My effin life, p.12
My Effin' Life, page 12
In the early seventies, the Toronto circuit basically consisted of the Abbey Road Pub, upstairs from George’s Spaghetti House on Queen Street, and the Gasworks and the Piccadilly Tube, both on Yonge. Those were the days before moshpits and body surfing, so the only time I ever had that kind of interaction with the audience was when I got drunk on my birthday and fell into the crowd and they very kindly pushed me back up onto the stage. There was also the Meet Market (renamed the Colonial Underground in punk’s heyday) with a seriously rambunctious crowd—Alex had just had a wisdom tooth removed before one gig there, so out of it due to the painkillers that he had to play sitting down on a chair, his mouth swollen and bleeding, the upside being that he had a front-row seat for a fight that broke out in front of him right as we were playing “You Can’t Fight It”! Then there was an oddball show at the Queen Street Mental Health Centre,* with patients dancing/convulsing in every imaginable way, and me discreetly mumbling the line “They got some crazy little women there / And I’m gonna get me one” for a rocked-up cover of Wilbert Harrison’s “Kansas City” we were playing at the time. We laughed about it for years after, but truthfully it was sad and disturbing. I can only hope that to them it felt like a party.
While never taking our growing Toronto following for granted, Ray would often send us gigging around Ontario, way out of town. He booked us in some pretty obscure places (for us, anyway), sometimes for a week or two at a time. The Russell Hotel in Smiths Falls was one memorably shabby party place. Then there was the unforgettable two-week stand at Finnigan’s in the Thunder Bay Motor Hotel in, you got it, Thunder Bay, where our deluxe accommodation consisted of two big rooms with cots scattered about, and zero heating. I remember sleeping with a blow dryer under the covers and having to turn it on every hour to warm myself up. Then on waking we’d have a shot of rye whiskey just to get the blood circulating. The owner was a real dick who wouldn’t advance us any money; being broke, we couldn’t go out for so much as a 99-cent burger and had to take all our meals on credit in the hotel, running up a food bill that in the end would come off our pay. His only kindness was just before the final Saturday matinee (attendance, two to three drunk patrons), when he sprang for a couple of jugs of draft beer, which of course we annihilated before the set—half of which Alex and I ended playing horizontal. It hardly mattered to the crowd, such as it was. I recall one regular yelling, “Neil Young was born here! Neil Young was born here! Neil Young was born here!” Okay, dude, thanks for letting us know . . . again.
On the bright side, enduring years of cat calls and slurred requests for “Smoke on the Water” did build character and gave us a thicker skin. As official working musicians now, we simply took it in our stride and would end our bar days in July 1974 headlining upstairs at the Colonial Tavern, the venerable jazz club where greats like Cannonball Adderley and Thelonious Monk had once played; it was the only place any of our parents came to see us, as you could book a table upstairs overlooking the stage and enjoy dinner while we pummelled you from below.
Now, this whole business of writing a memoir is a dicey proposition, especially when one is over the age of, ahem, sixty-nine. (Yikes, did I just say that out loud?) I, for one, am filled with self-doubt and recrimination when the old hard drive fails to bring up a file on demand. Some memories are solid as a rock—usually moments of triumph or failure, turning points, instances of sadness or loss—but others are . . . a blank. This is troubling. You’d think that the life I led, especially between ’68 and ’72, was so new and exciting that the memories would be indelibly imprinted on the little grey cells, yet to my dismay there are tracts of time and even relationships that have blown away like so many fallen leaves.
In addition to the bars, we still did high schools that had us crawling all around Ontario (and all over the stage). The first shot (TOP) inspired the “devolved” stage set for the encore finale of the R40 Tour in 2015.
Geddy Lee Archive
December 21, 1970, at A.Y. Jackson School. One of many gigs before we were allowed to play the bars.
Ossie Parsons
Vices of the road.
Geddy Lee (TOP, BOTTOM LEFT), Geddy Lee Archive (BOTTOM RIGHT)
Why? Why so many lost gigs? I suppose that some were simply not of much consequence, while others are simply too painful to recall. I can barely remember a thing, for instance, about the hiring of the guitarist Mitch Bossi, the gigs he played with Rush or even my relationship with him. Why not?
