“He’s very dramatic in how he plays the lighting board as an instrument.”
With four more studio albums under their belts, it was time for another double vinyl live album. A Show of Hands would feature material mostly from the tour for Hold Your Fire, but two Power Windows dates, March 31 and April 1, 1986, at the Meadowlands Arena in New Jersey, would also be represented, yielding the tracks “Witch Hunt” and “Mystic Rhythms.”
The Hold Your Fire campaign opened with Rush once again promoting a small local act in the opening slots of their shows. The guys had heard about Chalk Circle while they were writing and recording for their last album at McClear Studios in downtown Toronto. Geddy and Neil had talked about how it was refreshing having their ear to the ground once again, feeling the pulse of their city, after all those pilgrimages to rural settings to cook up Rush songs.
After a handful of Atlantic Canada tour dates, it was off to the States, supported by the McAuley Schenker Group — one bit of Rush lore had Neil and Geddy pondering putting together a project with blond bomber Michael Schenker back in the early ’80s, but it never came together. When asked if he actually played with Geddy and Neil, Michael says, “No, we just discussed it, and they said they wanted to do it. I think I may have blown it because I made a joke and said that Alex could be the coffee boy. Maybe I went too far, I don’t know. I can’t remember actually what happened or why it didn’t work out.”
The Atlantic Canada shows were the result of a petition campaign much publicized at the time to get Rush to play there. It’s always been notoriously hard for bands to make the economics work for shows in Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Newfoundland. But Ray made it happen, with Rush playing Moncton, New Brunswick, two shows in Nova Scotia and two dates at Memorial Stadium in Newfoundland and Labrador’s capital, St. John’s, October 29 through November 4 of 1987, all dates supported by Chalk Circle.
Into December, Rush again toured with a former heavy hitter now onto a career as a solo artist: Tommy Shaw from Styx supported the band through to March of 1988. After this, it was back to Canada with Chalk Circle. Three shows in January and February of 1988 would be recorded for use on the new live album. Three additional shows would be recorded in April, all in Birmingham, U.K., as the band conducted a short European campaign, wrapping up May 5 in Germany, Wishbone Ash as support. Birmingham would be captured on film for the platinum-selling video release of the album.
Rush’s stage presentation was both massive and classy by this point, but very much reflective of ’80s style.
“Howard had really developed his skills as a lighting director,” recalls Lifeson of Mr. Ungerleider, now in his fourteenth year with the band. “And I gotta say, the way he sees things, it’s just unbelievable. He has such a creative ability. The colors are liquid; the application of the lighting is so dramatic and so unique and exciting. I’ve been to some other shows that have looked amazing, but there is something about his style and the way he sees things that are so deserving of the awards he’s gotten.
“We spend a lot of time talking about aspects of the production. I mean obviously, the lighting is something he brings to the table, and he makes suggestions, and he’s always got a fixed idea of how he wants to change one tour to the next to the next to the next. We try to reel him in a little bit budget-wise, or at least, our road manager, Liam Birt, does. He’s got this idea, and then we talk about some of the other signature things we want based on what we’re promoting on that tour, which album it is, or what point in the tour it is. And then we work together on these concepts. And he often brings things from a technical standpoint. He always brings in really great visual moments.
“He’s been there since 1974,” continues Lifeson. “He knows the music as well as we do. He’s heard those songs as many times as we’ve heard them. So he knows them inside out. And if you’ve ever been out in the house to watch him work, you see that he’s very dramatic in how he plays the lighting board as an instrument. It’s very, very effective. And as a technician he’s amazing; he directs that show. I don’t know how he does it, because you’re working with different people every night, different spot operators, different countries. Some of them don’t speak the same language. It’s a real challenge at times, and he always pulls it off.”
As for how in the world it turned out that Howard ended up with the band from 1974 through to this point (and actually to the end), Alex says, “Well, we love each other, for one thing. We’re great friends. It’s always been a part of the way Rush operates. We get close with our crews, and we become friends. And it has an impact on how the whole show comes up and comes down and how it works, and how obligated everybody feels to put on a good show, whether it’s their station or someone else’s. You know, something happens across the production, everybody is there to help. And it’s an amazing thing to witness on our shows. And Howard’s just been there from the very beginning. We’re like brothers. So I couldn’t imagine it any other way, really. And he’s such a character. He is absolutely the greatest storyteller I’ve ever heard. He can tell a story in such a way that you’re crying, in tears. And quite often he’ll tell stories of things, situations that I’ve been at, and it’s completely different from what happened. But who cares? They’re just awesome stories.
