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Subject: 10/15/93 - The National Midnight Star #782 *** Special Edition ***

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          The National Midnight Star, Number 782

                 Friday, 15 October 1993
Today's Topics:
            World Premiere of _Counterparts_
--------------------------------------------------------------

From: [e-mail] (******* 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 ]