Bringing him on board was John’s idea, as they were friends. He started with us in the late fall of 1971, maybe early spring of ’72. He was a sweet guy and a decent rhythm player; I remember that much. He lent us a fatter sound; as Lindy had before him, his parts gave Alex more freedom to solo, and he definitely looked cool onstage with his groovy shag haircut. As we became more successful on the bar circuit, John himself was getting more and more into fab threads and had cut his hair into a cool layered Mod vibe. Maybe that’s a reason John wanted Mitch in? To some degree they were brothers in fashion. Alex and I weren’t so concerned about the band’s visual appeal, but I guess we went with the flow. After a few months, however, we decided he wasn’t working out. Alex recalls that as Mitch was opening his guitar case one day, John broke the news to him. Mitch simply closed the case, picked it up and walked out without a word.
Beyond that, all I’ve had in my mind’s eye for years were images of Mitch sitting in a parking lot with us, and another occasion at a shoe-shine stand. But rummaging through the old files, I find that both of these “moments” are in fact publicity shots from the period. In the grand scheme of things, I’m sorry to say, our connection was tenuous at best.
At home, despite giving me the silent treatment for leaving school, Mom had more or less resigned herself to the fact that I wasn’t changing my mind. She helped with the occasional handout of cash and paid for my driving lessons, and I even inherited her old car, a beat-up Pontiac Grand Parisian that I used to drive to gigs in places like Oshawa. She was a powerhouse, I have to say: whilst almost single-handedly raising my ten-year-old brother, she’d built up the store in Newmarket enough to consider expansion. She was struggling, however, to come to terms with my sister, Susie, who’d married outside of the faith (and given birth to my nephew Robbie), and I knew she’d find the idea of me following suit very hard to swallow. I had left religion behind me after Dad died, so Nancy being a gentile was never an issue for me at all, but this was not the life Mom had imagined for herself after surviving the war! Unless things became serious—like marriage serious—there was little to gain from adding to her woes, and although I was technically still living at home I was out and about so much that it felt just as easy to keep a little truth like my relationship with Nancy from her.
The only performance photo I have with Mitch Bossi (at the Abbey Road Pub, I believe) . . .
SRO / Rush Archive
Did I say “marriage serious?” In reality, things were becoming strained between Nancy and me. It’s a big enough ask for anyone, let alone someone as fiercely independent as she, to hook up with a musician, but the extra pressure we’d created for ourselves by keeping our relationship a secret made it increasingly tough to be on the same page. It was looking more and more like we needed to flap our wings a bit, and one day she suggested we break up. I was shocked and hurt at first, arguing that we could work it out, but she was determined to move on. Then I thought, maybe the timing wasn’t so bad. She wanted to get out and have fun, while I was more preoccupied with the band and writing music. Alex had also just become single and bought himself a 1963 MG—a “piece of crap,” in his words, the hood tied down with a clothes hanger—which we could make good use of in a quest to be swingin’ bachelors, and I took her rejection even more in my stride. (That car really was a piece of crap: driving to a show in Newmarket, the hood came loose and flew up smack into the windscreen, blinding and scaring the hell out of us. Probably from the shock of it, we ended up on the side of the road helpless with laughter.)
. . . and one of the only publicity shots with him (seated).
SRO / Rush Archive
Between the Abbey Road, the Gasworks and a repurposed old tavern called Larry’s Hideaway, Rush solidified its local following, and those places became showcases for record company execs to check us out. The owners and managers at the Abbey Road particularly liked us; we gigged there so often that we felt like the house band. We’d hang with the staff after closing, sharing stories and playing drinking games into the wee hours, before staggering outside and weaving our way home.
We were desperate to make a record and snag an opening slot on some major band’s concert tour, but our brand of “Energized Rock,” as our stickers and T-shirts proudly proclaimed, was at first rejected by every single record company in Canada. Fortunately, when you’re young you’re also arrogant: if somebody casts aspersions at you, you just think they’re being a dick. You justify any bad reviews by saying, “Well, that guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” So we were disappointed by the rejections—and the rejections after that, and after that—but not broken. We understood that we were not commercial. They were looking for hit singles, and we were not a hit single band. We had a crude sound, and we knew it. And we liked it.
