My effin life, p.25
My Effin' Life, page 25
Zut alors: our assistant Sam Charters, me and Max Webster’s drummer, Gary “Stixy” McCracken. On a sad note (why does there always have to be a fucking sad note), a few years later Sam succumbed to the many injuries he sustained from an accident in Toronto. A bright light extinguished in his prime. Mais au fin du jour, mon ami, we will always have Paris.
Geddy Lee Archive
Still haunted by the hellish stories of my parents’ Holocaust experiences, I reflexively thought of Deutschland as the epicenter of evil. When I walked through the bullet-riddled façade of the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg, infamous for figuring prominently in the birth of Nazism, I got chills. I checked into my room, and though it was now a refurbished modern suite like so many others I had stayed in over the years, I could not bring myself to remove my jacket. With a litany of stories from my mother’s lips crowding out my brain, I couldn’t shake the feeling that during the rise of the worst fascist regime the world has seen, the German High Command might have stayed in that very room! And not just that. I was also painfully aware that this hotel was just up the street from the infamous Palace of Justice where in 1945 the Nazis who’d murdered so many members of my family and destroyed the lives of countless others had most certainly been put on trial. No wonder I was seeing ghosts. Further feeding my wartime hallucinations, when I switched the radio on, I found it tuned to, of all things, the American Armed Forces Radio Network. Thankfully, they were talking about baseball, and the room began to warm as I returned to my senses.
Still, I had to get out. I went for a walk, observing and eavesdropping on people from every walk of life going about their regular day. I bought a frankfurter and sat listening to German being spoken—and was shocked to find, due to its similarity with Yiddish, how much I could understand. And every time I saw someone old, I could not help but ask myself, “What was he doing during the war? Where was she?” (Geddy Lee, Nazi Hunter? Nah, better stick to my day job.)
The end of that tour was a limp to the finish line—literally. The morning after the show in Hamburg, the plan was to drive promptly to Mannheim, but Alex injured his finger in his hotel room (during what I must assume was some sort of Serbian mating ritual with Charlene) and had to go to the hospital, where they drilled a hole in his fingernail to relieve the swelling. He then insisted on taking the wheel out on the Autobahn, which as you probably know has no speed limit. Pedal to the metal, he lost control as he noticed too late that he was about to fly past the Ausgang—and badly rammed a road sign. The police arrived but spoke no English, while he spoke no German, requiring them to wait two hours for a translator. And then, when he finally caught up with us in Mannheim, he was in too much pain to play, so we cancelled the gig at the last moment, and the following two as well.
We hung out in Zurich for a couple of days as he recovered, and did manage to make it to Holland’s Pinkpop, the world’s longest-running annual pop and rock festival, with a star-studded lineup including Dire Straits, Elvis Costello, Peter Tosh and, right before us on one of the festival’s three stages, the Police. They were riding high with “Roxanne” that summer, and everywhere you went their catchy, reggae-fied melodies put a bounce in your step. Darlings of the press corps, they mugged and cavorted for the paparazzi at every opportunity, and after their set dove straight into a swimming pool that was backstage (only time I’ve seen that) with all their clothes on—Sting in his effin’ jumpsuit. Also back there was a low wall, the other side of which was a concrete staircase leading to the exit. After soundcheck my keyboard tech, Jack Secret, quite possibly under the influence of the demon weed, hopped over it and fell twenty-five feet through the air as Jan Smeets the promoter shouted, “His feets! He’s broken his feets!” Howling in pain, Jack was carried by Lurch across the field to a medical tent, whence he was taken to another hospital, but insisted on being brought back straightaway so he could program the keyboards at the side of the stage, even while prone and in plaster. He spent the rest of the summer recovering on his mom’s sofa, but man, what a trooper.
After the tour, our batteries sorely needed recharging, so we decided to take a six-week break—the first of that length since Neil had joined the band. Then, in midsummer, we moved into a house on Lakewoods Farm in Flesherton, Ontario, hoping to replicate the kind of isolated rural work environment we’d enjoyed in Wales—the bonus being that it was just a two-hour drive away, so we could slip out for the weekends and see our families.
