“I think we recorded a fairly sterile live record.”
Perhaps another marker of increased success for Rush and their suddenly solo-flying manager Ray was that in advance of their Moving Pictures campaign, they would set up at Wings Stadium in Kalamazoo, Michigan, for three nights to rehearse their bigger, broader show, before presenting it there on a fourth night. A month into the tour, the guys would return home to Toronto for a triumphant three-night stand at Maple Leaf Gardens. Directly after, the trucks would roll up Highway 401 for six hours to Montreal, where the show would be recorded for use on the band’s second live album, Exit . . . Stage Left, issued October 29, 1981. Also making the album would be material from the band’s two nights in Glasgow, Scotland, June 10 and 11, 1980.
In between Glasgow, which was part of the Permanent Waves campaign, and the subsequent Moving Pictures tour, Rush would do a handful of isolated dates in September 1980 to limber up before entering the studio to work on Moving Pictures. These were U.S. eastern seaboard shows supported by NWOBHM up-and-comers Saxon. Featured would be pre-LP versions of both “Limelight” and “Tom Sawyer,” neither of which differ much from the eventual finished product, right down to Neil’s fills.
The reason the material on the record reached back so far was that the band had been recording the Permanent Waves tour for use on a live album that was supposed to come out before Moving Pictures, something the guys often spoke about in interviews at the time, offering that it would comprise performances from Glasgow, Manchester, Newcastle and the Hammersmith Odeon in London, and musing about making a sort of rock documentary at the same time.
“Our first tour in America was supporting Rush,” explains Saxon bassist Steve Dawson, offering fond memories of playing with Rush. “Fantastic, brilliant. I mean, can you imagine me, from a little town in England, opening up for Rush, with probably the greatest bass player who’s ever lived, Geddy Lee? He came over when we were doing sound check. They had done their sound check and we were doing ours, and he just came over and talked bass, if you know what I mean. Because I was fascinated with his sound. Because he plays with his fingers like me. He doesn’t play with a plectrum. He plays with his fingers, and I was amazed at the sound that he got. And I was asking him how he did it. And Neil was just a quiet guy, kept to himself, and the guitarist spent all the time in his dressing room making model aircraft [laughs]. So we basically didn’t have a lot to do with the other guys, but Geddy was really friendly, a good guy. And in fact, we talked a lot about UFO, me and Geddy, because UFO supported Rush just before us, and so we were swapping Pete Way stories. You can pass a lot of time because there’s an awful lot of stories.”
There’d be some drama — although not Pete Way–related — in April of 1981, when Kim Mitchell blew up Max Webster, who had been supporting Rush across America until then. Into May, fellow Canucks FM would begin a long support slot as Rush finished off a full blanketing of the U.S.
Supporting on the band’s final dates of the tour in early July ’81 would be the Joe Perry Project, with the Aerosmith guitarist going solo after the implosion of “America’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band.”
Keeper of sanity on the road, Howard Ungerleider, remembers this situation all too well. Rush, of course, opened for Aerosmith in the old days, and as Howard relates, “Aerosmith had a tour manager who was not a pleasant man. Aerosmith had six hundred lights and they let us use sixteen. We were not allowed to have dinner with the Aerosmith entourage. Whatever was left over, Rush was allowed to have. Our contract rider was modest; we asked for a case of Canadian beer, a deli tray and some water. And he came in one day, must’ve been the tour manager, and said, ‘You’re in the United States now; you’re gonna drink American beer.’ Then we’re not allowed to have a sound check until the doors open. When the doors open and the crowd starts coming in, you can bring your equipment onstage and then they would turn the PA down halfway. This went on for seventy shows.
“Their just deserts came when Joe Perry left Aerosmith years later. He couldn’t get a tour because there were no bands out. There was one band out on tour and that was Rush. Many agents came to Rush’s manager and said, ‘Listen, can Joe Perry get on the tour? You guys are out.’ ‘Sure, Joe Perry, sure.’ And I went to Geddy and Geddy said, ‘Whatever their contract rider says, I want you to double it.’ And I said, ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah, make sure he gets a sound check and PA, and I want you to just kill him with kindness.’ I said, ‘Geddy, are you sure?’ And he says, ‘I’m sure.’ Because Geddy Lee’s a class act.