It probably wasn’t just our lack of commercial viability. Record companies in Canada at the time were mostly branch offices without much autonomy when it came to signing acts, the head office usually in Europe or the States. Canadians like us would start to break through in America only after a touring circuit had been established there. Without the precious airplay from a hit single, we’d have to sell our music directly to fans on the ground—the whole word-of-mouth thing. The door would open for us only with the rise of AOR, or “Album Oriented Rock,” as it was known in the industry, played on FM stations where a grassroots following could request our kind of music.
By then Ray Danniels had partnered up with Vic Wilson, an industry veteran (and sax player for, among others, the Downchild Blues Band), to create SRO Management. It was a larger company with more employees and a roster of acts including Max Webster, Fear, a Beatles cover band called Liverpool and another novelty act called The British Are Coming!, which covered all the British Invasion bands of the sixties. SRO made no bones about it: those two were blatantly commercial groups that were in a sense paying for us. But eventually, Ray and Vic resolved to break the impasse for Rush, and they did this with a two-pronged attack.
First, we needed an album, and since we were having zero luck with the labels, they’d have to start their own. A few ambitious, independent thinkers in Canada had already tried their hands at this. The inimitable Bernie Finkelstein was one: his True North Records, which released music by folk-driven talent like Bruce Cockburn and Murray McLauchlan—whom he also managed—were an inspiration. But while it was easy enough to start an indie record label, actually making money from it would be more difficult.
Part one of the SRO master plan begins with a celebration of our signing to Ray and Vic’s new label, Moon Records. (BACK ROW, LEFT TO RIGHT) Vic Wilson; Ray; S. Maley, SRO; me; engineer of our first record, David Stock; J. McDonald (FRONT ROW) Alex and John.
SRO / Rush Archive
Second, with a record to release, SRO would establish itself as a show promoter. In that capacity it could slot us in as an opening act for whichever big-name bands were brought in from abroad and connect with booking agents from all around the world. With any luck, this ambitious plan would lead to a cross-country tour, a wider (and more sober?) audience than the ones we were facing off against in the bars and ultimately a record deal in the USA and beyond.
Recording our own songs was a potentially expensive proposition. (We had only ever recorded once before—just a few songs* at a demo studio called Sound Horn at the back of a parking garage beneath the notorious Rochdale College building.*) No manager or band wants to spend their own money if they can help it—no record company, either; as we would discover later, that’s what advances are for—which meant booking session time in a small studio in the middle of the night when the rates were very low. We were playing five sets a night at the Gasworks at the time, so we had to load out at one in the morning after our last set and take our gear to Eastern Sound Studios on Yorkville Avenue, record our songs through the night, clear out before their first morning session, go home, get some sleep, then bring the gear back to the Gasworks and do it all again. Thankfully, we pulled it off in only two sessions.
Eastern Sound’s Studio B was a small eight-track studio. Alex recalls that on the first night he stumbled into Studio A by mistake, where an advertising session was going on. Some dour-looking guy turned around, looked down his nose and gave a harrumph. Alex muttered back, “Stupid boge,” and closed the door. For me, walking into that place that night was to enter an Aladdin’s cave, an awe-inspiring world of wonders. It didn’t matter that it was tiny and equipped only with an eight-track recorder; it might just as well have been the cockpit of a supersonic jet, with its smell of electronics, the studio baffles and knobs, dials and gauges that seemed to go on forever. When you closed the thick, heavy door of the vocal booth you were enveloped in a vacuum silence—my god, like saying goodbye to the rest of the world.
Here we are in our finery, playing at the venerable Gasworks. Deep in the throes of glam, we’d change into our sequins and studs in a tiny dressing area situated beneath a restroom, which more than once leaked through the ceiling, forcing us to go onstage redolent of urine.
SRO / Rush Archive
(TOP AND RIGHT) Lyric sheets I wrote on the spot in-studio for “Before and After” and “What You’re Doing” (and “Finding My Way” before the Terry Brown sessions). (BOTTOM LEFT) Figuring out what to record: John’s reckoning of all our songs.
