Limelight: Rush In The 80s , livre ebook

Ecw Press - Martin Popoff

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198 pages

English

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In the follow-up to Anthem: Rush in the '70s, Martin Popoff brings together canon analysis, cultural context, and extensive firsthand interviews to celebrate Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart at the peak of their persuasive power. Rush was one of the most celebrated hard rock acts of the '80s, and the second book of Popoff's staggeringly comprehensive three-part series takes readers from Permanent Waves to Presto, while bringing new insight to Moving Pictures, their crowning glory.

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Publié par	Ecw Press
Date de parution	15 octobre 2020
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781773055855
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0500€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Limelight
Rush in the ’80s
Martin Popoff

Contents Introduction Chapter 1: Permanent Waves Chapter 2: Moving Pictures Chapter 3: Exit . . . Stage Left Chapter 4: Signals Chapter 5: Grace Under Pressure Chapter 6: Power Windows Chapter 7: Hold Your Fire Chapter 8: A Show of Hands Chapter 9: Presto Photos Discography Credits About the Author Martin Popoff — A Complete Bibliography Copyright

Introduction
Get any pile of Rush fans together at, say, one of the many legendary RushCons over the years, and you can quickly elicit strong opinions on what parts of the band’s ’80s catalogue are valid and which are not.
It was an action-packed decade for the boys, as they finally found themselves, by dint of their own wiles and will, in the top quartile, not so much with Permanent Waves but for sure come Moving Pictures , a red-and-black record accepted as the band’s masterpiece.
With Signals , Rush started challenging expectations. The ’80s will mess with your head, and Rush took to messing about with all the decade had to offer, enthusiastically so, given the guys’ predilection toward explorations of modernity. Keyboards and hairstyles in tandem, Geddy, Alex and Neil took the mile when offered an inch, and by the time we get to Power Windows and Hold Your Fire , Rush was an astringent, high-strung pop band, trendy keys and synths in excess.
Most fans went along for the trip, and if they weren’t always happy with records like Presto , the concert halls were still filled, as the band had no problem delivering the power trio power the fans expected during a show, aided and abetted by a deep catalogue of hits more analog.
And the productivity was impressive as well. Most ’70s bands couldn’t hold a candle to Rush’s tally of seven studio albums and two double live spreads in the ’80s, even if the guys decided to notch back on the mega-tours. Rush were regulars in Europe, but, never a world band, they began to visit less frequently, also cutting back on how much of the U.S. and Canada they would hammer at repeatedly.
As you may or may not know, Limelight: Rush in the ’80s is the follow-up tome to Anthem: Rush in the ’70s . That book looked at the long ramp-up to the Zeppelin-esque debut album in 1974 and the arrival of a transformational force in the guise of Neil Peart, sadly and shockingly deceased from brain cancer just as that book was getting ready to go to print. Peart, of course, became heralded as one of the greatest rock drummers of all time — and certainly one of the most air drummed — as early as his third record with the band, 2112 . Anthem then examined the band’s first live album, followed by A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres , and all of a sudden, the ’70s are over and it’s time for something fresh, including technological innovations as well as the rise of MTV and the age of video.
Limelight: Rush in the ’80s is the story of these subsequent years, beginning a couple of weeks into the “haties” (as voiced by Morrissey) with the robust if brief Permanent Waves and bowing out in November of 1989 with Presto , a record that bucked so many trends, the band found themselves kind of marginalized, or more positively, defiantly singular, sounding like no one else while still essentially playing a form of mainstream pop.
Along the way, we hear from the myriad producers Geddy, Alex and Neil brought into the circle, not so much desperately but avidly, curiously, looking for inspiration from industry peers. Essentially what Peter Collins and Rupert Hine (and slightly less so Peter Henderson) brought was pop modernity, with the guys all too happy to push buttons on the latest toys to craft a sound more in keeping with what they saw as valid and au courant, the music of grown-ups. A contentious dynamic of the book, which I argue is borne out in the music and lyrics, is that the band was seeking the respect of folks they thought were smart, folks who had good taste. You may look at that as a negative, or you might see that as the guys enthusiastically participating in the hustle and bustle of the modern world, growing intellectually, not conceding that they themselves couldn’t be new world men.
And becoming new world men meant that Geddy, Alex and Neil would develop interests outside of music, because, after all, wasn’t music itself moving toward the idea of multimedia? Toward this end, toward becoming well rounded — in effect, Renaissance men — as the ’80s wore on, the guys pulled back from touring, spending more time on family, travel and other creative pursuits. The business of Rush is very different in this book versus the first one, reflected in the vast difference between A Show of Hands and All the World’s a Stage .
But this isn’t the end of our story. Because of course Rush didn’t stop at Presto , even if the band had slowed. More joy and much more heartbreak were to star-cross the lives of Geddy, Alex and Neil, and the story wouldn’t be complete if we didn’t march forward and meet the heroes of our tale at their own individual completions. Stay tuned as we continue this loud and loving march through time toward a conclusion that now, with the recent passing of the Professor, is very, very different and darker than when this trilogy began.
Martin Popoff

