"The bassist and singer was dismissed long before the Canadian outfit made their first recording. It happened even before they’d become a three-piece. The band’s new manager, Ray Danniels, who is still with them, carried out both the firing and re-hiring...He says: “That was pre-history really. We hadn’t recorded yet and were still in our embryonic stage, and Ray came along. He had no real reputation yet as a manager or anything. He was just kind of an agent working in Toronto.- Thanks to Tony Riviere for the headsup!
“So he started directing the band and he just thought I wasn’t suitable, for whatever reasons he had. I don’t know whether it was the way I looked, or my religious background – who the fuck knew?
“Anyway, he influenced them and they went along with it, Alex Lifeson and John Rutsey, and I was out. They kicked me out.”
Rush were still laying the foundations of the band they’d become playing local drop-in centres with Lifeson, Rutsey and Lee’s brother-in-law Lindy Young on piano. After being dropped Lee formed a new outfit and joined them on the low-end live circuit.
“I started a blues band,” he says, “and I was, frankly speaking, doing better than they were. Then I got a call from John and he said, ‘Can we get together?’ Basically, ‘Can you come back? We’re sorry.’
“They had to go through whatever they went through. We tried it again and that’s really when the band started. We became this three-piece and we were really going in the same direction.”
 |
| Preorder Now |
LANDMARK CROSSOVER PROJECT:NEW RUSH ALBUM CLOCKWORK ANGELS TO FEATURE ACCOMPANYING NOVEL BY BESTSELLING AUTHOR
The new Rush studio album, Clockwork Angels, is accompanied by a full-length “steampunk” novel written by bestselling SF author Kevin J. Anderson and Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart.
In an innovative combination of music and literature, the new album Clockwork Angels by legendary rock band Rush has been converted into a full-length “steampunk” science fiction novel by international bestselling SF author Kevin J. Anderson and Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart.
"I didn't actually listen to Rush albums, and I couldn't tell you one from the other – although Neil is a good buddy. [laughs] We agreed to disagree on certain things, and it is a measure of his greatness as a human being that he is completely over whatever my feelings might be about Rush.For the full interview click here.
"This truly is the case: He's never heard me say a wonderful thing about his band. He's read a few comments that I wish he hadn't read. In unguarded moments, things tend to slip out. Musicians tend to be snippy about one another, and I'm generally not. I generally love all music and all players.
"There was a time when bands like Rush were the epitome of what The Police were theoretically against, which was an overemphasis on musicality. Our ethos in the early days was about the primal scream and that musical technique was a distraction from that mission. There may have been a few comments that I might have made regarding Rush's position on that debate, and it is really, really to Neil's credit that he's over that debate. And we get along great."
“We wanted something that was bold and stripped down. The goal was to make it real in your face and very much the sound of a three piece – a hard rock record in the classic sense. I’m happy to say that it really did come out the way we anticipated and hoped for.”Click here for more.
“It is a concept record...I think the songs stand on their own, though. I can listen to them independently of the story, but when I hear everything from front to back, it really makes sense to me. So it works on lot of levels.”
“I tried to pull myself back from yielding to the temptation of layering so many guitars and things that are kind of inconsequential. It’s really about the basic rockiness of the songs, so it was a lot of double-tracking and beefing things up. No six tracks of guitars, no rhythm guitar and solos – simple little changes that made the sound more impactful.”
There are two Rush features in the new PROG magazine, issue #26 featuring Squackett on the cover, hitting newsstands today."[remixing Vapor Trails and including it in a deluxe edition of Clockwork Angels] was an idea but it's now been shifted down. Rather than remix the entire album we might now take a bunch of different songs from albums and get different people to remix them for fun, rather than just do Vapor Trails. It's an idea in flux."- Thanks to Tony Riviere for the headsup!
