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Took On the 80s and Won PROG Magazine - April 2023, Issue #139 The Analog Kid: Dave Everley Image: Deborah Samuel Artwork: Hugh Syme |
Ed's Letter
Hello, and welcome to the new issue of PROG magazine. Do you have a favourite period of Rush? I’ll hazard a guess most readers would opt for the 70s era of kimonos, side-long sci-fi epics and dubious facial hair. And with good reason. But as we moved into a new decade, I remember being equally intrigued with where Rush were headed, and 1982’s Signals has remained in my top three Rush albums ever since!
Of course not everyone felt the same way. I remember the letters page of Sounds, my then chosen music paper, being full of missives from irate fans – Christ, imagine what the internet would have been like then?! – but I think the majority of fans understood that Rush were on a journey. No one knew exactly where they were headed, but most were happy to go along for the ride. As Alex Lifeson says, in Dave Everley’s in-depth cover feature on page 28, “We were in a rock band, in a recording studio, making a record – how does life get better than that?”
Elsewhere this issue, fellow Canadians and Rush devotees Crown Lands tell us all about their own Rush fandom – I have the Starman logo tattooed on my arm, but Kevin Comeau went one better and has it on his butt! – Bruce Soord interviews his hero Alan Parsons, and legends Jethro Tull and Hawkwind tell us all about their new studio albums.
We’re back on May 19 with a real exclusive treat for you. Until then, stay safe and prog on…
Jerry Ewing – Editor
Message Received
The launch of the Space Shuttle
Columbia on April 12, 1981
was the biggest leap forward
in the Space Race since the
Moon landing 12 years earlier.
This was the very first reusable
spacecraft, able to orbit the planet and
return safely to Earth in one piece after
its mission was complete.
Several NASA employees and a group
of specially invited guests had gathered
at 7am in a private viewing area within
the grounds of the Kennedy Space
Center on Merritt Island, Florida to
watch billions of dollars’ worth of
technology and two flesh-and-blood
astronauts be fired into orbit. And
among that group of onlookers were
the three members of Rush.
The Canadian trio were guests of
Kennedy Space Centre deputy director
Gerry Griffin, who’d given them a tour
of the facility, including the assembly
building, a room so vast it had its own
indoor cloud system. They’d also had
a cheeky go on the Space Shuttle
simulator during the tour, only for
guitarist Alex Lifeson – a qualified
pilot – to crash the computerised craft
headfirst into a swamp.
The launch of the real thing was
originally scheduled to take place two
days earlier but it had been delayed due
to technical problems. The change of
date meant that Rush had to hightail it
to Florida immediately after a show in
San Antonio, Texas, then head back
straight after to play another show in
Fort Worth. But there was no way they
were going to miss this.
And so Lifeson sat with bassist/
vocalist Geddy Lee and drummer Neil
Peart on a blanket on the viewing area’s
grass lawn, gazing over the lagoon in
front of them to the launch pad a few
kilometres away. As the countdown
began, the already electric atmosphere
began to intensify: five, four, three,
two, one… Flames billowed from the
shuttle’s booster rockets, a huge roar
swept across the lagoon, and the
Columbia lifted off.
“It was the most incredible thing
I’ve ever heard,” says Alex Lifeson now,
his voice still edged with awe. “It was
so loud – the low end rumble of the
rocket was incredible. It just screamed
off in a plume of exhaust as it rose into
the sky, and then it was gone into space
and there was this eerie quiet. In this
lagoon that was right in front of the
viewing area, these dolphins came up
and they started swimming in their
little pattern. Here we are at the peak
of human technology, and there’s such
a great example of ancient nature right
before us. The contrast was amazing.”
As the magnitude of what they had
just seen sank in, Lifeson and his
bandmates glanced around at their
fellow guests. That’s when they spotted
some familiar faces.
