Original subtitles

The story of Rush in the scheme of rock history has got to be one of the more

courageous and least glamorous of all.

Panned or ignored for years by almost everyone with a pen or a microphone,

has succeeded to the platinum degree on the strength of their musicianship and

uncompromising devotion to their music.

If there was ever a band supported solely by its fans, it would have to be

During the next two hours, we'll profile the history and music of this Canadian

trio. Alex Lifeson, Neil Peart, and Geddy Lee.

Rush, underdogs on top.

Tom Sawyer from last year's Moving Pictures album on the Rush special.

Canada's contribution to the music of the 60s was basically limited to the

guests who Joni Mitchell and Gordon Lightfoot.

1968 in Toronto saw the beginnings of Rush.

Guitarist Alex Lifeson formed a band with drummer John Rutze and a bass

For this source event, Alex recalled asking his friend Geddy Lee to join that

band. Oftentimes, because I didn't have an amp, I'd call GetUp and ask him if I

could borrow his amp.

And I called him up this one day, and right away he thought, oh, he's going to

want my amp.

And I said, listen,

do you think that you could come and play with us because Jeff is not coming?

And we don't have a bass player. And we have this gig tonight and we'll just

play the songs. Because Ged and I used to hang around in his basement and my

basement and work together all the time learning songs and stuff. And he said,

well, all right. For six years, Rush played high schools and bars around

Toronto, performing mostly their own material.

In 1974, whenever they could spare the time, they recorded their first album.

got to the point where it was time to do some recording.

We decided to do it on our own.

There wasn't really too much interest as far as getting an advance to get in a

studio, so we had to spread it out. We'd take one day here and then not record

for a month or two and take a couple of days. The first album was done like

that. Vocalist and bass player, Geddy Lee.

No one wanted to sign us in Canada, and we thought we had something to offer

somebody.

My manager had enough belief to hustle some cash up and got our own label.

Longtime Rush manager, Ray Daniels. London Records at the time said to me

they wouldn't take the record, but if I wanted to form my own label, they'd

distribute it.

That was the best offer we'd had.

It didn't cost a whole lot to do that at the time.

The album was really made with a very low budget.

I mean, it had some essence of something in there.

Some people still prefer it to anything we've done in our more sophisticated

period, I guess, but I'm not one of those people.

It did have something. I think it had some sort of appeal in a raw sense.

Eventually, that record found its way to the all -important American market,

Alex. A copy made its way down to Cleveland to a radio station and a

director there, and he passed it on to...

Mercury Record.

Coinciding with their contract with Mercury was a debut U .S. tour in August

1974. Just prior to their opening show in Pittsburgh, drummer John Rutte left

the band, and auditions were held to find his replacement.

Neil Peart was chosen.

Getty. It's the only audition we ever held.

I think we had two or three drummers before Neil, and we had one after Neil.

after we heard Neil play...

Like there's no one that could come after the guy, you know?

So we were pretty convinced, at least I was in my own mind, that he was

definitely the drummer for the band.

Alex Lifeson. I remember I had reservations because I really wasn't

the second guy we tried, and who knows, maybe there's going to be three or four

other guys that might be as good. So it was a bit weird. We sat down, we talked

a lot. Getty and him talked mostly, and they hit it off.

Immediately, I guess I had those reservations, so I wasn't sure.

Drummer, Neil Peart. It was funny because Geddy and I hit it off right

conversationally. We had a lot in common in terms of books and music. So many

bands that we both liked.

And Alex, for some reason, was in a bad mood that day, so we didn't have

anything to say to each other, really.

And playing together, we did what eventually became Anthem, in fact. We

on some of those rhythmic ideas and jammed away on this and that.

I thought it was a disaster, and I think that's generally the case without it,

since you always think it went horribly, and you played about 10 % as good as

you should have, and you'll never get to give you all that. I felt terrible

about it, you know. I thought, oh, this is awful.

But I guess the chemistry was right, that's all. The chemistry was right.

Rush was intact.

The tour ended, and the band returned to Toronto to record their second album,

Fly By Night.

That's coming up when the Rush special continues from The Source.

but also a lyricist.

