Current Shareware 1994 January/SHAR194.ISO/textfile/rushnt.zip/RUSHINT2.TXT

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DATE:    10/16/93 12:31 AM

Re:    Digest #783 Part 2 of 3

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Subject: Digest #783 Part 2 of 3


SW: Rush, "Double Agent". And we'll continue with the world premiere of
_Counterparts_ in just a moment.

   [commercial break]

SW: Welcome back to _Counterparts_, the world album premiere with Rush. I'm
Steve Warden. The next song we're going to hear is "Animate" -- a song that
makes excellent use of some wicked Geddy Lee base guitar. As Geddy told me,
they employed some unusual equipment to get the base sound that they were
after.

GL: We set up the gear I had in the studio, and The Caveman went in there, and
he looked at all this high-tech gear and he said, "You know, I saw this old
beat-up amp head that was lying in the corner yesterday. Do you mind if we
plug that in?" So we dragged it out, and this is literally an amp that was
found in the garbage that one of the assistants at Le Studio had repaired, it
was an old tube amp, and plugged it in to all these speakers we had, and he
turned it up to like, 15, and the thing was like... I thought it was going to
explode. So, we used a combination: my regular DI setup, my regular setup, and
plus this exploding amp setup, and you know, he made it happen. It sounded
great, I had a tremendous amount of energy, and all the explosion sounds of it
kind of disappeared in the track, so you're not really aware of the fact that
it's an amplifier on the verge of death. But what you are aware of is the
power that's coming out of the speaker, so that was a great benefit.

SW: We'll hear Geddy Lee's driving bass guitar sound in just a moment on the
song "Animate", but first, Neil Peart on the song itself. It's a track that
not only displays Rush's awesome musicianship, but also delves into the
duality theme that was on Neil's mind.

NP: I hope that it's going to be clear that it's about one person. It's set up
on purpose a little bit vague to sound like it might be about a relationship
between two people, and almost a love song in a sense. But, that became such a
cliche certainly through the 80's, of the modern sensitive man, and it was
wrong in many ways. I draw upon my research, if you like, on this, everywhere
from Karl Jung to Camille Palia, about what the modern man was supposed to be.
And to many people in the 80's, the modern man was supposed to be a woman, and
you know, to be sensitive and nurturing, and all, and to completely lose the
masculine side of the character, the "animus". So, just in the reading about
that and the thinking about that, and observing certainly people around me,
and how they behave and how the pretended to be... how they pretended they
really were, and so on. It became a bit of an act of men pretending to be more
sensitive than they actually were, and sometimes women pretending to be more
aggressive than they actually were.

So, it was basically pleading for a balance of that; I feel that, yes, men do
have a large female component to their characters, as it can only be. It's
natural, again as counterparts we are both duplicates and opposites. The Oxford
dictionary definition of the word includes both of those things. So, that's
definitely true of genders as well, and in the song I was trying to get at the
idea of that you can be both strong and sensitive; you can be both ambitious
and soft, really, but not to deny either and to keep them in balance. So the
dominance and submission metaphor had to come into play, but I used it again
of a person dominating himself, in this case, because it's a man. He's
dominating his softer side, but at the same time he also has to dominate his
"a" words -- the aggression, and the ambition, and the traditional biological
male things, which in spite of all modern sociological changes, we are in the
last 20 or 30 years of sexual revolution, trying to change tens of thousands
of years of human evolution: really, men as the hunter and woman as a
nurturer.

So, those things have to be recognized, and yes we can change them, we've
changed a lot of things. You know, we used to be comfortable with slavery and
call ourselves Christians; that's changed now. There are definitely changes we
can make in acting more civilized, but at the same time it's foolish to deny
that which courses through our veins. So the song really tries to reconcile
that very complicated and also very topical thing.

   [ "Animate" is played ]

SW: "Animate" -- that's Rush from _Counterparts_. And we'll be back with more
of the world album premiere right after this.

   [commercial break]

   [ "A Passage To Bangkok" is played ]

SW: Hi, I'm Steve Warden and we're back now with _Counterparts_, the world
album premiere from Rush. We're joined by Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil
Peart, and at this point we have the instrumental track from the album queued
up, it's called "Leave That Thing Alone". Now Rush fans will probably make a
connection between this song and "Where's My Thing?", the instrumental
tour-de-force that was on the band's last album _Roll The Bones_. But as Alex
and Geddy told me, there really isn't much of a connection between the two
songs.

GL: Only that the fact that they both have "things" in the title.

AL: Yeah, and they're on our records.

GL: The "things" are different are different things.

AL: It's not the same thing.

GL: It's not the same thing. Really, you have to say, "It's just not the same
thing."

AL: No, no... it's just a... thing.

GL: It's a different thing.

AL: A totally different thing

GL: Yeah.

AL: It's some thing though, it's...

SW: So how did we end up with another instrumental?

AL: Oh, they're so much fun to do.