“In the world of lighting, things change so quickly. There are big tours that go out with unlimited budgets. They get the latest equipment, they get the great people working these shows, and they’re such a visual extravaganza. You have to find your way in that sort of stuff. And I think Howard has a real good sense of not competing with those big shows, but to do something on another scale that’s very emotive, or, you know, powerful and profound. Some of his movements are just astonishing. When you see them up front. I mean, I don’t really get to see too many Rush shows, but during rehearsals, when he’s doing a full production, he’ll show us some of the stuff he’s doing. Or if we videotape it, we get a chance to see the kind of action that’s going on.”
“I love multimedia,” says Howard, who was obviously so much a part of the live presentation by this point. “To me when I sat in an audience watching Pink Floyd when I was young and I saw all this eye candy happening, you know, it’s really great that you can deliver something like that. It helps to tell a story. The first thing I ever did with Rush is use these Kodak S-AV projectors and put together the owl from Fly by Night. We made it flap its wings. To me back then, I was like, wow! Look at that — we can flap its wings, and the audience went crazy when it would do that. But looking back it was such a simple effect. I sort of developed it from there.”
Howard offers a glimpse of what was involved as the show evolved. He says, “Video walls weren’t out yet, so we used a lot of projectors. And then we used thirty-five-millimeter projectors, and then to get bigger I created a monster because we got together with a friend of ours in Toronto named Norm Stangl, who worked for a company called Nelvana Films at the time. And we’d do prints from New York to develop some content, and I came up with this wacky idea: let’s take three projectors and take three rolls of film, and let’s feather them together and do it like pseudo IMAX, but not IMAX.
“And I didn’t realize what a nightmare I was creating for myself at the time, but three rolls of film all have to be in sync. All the edges were soft, all the sprockets must be counted on the film, and they need to have a starting point so that when the projection edits the film, we don’t lose track of where we are. But more important than that, we never even realized we needed encoders — a piece of equipment that goes on a projector to make sure each individual projector runs at the same speed. We found out that everything was running out of whack, and this projector guru from New York said, ‘You need to put encoders on your machines.’ And then we finally tightened that up and were able to do some really nice widescreen projections.”
The band felt it was necessary to get this grand with their shows for a few reasons. First off, as any trio will tell you, an audience requires distractions, at the base level, because you are looking at only three guys. As a trio, you often have your hands full, so it’s hard for the band members to put on a show. In Rush’s case, two of the three also have to play bass pedals.
“I just think it’s an entertainment thing,” adds Howard. “Very few people were doing it, and it’s something that adds another dimension. You have some great music happening, so why not tell the story through visuals? It delivers a message. I can always remember the visuals that I saw when Pink Floyd did “One of These Days” from Meddle. They had that quiet part, the ethereal part, then they exploded a concussion prior to the voice saying ‘One of these days I’m going to cut you into a million pieces,’ and then the police car lights come on and these towers lifted. Every time I heard that song on the radio, that’s what I saw in my mind. So I think visuals help recreate the experience of a live show. When you hear the song on the radio when you’re not at the show, in your mind you might actually see the picture of what you remember — that’s what I think is important.”
And by A Show of Hands, Howard says, “It was like when you put on a high school performance and then you take it to Broadway. We had the ability and the money and the crew to pull it off. It’s not easy putting together a show that is multimedia. You are dealing with animators, actors, amazing editors and conceptual people, and with Rush it’s a brain trust. Geddy is really into the visuals, his brother Allan spearheads our productions, and Geddy and myself and Alex sit down and we brainstorm ideas. Geddy has a lot of amazing ideas and then they take it to the film houses that we hire, and they have on-staff people who will add to those ideas. It becomes a collaboration.”