Neil has written most of the band's lyrics since their second LP, Fly By

Alex. Ged and I weren't into it.

The first album, Ged wrote most of the lyrics, all but one song.

With Fly By Night, we weren't really into it. So we figured if Neil was into

fine. You know, when writing music, it's always difficult for a drummer to take

a really strong role in the actual melodic writing of a song.

So we'd do that between us, and he took on the lyric.

Neil, after writing lyrics by default, thought he really enjoyed his new role.

I'd written like two songs before that, and it was even quite a few years

before. And basically it was because nobody else was going to do it, you

and it was by default. And I thought, well, I've always been interested in

words, I've always loved to read. I thought, well, I'll give it a try and

how it comes out. So I wrote a couple of songs and showed them to the guys, and

they liked them. So it gave me the encouragement to keep going.

It became an obsession, too.

In 1975, Rush received their first Juno Award, the Canadian equivalent of a

Grammy, as Most Promising New Group.

That fall, their third LP and first concept album, Caress of Steel, was

released. Alex Lifeson. Again, Neil wrote the lyrics for The Fountain of

Lamneth, and he thought it would be kind of nice to try to incorporate a very

loose concept in it.

Having a starting point and ending point, which would go from the beginning

side two to the end of side two, and it would be one complete story, but broken

up so that it could be individual songs that, unless you look closely,

wouldn't necessarily relate to each other.

Good. 2112.

we worked very very hard and all of a sudden we weren't getting any support

by the nature of the way our deal was set up at the record company we had

freedom to do musically what we wanted and okay of course it still maybe didn't

do well commercially and we lost a lot of support from people around us but it

was an important stepping stone for us we had to try some things out and that's

what we did and then 2112 came

And it's a very aggressive album. When I listen to it, which is... I haven't

heard it in quite a long time, but every once in a while you hear a cut on the

radio. The whole feel of it is very tense and aggressive.

And I think it was because we were in that space at the time.

We had to decide whether we were going to say, okay, we give up, we either

up, or we try to make another first album, or...

We say, forget it to everybody and do whatever we want, and we decided on the

third.

We won 12 on the Rush special.

2112 was Rush's breakthrough album in the U .S., and the first to feature

Star in a Circle logo, designed by their friend Hugh Syme.

Getty Lee. Hugh Syme designed that.

Once he received the lyrics for 2112 and heard some of the music and knew what

the album was.

sort of what direction the album was going, then he designed the graphics to

along with it, and he came up with the design.

It sort of comes to us to sort of stand for individualism and sort of man

against the masses.

Up next, all the world's a stage of and hemispheres when the Rush special

continues from the source.

During this period, the possibility of adding a fourth member to the band was

discussed. Geddy Lee. We went through a period where we wanted to add someone

else.

But we were really nervous about doing that because in the history of most

I've been in, I mean, I've been in Russia almost all my life, but we've

through different phases in our sort of prehistory where we've had four guys and

then gone back to three and had four guys and gone back to three.

And every time we've added a fourth, I don't know, it's not the same.

It's really easy to communicate with three people. As soon as you bring a

in, you have danger. You can have two sides, you know.

Two against one isn't fair.

So three works that way. But two against two is fair. So you have a stalemate

and the group sort of breaks off into factions.

So I think we've had this real fear of losing the communication by adding

another member. So at that time, after the live album, we decided that...

We would rather push ourselves by playing other instruments than risk

our communication in jeopardy. Following a lengthy and highly successful British

and European tour, in 1977, Rush stayed in Europe to record their next album, A

Farewell to Kings.

Once again, Neil was responsible for writing most of the lyrics.

Following a lengthy and highly successful British and European tour, in

Rush stayed in Europe to record their next album, A Farewell to Kings.

Once again, Neil was responsible for writing most of the lyrics.

Being a musician and, of course, very involved in the arrangements of the band

and playing the songs live all the time and that, I'm never just a lyricist, I'm

always writing songs for music.

So I tend to put into my phrasing certain twists that will demand a

of musical interpretation, or I'm always thinking of the musical framework

within the context of the lyrical framework.