GL: Yeah, they're fun; it's like recess; it's like somebody blew a whistle,
let's do an instrumental! Yeehah!

AL: They're very spontaneous, they get written quickly, the ideas go down very
very quickly, and the nice thing about this particular instrumental is that
there's a tendency to be very flashy when you do an instrumental; it's you're
kind of a release to be a showoff. But I think on this song, the melodies are
very very strong, and it's something that touches you more emotionally.

GL: Yeah, I think this is one of our best ones, I'm really happy with this
one.

AL: Yeah, I like listening to it.

GL: From two points of view, as Alex said, the chorus melodies especially the
guitar melody, I think is beautiful. I think no matter what style of music you
want to call it, I think it's a great melody. But the other thing that I like
about it is the rhythmic attitude of it, which is very different for us, and
it's an area we keep playing around with and experimenting with, and learning
how -- "how do white Canadians learn to play funk music?" These are continuing
experiments in that area, even though it's not funk music by any funk player's
standards, for us it's got more of that rhythmic attitude which is a lot of
fun to do. And sometimes I think it comes in reaction to having written tense,
very structured, meticulously put together songs, and here we are at the end
of that, we're going, "Let's just have some fun! You know, let's bring these
riffs together." And we always have a riot when we put these down.

AL: We kind of feel sorry for Neil cuz he's not really included. We don't even
let him in, actually, when we're working on those things. We give it to him
and that's it.

GL: But then he gets to have his stab at it, and usually there's two or three
suggestions that he will have that will change the arrangement a bit here and
there, so, he gets his turn, but he has to work alone, so it's not as much
fun.

AL: And then he wrecks it with the drums.

GL: Yeah, that! That's the other thing.

AL: There's the other thing with all our songs.

GL: Oh yeah, there's the other thing.

   [ "Leave That Thing Alone" is played ]

SW: "Leave That Thing Alone", that's Rush from the new album _Counterparts_.
Now unlike that song, our next track "Speed Of Love" features words. And not
only that, but they're words written by someone other than Neil Peart. It's a
rare collaboration between Neil and his old pal, Pye Dubois.

NP: Yeah, in the past, "Tom Sawyer" of course was co-written with Pye, and
"Force 10" on _Hold Your Fire_ was too, and I really like his style of
writing. It's inscrutable to me, sometimes, as I think it is to other people
too, but at the same time it has a certain power in his images and writing.
And also, there was some strange symbiosis that seemed to affect the songs;
when Pye was involved in "Tom Saywer" and in "Force 10" it made them somehow a
little different musically, you know, his percolation through me. I would get
his ideas and then I would add mine to them and structure it as a Rush song,
and then pass it along to the other guys. Even through that chain of events,
somehow there was some outside influence that was good, so we've always kind
of kept the open door to Pye's ideas. Anytime he had anything to submit he
would send it along to me, usually scrawled in an exercise book. And in this
case that was one that we all responded to some of the images in his
presentation, so again I went to work on it, shaped it up into the kind of
structure that we like to work with, and then added some of my own images and
angles on it. And so it went.

SW: And is that something you enjoy just as a change of pace? Having another
input?

NP: Yeah, I'm a happy collaborator really. Obviously we couldn't have stayed
together, the three of us, for 20 years if we weren't happy collaborating, and
it's the same way lyrically. I do like working with someone else, as long as
they're equally open about it. I'm always concerned with Pye, "Do you think
I'm wrecking up your work?" because theoretically when he finishes it, he
thinks it's done. So, if I come in and start changing things around, and
adding and subtracting things, it could seem a bit presumptuous, I guess, so
I'm always concerned about his feelings on that. But he seems comfortable with
it too, so it's just like he said, it's just turning out a good tune that
counts, that's what matters to him. So, it's just a nice thing to do, to have
somebody else's input. I've done it in the past even with Geddy and Alex, who
put ideas together in words, and the song called "Chemistry" on _Signals_ was
like that. They just wrote down a bunch of images and ideas and gave them to
me and I stitched them all together into an organized thing. So that's always a
kind of a fun way to work, I like that.

   [ "Speed Of Love" is played ]

SW: Album Network's world premiere of _Counterparts_ from Rush will continue
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. If the first half of
this album is "in your face aggressive", the second half seems to be for the
most part, more melodic. Geddy Lee told me that it was a real challenge to
organize the order of the songs on this record _Counterparts_.

GL I think this was one of the hardest records to sequence that we've ever put
together. It was much easier in the old days when we had two sides, and now
that you have one side, boy it's really tough. Alex made this most
magnificent...

AL: Oh, please!

GL: ...artistic creation, you know, form follows function to the end...

AL: Sort of a storyboard.