We set up our gear in the basement and hunkered down to write. Our approach to Permanent Waves would be a total reaction to Hemispheres. Instead of composing side-long interconnecting pieces, we wanted to create songs no more than five to seven minutes long. We were still after big ideas and complexity but thought we’d lend them more flexibility if we freed them from a strict overarching narrative: a small-c concept album this time, loosely tied together by a broad theme. We were determined to approach this album with “crisp professional dispatch,”* and as it turned out, everything about making Permanent Waves was shockingly painless. We bust out quickly, the ideas flowed and in no time we’d written “The Spirit of Radio.”
This was a time when new wave or “alternative rock” was trending on radio across North America, and one particular station just outside Toronto was making its mark with a looser format that, as Neil told the CBC, he found inspiring:
I remember coming home very late and as I was cresting the escarpment with all of the lights below of Hamilton and the Niagara Peninsula, where I lived at the time, CFNY Radio was on the air with a fantastic combination of music . . . CFNY’s motto was “the spirit of radio.” The song itself, musically, is switching between radio stations, with a reggae section at the end, the second verse is new wave, I’m playing like a punk drummer there, and that was all intentional.
With a bunch of songs tuned up and fingers in good form, we were primed to start recording at Le Studio in Morin-Heights, deep in ski country an hour north of Montreal and overlooking the Laurentian foothills. It didn’t take us long to fall in love with the place—so much so that we’d record or mix the next five, and parts of eight, albums there. It was just five hours from our homes, meaning we could drive there with ease and Broon could bring along his cocker spaniel—our mascot, Daisy or “Ski Bane,” the nickname she’d earn for her knack of being unfailingly underfoot whenever Neil and Alex went cross-country skiing.
You feel the province’s French influence even before you get to Quebec, as soon as you’ve passed Kingston on Highway 401 and start seeing vans advertising the classic Quebecois delicacy, frites avec poutine.* Then you cross the border, and everywhere there are houses with colourful sloping metal roofs (to help the massive snowfalls melt and slide off) and, instead of convenience stores, dépanneurs. You approach the teeny village of Morin-Heights and zoom past the local watering hole, the Commons Hotel, where David Bowie, the Bee Gees, Chicago, Bryan Adams, Sting, the Cult, Keith Richards, Rupert Hine, our own Jack Secret and more have been known to quaff a few, play a game of pool or jam with local bands after their sessions up the road.
Most days, sunlight streamed through the studio’s floor-to-ceiling windows facing onto the lake, a welcome change from the bunker atmosphere of most recording studios. Most important, the control room featured a Trident A-Range console, which provided the sound we knew and trusted from our time at Trident in London. Making Permanent Waves with the Trident from start to finish would give us a continuity of sound—the first time that had happened since our Toronto Sound days. Like at Rockfield, Le Studio’s isolated location allowed us to record outdoors, with the added bonus of being able to bounce an amplified guitar across the lake and off the foothills for some truly natural echo; and we were able to create our own tidal pool sound effect for “Natural Science” by recording Neil and Alex gently paddling on the lake.
On the far side of the water sat a four-bedroom guesthouse and a one-room cottage where we lived for the next few weeks, feasting on meals prepared by a celebrated local chef, André-Paul Moreau. We’d also eat at his restaurant, La Bouffe en Broche in Saint Sauveur-des-Monts, a ski town a twenty-minute drive away whose streets were lined with French restaurants, making the place just as busy or busier in the summer as it was in the winter. I was by no means a foodie back then, but in many ways, this is where my interest in food and wine took flight. Every day in the chalet, André would pick a Beaujolais for us, usually a Brouilly, which I knew nothing about other than it was fruity and enjoyable, but the idea of having wine with dinner on a daily basis appealed to me. It felt so civilized. My keyboard tech, Jack Secret, meanwhile, was a teetotal cannabis man who preferred Coca-Cola, so Chef André would fill his wineglass to the brim with Coke and announce with a glint in his eye, “Voilà, Jacques, le Beaujolais Américain!”