Just as we’ve heard with the production of the records, Geddy was heavily involved in the production of the show. “They all care about the show, but Geddy in particular,” says Ungerleider. “He’s playing the music, but now he has a handle on what’s going on behind the music as well. It’s sort of interesting and fun. We look at this as a fun project. Although it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of fun, because who gets the chance to dream of something and your dreams come true? A couple tours ago, I was up on a patio at a cottage in Northern Ontario looking at wind chimes, and I said, ‘Wow! It’d be great if those wind chimes were LED video pixels.’ And I designed my next video rig to be hanging like wind chimes. So it’s all these ideas you get. I’m driving in the middle of the night and I’m going through the forest and there’s the moonlight coming through the mist, and it just looks like something from a science fiction movie. I would want to try to recreate that onstage, get that same look.
“But Geddy, yeah, the beauty about him is, he’s a hands-on guy, but he gives you the respect and the freedom to do what you want to do. He’ll never come and say, ‘You know, I hate that.’ But we discuss everything. He’s not even a micromanager; he just knows specifically what he wants, but always asks your opinion. You can’t expect that everyone knows everything. I had a fan come up to me once, ‘You should be putting those lights in the back in blue, because I think it would look better in blue, and you’re using them now in red — I don’t think it’s working.’ So I listened to what he said and I’m thinking, all right, I’ll do them blue. Next day I put them into blue, checked it out and said, ‘Yeah, I like them in blue — I’ll leave it there.’ So I’d take people’s advice, just so long as it’s not stupid. And I think when you give somebody creative freedom, there’s a trust there. The band has always given me the creative freedom to design lights. They’ve never told me, ‘No, you can’t do this, you can’t do that.’ Well, they’ve told me, ‘No, you can’t spend that much money,’ but they never said we hate what you’re doing or we don’t believe it works — they trust you.”
Though his job is dealing with all this technology on the road, Howard of course also deals with the guys themselves. Taking a run at their personalities, he figures, “Alex is one of the most generous, friendly guys you ever want to know. There’s no way you are going to have a boring time hanging out with Alex; he’s a party waiting to happen, basically. And he’s a great guy, and he’s involved and into a lot of things. Al is Al — he’s outgoing and out to have a good time. I mean, they all are. When Neil gets going he’s classic, he’s a fun guy to be around. But he’s very serious too. And Geddy is very serious only because he feels the responsibility of keeping everybody focused. But once in a while, we have fun. Ged gets loose too; everyone in the world gets loose — it’s just when. People think you get out on the road and get out of your mind and every day is a party. It’s not true, because we’d all be dead if that was the case.
“The secret with Rush is consistency,” affirms Howard. “Great songwriting, putting together great productions, keeping a team of people you trust around you to support you. And the machine rolls — the machine rolls smooth. You know, you buck the odds for so many years, you’ve never had a bona fide hit single . . . Rush have never been a Top 40 act, but they’ve succeeded despite everything. Everyone used to say this band will never succeed. You don’t have a hit single, you don’t appeal to commercial audiences. Instead they developed an underground following that is staggering. By bucking the odds for all these years and going against the grain, this is what you have. You have a solid three generations of fans, which I’m seeing at the shows every night. It’s pretty amazing.
“How many bands out there are still doing this? There’s not a lot. There’s a handful of true artists. When you go see a David Bowie or an Elton John, you realize there’s talent. You see Rush, you realize there’s talent. When you get your fans to come see it, and word of mouth spreads, that’s why they’re still able to write spectacular music and move ahead. It really upsets me when I hear fans say, ‘Oh, I just want to hear the old stuff.’ Yeah, you do want to hear the old stuff, but they should be thankful the band is writing new material and pushing forward and giving them more than the old stuff. I mean, I can always say to someone, ‘Why don’t you go and act the way you did when you were eighteen even though I know you are thirty-five now. Act the way you were when you were eighteen — I liked you better then.’ You know, that’s what it’s like.”
Thinking more about the band’s unique appeal, Howard comments, “Maybe you can call them a cult band, because they do have an underground following. Is it a commercial following? Maybe it turned into that. But I think it’s more of a hard-core cult following. A lot of people don’t go around humming Rush tunes in their head. They know them.”
For his part, Geddy agrees with Howard’s statements about how the two work together. “Yeah, I’m pretty involved in the visual presentation as far as the films go. But the lights are Howard’s, ninety-nine percent. I might give him an opinion at the end, but I trust Howard implicitly with the lights, and I only get involved when there’s a budget that has to be crunched. Because what he always wants is the moon. And I like to give him the moon, but I have other people who don’t want him to have the moon. So I have to put myself between the bean counters and Howard and figure out the creative alternative so it works for Howard and it works for them.
