Rush Read online

  THE ILLUSTRATED HISTORY

  BY MARTIN POPOFF

  with

  Richard Bienstock

  Daniel Bukszpan

  Bruce Cole

  Fin Costello

  Neil Daniels

  Andrew Earles

  Rich Galbraith

  Gary Graff

  Jeffrey Morgan

  Jeff Wagner

  Ray Wawrzyniak

  Frank White

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  1 SUBDIVISIONS, 1964–1972

  2 ENTER THE PROFESSOR, 1973–1974

  3 SOMETHING FOR NOTHING, 1975–1976

  4 TIDE POOLS & HYPERSPACE, 1977–1980

  5 MOVING PICTURES, SHIFTING UNITS, 1980–1981

  6 KEYBOARDS, MULLETS & FINE HABERDASHERY, 1982–1988

  7 POP GOES RUSH, 1989–1992

  8 THE ALTERNATIVE TO THE ALTERNATIVE, 1993–1997

  9 OUTSIDERS NO MORE, 2000–2007

  10 DIGITAL MEN: RUSH IN A WORLD WITHOUT RECORDS, 2008–2011

  11 PUNCHING THE CLOCK, 2012–2013

  SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

  SOURCES

  CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

  INDEX

  INTRODUCTION

  As I plume-and-inkwell this, Rush has returned triumphant with their heaviest, grooviest, most red-lined record since Moving Pictures. The Clockwork Angels tour begins today, actually, and once Manchester, New Hampshire, is in the books, all will be right in the world of heavy yet well-meaning progressive rock as sculpted and divulged by three busy stagehands from Canada.

  I must say, it’s so nice writing these rock bios when you get to the end and it’s a happy story, with wizened rock veterans not burnt out but using all that wisdom gained to knock out a barnstormer like Clockwork Angels, a concept album to boot, and one with a novel to go with it, lest Peart’s inscrutable jottings aren’t plot enough (they aren’t).

  Truth be told, after working for months on the Rush movie, Beyond the Lighted Stage, as well as having penned a previous Rush book, I didn’t think I had the energy or curiosity left in me to dive into Rush world again. But the beauty of this Voyageur Press concept (applied to previous lush tomes on Zeppelin, Queen, Aerosmith, AC/DC, and Iron Maiden) won me over but good.

  Forsooth, it is to the credit of Rush fans and their (our) completist and detail-obsessed nature that an abbreviated history, such as I’ve done here, would seem doomed to dissatisfy. But look beyond and this book in fact serves the superfan sod-bustingly robustly. First, there’s the contribution from our panel of rock critics who have been asked to pour their most intense creative energies into thinking and feeling out Rush’s mesmerizing, mathematizing, baffling, and exasperating catalog—this is, indeed, a deep, intellectual read for the demanding fan, and I know these writers have had a ball saying their piece, making peace, and offering a piece of their hearts and minds. Indeed, some of the most satisfying writing I’ve ever done has been my own contributions to Voyageur’s Maiden, AC/DC, and Aerosmith books from this series. In fact, I envied being part of the review team so much for this one, I managed to weasel my way into being the dude to bisect and further dissect three of Rush’s platters—two that matter, Counterparts and Clockwork Angels, and one that … doesn’t? (Presto—ouch.)

  Clockwork Angels tour, Target Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, September 24, 2012. Steven Cohen/www.stevencohenphoto.com

  Still, beyond the intense debate these full-pro, full-press reviews are bound to cause, the yummiest part of this book is the fact that it is surprisingly near on the first (well, fer sure by far the best) book-bound pageant of Rush memorabilia ever presented, which is of course as expected, given the plush presentation of the other books in this series.

  Anybody who knows me knows I love the ads, especially the early ones from my beloved days of elementary school subscribing to Circus (biking home at lunch, wishing beyond all striving and deprivation that the new ish was in the box), as well as the big black-and-whites from the U.K. tabloids, which by osmosis and abstraction tell the story of Rush’s close and respectful relationship with Jolly Ol’ England. The passes, the ticket stubs, the 45 sleeves, the CD singles … they’re all here, much from my own heaping collection but very much so because of the scholarship and cheerful toil thrown into the project by ultimate Rush collector (with requisite basement museum) Ray Wawrzyniak, good bud from Buffalo, who, with a beautiful family and a teaching job, had more important things to do than drop everything and cede to image requests from me and our shared Voyageur helmsman Dennis Pernu.