Geddy Lee Archive
Like anyone making their first record in an utterly foreign environment, we had no idea what we were doing. A studio is a dead-sounding space in which you have to rely on the engineer to capture the way you sound live and at your best—or at least the way you think you sound—and what’s coming back off the speakers is not that. Not having an audience feeding back to you or the sound of your amplifiers buzzing in a live room, creating excitement, is no small thing. An isolation chamber is unforgiving. Playing live, you may think you’re in tune, but even if you’re not, the moment’s gone in an instant, never to remind you how you actually sucked; in the studio you’re laying it down for the rest of your life. At a gig you start out stiff, but as you warm up and your muscles loosen, you start to gel and you hit a groove; in the studio you’re playing the same song over and over again, and all your focus is on the mistakes instead of the vibe and the fluidity of the overall performance.
This was a huge and daunting adjustment for us. We asked a million questions of the producer our management had hired, David Stock, a British guy living in Toronto and working with Vic and Ray as their in-house engineer/producer. He seemed like a good fellow, and we buckled down, eyes wide open and trusting.
As a rhythm section John and I had a lot to learn, but because we’d been playing long sets back-to-back nightly for weeks, we had our parts down pat. Likewise with Alex on both rhythm and lead guitars, double tracking for the first time. It was all pretty magical, and at first as we played ourselves back while turned up to 11 on the studio speaker system, we thought the tracks sounded awesome . . . if not quite awesome enough. Naturally we wanted to reproduce the energy, power and heaviosity of our live shows, and when we said with the full authority and technical know-how of a band that had never been in a studio before, “David, can you make the guitar sound . . . ya know . . . a little heavier?” he answered, “Don’t worry, lads. It’ll all be fixed in the mix.”
Of course we nodded and said, “Okay.” In time we’d learn that those are the exact words no musician should ever have to hear.
We laid down all the bed tracks on the first night, including those for “Working Man,” a number we’d written with a heavy riff and a lengthy jam in the middle with the express aim of proving ourselves the fastest guns in Willowdale, and at our management’s insistence a cover of the Stones’ “Not Fade Away” that also did well for us in the bars. On the second night, I was excited and nervous because it was time to record the vocals. Though I was tired from singing all night at the Gasworks, my vocal cords were young and resilient, and I felt up for the challenge.
As I mentioned earlier, while waiting for John to come up with actual lyrics, I used to make up substitute words on the fly to tide us over, and after several performances those substitutes would sometimes form a pattern. Thank goodness for that practice, because on night two in the studio, John was nowhere to be found. We waited, hoping he’d turn up, but he never did. We then received a message from him. I don’t recall verbatim, but it was basically “I wasn’t happy with them, so I tore them up.”
I was stunned.
He never really explained himself to Alex or me, either that night or later on, and in retrospect I don’t think he understood his own actions. He never apologized because he was not an apologetic guy to begin with. He always kept so much to himself. A while later, it was clear that he was embarrassed for what he’d done, but mainly because it was a failure of his own personality on display for us to see. And indeed, what Alex and I understood that night, as clear as day, was that he’d been defeated by his own demons.
John was a moody guy. He was highly intelligent with a great sense of humour but cynical too. He could light up a room with a clever quip just as quickly as bum you out with a glare. He could make you feel you were his best pal or wither you with a sarcastic remark. He was a difficult guy in the dressing room. Some days you’d come in and he’d be happy, and when he was happy, everyone was happy. But other days you’d come in and he was pissy, and if you said the wrong thing to him, he would just snap a retort at you, dress you down in a sentence. Contrast this with after Neil joined the band: you could count on one hand the number of snarky comments that we threw at one another over forty years. If we wanted to make a point, we’d do it with humour, not from a place of nastiness. Alex will say that insecurity made John take things out on the very people who cared for him the most, and that he was angry about his health issues, as if he felt he’d been ripped off for a good life. He suffered from Type 1 diabetes, which we suspect had been alienating for him as a boy (and with us he still had to inject himself with insulin every day), but whatever the root causes, John’s moods could be wearying.