“We looked over and, a couple of
spots to our left, Steven Spielberg and
George Lucas were sitting on a similar
blanket,” says the guitarist. “We didn’t
know each other, but we just looked
and nodded and smiled at the whole
experience that we’d just had.”
Even the proximity of two Hollywood
A-listers paled into insignificance next
to the launch itself. Neil Peart was still
processing what they’d witnessed as he
boarded the plane they’d hired to get
them to that evening’s gig.
“I remember thinking to myself
as we flew back to Fort Worth after
a couple days without sleep, ‘We’ve
got to write a song about this!’” the
drummer and lyricist later noted
in a diary he wrote for Sounds
magazine in 1982. “It was an incredible
thing to witness, truly a once-ina-
lifetime experience.’
Rush did indeed write a song about
what they saw on that April morning.
Countdown would appear as the
propulsive closing track on their ninth
album, Signals, its build-and-release
energy mirroring the launch of the
shuttle itself. As real-life voices from
the NASA control room punctuate the
song, Peart’s words capture the wonder
and promise of the moment. ‘This
magic day when super-science/Mingles
with the bright stuff of dreams,’ sings
Geddy Lee, bringing the drummer’s
lyrics to life.
Signals was Rush’s own space shuttle
moment. A bold step into the future
that saw them embracing new sounds
and new technology (and in the case
of Lifeson, a snazzy new wave haircut),
it opened up the rest of the decade
for them. The album’s shorter songs
and increased reliance on keyboards
and synthesisers alienated the more
obdurate section of their fanbase,
but Signals was ultimately the sound
of a band ready for the oncoming
technological rush of the 1980s.
“I guess you could stay where you
are and do the same thing over and
over and over again, but that’s not the
kind of band we are,” says Lifeson.
“Progress is important to us. We
always need to go somewhere else.
We always wanted to evolve.”
Few Rush albums are as representative
of that desire to move forward as
Signals, yet it didn’t come completely
out of the blue. The shift towards
shorter songs had properly begun two
albums earlier, with 1980’s Permanent
Waves, while synths and keyboards had
been an integral part of Rush’s sound
since 1977’s A Farewell To Kings.
But it was with 1981’s Moving Pictures
that Rush took a big leap forward.
Sleeker and less concerned with the
(admittedly glorious) instrumental
grandstanding of the past, it was the
closest the trio had come to making
a contemporary rock album.
Buried at the end of that record was
a song that signposted what was to
come next. With its squelching
keyboards, fluttering synths and
Police-esque reggae breaks, Vital Signs
sounded like nothing Rush had recorded before – prog sensibilities in
a new wave wrapper. But the biggest
tell came via Peart’s lyrics. ‘Everybody
got to deviate from the norm,’ sang Lee,
inadvertently foreshadowing Rush’s
own next move.
“It was the last song we wrote on
the record, and we wrote it in the
studio,” the singer told Prog in 2021.
“Certain albums have that one
spontaneous song, and it’s funny
because those types of songs end up
being a precursor for some styles that
we might do on the next record. Like
a segue, almost. So Vital Signs really
kicked us off towards Signals without
us even knowing it.”
Moving Pictures was the most
successful album Rush had released to
that point, and an intensive, 10-month
long tour followed. It was during those
dates that Rush began formulating
ideas for their next album.
“We were touring so much that we
were limited in the time we had to write
for a record, so we utilised soundchecks
or even days off, when Ged and I would
sit down with a couple of guitars and
do a little bit of writing,” says Lifeson.
“But soundcheck was the best
opportunity for us to throw some ideas
around – we’d play a couple of songs in
full, but also do a little bit of writing.
I’m sure there are ancient cassettes somewhere with snippets of ideas that
ended up on all our records.”
One song that emerged in nascent
form from these jams was Chemistry,
which would eventually become the
third track on Signals. In his diary
for Sounds, Peart recalled the song’s
inception at some forgotten North
American venue.
“On this particular day in ‘Somewhere
USA’ we will unknowingly write
a whole song at once, each of us playing
a different part,” the drummer wrote.