“Three months go by, and I’m in the dressing room one day and Geddy says, ‘Is Joe Perry here?’ I go, ‘Yeah, he’s in his dressing room.’ And he said, ‘You want to go ask him if it’s okay if I come by and say hi?’ I said sure. So Joe says, ‘Hey, sure, yeah, he can come by.’ So Geddy and I come by, we go into Joe’s room, and Geddy goes, ‘Hey Joe, how’s it going?’ He goes, ‘Great, man.’ Geddy says, ‘Are you getting a sound check every day?’ He says, ‘Oh yeah, it’s great.’ ‘You got food and stuff?’ He goes, ‘Yeah, more than we asked for. It’s really, really great.’ And Geddy says, ‘Are you enjoying yourself?’ ‘Yeah, for sure.’ Geddy says, ‘Good, that’s great. Because I’d never want you to feel the way I felt when we were touring with Aerosmith, and I was opening for you.’
“We had other bands too who would turn the PA down, ‘Screw that band from Canada.’ People were paranoid, paying for the PA, paying for the lights. So that’s the adversity I was privy to before we were headlining. A long and muddy trench. Seventy-four hundred concerts. Those are the things I dealt with on a daily basis.”
But Howard remembers this campaign fondly, in terms of his development as a lighting director. “Yes, and the thing for me that really made it come alive was when I had the three wings over the band during the Moving Pictures tour. I just loved that I could use the truss as a box, although it wasn’t square, it was circular. I could put it over the band and make it do things.”
Rush’s stage presentation by now featured back-projected film, pyro and dry ice in what was estimated to be a $40,000 show. The final tallies for the tour were cited as a gate of $4 million from 905,000 fans at seventy-nine shows. But the guys could afford the extra expense now, Alex explains. “When Moving Pictures came out that’s when we could actually get ourselves out of debt. Also, we were offered to re-sign, renegotiate, redo our deal. That’s when a lot of those sorts of worries were dispelled.”
Tony Geranios, an important part of the crew since 1977 and credited in Exit . . . Stage Left as “guitar and synthesizer maintenance,” remarks that Rush “always offered value for money. After the keyboards started becoming a prevailing part of the sound, it was tying Geddy to the keyboards quite a bit, and Alex to the pedals. And I think the concern was there wasn’t enough action onstage. Because they felt they should be running around and rocking out. That’s when the video became more of an important factor. And as time went on, things started to loosen up. Howard’s lighting designs . . . I can’t think of a tour where I wasn’t just totally blown away by what he’s been able to come up with. It’s a full media production. You get the lasers, you get the lights, videos, music, and to me, that follows along with their philosophy.”
Geranios draws an interesting analogy between the shows and the crafting of the records. “Each new tour always impressed me. The fact their level of playing was at one plane, but then their level of creating was like twenty percent higher, and it would always go that way from album to album. They would try to deliver something they hadn’t delivered before, make a statement musically that they hadn’t been able to, or hadn’t considered before. Everything is always one step better. Their progression with their music is the same with the shows. Every show has its own magical portion or addition to it, but all of them are of a caliber where the enjoyment factor is there.”
But that doesn’t mean things always ran smoothly. “We had some trying times with the keyboard stuff and also with the rear-screen projector,” continues Geranios. “I remember one of the earlier shows, after we’d gotten a thirty-five-millimeter projector. Lee Tenner was the projectionist at the time. And we were setting up scaffolding, and I guess the people we’d been working with made a mistake, and the projector fell twenty feet off the scaffolding onto the floor. That was pretty horrendous.”
Then there was that time back on the Hemispheres tour, on March 27, 1979, when Rush was supported by April Wine.
“Yes, we had like a week, week-and-a-half break, and we were gonna start up again in Salt Lake City. And I was having a lot of grounding problems, things going on with the Oberheim. So I sent it off to Oberheim, and they were gonna ship it back to me, but in Salt Lake City. We get in a day before the show actually starts. That’s how everyone always worked, to make sure the crew was there the day before the show so there’s no mix-up.
“I called up Oberheim and they said, ‘Yeah, we shipped it out.’ And he gave me a shipping number, and I called asking about it, and they said they didn’t have it. A whole day goes by, and next day, day of the show, I’m calling again and saying, ‘I can’t find this thing; nobody has a record of it.’ And Oberheim said, ‘We’ll get back to you.’ And about an hour later they called me and said, ‘Well, it’s still sitting on the shipping dock. At the airport. The case is too big to go into any of the doorways for the planes that we fly into Salt Lake City. Look, we can put it on a truck and get it to you in eight hours.’ And by this time, it’s eleven, twelve in the morning.
“So I called up my contact there, good guy, never about the dollars, just really a great business person. So he told me there was one guy they sent an Oberheim to, one guy in the Salt Lake City area that had one. I got the number from him, called him up, got his roommate. And I said, ‘I need this keyboard for tonight; will we be able to rent it?’ ‘Oh yeah, hundred bucks.’ ‘Well, fine.’
