Grace Under Pressure Radio Special
Promo album by Anthem Records for radio broadcast, April 1984, transcribed by pwrwindows
Geddy: We all feel like we've got so much great music in us that has never come out.
Neil: As songwriters we have wanted to take a mirrored kind of progression.
Alex: Went into the studio feeling really good about it, knowing exactly what we were going to do.
Neil: It was basically looking at things with a lot of compassion, but at the same time with anger.
Geddy: We admit, number one, we don't want to stop working with each other.
Alex: Not that it was wrong in the past, but it's just, again, growth and something different.
Geddy: The record sounds different, but it still sounds like us to me.
Neil: It reflects my reading and reflects my progression of knowledge about words and how to say things.
Geddy: When we first start getting into lyrics like this, and we read them over to ourselves, and we talk about subject matter, you know it opens up a lot in you.
Alex: We're basically a hard rock band but if we can bring in elements of contemporary music that's happening, it can only be a healthy thing. Change is important, and the growth is important.
Host: After 10 years of working and performing together, Rush still enjoy their constant progression, moving on to new musical boundaries, images, messages and lyrical frontiers. In this radio special we'll hear from Geddy, Neil and Alex, as they talk about their newest album, Grace Under Pressure.
["Distant Early Warning" plays]
Host: One of the biggest changes for Rush in the making of Grace Under Pressure was using British producer Peter Henderson. After having Terry Brown as the director in the studio since their first album, it was quite a different experience for them. But was a needed change, as Neil, Alex and Geddy explain.
Neil: It's very much a catalytic relationship with us. We don't hire a producer to dictate, but we hire someone to work with, and of course this is the first time we've ever worked with anyone other than Terry Brown. So it was a very, very different experience for us just working with someone who we didn't know either in a personal or a working technical sense. So there were just a constant interplay of his opinions and his methods with what we had grown accustomed to and us trying to be just as open minded as possible to anything he would suggest, because our whole purpose of working with someone else was to find out what it was like to work with someone else. So we tried very hard to be as open as we could. There was a chemistry that had to develop and did develop between us, that was very good.
Alex: I think we as a band worked a lot harder on the production than we have in the past and that was part of the reason for making the switch. We'd gotten to know each other so well with Terry, it was so predictable. And we wanted that element of surprise and uncertainly, and I think we got it with this record.
Geddy: After every album you always feel like, 'OK, well that sounds pretty good, but I still feel I have it in here, it still hasn't come out yet'. So we figured we've made so many records with Terry, and we enjoy working with Terry tremendously, he's a great friend, and a great person and a very good producer, nothing to take away. But we realized, we're not getting younger, and we have a lot to say musically, and we have never... We admit number one, we don't want to stop working with each other. We like working with each other, it's something we don't want to change. So we have to change around us. So it was time to go out into the big bad world and find some other people to work with. I realize that the sound of a band comes from their fingers, and you can put them in 5 different studios, and it almost doesn't matter what guitar they use or who's behind the board, somehow their personality will come through.
["Afterimage" plays]
Host: Alex Lifeson tells how Rush have developed their songwriting and playing over the past years.
Alex: I think it's grown. I suppose we first started thinking like that with Permanent Waves. The idea was to write songs that were a bit shorter, a little more condensed with again the feel where you could really grab onto it. I guess you go through a period where you really want to show off your dexterity and "well we can play in this bizarre key, do all these crazy things". We went as far as we could with that, I think. It's getting a little self-indulgent at times. We just turned around and went for the song, for a really good song.
Host: As Neil Peart explains the questioning feelings that permeate the record lyrically.
Neil: It was basically looking at things with a lot of compassion but at the same time with anger. There's no denying that I've taken kind of a different lyrical turn this time. I don't think it is a permanent change, but it is a phase that reflects my reading and reflects my progression of knowledge about words and how to say things. So there's more current events on this album, certainly, which is a sensitivity to what's happened in the lives of people around me. Basically I've looked at my friends and watched the troubles they've gone through in the last year or two and the difficulties that life has presented for the whole world. But also in a microcosm for myself I used the second person singular a lot on this album, whereas Signals was a lot of the third person singular. I used "he" all through that album and I might have been talking about me, I might have been talking about you, I might have been talking about them, but I used he as my device, if you like. And this album my device was the second person singular which is a very important thing that no one has mentioned yet. The fact that it's always about "you". It's about the singular you and that the point of view I was writing from. I felt this tremendous reaction to what was going on, this tremendous pathos, compassion for the tragedy I saw in people’s lives, being unemployed and people’s lives being ill and reading the paper every day while we were working on the new material, those things that were happening in the news couldn't help but creep into the lyrics also. So if it seems a bit darker, perhaps it is, but it doesn't reject anything I've said in the past. So the optimism and idealism that I've still expressed is still true. But it's tempered now with an essence of understanding, "what is" as opposed to "what ought to be", and also a feeling for what is opposed to what ought to be, which is important. It is a common mistake, I think, to cut yourself off from the reality that people are dealing with, because it's easy to say, "Well they should be doing your thing”. I read a great quote the other day that kind of applies here. My brother sent it to me, a quote from Oscar Wilde saying "Selfishness is not wishing to live as you wish to live, it’s wishing others to live as you wish to live". That's an essential truth that I think really applies to some of the things I've said in this album too.