“While Geddy plays what will become
the keyboard melody for the bridge
section, Alex is playing the guitar
riff for the verses, and I’m playing
the drum beat for the choruses. Just
like that!”
Lee and Lifeson would refine the
song further at the bassist’s house
on the shores of Lake Simcoe, 60
miles north of Toronto. The guitarist headed up to his bandmate’s place
after the Moving Pictures tour wrapped
up in July 1981. He bought with him
a tiny, cigarette packet-sized practice
amp that he’d been given, and the pair
proceeded to construct a primitive
record booth by placing the amp and
microphone in his guitar case.
“It was our way of isolating the
sound,” he says. “Chemistry was one
of the songs we worked on while
I was there.”
Chemistry remains the only Rush
song to feature a joint Lee/Lifeson/
Peart lyric credit.
“Geddy and Alex together came up
with the title and concept for the song,
wrote out a few key phrases and words
that they wanted to get in, then passed
it along to me for organisation and
a little further development,” wrote
Peart in Sounds in 1982.
Another track that took shape during
the band’s on-the-road jam sessions
was Subdivisions, Signals’ eventual
opening track. The trio would pick the
latter song up when they began mixing
the live album Exit… Stage Left with
longtime co-producer Terry Brown
in September 1981 at the Le Studio
recording facility in Morin-Heights,
Quebec, 50 miles north of Montreal.
“We were getting a little bored with
inactivity,” wrote Peart in his diary.
“During the mixing of Exit… Stage Left
there was really not much for us to
do except say ‘It sounds good’ or ‘It
doesn’t sound good.’”
The drummer used the time to work
on lyrics, including those of Subdivisions,
an empathetic look at growing up in
the suburbs, with all the emotional,
psychological and cultural baggage that
came with it.
“One afternoon as I was idly polishing
my car, Alex and Ged returned from
working at the little studio, set up
a portable cassette player right there
in the driveway, and played me the
musical ideas they had come up for it,”
wrote Peart. The drummer liked the
tricksy, shifting time signatures and
the interplay between guitar, bass and
keyboards, and the three of them
fashioned it into a completed song in
between mixing sessions.
Subdivisions would be road-tested at
shows in Europe and North America
on the Exit… Stage Left tour in
November and December 1981.
Bootlegs from the time capture a song
that’s virtually identical musically
and lyrically to the finished version,
though Lifeson’s jagged guitar was
far more present on those early live
performances. That would eventually
become a bone of contention, but for
now, all three members were pulling
in the same direction.
At the beginning of 1982,
the band decamped to
Windermere Lake in
Northern Ontario with Terry
Brown for pre-production. The
English-born Brown had co-produced
every Rush album since 1974’s Fly By
Night and was their unofficial fourth
member. The fact that it was off season
meant they could rent an entire ski
resort for themselves.
“The place was completely empty
– it was like The Shining,” says Lifeson.
“There was a big venue and we locked
ourselves in there for a month or so
and rehearsed and finished the songs
for the album.”
The one thing that they emphatically
didn’t want to do was make Moving
Pictures II.
“That would have been boring,” says
Lifeson. “The style of the songs we
were writing was very much of the 80s,
and what was prevalent at the time. ”
Rush were as plugged into what was
going on around them musically as
they had been a decade earlier, except
where Yes and Led Zeppelin had been
their twin north stars in the early
1970s, now it was everyone from The
Police, Ultravox and early U2 to
Discipline-era King Crimson and UK.
“There was a lot of crappy music
back then too,” says Lifeson, laughing.
But while they were woodshedding
the songs in that big empty winter
resort, they shut out all external
musical stimuli for fear of it explicitly
influencing what they were doing.
“Typically, the three of us seldom
listened to any outside music when we were working on a record,” says
Lifeson. ‘That was an unspoken rule.”
The early versions of the songs
hewed close to the finished article,
albeit in more bare-bones form.