"I wanted the songs to be a collection that could stand on their own, outside of context of the whole story. When you look at a collection of songs like those on the Who's Tommy, you could pull "I'm Free" out of that and it still stands on its own. But in connection to the story, it takes on another interpretation. So there was a lot of discussion about that. I think at one point, Neil was a little frustrated with my determination to keep the story-line minimal in a sense...The three times we attempted side-long concept pieces in the past, the music was really like one song broken up into many parts. The thread connecting the music on Clockwork Angels is the story-line. That's the key difference."and the lack of overdubs on this record:
"this time we wanted to restrict the way we used overdubs. We wanted it to be very much a three-piece record."and in regards to the upcoming tour:
we're gonna expand upon the whole steampunk element that we brought on the "Time Machine Tour." We're gonna have fun with that whole kinda machinery and we're designing rear-screen things and have a fun little movies. Hopefully it can all tie together in some ludicrous way."
"We just re-mixed them. We wanted them to have the same character mix wise as the rest of the record. Now they are much more attached to the whole album rather than being standalone tracks."He also talks about the guitar solos on the title track and "The Garden":
"the solo in “Clockwork Angels” and also the solo in “The Garden” which are two of my favourite solos that I`ve ever done, were throwaway solos. After we`d written those songs and worked on the arrangements, Geddy went away for a few days, so I continued working and filling things in a little bit and I threw down a couple of solos in just a few takes and that was it."And regarding the Classic Rock Fan Pack, he confirms it is to help sell physical product versus downloading:
"Yeah, and the great thing about it is that it gives you something to look at when you`re listening to the record. It`s like back in those days where you`d have a beautiful album jacket in your hands. That whole tactile experience has gone from music and at least with the Fan Pack it gives you a little bit of an opportunity to have that again."Click here for the full interview. - Thanks to Ed at RushIsABand for the headsup!
"The plot draws from Voltaire's Candide, with nods to John Barth's The Sot-Weed Factor, Michael Ondaatje and Joseph Conrad for 'The Anarchist,' Robertson Davies and Herbert Gold for 'Carnies,' Daphne du Maurier for 'The Wreckers,' Cormac McCarthy and early Spanish explorers in the American Southwest for 'Seven Cities of Gold.'Thanks Stew for the headsup!
"Diane Ackerman's use of a few alchemical symbols as chapter heads in An Alchemy of Mind. ...you can find brimstone at one o'clock for the faith-bashing "BU2B," gold at six o'clock for "Seven Cities of Gold," earth at eleven o'clock for "The Garden," and so on. (The "U" in Rush stands for "amalgamation.")"
If you can please take a moment to scan your ticket and email it to me, or if you do not have a scanner, take a quality photograph, please do.
In addition, if you have any ticket stubs or advertisements, handbills, photographs of marquees, etc, from previous tours, perhaps you can fill in the gaps? Who knows, you might have a stub for a show that has been forgotten in the depths of time.
"MIDIpedals.com interview with longtime Rush keyboard tech, Tony Geranios (aka Jack Secret) from March 2012. He talks about the early days with Rush, connecting the non-MIDI Taurus Pedals to Geddy’s Oberheim synths, and about the redundant MIDI and sampling setup when they are touring. Tony has also worked with Blue Oyster Cult and Bob Seeger in the past as well. Part 2 is coming soon, which will include info on what role he has played in setting up the gear when Rush is in the studio, as well as tour rehearsals." Click here for the interview, March 10, 2012Update (April 25): MIDIPedals.com has posted an update:
"A couple of weeks after posting Part 1, Tony called me and hoped to finish up the interview. When he called I was not prepared to record the call, and let him know I would need to call him back. I am assuming Rush has started tour rehearsals, so he has been busy and we haven’t been able to do Part 2 because we haven’t been able to schedule a second interview. Here are a few questions I emailed to him and his answers. I call it Part 1.5 in hopes we can do Part 2 soon." Click here for the interview, April 25, 2012Update (May 16): MIDIPedals.com has posted Part 2 of the video interview, you can hear it here.
Home