["Red Sector A" plays]
Host: From Grace Under Pressure, the new album by Rush, "Red Sector A". Geddy Lee tells how the song came about.
Geddy: The music for that came out of a jam we were having. What we did on the last two tours, every time we go in for a soundcheck we tried to get in a little early so we can play for half an hour. Just play, without structure, without anything. Jon [Erickson], our soundman, tapes all of these. At the end of every tour I take all these tapes home and I listen through them, and it's really interesting. Sometimes it's rambling garbage but sometimes there's moments that are so spontaneous, and they just move you. Part of that song came from a moment such as that.
Host: Neil tells us how the word red became such a used word in the album.
Neil: The use of red is more whimsical than thematic because I just happened in the last couple of years to get a strong feeling for the color red. Red anything is really an exciting, vibrant color and bespeaks excitement, I guess, is the only thing I can say. It's a brash color. The Red Sector A title comes in a whimsical way from the area that we sat in when we watched the launch of the space shuttle Columbia. The visitors area in which we were was called Red Sector A. Well I've had it in my notebook as being a great sounding thing for a long time. So when I needed a name that was non-political, and non-geographical and also non-temporal for that song, because I didn't want it to be set in any particular historical time and if possible I wanted it to slightly suggest the future, so the title was perfect. The fact it had red in it was coincidental, that was the name of the place. And 'rockets’ red glare' was of course a nod to The Star Spangled Banner. And "Red Lenses" is of course a play on words of rose-colored lenses and of anger and bloodshot eyes, and to me I love the sound of the word lenses and they had to be red. That was kind of accidental and 'Red Alert' is a phrase, the kind of little phrase I write down all the time because I like them. I like the way they hit me, and I like the sound of the words. To some extent it's coincidental all those reds and once I started to see that pattern I just played on it because I liked it, I like the color, I like the word also, it's a great little word, "RED".
["The Enemy Within" plays]
Host: Geddy explains how he feels about putting music to lyrics such as "The Enemy Within".
Geddy: I'm of the belief that whenever you're talking about something that's hard and tough to take, that the music should be diametrically opposed to that. Every once in a while you could take something that's on a downer, a blue lyric for example, and if the music is blue, you've got one big blue, which sometimes for its own sake is nice to do. I'm of the opposite belief. I believe that if you're talking about something heavy that the music shouldn't reflect that heaviness in that way. I like to go to the opposite, I like to bounce in the other... I like to sing heavy lyrics but really be snappy when I'm singing them, because it seems to make better communication somehow. Instead of people going "this is like a pillow of darkness", I like to intrigue people by these lyrics and have a different way of saying "We're talking about something here". I'd rather hold out a hand instead of having this dark cloud just sitting there".
Host: Band lyricist Neil Peart gives us his thoughts on the track "The Body Electric", a certain nod to previous science fiction material that Rush has done in the past.
Neil: It has always been a great vehicle and it's a thing I said around the time when I was writing more using that background, is that it's not important to me, the fact of technology or the vision of the future and all that, but if you want to express something it's such a perfect way to do it because there are no preconceived parameters to it. Your imagination, or the idea that you want to present, is given free reign and you can paint things as black or white as you chose to illustrate your point. Well in this case it was again another way of expressing a kind of compassion and it growing out of a machine thing. Great writers like Rod Ser1ing and John Windham have explored that before and have given machines thoughts and feelings and of course I was subsequently to discover Blade Runner also, was a very excellent story using the same premise that I had used for "The Body Electric". I am glad that the song came first before I had seen the film. As soon as I showed it to Geddy and Alex who had seen the film, they both immediately drew the connection and suggested I see the film. But it is the same idea and I think you can feel compassion for a machine that feels. There was no deep underlying theme to it but it was something that touched me, that idea. It grabbed me that here should be a human metaphor also of an individual trying to escape something and drawing on that grace under pressure again. And also an angle of religion that I brought out in it too, which Blade Runner had made use of, and I have read in other science fiction books too, is machines, because they develop sentience, they also develop religion. And to me the image of the android bowing and praying to this mystical figure, which was the mother of all machines, and to me I find that very effective. It gives me a chill somehow.
["The Body Electric" plays]
Host: "The Body Electric" from Grace Under Pressure, Alex's guitar sound and his approach to the material is different on this new album. Here he tells how it came about.