“The demos sounded really good,
but of course lacked the sophistication
of sound and performance that one
fine-tunes in the studio,” says Brown.
“In terms of arrangement, they didn’t
change a whole lot, but in terms
of production values, the vocal
perspectives on Subdivisions, the
unruly mob on The Weapon, and all the
sound effects on Countdown were big
production values that weren’t tackled
in the pre-production stage.”
But even in this formative stage, it
was clear that these songs were a step
on from what had come before. There
was a pronounced reggae feel to one
new song, Digital Man, even more so
than past dabblings in the genre on
The Spirit Of Radio and Vital Signs.
“I don’t know if any one of us was
a reggae fan specifically, but it was in
the air,” says Lifeson. “There was never
a case of, ‘Let’s sit down and write
a reggae song.’ It was just part of the
mix of styles that we absorbed.”
One person who was surprised by
the growing presence of reggae in
Rush’s music was Terry Brown.
“I was a little taken aback by the
reggae/ska influence,” says the producer,
“but juxtaposed to Subdivisions,
Countdown, and The Weapon I felt we
had a really strong record.”
Something else that was increasingly
part of the mix was the growing
prominence of keyboards. Lee,
especially, was the band’s resident
gadget-head.
“The synthesiser is a wonderful
thing in that it opens up so many
areas of expression for people who
don’t have the technique a keyboardist
might have,” he told Northeast
Ohio’s Scene magazine. “You really
don’t need technique because with
a synthesiser you can use your
own technique. As long as you have
a sense of how to write a melody,
you can use the synthesiser to
express yourself.”
Lifeson is sometimes painted as
a keyboard refusenik, unhappy with
the presence of synthesisers within
Rush’s sound. Not so, he insists today.
“I know I’ve come across as being
very down on us using keyboards, but
that’s not the case,” he says. “From
the beginning, when we started using
keyboards and bass pedals and things
like that, it was a group effort. We
wanted to expand our sound but we
didn’t want to add any more members.
I was happy to use them, I thought
they did a great thing for our sound.
But when they started taking priority, that’s when I started having some
issues with keyboards.”
By the time Rush made their latest
trek to Le Studio with co-producer
Terry Brown and engineer Paul
Northfield in May 1982 to record
Signals, the place felt like home from
home. They’d made their last two
studio albums at the studio, located in
the Laurentian Mountains, as well as
mixing Exit… Stage Left, there.
The recording facility was built on
one side of a lake; the house where
Rush team were staying was on the
other side. Getting from one to the
other entailed walking through the
woods or, even more idyllically, across
the lake via canoe or rowboat.
“There were huge windows
overlooking the lake in the studio and
windows in the control room too so
you never had that feeling of being in
an airtight studio, where you could
never tell whether it was two in the
afternoon or two in the morning,” says
Brown, who Lifeson describes as “really
like a fourth member – he understood
our music, he was a great producer,
a great engineer in his own right. He
was a brother.”
They put in long hours at the studio,
starting at 11 o’clock in the morning
and finishing around two in the
morning, with a 90-minute break for
an evening meal. Any distractions were
deliberately self-created. A volleyball
net was set up at the house to unwind after spending countless hours in
the studio.
“After we finished a session, we’d
come back and we’d play volleyball
until five o’clock in the morning, when
the sun was coming up,” says Lifeson.
“It was an opportunity for us to let off
some steam, get a little exercise, drink
copious amounts of brandy, smoke
lots of pot.”
Brown remembers it a little
differently. “Ged had an obsession
with baseball so that was our focus in
our downtime,” he says. “We practised
on a daily basis until Ged was confident
that we could tackle the girls’ team in
Morin-Heights.”
Whatever sport they played away
from the studio, the atmosphere during
work hours was both intense and, Rush
being Rush, light-hearted.