“But the fun part of it for me — and it’s always been the fun part of it for me — is the film stuff and the animation. I’ve always been fascinated with film; I’ve always been a huge film buff. One of my private lives was dreaming of being a movie director at one point. I gave that up a long time ago, but this satisfies a lot of that because I get to work with some great creative people, put a great team together. My brother is very helpful in that regard. He’s a talented producer and finder of real talented people. And there’s a number of people I’ve worked with for years, and we just keep finding these new artists, these young animators that are interesting, and we give them a song to work on. We try to find different, fresh approaches to making films for the rear screen, and that’s great fun. You learn a lot and you get to meet some really fabulous animators and talented people.”
And live, of course, is the where and when for Rush in terms of really getting to interact with their fans.
“I bless their hearts every single day,” says Geddy. “But they’re hard to analyze as a group because they’re so different. We have these hard-core fans, the old fans who have been there from the beginning, and they’re usually male, and they are really intense about the band. And then you get this new wave of female fans we keep seeing, and they’re driven a lot by the lyrics, I think. Then you get these fans who are so young, all young players, and they’re just air drumming. So you’ve got musicians in there, and then you’ve got people who’ve been really touched by the sentiment of a song that has some profound effect on their everyday life, their optimism. If anything is a connector between a lot of them it’s that something Rush has done musically or lyrically has had a connection with them that has impacted their life in an optimistic way, and that has made them indebted in some crazy way.
“I’m always amazed when a fan holds up a sign that says thank you. I think that’s all wrong. I’m the guy who says thank you, you came to see me, you’ve invested your life in something I’ve done. Yet they’re saying thank you to me. That is the most common thing fans say to me. It always takes me aback. It blows my mind that they’re thanking me for what we’ve done. It means I’ve given them something they’ve really needed or really wanted in some way. That it has offered them some comfort, maybe escape, but something that’s been interpreted as a positive thing to their lives.
“And so I am so appreciative of our fans, and I’m not just saying this in a pandering way. Every night I’m out there I cannot believe they’re there for us in those numbers. It really does touch me every night. It makes me want to play the best show I can possibly play. I can’t think about it past that because it distorts your sense of yourself. In a way, it’s not my business. Their relationship with me is their business. My relationship with them is my business. And to ponder it . . . like I know there’s some guys in our organization who go on these chat lines and blogs, and I can’t do that. I feel like it’s not meant for me. I feel like I’m eavesdropping on a conversation that I shouldn’t really be a party to.
“I still have the most beautiful miniature pair of basses that a fan made,” continues Ged on his relationship with his fans. “An exact replica of two of my basses. It was done with such care, in a little glass. I’ve kept it ever since, and it’s always on my desk. It’s one of the most touching gifts a fan has ever given me.
“I was given a ring, which I wore for over twenty years. A fan came up to me at the Edgewater Hotel in Seattle. This was on maybe the second tour, and it was a female fan, and no I didn’t sleep with her. A female fan just came up to me out of the blue and said, ‘I want you to have this ring.’ And it was a little ring that had a lyre on it, you know, a little medieval musical instrument. I thought it was such a sweet little thing. Anyway I put it on my finger, and I don’t know whether I thought of it as a good luck thing or some sort of icon or totem of some kind, but it stayed with me until just last year when finally because of the fatness of my baby finger I had to remove it. I keep meaning to wear it around my neck. I have no idea what the person’s name was.”
And the fans are so dedicated. Eventually they even created RushCon.
“Well, Kiss, Star Trek and Rush — those are conventioneers, right?” figures Ged. “I don’t know, I can’t think about that either. It just blows my mind. I don’t know how it came to be like that for them. There was a magazine in England called The Spirit of Rush. They talked about all kinds of stuff, and every time we came to England, they gave us copies. I think the guy who originally started it passed away — nice fellow. But they used it as a means of collecting all these like-minded people, and then they talked about other music and other bands and other things these people might like. It was like a coming together. I guess the internet has made that obsolete now, but it was like bringing a community together.”
