topics: World Premiere of _Counterparts_ -------------------------------------------------------------- From: meg@syrinx.umd.edu (******* Meg *******) Date: Sat Oct 16 00:18:53 EDT 1993 Subject: World Premiere of _Counterparts_ Forgive any misspellings of words, or names mentioned... enjoy! -meg ======================================================= World Premiere of _Counterparts_, aired 10/14/93 Taken from KIOZ 102.1 Oceanside, CA [Medly of: The Spirit Of Radio/The Big Money/Show Don't Tell/Fly By Night/ Closer To The Heart/Tom Sawyer/Freewill/A Passage To Bangkok/New World Man/ Roll The Bones/YYZ] SW: Now into their third decade of making music together, those are the unmistakable sounds of Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart, better known as Rush. Welcome to the world premiere of the brand new Rush album, _Counterparts_. I'm Steve Warden, coming to you from Rush's home town of Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Over the course of the next two hours, in addition to hearing this very powerful new album, you'll be treated to a first for one of these radio album launch deals -- exclusive commentary by all three members of the band, including as a special fall bonus, Geddy Lee's championship baseball prognostications. Stick around, we'll get started with Rush right after this. [commercial break] SW: Welcome back to Toronto. I'm Steve Warden, and this is the world premiere of _Counterparts_, the brand new album from Rush. In the last few weeks, over a couple of separate interview sessions, I had a chance to spend some time with Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart, and as we go through the album, you'll hear various comments from all three; some of them surprising, some hilarious, all of them revealing in one way or another. We begin with Geddy Lee's assessment of the sonic direction the band chose for _Counterparts_, an almost deliberate move back to capturing the basics of bass, guitar and drums. GL: It was about as deliberate as we ever get. When we start making a record, we really don't know what the hell we're gonna do; we go in, and just see what starts coming out. I think there's been a few frustrations, in retrospect, over the last couple records. Not in the material, and certainly not in the quality of the songwriting and performances, but mostly in a sonic thing. I think there were a few tracks on the last record that the style of production that we used suited very well. And there were other few tracks that seemed in the final result when we wanted them to kick a bit more, to have a bit more power, it really wasn't there to get out of the tracks. And I think that stuck in the back of our minds, and throughout the tour hearing those songs live, and feeling how much more power they had live, cuz I think about three of the tracks on the last record just sounded, at least to us, really killer live. And we thought, "Hm... we're not capturing one element of our band. There's some element that we do, that is natural to the way we play, and it comes out live, that we're not grabbing on record these days." So it was a concerted effort to grab that, and we wanted a complete change of scenery, complete change of engineers, production, everything. And even though we interviewed a lot of young producers, and talked to -- got so many people to work with on this record, we turned to Peter Collins in the end, who we had worked with before, for a couple of reasons: number one being the fact that he is very much a different producer now than he was when we worked with him last. We've always been friends, and we've always had a great respect for his way of doing things, but since working with us last he's worked with a lot more American bands: Queensryche, and so on. And we felt he was different producer now, with the same priorities, which we liked. And talking to him it was kind of like an instant, "Let's do this record together" as soon as we talked. We knew it would be great, so, and he agreed with the vision of what we saw; and his comments, criticizing the last couple records, sonically anyway, were very much in line with the direction we wanted to go, and we thought, "Bingo! Here you go, this is what we need." SW: And then you introduced in a different element in the engineering side. GL: Yeah, and we decided, "Well, what do you wanna do for an engineer?" Cuz when we worked with Peter Collins last, he was kinda teamed up with Jim Barton, who has since gone on to be a producer in his own right, and a very good one. So it was kind of like, "Who do you work with these days?" And he goes, "Well, I work with lots of different people." And so we sat down to kind of a laborious but interesting search, and we had tapes from, you know, producers from all over the world -- I mean engineers from all over the world that we were listening to just for a sound. And in the end we settled on this "caveman" character: his name is Kevin "The Caveman" Shirley, and he's a South African by way of Australia, whose tape was really raw, and it had a very natural sound to it. And we thought, "This is good. Let's get this raw attitude in the bed tracks and primary stages of recording and let's bring someone different in to mix it that maybe has a different, and a bit more of a sophisticated flair; a bit more of a high-tech attitdue." So we were after the best of both worlds. And from my point of view, it worked a treat. We brought Michael Leflough from Australia to mix it, and I think he was great -- both guys were great. So it was a very happy marriage and I'm really pleased with the result. SW: Did you see it as a bit of a risk though? GL: Yeah, it was a bit of a risk. But you know, when you've made records for the many years that we have, you do have a certain confidence that you'll be able to pull it out. There are risks, but you know what the risks really are. And there were a few times we were going, "I don't know about this, some of these sounds are pretty raw." But we just had confidence that it would all work out, and thankfully it did. SW: Was it also kind of challenging yourselves? You know, you mentioned having made so many records. Is it just something that you had arrived at, it was like, "Let's just try this, and maybe trigger something in us that we may not otherwise get."