“Cutting the bed-tracks was a lot
of fun, but some of the vocal sessions
were tense,” recalls Brown. “I remember
wanting to record Ged’s vocals in the
chorus of Subdivisions with the sound
that you hear on the record – I felt it
would inspire him to deliver the lyric
in a very sincere and emotional way,
but it took time to set up and he found
it quite frustrating.”
Lee wasn’t the only one to be
frustrated with Subdivisions. When
it came to mixing the song, Lifeson
noticed the stabbing guitar that had
been present in early live versions
was now buried under banks of
Lee’s keyboards.
“We would all get behind the console
and we would all have jobs – turning
a knob, pushing a fader at a certain
point, those sorts of things,” says
Lifeson. “I was sitting there thinking,
‘I can’t hear guitar.’ I’m a very easygoing
guy, but I thought, ‘This is not
right.’ So I pushed that fader up. I do
remember Terry turning to me and
smiling and reaching over and pulling
it back down. I haven’t forgotten that.”
Terry Brown remembers the polite
yet borderline passive-aggressive
tussle with Lifeson over the volume
of his guitars, but says he wasn’t aware
of any deeper differences of opinion
at the time.
“I’m not so sure that those differences
were resolved,” he says now. “Especially
since it wasn’t until after the record
was released that those feelings
became evident.”
The balance between Lifeson’s
guitar and Lee’s keyboards was more
equitable on the sparkling The Analog
Kid, Peart’s semi-autobiographical
exploration of adolescence. The song
dated from an unlikely holiday in the
British Virgin Islands at the start of
1982, where the band and Brown had
spent a week on a schooner the
drummer had recently purchased.
“Neil had been talked into buying
this beautiful boat,” says Lifeson with a laugh. “It cost him a lot of
money and he got rid of it after a year
or two, but not long after he got it, he
refurbished it and invited us all for
holiday. We had a week on a boat, just
sailing around the British Virgin Island
and being pretend pirates.”
Peart recalled Lee playing him some
ideas he’d been working on at home,
including an electronic instrumental
that would form the basis of Signals
track The Weapon (the second part of
the ‘Fear’ trilogy’ that had begun with
Moving Pictures’ Witch Hunt). The
drummer reciprocated by sharing
a couple of things he’d been working
on himself.
“That night as we lay at anchor in
Virgin Gorda, Geddy and I went down
below after dinner, and I showed him
some of the work that I had been doing.
I had written The Analog Kid as sort
of a companion piece to Digital Man…. He told me what he liked, and what he
didn’t like, and gave me some good
points to go to work on. We put an
end to the ‘shoptalk’ and went back to
our holidays.”
Signals also featured one of Rush’s
great unheralded classics, the slowburning
semi-ballad Losing It. Inspired
in part by Ernest Hemingway (‘The bell
tolls for thee’ is a reference to the
American author’s 1940 Spanish Civil
War novel For Whom The Bell Tolls),
the song was Peart’s treatise on the
passage of time and the loss of youth.
Its emotional pull was amplified by the spine-tingling contributions of
violinist Ben Mink.
Like the members of Rush, Mink grew
up in the suburbs of Toronto, though he
didn’t properly get to know them until
his band, FM, were invited to open the
North American leg of the Moving
Pictures tour in 1981. The following year
Mink got a call from Geddy Lee asking
if he wanted to play violin on a track
on the band’s new album.
“He said, ‘We have a song that we
think would work really well with
a violin part,’” Mink recalls today.
“They sent me a cassette of the
working arrangement. It had all these
ridiculous time signatures, and I didn’t
really know what to make of it. But
I was honoured to be asked, and I could
always use a trip to Montreal.”
Mink ended up spending a few days
at Le Studio, where he got to see firsthand
how Rush worked.
“They grew up playing together,
so they had their own code and their
own language,” he says. “They would
communicate with each other via eye
contact and head movements: ‘Let’s do
this, let’s not do that.’ It was amazing
how many long, nuanced phrases they
could play that way.”