So it's kind of intertwined in a way. I might only be working on the words, but

a musical intention is always in my head at the same time.

Following a 10 -month tour that drew over a million fans and a second Juno

as Best Group of the Year, the next Rush album, Hemispheres, was released in

late 1978.

Recording the album had its problems, but producer Terry Brown helped solve

by changing studios.

Alex Lyson.

We were late on everything.

We had one evening off when we recorded that album.

We worked for about five weeks straight on the recording end of it.

We left for London that morning, started mixing. We were there for about 10

days. Nothing was working. It sounded awful.

Finally, at that point, Terry said, and Terry never gets angry.

And he was almost out of his mind.

I've never seen him before, you know, like that or since.

And he said, I have to get out of here. He took the tapes and he went around to

three or four other studios just to hear it in another studio.

And he finally went into Trident, put it in Trident.

That's the problem. Rush producer Terry Brown.

For various reasons, we end up there late one night and we take a rough mix

what I've been doing and we take it down. And for sure, it becomes very

that all the problems that I've been having are amplified, you know, at

And it was quite obvious that my fears were confirmed. We didn't have anything.

And he heard everything that was wrong about the mixers to that point that he

couldn't pin down.

And we'd had a lot of really good fortune with Feral to Kings and

Hemispheres had a different feel to it, and it just was not happening.

And at Trident, everything stood out.

At the time, we were all quite happy with it. We felt all of the blood,

and tears were worth it.

And again, it was another album that was a transitional album for us, and it was

an important album for us to do.

I think it really set us up well for what was to come next.

Rush in the 80s, including a rare live track, coming up in Hour 2, when the

special continues from The Source.

Welcome to Hour 2 of this Source event.

The Rush Special with your host, Sean McKay.

Having received their second consecutive Juno Award for Best Group of the Year,

Rush opened the new decade with the release of Permanent Waves. Not a

album, but rather a collection of shorter songs, including The Spirit of

which was written especially for radio station CFNY -FM Toronto.

Marsden here.

She said she was with him most of the time.

The Spirit of Radio on the Rush special from Permanent Waves.

The cover photo of Permanent Waves is visually arresting and is one that Neil

supervised. That cover was a real headache for me because Geddy was off

producing Wireless at the time and I think maybe Alex was away or something

I was the only one that was around.

I kept getting these phone calls about, well, you can't do this and you can't do

that. In fact, in the back of the hurricane scene there was a little Coca

sign and the Coca -Cola people wouldn't let it go on there because it was too

close to the...

semi -naked thighs of this girl, you know? They didn't want the connotations

sexuality.

The follow

-up to Permanent Waves was 1981's Moving

Pictures. On this album, Rush continued to change their musical attitude.

Drummer Neil Peart. We did find ourselves wanting to...

streamline things a bit, and we started approaching our songwriting, too, from a

different point of view, rhythmically, where we'd find a rhythmic pulse that

strong and that really felt good, and work our melodic changes around that,

whereas in the past we tended to do somewhat the reverse.

I think Permanent Waves was certainly a turning point, and Moving Pictures was

very much an affirmation of that.

Limelight from Moving Pictures on their Rush special.

Despite the abuse of critics, Rush had become immensely popular.

Both Alex and Neil were wary of the changes success could bring.

We were very, very careful not to let it get the best of us.

That sudden success can really change and you become lazy and you constantly

have other people doing things for you and you lose perspective.

on why you're there and really what you're doing. Success puts a strain on

friendship and it puts a strain on your day -to -day relationship.

And it's something that we did go through.

We're not immune to it. But we were able to overcome it just through our

closeness and we were able to help each other with difficulties like that and

learning to deal with the pressures of things like that.

Both Geddy and Neil admit to being rather uninspired by the live album

although Rush is one of Rock's premier live acts. I really didn't enjoy doing

the first live album, and I didn't enjoy doing this one anymore. I thought I

would, but I didn't.

It's a very tedious affair for a guy in a band, and if you notice the credits on

the album, we didn't produce the album, we didn't have anything real.

While we were there, and we sort of observed, and we...