“About twenty minutes later, I get a call, ‘Could you make that two hundred bucks? I just talked to my guy. He wants two hundred dollars.’ ‘Two hundred dollars, you get a pass, here, fine.’ So we get this thing in, during sound check, still haven’t met the guy who actually owns it. His roommate brought it down because the guy was at work. I’m going over with Geddy how to get the sounds and make everything work because we don’t have the interface. So we get something to where it’s useful, to get away with it for the night, everything will be fine.
“So we’re in the beginning of the show, and I’m on the other side of the stage, on Alex’s side, which is where I always preside for the most part. The guy who owned the keyboard started coming up on Geddy’s side of the stage. He’s walking up, and at the time, National Sound was doing our sound, and there was a guy named Dave Berman. Dave looked at this guy coming up and goes, ‘Where’s your pass?’ ‘In my pocket.’ ‘Put your pass on. You can’t be up here without your pass.’ ‘I can do whatever I want.’ And he took another couple of steps. Dave popped him right in the fucking face, split his lip. So as the security is carrying him off, several people around there are hearing, ‘But that’s my keyboard onstage’ [laughs]. We got sued over that.”
Off the road for the summer, Rush set up at Le Studio to go through what Neil estimates was fifty reels of two-inch tape. The producing credit would go to Terry Brown as well, with engineering by Paul Northfield. One bonus from the idyllic summer retreat was the writing and recording of “Subdivisions,” soon to be the centerpiece of the band’s next album.
Says Terry, “We had recorded in a number of different cities, and we’d have to sift through it all and find all the right takes and make sure we weren’t shortchanging tunes. I think that record’s just fine. We had a great time, did a lot of traveling, met some really great people, recorded with great recording trucks using good technology, and then we spent some weeks putting it together and mixing all the right songs and getting the continuity right.”
Exit . . . Stage Left was issued as a double album in a gatefold sleeve. Hugh’s clever cover art featured a character or element from every studio album on either the front or the wraparound to the back. Guys in overalls are “moving a picture” that depicts the Caress of Steel cover art. Both the naked man and the suited man from Hemispheres are represented, plus the young royal from A Farewell to Kings. There is a flying owl, and a road case features the logo from the debut. Way at the back we see the Starman and pentagram from 2112.
On the front, model Paula Turnbull from Permanent Waves, standing stage left, pulls back the curtain, peering at the packed house waiting for the start of the show. Hugh recalls that Turnbull, now a famed model in Europe, was incensed that there was no trailer for her. The photo shoot was conducted at the Winter Garden Theatre, at that point unused but now revived, just around the corner from Massey Hall in Toronto (although the live crowd is from a Buffalo show). Hugh wanted to get the band on the front cover saying goodnight and exiting stage left, but after attempting the shot at about fifteen shows, he had to admit defeat.
As for the title, “Exit stage left!” is what Hanna-Barbera’s pink cartoon cougar, Snagglepuss, says when he gets in trouble. The band even wanted to put Snagglepuss’s tail on the cover but were hampered by the legalities of the idea.
All told, there are three amusing similarities to the packaging of the first Rush live album: (1) both have stage in the title; (2) both feature an empty stage; and (3) both were shot in Toronto, at locations about a minute’s walk away from each other.
Interesting wrinkles to what is a pretty predictable record — both in the playing and in the track list — include the waltz music intro to “Jacob’s Ladder” (actually a snippet of a big band piece called “Ebb Tide”) and the huge crowd sing-along on “Closer to the Heart.” The guys acknowledge this magic moment by crediting the Glaswegian Chorus — this one is from Scotland, along with “Jacob’s Ladder,” “A Passage to Bangkok” and “Beneath, Between & Behind,” the latter two being the only songs from records previous to All the World’s a Stage. The four Glasgow performances comprised all of side two of the original four sides of vinyl. Also of particular interest is Alex’s classical guitar piece, “Broon’s Bane” (Broon is Terry Brown’s nickname), Geddy’s Yiddish “vocals” in “La Villa Strangiato” and Neil’s gratuitous bells in “A Passage to Bangkok.” Neil’s drum solo was inserted into “YYZ,” where it would stay for two tours.
Exit . . . Stage Left was certified platinum, reaching #10 on the Billboard charts, #6 in the U.K. and #7 in Canada. A video version, much shorter than the album, was issued the following year.