The Spirit of Rush was first published in the summer of 1987 and ran sixty-four issues, closing shop in the spring of 2003. Its founder, Mick Burnett, died of a heart attack in July of 2002. The band sent a bouquet of flowers to his funeral.
“It goes back to that whole sense of comfort,” continues Lee, “and offering some optimism at a time in their lives where they need it. Everybody needs that, and you get it from wherever you can. You get it from your friends, you get it from your family, you get it from the books you read, you get it from films. I mean, film has a powerful effect on me. And I think for these fans, our music has that effect on them. I think if it were a poem, it would be less effective, but in the right surrounding, and if we’ve done our job properly in constructing the music to go along with Neil’s lyrics, then we’re delivering this message in a more emotional fashion.
“Some magazine — is there a magazine called Paste or something? — said that a Geddycorn is a semi-mythical creature, usually or always female, that comes to a Rush concert, sings all the lyrics, without a significant male other. And I was telling the story about how I saw a guy holding up a sign saying, ‘My wife is a Geddycorn, and she doesn’t use earplugs,’ which I thought was great. But that’s a new trend now — we’re getting more Geddycorns.”
Back to the business of 1989 and A Show of Hands. “Our productions got incredibly complicated at that point,” explains Geddy, reiterating the band’s intense reliance on technology, as can be heard all over this slick live spread.
“It was the beginning of the nightmare years for me. We started bringing in banks of samplers and sequencers to try to reproduce all these things we had now put on our records. So you take a record where maybe the biggest difference was that there was an extra guitar in a song or a little bit of keyboard here and there, and now we had orchestras and choirs. How do you go onstage and reproduce that? Play that song suddenly without the orchestra and choir? So we had to figure out a way to do all that. And the only way to do that was to bring in these sequencers and samplers. And at that point, they weren’t like they are now. Now you can hold down a cluster of keys and you can play the whole fucking song — it goes forever. In those days there was only a certain amount of sample time you had per piece.
“To avoid having to play to a click track and just automate the whole thing — we didn’t want to do that; we wanted it to be performance-based — we would have these sequences assigned for each note or each chord part of the song, and in order to play them live and still play them as a band would play them, I would have to play them in time. That meant playing bass pedals to keep the bottom end there, not playing bass in a particular part of the song and triggering either the chord pattern or the sequence, whatever it was. And in a lot of those songs, there were layers, so you’re playing a string part, and you’re adding a little accent on the other hand. It was very complex and required a lot of technology and required us to have somebody offstage loading a separate bank of sequencers and samplers for each song.
“And we had to design a fail safe too,” continues Ged. “What happens if the sampler goes out? It’s electronic technology; it’s very buggy. At that stage, computer technology also was very buggy. So we designed this whole system that was literally duplicated. Every song was loaded twice, and we had this giant switch that if one bank of sequencers went down, Tony Geranios, who does my keyboards, could hit this switch and instantly it would switch to the other bank of samplers. And some of it was just too much for me to handle, so we would split some off to Alex and he would trigger some stuff. And then we’d split some off even to Neil, because he was using electronic drums, although he had his own sampling nightmare going on back there. But sometimes if we had an extra sample that none of us could trigger, we’d give it to him, and he’d stick it on his [laughs]. So we became really trapped in this complex arrangement of keyboards.”
The video version of A Show of Hands (VHS and LaserDisc, with DVD to follow in 2006) would include a number of selections not on the double LP album or single CD, namely “Prime Mover,” “Territories,” “The Spirit of Radio,” “Tom Sawyer” and the “2112”/“La Villa Strangiato”/“In the Mood” medley used as an encore. “Lock and Key” showed up on first pressings of the U.S.-issued LaserDisc.
“A Show of Hands to me is a very fine album,” says Geddy, despite the computer-borne challenges. “That style of recording a live album, basically taking a handful of shows and choosing the best you’ve got, is a very good representation of that kind of live album. In terms of the construction of it, I think it was down to Paul Northfield and myself mostly.”