  Ray’s contribution of images put this project over the top, past what all of us Rush fans have been missing and yearning for all these years, a Rush museum, even if this one is in convenient book form and not somehow bricked an’ mortared onto the back of Rush HQ down on Carlton.

  Oh, yeah, since you asked, my favorite Rush album is Signals, and that’s ’cos I just love the creamy production, visualized perfectly by the front-cover colors, plus the fact that 1982 was a fun yet lonely drum woodshedding year for me, second year of university in Nelson, B.C., big Peart-mad drum set crammed in the attic of a buddy’s house, learning “New World Man,” “Subdivisions,” all those buttery Signals songs … OK, on that note of nostalgia necessary in every Rush fan’s life, read on, soak in that eye candy, and let the debates begin.

  Martin Popoff

  martinpopoff.com | September 2012

  1964–1972

  SUBDIVISIONS

  “Three friends from suburban Willowdale at the north end of Toronto get together in high school and drive their parents nuts with the noises they make down in the basement. After a while, they play a few gigs at the school and all their friends say they’re far out. Then they get ambitious, and join the union. Soon, they’re deep in debt to the instrument store.”

  —Richard Flohil Canadian Composer, 1975

  IN MANY WAYS, it’s a typical generation quake of a rock ’n’ roll story, but roiling beneath, it’s also the story of pursuing the Canadian dream, with its subtle differences against the American experience. The story of Rush begins with the foundation of solid parentage, of organization and practicality out of necessity, of the kind contours of Canada’s immigrant mosaic allowing folks to rise up to and then through the middle class from a foundation of nothing.

  Gary “Geddy Lee” Weinrib’s parents, Morris and Manya (later known as Mary), arrived in Canada in 1948, having survived Nazi concentration camps—at the end, Dachau for Morris and Bergen-Belsen for Manya. The couple was one of two thousand married at Bergen-Belsen, after the war when it had become a displaced persons camp. The original plan was to settle in New York, but Canada romanced the couple, and they moved in with Manya’s sister. Two years into renting on their own for the first time, a daughter, Suzie, was born. While in their first purchased home on Charles Street in Toronto, Gary was born on July 29, 1953. On to Downsview briefly and the young family’s second home, where younger brother Alan joined the fold, followed by a move to Willowdale, where Rush history blossoms.

  Early publicity photo shoot. © Bruce Cole

  With Geddy barely eleven in October 1964, his father died, succumbing to a body broken by the Holocaust, forcing the boy to become a man quickly, in fact, the man of the house. He worked with his devastated mother in the family’s variety store clear across the north of the city, commuting through what were then muddy streets and farmland to undeveloped Newmarket. Working tirelessly that busy Christmas, Geddy’s appreciative mother asked him what he might want for a present. Geddy had his eye on a guitar, and his mother gave him the $50 for its purchase on Christmas Eve of 1964.

  Geddy was already a rock ’n’ roll fan, constantly listening to the radio and having tried in jest to get Dad into the Beatles. He had already proven his music
al ear on the family piano two years earlier—“a gift from God,” his rabbi called it—taking after his father, who back in Germany would serenade Geddy’s mother with a mandolin from beneath her window.

  In their teens, Geddy and Alex were into the likes of the Who, Buffalo Springfield, Cream, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, the Yardbirds, and later, in the defining year of 1969, Led Zeppelin.

  Geddy and Alex met through mutual friend Steve Shutt, a future Montreal Canadiens star and NHL Hall of Famer.

  Arguably factoring into Geddy’s centering were the strict months and months of formal Jewish prayer and mourning he had to perform upon his father’s death. An aggravating stipulation for the boy of twelve had been the banishment of music, which, one might recall, would become the subject of a Rush concept side a few years hence.

  Enter Fisherville Junior High in 1965, and rock ’n’ roll was legitimately back in Geddy’s life, early in the school year Geddy having completed his yud bet chodesh, or twelve months of mourning (actually eleven months and one day in his case, according to Lee). Indeed, Geddy consumed voraciously all things rock ’n’ roll once he was again formally allowed to; years later, he would wonder if this banishment period was the defining factor in his interest in music. In any event, Geddy’s starved enthusiasm for music, as maker and consumer, was quickly accelerated by the presence of a personable joke-cracker of a new chum named Alex.