Mink also became part of an
impromptu side-project during his time
at Le Studio. The Ziv Orchestra (named
in part after Lifeson’s real Serbian
surname, Živojinovi´c) found Mink and
the guitarist swapping instruments,
with the former on guitar and the latter
on rudimentary violin, with Peart
playing along on snare drum. Their
repertoire consisted of wedding band
standards such as Al Martino’s Spanish
Eyes and The Surfaris’ Wipe Out.
“It was just us goofing around, but
we did have a photo taken of us, kind
of a hammed-up picture,” says Mink.
The business of recording Losing It
was more serious. The band gave Mink
a sense of what the song sounded like
and what it was about, but essentially
left him to do his own thing. Fuelled
by espresso, he laid down the parts for
the body of the song on a five-string
electric violin before shifting to
Canadian Club whisky for his solos.
“We used echo and delay to give
a sense of grandeur, which I think
matches the sentiment of the song,”
he says. “I spent an hour or two laying
down a bunch of solos, and then
when it was done I went into the other
room and left them alone to compile a version of what they felt were the
best moments”
“Right off the bat, what he played
was just so perfect and so dripping
with feeling,” remembers Lifeson.
“We were all sitting in the control
room when he was doing his part, and
we were just blown away by it. I might
have had tears in my eyes, actually.”
As with the 11th hour addition of
Vital Signs to Moving Pictures, the final
piece of the Signals jigsaw fell into place
in the studio.
“We were pretty much done with
the record, but we thought, ‘Why don’t
we just throw on one more track?’”
says Lifeson.
That track was New World Man, the
album’s first single. According to
Lifeson, it was written in a couple of
hours and finished within the day.
“We’d usually spend months
rehearsing and writing and then
months recording, so to finish a song
so quickly was really unusual for us,”
says the guitarist. “It was one of those
songs that happened so instinctively
and so suddenly.”
Like Digital Man, New World Man
bore the imprint of the white reggae
popularised by The Police. But Lifeson’s
guitar had a brittle new wave edge to it
too, the guitarist seemingly determined
to leave his mark on at least one part
of the album. Yet any discontent he
did feel over Signals was pushed down
for the greater good of the record.
“It was smooth sailing,” Lifeson says
now. “We loved being together, we
were in a rock band, in a recording
studio, making a record – how does life
get better than that?”
When Signals was released
on September 9, 1982,
housed in another
memorable sleeve designed by their
longtime art director Hugh Syme, it
divided opinion. While some fans
understood the band’s need to
constantly move forwards, a more
vocal section of their following viewed
it as a betrayal of Rush’s core values.
“There was always a complaint with
Moving Pictures that, ‘Oh, now they’ve
become commercially successful,
they’re no longer our band, they’re
everybody’s band,’” says Lifeson of this
pre-internet gatekeeping. “But you’ve
gotta do what you’ve gotta do.”
Still, the guitarist admits that he
wasn’t unsympathetic to those who felt
let down by the record:
“I remember feeling disappointed
that we had disappointed those earlier
followers, because they were really
important to us.”
This much was proven on the
subsequent tour, which began on
September 3, 1982 in Green Bay,
Wisconsin and ended 109 shows later
on May 25, 1983 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Though seven of Signals’
eight songs were featured in the set
(Chemistry was dropped towards the
end of the tour), they were outnumbered
by tracks from the band’s older albums.
Yet there was an undeniable sense
that Rush were moving into a new era,
and not just because of Geddy Lee’s
shiny new synth set-up. Visually, too,
they were kicking it into the modern
age. For Countdown, the band contacted
their old friend Gerry Griffin, deputy
director of the Kennedy Space Center,
and told him they’d written a song
inspired by the space shuttle launch
they’d seen in 1982.
“He said, ‘Well, that’s incredible. Let
me talk to our media department and
see if we can get you some film footage
of rocket launches and things like that
which you can use in your show.’ And
they provided all kinds of stuff, some
of which had never been seen by the
public before. We used it in a montage
for the rear screen projection.”
