I mean, we recorded that album in 10 days. Not to belabor the Ayn Rand of it all, but you were presented with some pretty out-there lyrics at that point. On any level, those were not typical rock lyrics.
Exactly, and at first it was a huge leap of faith for us to just accept that. He reads a lot of books. Let him do it. That whole thing was not something Alex and I thought of or talked about.
Once we got on the road and got to know each other more and started sharing reading material, I think we got a better understanding of Neil and he got a better understanding of us.
A lot of times he would inspire us to read something that was a little out of our comfort zone and so through all that we kind of developed that acceptance of that style of lyric, but it was definitely night and day when that album came out. As much as some people loved it, other people were disturbed by it, because that was not the Rush they had invested in from the previous record. It was definitely a new band.
Again, you must have had a reaction when you were first handed those lyrics. Well, yeah. I had to be sort of an actor playing a role and so all those things had to feel comfortable on some level, and that required discussion, of course. I marvel at the relationship that we developed because in the early days we were just happy to get lyrics. How is this going to work?
But as time went on, we developed a rapport and a feel for each other and a consideration for each other. Neil, in terms of writing, became more and more considerate of what I had to do, of my job not just as a singer of words but as a shaper of melody, and someone who also had to express emotions. He was very sensitive to that, and always for many years, sat beside me in the control room when we listened back to vocals.
If we talked about something that could be improved, he would rewrite it on the spot. In later years, while we were writing the material, he pretty much gave me license to choose the bits of his lyric that moved me the most, that I felt I could write a melody to or arrange a song around. Even if it was four lines out of six stanzas, he would go back and he would rewrite the song around those four lines.
Neil was a perfect example of a guy who checked his ego at the door. Which is not to say we never had an argument. Certainly we would argue about a concept or if I had changed the meaning of a line or something that was really important to him, of course, we would work something out.
But he turned into an incredible collaborator and a very considerate song partner as time went on. Matt Scannell from Vertical Horizon told me that when he collaborated with Neil on a song, he was handed almost like a beautifully handwritten medieval manuscript of lyrics.
Was that your experience as well? They were all handwritten and he had little drawings at the top of all of them and he loved cartoons that described the song, and the titles were always a little on the ornate side. He almost never just banged them out on a typewriter or something. Later on, when it was a computer age, he still managed to find a way to make his presentations to us as artful as possible. It was a big source of pride for him, and in the early days when we were writing on the road, he used to add in the top corner which towns we were in when he worked on that song, so it also served as a little travelogue.
It seems like you loved it when his lyrics started to turn to the more earth-bound in the Eighties. Oh, of course, yeah. His lyrics became more about the human condition to a large degree.
You could say that he was always talking about one part of the human condition or another even through the years of using science fiction as a device, but it started to become more overt in style and more traditional in shape.
I gravitated to that a lot because it helped me as a songwriter and helped me in terms of the direction that I wanted to go in. And of course, the overall sound of the band kept shifting in many ways as well. Neil and I as a rhythm section were trying to get earthier and slightly funkier and trying to experiment with moving the songs in a different way instead of just kind of at breakneck speed. We always were a band that played fast. I mean, we were in a hurry. So we consciously moved in to find a deeper groove and the idea of groove became different than the idea of groove as a young prog-rocker.
So I think his lyrics changed at the same pace. As we were looking for a deeper groove he was looking for a more real way of expressing himself, a more earthbound way shall we say.
Exactly, yeah. I always loved to play it, and it was emotional. I love to sing that song. With regularity. He was a monster drummer of the highest magnitude. So for me, I was always trying to live up to his watermark, so to speak, because he pushed me. But he awed me over and over again. He was relentless in the studio and he would play it as many times as required. He was so incredibly demanding of himself and of course, you have to rise to that level. It just happens that way.
It just becomes your band mantra when you see a guy working that hard. You work that hard. How challenging was that not only as the bass player but the bass player who had to sing at the same time? It was intentional and it was discussed. So we both loved doing that kind of thing. I mean, singing was always a challenge over the rhythm-section parts that we would sing together but I always worried about that later.
It was the writing of it and the thinking up of those parts that was so much fun for us. Whenever we finished an album, we always ran off one version that was just bass and drums just so that we could glory in the quirkiness of our rhythm section together and also the unblemished sound of bass and drums before all that white noise [ laughs ] came and got plastered on top of it.
So you have your own personal, bootleg versions of Rush albums that are just bass and drums? Yeah, somewhere. Neil wrote in his book that he was very proud of the drum solo he did your final tour, and he was under the impression that you and Alex never said anything to him about it. I told him lots of times. I mean, I listened to that drum solo every night in awe and I talked to him about it numerous times. Neil felt a lot of pressure to be the drum god people expected when he played.
How did you see that weighing on him? He set the bar really high for himself, and as his body started to let him down he worried that he would betray that. He was really big on that. He used to say all the time that he never wanted to let down the kid in him. He would visualize him as a kid watching his own drum performance and never wanted to let that kid version down.
But it was really a very difficult gig and as time went on and his body started to, as I said, let him down, it became much more difficult for him to get through it. Yet somehow he did. Yeah, I know. But he struggled through that tour. He had lot of weird issues, physical issues, a tendency to get infections. He was so fucking stoic. He was the exact opposite of me. When I have something wrong, everyone in the fucking organization knows I have something wrong.
Well, it happened over time. I think he always had a little bit of stage fright, but he got over it as soon as he hit the stage. But it really happened over time, the more demands that were made of his time and the more notoriety he was garnering as a drummer and as member of the band.
All that stuff started to play on his nervous system, and he started reacting in a much more extreme way as he got older. I was thinking about this the other day. Early on, the first few tours we did, he was laughing a lot, having a lot of fun onstage. There was a time when we would even sit backstage after a gig and sign autographs for fans, especially in the U.
The U. So we would sit there in the drafty hallway as they were ushered in, and Neil would sign for everybody. As we got into the Eighties, something changed in him that made him much more sensitive to his private time and his exposure to the public and he started backing away from it.
He started taking off on his own between shows, first on a bicycle and then on a motorcycle. How did you feel about that? Well, every once in a while it was odd for us. We missed him. We wanted him to hang out after a gig sometimes and just get wasted with us as we used to do in the early days.
But it was his only method of staying sane, and he needed to do that. So we allowed him that luxury. There was no way you were going to stop him, anyway. This is what you have to deal with. Page 1 of 2 1 2 Next. Sponsored Post. Posted 08 October - PM Could be signaling to his mix moniter that someone is too loud, or too soft.
When neil is too loud, he points to him, and then sharply points down, or up. Seems to just be a random funny thing, but I always wondered how that originated too.
Catharines, Ontario. Posted 08 October - PM It's just something he does. Playing with my dogs, hiking, working out like a maniac. Thoroughbred racing.
Posted 08 October - PM Can someone get a. It would be a nifty addition to a signature. Posted 08 October - PM I noticed that too, maybe his hair is getting in his face or something. I think it's part goofing around and part playing with the killer YYZ beat. I think he does it to emphasize Alex's riff during a short break on his bass line. It's just my guess, I would have to see a couple videos to see if it's really a certain beat at the same time thing or not.
Presto-a RUSH fan! I thought for sure it was gonna be a thread on when to get up during the concert and "hit the head"!! I've watched enough videos of the song to know. It's just a habit he's been doing for decades. Take Care. Posted 09 October - AM Does there need to be a reason behind it? No, his hair is not in his face. It's just something he does. Why did Pete Townshend twirl his arm around when playing guitar?
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