  Alex Zivojinovic (a.k.a. Lifeson) was born August 29, 1953, in the mining town of Fernie, British Columbia. Like Geddy, his parents had only recently arrived from political strife in Eastern Europe. Mother Melania’s family had left Yugoslavia rather than take forced citizenship there (being of Russian descent) and were placed in a camp in Trieste, Italy, for six months before they were given the choice to emigrate to Australia, New Zealand, or Canada. Melania (informally Mellie) arrived in Canada on June 18, 1951, with her parents and two brothers, becoming, briefly, a family of farmers. It was in British Columbia, where Mellie had been working at a restaurant (with one brother at the coal mine, another at the mill), that she met Nenad, Alex’s dad, a coal miner who had moved to town after his first wife passed away. They dated for a year and got married, with Alex arriving the following year. A sister, Sally, followed a month after the small family’s uprooting to Toronto in April 1955.

  The family started life in the big city right downtown, but moved out to Glencairn, then to the Jewish enclave Pleasant Avenue, and finally to Greyhound, home to a mix of nationalities, from Italians to Greeks to Chinese, along with naturalized Canadians. Mellie, having grown up amid the Serb versus Croat turmoil, was quick to ingrain in her children a respect for all peoples. Alex caught on quickly and grew into a polite and bubbly kid who was popular with his classmates.

  Back at Fisherville Junior High, with buddies Geddy and Alex, as with millions of kids through the generations, rock ’n’ roll had taken over youth consciousness. Geddy had actually already heard about Alex through a mutual friend, Steve Shutt, who went on to become a hockey superstar with the Montreal Canadiens. Steve suggested they jam, but it wasn’t until Fisherville that they got together, things picking up when Geddy gravitated to the bass. But at this point, as Geddy put it, the two bonded more over “goofiness” than music, although a soaking-in process was starting to occur, just through listening to the latest British Invasion records in each other’s basements.

  Both Geddy and Alex could have made something of themselves academically, and both saw the pressure from their very traditional parents to do just that—doctor, lawyer, anything but this rock ’n’ roll nonsense with no prospect of success. Yet school slowly fell away, both Alex and Geddy eventually dropping out in the twelfth grade. In tandem, parents slowly relented, noticing the dedication each had to this weirdness and to little else. After all, these were good kids who were proving themselves capable of working hard, paying off loans, and staying away from drugs.

  “I started playing when I was about eleven years old,” recalled Alex, who neglects to note that he first had taken up the viola. “I begged for a guitar for Christmas, and got an $11 Kent acoustic—it was just terrible, but my parents still have it [laughs]. Then the following Christmas my parents bought me a Canora, which sort of looked like a Gretsch Country Gentleman. Both were inexpensive, poorly made Japanese guitars. I borrowed the guy next door’s Paul amp whenever I could, and taped Vox in black tape on the front of it [laughs]. I played for hours and hours and hours.” And once in cahoots with Geddy, the playing for hours and hours became deafening basement jams, driving Geddy’s grandmother crazy, while the mothers seemed more concerned with keeping a wary eye on which guys—and more importantly which girls—were entering and leaving the house. By this point, getting into their mid-teens, the two chums were into the likes of the Who, Buffalo Springfield, Cream, the Rolling Stones, the Grateful Dead, the Yardbirds, and later in the defining year of 1969, Led Zeppelin.

  A young Alex (second from left) and John Rutsey (second from right) in their early band, Hadrian. They are flanked by Joe Perna (left, bass and vocals) and Lindy Young (right, keys and rhythm guitar).

  Pounding the drums through Rush’s formative years was a schoolmate of Alex’s named John Rutsey, only a handful of months older than Alex and Geddy but a lot flashier, a snappier dresser, and, yes, seemingly somehow savvier—hard to believe, but it was Rutsey who would later introduce Rush’s songs at shows, as well as write the band’s first lyrics. Before the formation of Rush proper, Alex and Geddy would play together and separately, an important point, because many early “Rush” jams involved Alex, John, and whoever else was around. In fact, in 1967, just prior to the formation of Rush, Alex and John were in a band called the Projection, which featured not Geddy on bass, but Al Grandy, brother of “Rush’s first roadie,” Ian Grandy.