Chapter 1: Permanent Waves
“Most promising keyboard player of the year.”
For all the turmoil in the music industry in the late 1970s, including the changings of the guard (from rock, quickly past punk into post-punk) to the recessionary year that was 1979 (saved barely by the arrival of The Wall , In Through the Out Door and The Long Run ), Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart — a.k.a. Rush — kept moving forward from strength to strength. Their sixth album, Hemispheres , proved that the band could sell, and on tour excel, despite a record that was as anti-commercial as they get. Broken down, that record gave up a side-long song about Greek gods and a long instrumental, leaving room for only two short pieces, one of them heavy slide-rule metal (“Circumstances”) and the other hummable enough, but about trees fighting each other. But the awards kept coming, allowing for even more of the autonomy and validation the band attracted. By the end of the decade, Rush was undisputedly the biggest band from Canada.
Still, the band wasn’t making a lot of money. Rush had moved away from the days of hit singles like “Closer to the Heart” and “Fly by Night.” But the financial situation wasn’t dire, and there was a sense of generosity within the Rush camp. They wanted to give back, often playing B-city gigs that might not be particularly profitable. The band also poured a lot of their profits into making their show bigger and more extravagant any chance they got. It’s a strategy that paid off: it made Rush, a still-small band in 1979 and 1980, look huge.
In tandem with the band’s expanding maturity as a live act was their consistent growth from record to record. Permanent Waves would demonstrate a number of advancements, but these would be subtle, and in part driven by the guys changing up the environment in which they worked.
“We were torn at that point with what kind of music we wanted to make, in terms of its length,” recalls Geddy. “We had fallen into this pattern of writing these really long pieces and that started to seem formulaic to us, predictable. Complicated musical part here, this is where we do the chorus, and it kind of got boring. So we thought, we still like to play long, complicated pieces. If we had our druthers, that’s all we probably would do. And then there is the lyric thing. How do we bring that in and how do we keep improving? So we came up with this idea of trying to make the long pieces but have them much quicker. So over five, six minutes, as opposed to twenty.”
Permanent Waves did not let up on the quick edits, the progressive virtuosity, the rapid arrival and dispersal of action points, but as Geddy says, it’s almost as if the result was long songs defying the spa ce-time continuum, somehow being as long as they’ve always been, but then there’s time left over (maybe that’s also why Permanent Waves is such an irritatingly short album).
“It was a conscious thing, to not write really long songs,” seconds Alex. “And what resulted from that would be fine. I remember that when we wrote these songs, it seemed like they were songs within songs, just smaller pieces. ‘The Spirit of Radio,’ for example, the sequence was a very key part to it. That led to the signature guitar riff, off the top of the song. We all connected to that one thing as the center, and all these other little pieces branched out — the same thing but much more condensed.”
“There was something about the record that was really fresh for us,” continues Geddy. “It was written quickly. And the recording session was so smooth — or maybe it was just in comparison to the horrible pain of Hemispheres — but it seemed so fresh and energetic, and there was a really good vibe to the whole session. We weren’t so far from home, not so isolated from family, in a new studio. You walk in and there’s this beautiful view of this lake and the Laurentian Mountains. So it was a very happy, good-vibe record. And we finished it very quickly, I think five or six weeks.”
Leading up to the sessions at the iconic Le Studio, in Morin Heights in rural Quebec, the band had taken their longest break yet; they’d had six weeks to recharge. The band enjoyed a rural retreat before entering the studio, with writing and rehearsals taking place at Lakewood Farms, near Flesherton, Ontario. This mirrored their approach to Hemispheres and was something they also did for the next album. The sessions ran in September and October of 1979 toward a release da