GL: You know, he does this board, and he lists every title. It's like on a
magnetic board where every title can be moved around, so you can play around
with the sequencing. On each of these little boards is a fantastic drawing
representing the essence of the song as Alex sees it, which is convincing us
more than ever that he's a sick human being. We played around with so many
different combinations and it was really tough, so this is the one order that
I think just seemed, when you're listening to an hour's worth of music, and
considering how much aggressive music was in there, we felt it was kind of a
nice way to ease you out of the record.

SW: "Cold Fire"'s one of my favorite tracks. Can you tell me a bit about
that?

GL: Um, "Cold Fire". That song went through many permutations.

AL: Yeah, that actually one of the songs that we had a bit of a problem
getting into lyrically, working on it from a musical point of view.

GL: Yeah, it was hard to know the approach, and that was a song that we felt..

AL: That's right! Actually we had a few rewrites of this musically.

GL: We rewrote that song quite a bit. And thankfully, I think Peter Collins'
presence really pulled that song together. He came in and he pointed out
certain strengths in the previous versions of the songs that we had, and he
really helped us reorganize that song. It wasn't until he got there, I think,
that we finally locked in on a feel for those verses that enabled Alex to
play those great kind of steel guitar lines -- steel guitar-like lines -- that
he's playing, and enabled me to open up harmonically. I was having trouble
with the verses, you know, it's a tough song, when you're dealing with this
issue of male/female relationships, which is such a foreign subject for us to
deal with, in a song. You want to make sure it doesn't sound trite or hackneyed
or you're not just doing yet another -- who needs another song about
relationships? It took us a while to get the right mood, and I was really
happy with the mood we ended up with in the verses, and I think, oddly enough,
as much as it was a nightmare, that song for me, when I hear the record now, I
think the verses are one of the strongest parts of the album, in that song.

AL: Yeah I think there's a great balance between the romantic picture on the
one side, and how the music is sympathetic to those lyrics, and then the other
point of view which is much colder...

GL: Much tougher.

AL: ...more based in reality. And the contrast between the lyrics and the
music, and how they support each other, I think really worked out successfully
on that song from what Ged said was a very difficult song for us to work on.

   [ "Cold Fire" is played ]

SW: This might sound crazy, but because of the subject matter of the song, and
also something about the feeling, and Geddy you mentioned Alex's guitar sort
of a steel guitar sound, I thought with a slightly different treatment, this
could be a country song!

GL: It could be, actually we did a very slow country version of that song,
that we do have on tape somewheres...

AL: On 8-track.

GL: ...and maybe when we're dead and our manager is exploiting our remains, he
would probably release to some country-western thing.

AL: It's a cold fire.

GL: It's a cold fire, and it translates real well, so any country fans out
there...

AL: We'd be beholden to you if you wrote it.

GL: ...if you wanna do that song and make it into a big country hit, we'd be
appreciative of the check.

SW: The Rush world premiere special of _Counterparts_ continues after this
time out.

   [commercial break]

SW: Back now with the conclusion of Rush _Counterparts_, the world album
premiere. To wrap things up, we'll have one final song from the album, a track
called "Cut To The Chase"; but before we get to that, a final thought or two
from Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. During the last Rush tour, the band seemed to
have a definite air of rejuvenation about it; now, facing what will be a 20th
anniversary tour to kick off in January, I asked if that euphoria and that
sense of renewal were still with them.

GL: Oh, I think that happy phase wore off pretty quickly, and that's it..

AL: Yeah, we feel like that again, now, for at least this week anyways.

GL: That happy phase lasted about 10 days I think, and then we were renewed
and reborn and... I think after so many interviewers asked us how we felt
about being reborn, we felt like we were not reborn anymore.

AL: How come I don't wanna be reborn?

GL: All we wanted to do was fight. So this record we had some pretty darn good
fights, and I felt much better.

AL: Got a lot out of our systems.

GL: Yeah, got a lot out of our system. Mondays Alex and I would threaten to
murder each other.

SW: Is Rush kind of reinventing itself?

GL: Maybe, I don't know, that's a difficult word, "inventing". You know in 20
years...

AL: Yeah, it's probably a vague question to ask, I mean I guess you could
interpret it any way you want, but...

GL: I guess Rush is reasserting certain aspects of our band that have always
been there and maybe haven't shined the way they could have over the last
couple of years. And not trying to disregard the lessons that we've learned
over the years, we don't want to disregard the styles and some of the ways
that we have gone about working over the last few years. It's not a total
retromovement, you know, we don't want to throw away -- you don't cut off your
nose to spite your face kind of thing. If a song...

AL: You don't??

GL: ...well, maybe you do. But, you know what I mean, if a song deserves a
certain treatment, you give it. If a song is not working that way, you try
something else, and if you're sitting there trying to write a song in essence
is raw and supposed to crank it up a bit, let's do it and let's not pussyfoot,
and I think that's what this record is doing well.

   [ "Cold Fire" is played ]

   [credits]

SW: One last thing; we almost forgot the last word on this program -- Geddy
Lee's fall baseball prognostications. We told you about it at the beginning of