You know, we put our opinion in when we thought we should, but generally most of

the chores were handled by Terry.

I don't enjoy it, and I don't think the other guys enjoy it really either. Yeah,

there was an awful lot of difficulty there.

First of all, because it encompassed two complete tours worth of material, and

we wanted to spend all of the last four albums, you know, fairly equally, and

also the fact that there were some tracks that we had good.

recordings of that we weren't able to put on. Notably, I can bring to mind

Camera Eye and Vital Signs. We had really good versions of, but there just

wasn't space.

I mean, we had to figure out so many long songs and so many short songs and

songs that were almost mandatory to get on there because they were better than

the original versions.

It's hard to believe that three individuals can create such a big

sound live.

Yet Getty is convinced the trio format is the best for Rush.

It's the direction we've moved in for the last, you know, I don't know how

years, to be able to approach material that a trio normally wouldn't be able to

do. Just because we're three people, if you bring enough instruments and make

yourself adaptable enough, I mean, just the addition of a few other instruments

at the right time.

makes it feel like a whole different thing and brings it's like a breath of

fresh air sometimes that that blows in and guitar bass and drums when everyone

all of a sudden switches to synthesizer and some of the crunch goes away and

some of the sort of breathy sound of a synthesizer comes in and makes a real

nice change so there's always that addition of something which gives i

the musical more depth as we've said all along Despite the lack of airplay and

critical acclaim, it's their loyal fans who have made Rush successful.

Alex. We weren't the type of band you'd always hear on the radio, and it

developed into a cult following.

And I think because we weren't that popular to the people that did know the

band, we were all that more important.

And we felt that.

It was kind of nice. During their last tour, we talked to some of those fans.

We can just keep on listening to the music and never get tired of it.

It's just that every time you listen to it, you can pick up something else in

the music.

Hey, I've never heard this before, and it's great.

Sometimes it's kind of like watching a three -ring circus. They're all

performing so unhumanly that you don't know who to watch.

Part of the album was recorded in the UK, and Neil comments on the great

audience involvement there.

That's just a spontaneous reaction that...

that the English kids came up with, and it was just so great to hear, especially

in some of the smaller halls, because it had a really strong choral effect.

It just sounded like, you know, several thousand voice choir.

It's moving, especially when it didn't happen at the time very spontaneously.

It's the kind of thing that grabs you. Coming up, a rare live recording, and

some final thoughts when the Rush special concludes from the source.

Neil Peart thinks that touring is invaluable to the musical development of

Touring for us is not a commercial necessity, it's a musical. musical

not only do we develop so much as individual musicians but like we were

before about the soundcheck jams and all that it's so valuable and the

observances that I get on the road looking at people and looking at cities

watching little Trips go on between people and their emotional relationships

all that. I mean, I love observing.

I love gossip, you know.

I'm not involved in all the sort of myths of life, but I like to know about

you know. I like to know what's going on behind closed doors.

Geddy Lee's priorities are clear -cut.

My priorities in the day are to play.

That's it. That's the most important thing.

Everything else isn't important.

It doesn't have to do with my performance.

I mean, I have a responsibility to a lot of people every day.

I have...

you know maybe 15 000 people that have paid you know a lot of money to come see

something and money is not easy to come by and they have pretty high

expectations so i have a responsibility to keep myself mentally and physically

in shape enough to do that performance as best i can make sure that

professionally that everything around the show the equipment and You know,

everything is ready for those people to hear a show.

And I think that requires, you know, sort of a little bit more of a low -key

existence at times.

At least for me it does.

And I guess maybe that helps keep your feet on the ground. I don't know.

Free Will from Exit Stage Left on The Rush Special.

In 1981, Rush received three platinum and two gold albums and celebrated

ten years of consistency.

The same record company, management, road crew, and band personnel.

With this as history, what's in the future for Rush? Alex.

I really don't know what's going to happen next.

But from what we've been doing lately, I think it's going to be another

departure. I'm really looking forward to it. Very excited about it. We all are.

We hope you've enjoyed this Source event.

And it is especially for the loyal Rush fans that this special was produced.