Ironically, the one Signals track that
wasn’t played live was the one that had
Alex Lifeson welling up in the studio.
“We always had one song on every
record that we knew we weren’t going
to play live, so we would stretch out
a little bit and do things that we
couldn’t replicate live,” says the
guitarist. “Losing It was that song on
that record. We never intended to play
it live.”
Except they did play it live, albeit
33 years after it was released. Losing
It finally received its live debut at
Toronto’s Air Canada Centre on
June 19, 2015, halfway through the
band’s R40 farewell tour. As if the
poignancy of the song’s lyrics wasn’t
enough, they enlisted special guest Ben Mink to recreate his electric violin
parts onstage.
“It was tremendously nervewracking,”
says Mink, who made a second appearance a month later in
Vancouver. “It was supposed to be
a surprise, so I couldn’t tell anybody,
not even some of my closest friends.
It was a little difficult for me, because
my violin was way louder in my
in-ear monitors than it had been in
soundcheck, but from what I could
tell, people were thrilled to hear it.
They’d waited a long time to hear the
song live. I don’t think they expected
that it would ever be performed.”
Losing It was played just five times
in total on the R40 tour, with Johnny
Dinklage (brother of Game Of Thrones
actor Peter Dinklage) standing in for
Mink for the remaining performances.
“It was a very powerful moment in
the set,” says Lifeson. “I won’t deny
being choked up most nights when we
played it.”
As much as Signals marked the start
of a new era for Rush, it represented the
end of another. It was the last of the
band’s records to be co-produced by
Terry Brown.
“It wasn’t an emotional decision for
me, since it was the band that wanted
to make the split,” says Brown now.
“They needed to work with some
other producers and get some other
influences. Certainly producers that
could accommodate a lot of keyboards,”
he adds wryly.
Brown has the view that Signals
came at a point where Rush were
“heading for a midlife crisis, which
they handled really well, and I admire
them for their tenacity”, though he
says he would like the chance to remix
Signals with today’s digital techniques.
“I’d fine-tune some of the details in the
rhythm section and push the sonic
footprint up a few notches,” he says.
More than 40 years after it was
released, Signals remains a contentious
album to some for its apparent embrace
of all things 80s, though the cyclical
nature of music means its synth-heavy
approach sounds less dated today than
the glossily produced albums they
released later in the decade 80s.
Yet for others, the album has only
grown in stature and significance in
the years since its release. It’s a stretch
to claim that Signals saved Rush at
a time when traditional progressive
rock was cast out in the wilderness,
but, like Genesis before them and Yes
after them, it brought the band in line
with what was going on around them,
drawing up a roadmap that helped
them navigate the rest of the decade.
“I think if I had any regrets with
Signals, it was in the actual production
of the record, which when all was said
and done, sounded a little small,” says
Lifeson. “On my personal scale of
importance, Signals would be
somewhere in the middle – it wouldn‘t
be high on my list. But it was a pivotal
record for us as a band, because it
continued a writing style that we’d
embraced with Moving Pictures and it
was a step towards what we did next.”
Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures
had eased Rush into the 1980s, but
with Signals they dived in headfirst.
And for better or worse, they wouldn’t
resurface until it was over.
“The 80s was tough for me as a guitarist.”
Alex Lifeson looks back on the Rush’s progression through the 80s, aka ‘the keyboard era’.
The first 15 years of Rush’s recording career can be divided into
clear chapters, each consisting of four studio albums
bookended by a live album. Signals kicked off their third chapter
– aka ‘the keyboard era’. Its successors saw Rush charting
a slightly wayward course, torn between the synth-heavy sounds
of the moment (largely down to Geddy Lee)
and their traditional guitar-centred sounds
(via Alex Lifeson).
“I guess I just fought for my guitar rights
for years after Signals,” says Lifeson. “Of
course, on the albums that followed, we
really developed the whole keyboard
character. But it was a bit of a fight.”