You can hear the band’s cartoony intro music (including “Three Blind Mice”) before the vista-wide entrance of “The Big Money,” which closes in less grand fashion, using the heavy metal riff from Cheech & Chong’s “Earache My Eye.” Offering value for the money, the album contained only two pre-Signals selections, “Closer to the Heart” (included because of its explosive climactic finish) and Moving Pictures deep track “Witch Hunt,” which appeared on a live album for the first time. Neil’s drum solo, which had begun going by the name “The Rhythm Method” on the Hold Your Fire tour, was not supposed to fit but did after all, even if it is presented in abbreviated form, with the edits decided by Peart himself.
Though Geddy was involved with nearly every aspect of the band and tour, he might have been driven nuts if he didn’t have non-rock things to do on the road to keep him sane. Inquisitive as he is — as all three of them are — falling deep into their hobbies came naturally.
“Yes, baseball became a way of distracting me during a tour,” explains Lee. “I would get up midday after getting in at four or five in the morning on the road, and I’d order my breakfast, after arguing with the room service person as to why they should still serve me breakfast at one in the afternoon. I’d turn on the tube as I’m eating my breakfast and in that time period, there was nothing on except for soap operas — and the Cubs. So I used to look forward to watching the Cubs during breakfast every day.
“And the more I watched them, I got hooked. Always have a fondness for the Cubs for that reason, even though I’m a local fan. But I guess that was the late ’70s, early ’80s. And so as soon as I came home after that tour, I got myself Blue Jays tickets and I was off as a baseball nut. It became a way of keeping my mind off of what I’m doing, off of the seriousness. You know, you can make yourself believe that what you’re doing is so important that you become this obnoxious creature. I don’t like to do that. I don’t want to think that what I do is so important. I’m just a musician. I’d much rather get excited about something else. It’s a survival mechanism for me. So baseball is great, and now that I’m a complete freak for rotisserie baseball and fantasy baseball, it’s never-ending and it’s wonderful. So I can hide in a room full of people and I can escape from whatever the band has to do by just pondering my fantasy team.
“The more hobbies you have, I believe, the more interesting life is. Art became an interest, as did photography. Wine is interesting stuff; it’s interesting to know how it’s made, it’s interesting to learn about where it comes from. I’m more interested in European wine, particularly French wine, and that has taken me to spend my summers overseas more, bring the family and summer in the south of France whenever I can and investigate different parts of the world. And that suits me, and it suits my wife. She loves to travel, I love to travel, and I like my kids to be well traveled because I want them to feel they can live anywhere in the world. I think I love everything that my wine collecting has brought me more than I love the wine itself. I’ve learned a lot about a lot of places, I’ve met some great people, and that’s what that passion is kind of all about.
“And art goes on forever. I mean, you can never learn enough, or get tired enough. I think in my secret heart of hearts, I wish I had that to do as my expression more than music; I think that’s my deep secret. Because it’s solitary and I really admire the solitary artist. I think it’s wonderful. And I’m sure if you talk to a solitary artist, he’ll tell you the exact opposite. But I love the fact that he doesn’t need any partners — studio, committee, production manager — to do what he needs to do. He just needs some available light and his technology, which is paint. It’s a fantasy. We always want to be someone else, I believe. I haven’t met anyone who’s so satisfied with their moment that they haven’t imagined being something else — I always do.”
And Geddy has other dreams to add to this list. “I wanted to be a major league pitcher for a couple of years there,” he says. “And I fantasized about that, but that wasn’t going to happen. Baseball’s so interesting; so many games within the game. And I love that it’s an eighteenth-century sport. That’s why people can’t watch it now, because it’s a complete anachronism. I mean, it is out of time; it has no business being played in the twenty-first century. But that’s what I love about it. I love that no two games are the same, I love what’s going on between the pitcher and the catcher, I love that whole game of outfoxing the hitter. I love the fact they’re all trying to steal each other’s signs. I love that there’s a different defensive alignment for every pitch and that every player on the field is thinking about what to do when the ball comes to him.
“But yet when it’s orchestrated and it’s all working in a great team, it’s such a beautiful ballet of athleticism. It’s just endlessly fascinating to me and the whole side of me that loves numbers. Baseball is a great game for number crunchers — it’s just so full of ridiculous numbers. Plus I love to collect things, and I love to find undiscovered things in all my various hobbies. And fantasy baseball is like that, finding the player that no one else has gotten hip to yet, finding a photograph in an auction that nobody else has found, unearthing the diamond in the rough.”