While writing this book I’ve made it a point to listen to every single thing I’ve recorded in the last fifty years and make a note of my feelings, however good, bad, indifferent or painful. For want of space (and your tolerance), I can’t talk about every album we released (thirty-eight including our solo records)—but right here I’d like to stop and reflect on one song in particular, “Freewill,” that over the years has sparked some controversy. I’ve played it in concert hundreds of times since its release in 1980, and although I always sang it with everything I had, back in the day I may have taken its impact a little for granted.
I accept that every music lover is going to interpret songs their own way; that’s just the unwritten contract between writer and fan, it’s all in the game. Sometimes the two align, and sometimes not. But over time, every artist also has the right to change the way they originally felt about their own creation. Call it a mark of personal growth. With that in mind, here are a few words about the law of unexpected consequences.
When I was young I ran away from the obligations of the religious household in which I was raised. I felt like I was exercising my free will, but because I was headstrong I didn’t fully understand the implications of my actions. In those days I would grab on to whatever ideas supported my aspirations, both personally and as a professional musician. I was trying to forge my own identity. Then, as the band fought to resist the corporate pressure to commercialize, I needed even more backbone and found strength in the Ayn Rand books Neil introduced me to—in particular the artistic manifesto evidenced in The Fountainhead and, to a lesser extent, “The Virtue of Selfishness.”
In 1979, when he handed me the lyrics for “Freewill,” I instantly loved the song. It was a powerful expression of the way Rush was taking control of its own destiny, and also echoed my own refusal of religious dogma, of subjection to the hand of God or, more abstractly, fate. Even if some of Neil’s concepts were a bit of a stretch for me, I sang it every night with confidence and pride, offering it to our audiences as a contribution to the time-honoured discussion about existentialism, determinism and faith. It was, in fact, indeterminism that I believe was at the heart of it—the idea that our lives are not predetermined—and I hoped that would come across; but in the four decades since, I’ve seen people play fast and loose with the interpretation of the last lines of the chorus:
I will choose a path that’s clear
I will choose free will
To my dismay, those words have been cited without regard for the song’s overall message and used as a catch-all, a licence for some to do whatever they want. It makes me want to scream. Taken out of context, it becomes an oversimplified idea of free will, narrow and naïve, not taking into consideration that even the strongest individual must, to some extent, bow to the needs of a responsible society. Too often it’s seized upon as a reckless substitute for common sense.
Men at work. What a breath of fresh air to have daylight streaming in as opposed to working in a bunker—the reality of 99 percent of studios. I wish I could remember what song we were writing here . . . (BOTTOM RIGHT) Lyrics for “Entre Nous” and “Natural Science” waiting to be sung.
Fin Costello / Getty Images (TOP, MIDDLE, BOTTOM LEFT), Geddy Lee (BOTTOM RIGHT)
During the Covid pandemic, I saw this first-hand. When I posted a picture on Instagram of myself wearing a mask, loudmouths were quick to throw “Free will!” back at me, as if those two words alone constitute permission to act without regard for the well-being of others, to ignore science and to rid ourselves of responsibility for the consequences of our actions. To me, it was stupidity taking shelter in poorly thought-through ideology, holding on to the lyric as if it meant “I can be as selfish as I fucking want to be.” Well, folks, from where I sit, it ain’t that simple. I’ve read the book and the fine print. Life is not so black and white; we live in its grey areas.
I’m afraid that life is too complicated for us to simply “choose free will.” You can’t just say or do anything, prizing your rights over everyone else’s. Generations of scholars (notably the Talmudic ones) have spent their lives arguing in byzantine detail the interpretation of society’s rules, because it all depends on context: when, exactly, will I choose free will? Over the health of my kids or the happiness of my wife? Over the responsibility not to pass a disease on to my fellow citizens? A caring, functional society needs constraints and responsibilities. Terms and conditions apply.