? GL: Absolutely correct. I think the hidden benefit of working with someone like Kevin was that he challenged all our conceptions, all our ideas about how to make records. He questioned, he said, "Well why do it this way?" You know, he's a kind of character that had very little respect for a lot of music that's been made, and a lot of ways people make records; a highly critical character. And I think that was good to have that element in the room. You had to keep it to a check, to a certain point, you didn't want to suddenly be involved in a very cynical, critical way of making records. But, I think having someone that challenges you to make sure you're doing things the way you should be doing them. He is from a school of engineering that doesn't believe in grabbing bags of EQ, and tweaking this knob, and tweaking that one. To him, it's "Well, your instrument sounds good out there. Let's get the right mikes and let's record it. And if there's a problem with the sound, more likely it's a problem out there with the source of the sound, as opposed to trying to fix a bad source." And there was a lack of complacency that was created; he was fired up, he was energetic, and I think we found that quite infectious, kind of carried over. [ "Between Sun And Moon" is played ] SW: "Between Sun And Moon", that's Rush from their brand new album _Counterparts_. And we have more to come in just a moment. [commercial break] SW: Welcome back to the world premiere of the brand new Rush album, _Counterparts_. I'm your host Steve Warden in Toronto. Time now to meet drummer/lyricist Neil Peart. He's normally the most retiscent member of the band when it comes to publicity, but always a true gentleman, who provides incredible insight into this band's creative process. Now on the last record _Roll The Bones_, Neil explored the concept of chance; so I asked him what was on his mind this time around. NP: _Roll The Bones_ as you outlined had the element of chance as a theme, and that was when I starting thinking about it, and just grew, and so many elements of chance appealed to me and inspired me to write about them. So _Roll The Bones_ had that concept in common. This record didn't really have that; it was a selection of individual themes that I didn't really associate at the time. I was thinking certainly about gender differences, and I've been reading Jung so I was interested in the anima, the female spirit within the male, etc. So that intrigued me, and the "Nobody's Hero" idea -- I'd been thinking alot about the nature of heroism and what was good and what was bad about it, and the idea of a role model, and people I'd known in my own life who were important to me as influences but weren't important to the rest of the world. So that concept of a role model but not a hero, if you like. So that was one separate set of influences, and all these things I really saw, and to some extent still see, as quite separate themes -- duality became the only unifying theme, hence _Counterparts_, but there really wasn't a germ as chance was in _Roll The Bones_ that sent me on a unified quest. SW: So in the beginning then, in starting to put the songs together, is that okay that things are disprate, or do you try to find a thread? NP: No, no, the thread is entirely accidental almost always. Albums like _Power Windows_ or _Hold Your Fire_ it was completely accidental; after the fact I went back and realized that, well, I've been writing these songs lyrically over the same period of time, so it wasn't surprising that I was on the same fixations. And I look at my notebook of collected scraps and ideas for a period of a year or two, and I notice threads. And that is so helpful, because when I do sit down on lyric-writing day, I find the threads and I say, "Okay, I was thinking about that six months ago, and then last week, and those two ideas I'll stitch together." So it tends to happen very naturally and step by step like that, and only really in the final analysis most times, can you see what the associations might have been. So this time I remember the earlier songs that I started on lyrically were the "Speed Of Love", for instance, I was caught on that phrase and interested in writing more songs about love rather than songs of love. And "Nobody's Hero" is one of the earliest ones, cuz again that was a theme of my thinking over the last two years, and many conversations with friends around the country and so on; you get talking about the nature of heroism. So that was one that just was a growing crystal, I guess, over a year and a half or two years, and then the song was fairly bursting with input by then. SW: Why had you been thinking about heroes and heroism? NP: From so many things. What I mentioned before whether or not it's good, you know, the idea of having heroes. For a lot of young people if their heroes are in sports, or in the entertainment world, they tend to be sold and bought as perfect. Hollywood, I think, probably invented the idea of demigods and the deity of an actress or the deity of an actor. And then sports took it over too, and the sports deities until they get old or sick or whatever, they are superhuman. And that seems like all very well and doesn't really hurt anybody, and maybe it inspires young people, but I kind of think it's discouraging too. Because when you're growing up, you're painfully aware of your flaws and your limitations, and I think perhaps you can feel too distant from any ideal of perfection. A role model is to me the opposite of a hero, in a sense, or a counterpart if you like, in the sense of the definition of counterpart is both duplicate and opposite. It's one of the reasons why I was intrigued by the word so much. So a role model is good, because there's no aspect of deity or superhuman perfection about it, it's just, "That's the direction I want to go and here's a person doing it the way I'd like to do it." I thought that was a lot more healthy, and also the nature of heroism, again something I've touched on before in songs like "Limelight" and even more recently in "Superconductor", was the nature of fame and how it affects the