Grace Under Pressure (1984) –
co-produced by Peter Henderson after U2
associate Steve Lillywhite blew out Rush to
work with Simple Minds – went some way
to restoring the balance, bringing Lifeson’s
guitars further up in the mix.
“There’s something about the sound and
the power and the songwriting quality that
really strikes me,” says Lifeson. “I really love
that record.”
Lee’s keyboard obsessions peaked on
1985’s Power Windows, an album that,
sonically at least, came over like a more
refined, glossy version of Signals. Lifeson
told Classic Rock that he found the record
“a challenge – but I thought, ‘Go with it, it
will work out in the end.’”
It would, but it took a few more albums.
Despite featuring Lifeson in a more prominent
role (and one of the all-time great Rush
singles in Time Stand Still), 1987’s Hold Your
Fire has been written off by many fans as
a bloodless misfire. The 1989 live album
A Show Of Hands was a de facto end on the
‘keyboard era’, but Presto, released in the
same year, felt like a continuation, though
it was better received than its predecessor.
“The 80s was tough for me at times as
a guitarist,” concedes Lifeson. “I missed the
more direct hard rock approach. But I think
we came back around to that for [1993’s]
Counterparts.”
Leaving Your Mark
Rush album cover designer Hugh Syme discusses the ideas behind Signals.
Where did the idea for the Signals cover come from?
When I got the album title, it was the probably the
most intimidating singular word I could have got
because it was so vast in possibilities. We ventured
down the Marconi and Tesla radio signals route, and
Morse Code and semaphore as well. Then I heard the
song Subdivisions in the studio, and there was
a sense of suburbia, with its perfect green lawns and
its creepy underpinnings.
And I was walking down [Toronto thoroughfare]
Yorkville one day and I saw a fire hydrant and their
mascot, a Dalmation. I thought, “Why don’t we have
a dog sniffing fire hydrant?” It was about the idea
of leaving your mark on a particular place.
Did the band go for the idea straight away?
They were concerned that it might be too minimal.
This one had a level of glibness and whimsy that was contrapuntal to all things rock.
[Rush manager] Ray Danniels hated it, and he came to my studio to tell me as much.
It’s intimidating when someone doubts you, but we went ahead and did it. What changed
their mind? Trust, I think.
What do you remember about the shoot?
The photographer, Deborah Samuel, had worked on Moving
Pictures, and she was the quintessential craftswoman. She
had a studio, and we didn’t want any interruptions, so we
did it on her roof. I wanted perfect grass, so I opted for
Astroturf to make it even more kitsch. Lugging that 300lb
hydrant to the roof was a huge undertaking.
Where did the hydrant come from?
The Toronto fire department were kind enough to loan it to
us. Back in those days, if you wanted something you’d ask.
Was the dog well behaved?
We found the dog through word of mouth – a friend of
a friend knew someone who had a Dalmatian. It was very well-behaved, and very
interested in the biscuits we’d hidden under the hydrant to get him to sniff it.
What’s the story of the blueprint-style map on the back cover?
It was a blueprint of a neighbourhood with all the subdivisions in it. I mentioned we should
have a map which traced the path of the dog’s journey as he marked off his territory. The
band chimed in and started populating the blueprint with their inside jokes.
The new cover on the deluxe box set reverses the image, with the dog looking up at the hydrant. What was the inspiration for that?
It’s a monolith of sorts, but it’s also a nod to Claes Oldenburg, who was famous for his
oversized sculpture – he did an electrical plug that was partly submerged in the ground
that was 20 feet tall. The scale thing isn’t new – it’s just my nod to the icon from the
original cover.
How do you look back on the original cover now?
It’s a good cover. There are times when I think, “It might have been a bit more profound if
it’d been a full bleed”, but having the photo as an inset worked. Would I change anything?
I sometimes think it should have been three dogs rather than one, but that’s all.
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