A vague grasp of complicated ideas is not the same as virtuous independence. Existentialism has been interpreted by some as a licence to behave without regard for societal consequences, but unless I’m mistaken, that’s not what the big thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre or Paul Rée meant; their understanding of free will incorporated a measure of moral responsibility.
I may sound like I’m a grumpy old man yelling at clouds or that I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid of a quasi-socialist country, but my point of view has evolved with experience as I’ve watched and cared about what life has thrown at friends, neighbours and strangers alike. We have a social safety net here in Canada that includes national healthcare, daycare and so on—it isn’t perfect, but it works pretty well most of the time, especially for those on the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder. Living in that kind of society for almost (ahem) seventy years has made me see the world through more compassionate eyes than I had as a youth or in 1979. Sure, we pay more taxes than many others do, but I prefer to live in a world that gives a shit, even for people I don’t know. Okay, now I’ll get off my soapbox.
These track sheets exist but the master multi-track tapes they pertain to have completely disappeared, which means Permanent Waves can never be remixed. Nor could the original keyboard sounds ever be accessed for live performance purposes.
Geddy Lee Archive
Permanent Waves wasn’t the only record I worked on at Le Studio that year. I was asked to take the helm on a new album by Wireless and said yes, since I thought the guys were great players and had wanted for a while to try my hand at producing. In December I booked the sixteen-track Good Noise suite on Le Studio’s grounds, with winter in full force, the snow shin-deep and the air so cold you could crack it over your knee. I once again packed my bags, said goodbye to Nancy and drove back to Morin-Heights.
Sitting in the big chair was more of an adjustment than I’d expected. It’s one thing to sit beside the producer spewing forth ideas about your own music and asking him to make it all happen, and quite another to realize other peoples’ ideas as the decider-in-chief. The gig requires a good ear, of course, but also a high degree of resourcefulness and imagination, plus a level of objectivity and tact that I had taken for granted in Broon. I would soon learn that a degree in psychology can also be helpful. Above all, if at the end of the day the chips fall just right and you’ve helped them make a great album, their lives may be changed for the better—but make a stinker, you might be blamed for it but you get to move on and work on something new, while the band pays the true price.
Steve McMurray and Allan Marshall were Aussies who’d moved to Canada via England in 1975 and formed Wireless with Mike Crawford and the ex-Goddo drummer Marty Morin.* I found their twin-guitar sound driving and inventive, all four were excellent musicians and I especially loved Allan’s soulful voice and bass playing. They were pros, eager, good-natured and willing to do what it took. We bonded quickly and I had high hopes for the production.
It was a low-budget project, but we got a lot done working crazy hours. Thing is, I didn’t yet have a ton of confidence as a producer, and after a while the decisiveness that the job required, the pressure of responsibility, the moods and the deadlines were stressing me out. Studio life can be intense. It demands microscopic attention, and nerves can sometimes fray. Musicians swing back and forth from elation to boredom, from confidence to insecurity: they wait for their turn to bare their souls on tape and then listen back, overly scrutinizing every note and beat; working such long hours it’s almost impossible to retain a shred of objectivity.
There’s usually one guy whose ego needs feeding more than the others’, and who constantly tries to wrest control. (Oh, shit. That sounds like me.) I remember one time when I was mixing a track for another band, which shall remain nameless, the leader challenged my decision to push the guitar—which I felt was the most compelling part of the track—louder in the mix. I made my case, but then the guitarist himself came over and said, “Ged, can you pull back the guitar volume? It’s obscuring . . . you know . . .” He glanced over at the leader. “Him.”
Mike doing a take while I hold down the E-string to keep it from rattling (what you call a “hands-on” producer).
Geddy Lee Archive
That blew my mind. It was like he was under a kind of spell. I said, “Yeah, but it’s the guitar that really makes the song!”
He replied (and I quote), “Well, you know, the leader is like the flower, and we are like the weeds. The weeds have to be trimmed back so that the flower can be seen clearly.”