people in it. I've been involved, of course, in that world for a long time, and watching other people affected by the nature of fame and the nature of that kind of deification. And it really isn't healthy for them either, so I started thinking, "Well maybe this idea of modern, 20th century western world heroism really isn't so good." So, that was part of the thinking, and like I say, one idea is never really enough, so I had the other concept of people that had been significant enough in my own life to merit, almost the idea of heroism, to me. They had changed my life and prevented me maybe, in the case of the first person "nobody's hero" for instance, about the first gay person I ever knew, who was such a great role model, and almost occupies a heroic space in my life, because he prevented me from ever being homophobic or for thinking there was something sick or unnatural about it; because I just knew him, and worked with him when I lived in London, and went to his parties and it was all just very casual, and I guess I was young enough not to be already prejudiced, so he occupied an important part of my life. And then as the song dictates, we fell apart geographically -- drifted apart rather -- and then when I found out that he had died of AIDS it was like this hole had been left, and yet at the same time, this glowing example had been set by him. So, it's certainly not like his life was in vain, but his heroism was in a very small arena. [ "Nobody's Hero" is played ] SW: "Nobody's Hero", from the brand new Rush album _Counterparts_. As most Rush fans probably know, drummer Neil Peart supplies the words, while Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson sculpt the sound. And in the case of _Counterparts_, sculpting the sound meant showing off the goods of this very intense, very very impressive power trio, with lots of rock and roll guitar right up front. And it was a concept that Alex Lifeson had no trouble warming up to. AL: This is something that we discussed on the last tour a number of times; about having to focus more on the three-piece, and kind of recapturing some of the energy that we used to feel as a tighter three-piece unit I think, before we brought keyboards into a more predominant role in the picture of our music. Certainly the style of recording that Kevin Shirley, who was the recording engineer, used was very very direct, and captured the least amount of resistance from the speakers to the tape machine. It was just a matter of plugging into the amp and miking it; I wasn't really encumbered by any effects, we got into some things later, but certainly for the bulk of the guitars and for all the bed tracks, it was just straight ahead. I sat in a studio for the first time in 12 years and recorded guitars out there, which I've always stayed away from, figuring that in the control room you have a sense of control. There's immediate communcation; if you want the monitors down they can go down, if you want them up they can go up. So, I really wasn't into doing it, but Kevin talked me into it. And after a couple of days getting used to it, it was great! You could feel the wood of the guitar vibrating against your body, and it was more susceptible to that really cool feedback, and it was your own little world; it was a little bit of an escape. I don't think I'd go back now. GL: Can I ask you a question? AL: Yeah. GL: Did you actually say, "encumbered by effects"? AL: Yes, Ged, believe it or not I actually said that. GL: Did you actually said that phrase, or have you been possessed by some sort of logical devil? AL: I've matured a lot in the last couple of months. GL: Say Hallelujiah! AL: You know something, you get into a particular way of doing things, and it's very comfortable, and you get a little resistant to change sometimes, especially when it comes to sound of a guitar. I mean, I like to think this is my own particular sound, one that I've developed over a number of years. For that reason alone it's time to change it; you know, and mix it up a bit. And I have been very resistant to this kind of an approach to recording the guitar; I always thought that we could get power and size and total depth in a number of other ways. But, I have to say that after doing it this way, there's only one way to get a really great electric guitar sound, and that is to plug the thing into the amp and turn it up. And the shortest distance from the guitar to the amp is the best and the most effective. GL: This is not the guy I've known for the last 13 years. I don't know who this imposter is, but get him out of this control room! AL: Doh! You are a liar! Fake! Imposter! SW: When you say that you wanted to get back to a more kind of simplistic, you know, bass-guitar-drums trio sound. You talked a little bit about that on _Roll The Bones_ as well. Do you think it's been kind of a gradual process? AL: I think so, we've certainly aimed for it, but... GL: Yeah, but I think as Alex was saying, so much is do with a style, and the way the engineer hears things, and like we were talking about earlier, there are a number of songs that are kind of more subtle, and more textured on _Roll The Bones_ I think required the kind of production they had, but there are other songs that really, I think, the style of the song and the style of production were not in sync. And the way that Alex had described recording these instruments was more in keeping, I think, with the spirit of some of the ways that we have been writing in the last few years. SW: What were you doing on "Double Agent"? There's that kind of... GL: We were losing our minds, is what we were doing! "Double Agent" was a complete exercise in self-indulgence, and really, it was one of the last things we wrote on the record, and we just kind of -- we'd written all these songs that were heavily structured, and, you know, were crafted and meticulously worked on: this note and that note, and this is a song we just wanted to kind of get our yah-yahs out and just have a bit of a rave. And really, it's one of the goofiest songs I think we've ever written, but I'm quite happy with the result. In its own way, I think it's an interesting little piece of listening. [ "Double Agent" is played ]