  “John was one of three brothers,” explained Ian, when asked about Rutsey. “Bill, Mike, and John. His father, Howard Rutsey, had been a crime reporter for the old Toronto Telegram and had died of a heart attack before I knew John. John and my brother, Al, were in fourth grade together. I don’t know exactly how they got together, but my brother was in the Projection with John, Alex Zivojinovic, Bill Fitzgerald, and ‘Doc’ Cooper in 1967. If they played actual gigs, it would have been at parties and I don’t know where else. John was the guy who would bug everyone to practice, and I think thought of himself as a ‘rock and roller.’ I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: there would have been no Rush without John. He never had any kind of job during that time, living at home with his mom, Eva. Anyway, John led the guys as far as being ‘glam rockers,’ with really flashy jackets and pants, and eight-inch-high boots. One time, he was speaking to me at the [Toronto club] Gasworks and I said, ‘Didn’t we used to be the same height?’ He laughed and said, ‘Well, maybe a long time ago!’”

  Al Grandy was soon replaced by one Jeff Jones, who would wind up with the distinction of being the only bass player in Rush besides Geddy. It was Jeff, Alex, and John Rutsey who played the first gig ever under the Rush nameplate. Nobody had really liked the name the Projection, and at the suggestion of John’s older brother Bill, the name Rush was adopted, drug connotations notwithstanding. The three convened for the inaugural “Rush” show September 18, 1968, at the Coff-in, which was in the basement of St. Theodore of Canterbury, a nondescript suburban church in the neighborhood. It would be the first and last Rush gig for Jones, who had been overbooked and saw this band as more of a casual pickup situation. For the band’s second show, the following Friday—again at the Coff-in—Jones had apparently gotten himself drunk and was about to miss the gig, with Geddy getting the emergency call. During a two-hour rehearsal, the trio hastily came up with a dozen hard blues chestnuts they could all abide by. In effect, the first “Rush” show and the first Rush show were both at the Coff-in underneath an Anglican church.

  © Rock ’n’ Roll Comics, Revolutionary Comics. Courtesy Jay Allen Sanford

  © Rock ’n’ Roll Comics, Revolutionary Co
mics. Courtesy Jay Allen Sanford

  Rush began gigging regularly, mostly at high school dances, Alex and Geddy still with one foot in their own educations but part-time jobs necessary to pay back the band’s mounting equipment debts, a drag on income that would persist at least up into the early 1980s, except on a grander scale.

  In 1969, a self-starter and budding show promoter named Ray Danniels had entered the picture, checking out the band at the Coff-in and hanging out with the boys on his adopted Yorkville home turf, hippie central in Toronto at the time, the place to see your future in rock ’n’ roll (although mostly folk) take flight. Yorkville was a pilgrimage the guys made from the ’burbs with a combined sense of reverence and trepidation. It was all about looking cool, having the right hair, and making an impression—after all, these people were future fans and employers. Danniels, incredibly still the band’s manager forty-plus years later, was soon collaborating with the boys on big dreams. It is of note that one Lindy Young was also in Rush for a brief spell, playing keyboards and second guitar, Lindy being the brother of Geddy’s future wife, Nancy.

  “Ray was from a town called Waterdown,” said Grandy, “and I guess he always wanted to manage bands. He was hanging around from about May 1969, and you have to realize he was only seventeen at the time. Anyway, he had his agency at the time, Universal Sound, which had a couple of bands like Fear, in addition to Rush. There was no bar scene yet for rock bands, so it was a matter of playing high schools and beach houses.”

  It was also in 1969 that the band went through yet another name change, from Rush to Hadrian, and then an ousting of Geddy from the band, who went on to form a blues band first called Ogilvle and then Judd. Ray continued to work with both acts, in fact finding himself doing better with Geddy’s act. Once Lindy had defected over to Geddy’s band and Joe Perna had quit Hadrian, Alex and John were essentially without a band. It only took Geddy to knock Judd on its head in September of that year, given Lindy’s departure for college, for the trio Rush to be born (notwithstanding a three-month period in 1971 that found the band augmented by Mitch Bossi on second guitar).