Remarked Geddy of the record: “That one was an attempt to kind of overexaggerate how perfect you could make a live album. There was a lot of meddling with the tapes and trying to make sure we had the best performances. We also made a conscious effort to pull down the audience a bit and emphasize the music. In the end, I think we recorded a fairly sterile live record. So yes, that would entail the most tinkering of any of the live albums. We played around with making sure things were in time, snipping bits of time here and there. It turned into a bit of a nightmare of mixing and perfecting. And that was, as with All the World’s a Stage, most of us being involved, although I think Neil tuned out pretty early in the process.”
“We did a lot of recording on Exit . . . Stage Left,” confirms Paul Northfield. “They did a lot of repairs on that record because their first live album had been so raw, and they were so uncomfortable with it. They went to the complete opposite extreme on Exit . . . Stage Left. Apart from any drums, they replaced almost everything — vocals, guitars, a huge amount, in order to have more perfection. Which actually makes it more of a hybrid; it’s like a live bed track album with a lot of overdubs on it.”
Neil, to his credit, admitted in the press, enthusiastically and without apology, to the odd repair. At the time, he saw it as a virtue and of course in one manner it is — you want to have a good record. Interestingly, all three of the guys have professed an animosity toward live albums, Neil, at the time, even going so far as to say he didn’t think Rush would be making any more of them.
Indeed, there’s a “stuffiness” and a “corporateness” to Exit . . . Stage Left. Call it the sophomore jinx or the curse of the second gig. Despite the band’s initial discomfort with their first live album, fans gravitated to the rawness and realness of All the World’s a Stage. Priest . . . Live!, Extraterrestrial Live, Yesshows, Three Sides Live, Life/Live, Worldwide Live . . . it would be hard to find fans who think any of these bloated hockey barn productions possess the magic of the first live album from any of these bands. And then we get into the CD age and the idea of double albums and single albums and gatefolds is replaced by just “long” live albums, and the magic is gone. Most heritage acts — Rush egregiously included — started replacing the making of studio albums with more and more live albums. And then there’s the themed set lists, playing one old record in its entirety, along with trying to figure out which is the official release, the DVD or the triple CD? And what do we do when the track lists differ? (Even Exit . . . Stage Left dropped “A Passage to Bangkok” from its original CD issue.) Decades down the line and blown vocal chords later, all of this pollution and dilution of the catalogue tend to strengthen in potency the talisman-like nature of an All the World’s a Stage.
Exit . . . Stage Left would mark the end of the road for Ian Grandy as part of the crew, there since the basement jam days.
“I think they were mutually sick of me, and I was ready to go home,” says Ian. “We had our second child, who was two months old, and my wife was like, ‘I need you to be at home in the day.’ And I really wasn’t being treated very well at all. It’s one of those things that you know you’re getting the axe, and if you leave, you don’t get any money. If you stay, you get some sort of settlement. In the last couple of months, it was the truck drivers who told me, ‘You’re gone at the end of the tour, you know. You’re fired.’ ‘Yeah, thank you.’ It’s kind of disheartening. But it was the only time I was ever let go in my life, and I was quite happy to go. I was an accountant for twenty years after that, in construction. But yeah, we were going to Europe, and I hadn’t even got my passport, because I knew I wasn’t going.”
As for why he was let go, Grandy says, “Well, it’s my own fault, my own abuse of substances and all that. But when you’re in that kind of position . . . I’ll give you an example. They had something they sold, a promo thing, at the merchandise table, with all the roadies, except there were thirteen roadies and they only had twelve in the picture. I wasn’t even on it, and the guys were going, ‘You’ve been with the band the longest time. Like, you’re not on this?!’ And then Neil came to me, ‘I just realized you’re not on this. How can that fucking be?’ Well, it’s a little heartening. Especially when Neil is going, ‘I’m so upset that this happened.’ Like, I apologize to you.
“That seems to be that whole era,” continues Ian, including Signals in his survey. “They got rid of me, they got rid of the sound company, they got rid of Terry. They really kind of cleaned themselves out. I don’t think Alex was happy with Signals. That was my impression. He wanted to try something else. And what I’ve heard lately is, everybody is free to have Geddy’s opinion. But after fifteen years, you know, what I’ve always told people is, ‘The ninth time you’re in Toledo, Ohio, the thrill is gone.’ And I see their itinerary, and I’m going, Columbus, Cleveland, Pittsburgh . . . oh my God, how many times can you play there? I was ready to go. And no hard feelings, I went home, and I haven’t been back in thirty-three, thirty-four years. I don’t come and hang around.”