Alex: In the past we used a different micing technique. A little further away from the amps, a little bit more of the room. Different types of mics where the sound was a little brighter, not quite as warm. With this record I have been listening to a lot of the live tapes that Jon Erickson, our sound engineer, had been making during the last tour. The sound on those tapes was really good and I thought why don't we approach it like that. Mic it like we do live and see what we get, and if it does not work out we can just toss it out. And we set up the mics, close micing, using dynamic mics and it sounded great, right off the bat. It needed a little bit of work, but it sounded really quite good. It didn't take too much EQ and it took a bit of compression, the sort of things you do in the studio to enhance sounds. But it wasn't a chore that maybe it was in the past, finding a really good guitar sound. And as a result of that the guitar is warmer, it's more abrasive without being brittle. I think it's definitely what I wanted as far as a guitar sound. There are a few solos on this record where I approached it from more a rhythmic type solo rather than a flurry of notes. I have really gone off that now, I want to make the most out of the fewest number of notes.
["Kid Gloves" plays]
Host: Geddy talks about today's music and lyrics and the different slant Rush has to this.
Geddy: There's some really nice music being made but it's music that doesn't really push you. But it's an era of love. It's an era of romance. It's an era of discussing break ups between two people. It's an era of discussing all that goes along with that. I don't know if that's emotion or sentimentality or what's the fine line that divides emotion, real emotion and something that's just sentimentality? I don't know. It feels to me that a lot of the music today is just sentimentality even though it's very good. And sometimes you need to cut through that.
Host: One of the most unusual pieces for Rush to do on the album was the track "Red Lenses". Here Alex tells how it developed.
Alex: Well Neil had worked on a drum pattern that he had wanted to use. That was the drum pattern for the choruses, and we started writing around that. It was such a crazy drum pattern that we thought "let's go really crazy and make it real funky", and that was the approach to it. And the red sections, which if you want to call them the verses, they have more a fusion kind of feel to them or a jazzy/rock kind of feel in the use of the chords and the way the patterns are. It was really a lot of fun, when we started doing it. It was something that was really untypical for us.
["Red Lenses" plays]
Host: "Red Lenses" from Grace Under Pressure. And talking of lenses, how did the great master photographer Yousuf Karsh get to take the picture of them on the back sleeve? Geddy Lee explains.
Geddy: I don't think since 2112 have we ever had a picture of the three of us together, let alone on the back of an album cover. We've always stayed away from it. We were going through a weird hiding from the reality of what we do for a living kind of thing. But the last year was so difficult, from a lot of reasons, and as a result we wanted to have a picture of the three of us together instead of individual portraits. And Neil said let's get a "Karsh-like" photo, this was his way of describing it, and I said "let’s get Karsh!" Somebody in our office called him up and he was thrilled to bits to do it. He'd never taken a photo of a rock band before. I think he was a little disappointed in us to tell you the truth. I think he wanted us to be a little more extravagant, crazy guys with make-up on and wild hair, whatever. So I think we were a little conservative for him.
Host: A track on the new album which seems to sum up the feelings of this new work is "Between The Wheels". Geddy Lee.
Geddy Lee: We're so bombarded by so many aspects of this. I heard a little while ago how many wars there were going on at the present time in the world, and it was mindboggling. When we first start getting into lyrics like this and we read them over to ourselves, and we talk about the subject matter, you know it opens up a lot in you. It opens your emotions up and you start feeling a lot of things. One side of you says "This is pretty heavy stuff, do I really want to get into it?" But the other side of you is saying "You have to get into this. This is what life is about". My stomach is churning over this now so how can you not get into it. But the thing we tried to add is that you don't get a feeling that it's hopeless, and Red Alert is the best word to describe it. It's like, OK, this is the world we live in, look around and let’s recognize how do we cope with it? We're trying to cope, I think that's what we're saying in a way. We're trying to have some grace under all this pressure.
["Between The Wheels" plays]
Host: And as a final note Neil gives us an indication of the spirit that moves him and the band into new areas and directions.
Neil: I cannot stand still listening to music and I might love an album passionately for a month but the next month it'll be something else. And because of that hunger as a listener, it drives me always to be looking for new kinds of music and new artists and so on. It keeps me growing stylistically and in terms of influences, it's changing and growing so rapidly, because of that in me as an individual. Well when you apply that to music of course it gives you so much else to draw from and no one pretends that they aren't influenced by other music. But a lot of people are influenced by the same music all the time. Whereas we as a group, and myself as a person are influenced by different people all the time. So that keeps us changing. But the fact that we are true to something that is Rush, that's true but it's such an undelineated thing that we have never drawn-out margins of what Rush is supposed to be. So consequently there are no preconceived things where we would ever look at a song and say "It doesn't suit what Rush is supposed to be". That's never been a thing we've ever had to do, is put a song aside. The only reasons we've put ideas aside is because there's something better that we are more interested in doing. But otherwise everything has its place.