ON THE CREST OF A WAVE
If you take the spiral staircase down to Geddy Lee’s basement studio in his Toronto home, you enter a veritable Aladdin’s cave with guitars and basses hanging from every available space on the tartan-covered walls. Classic and obscure models in every conceivable colour make up a lacquered rainbow of instruments in a room where musical history has been made more than once. At the far corner of the room hangs a hand-tooled bass that holds almost as much history as this entire home studio: a pale Fender Jazz model with a Le Studio logo imprinted into its headstock.
Geddy takes it down from the wall and starts plucking abstractedly at its strings. “This was gifted to me from a guy called Mike Bump and the Fender Custom Shop people,” he says. “The wood came from the door to the sound room at Le Studio. Alex [Lifeson] got a Telecaster and Neil [Peart] got a pair of drumsticks. I guess one of the ex-employees had contacted Fender and told them that this wood existed, and he took it upon himself to have it sent to Mike. We knew nothing about it, and so it was a very emotional thing when they arrived because all these memories of recording in that studio came flooding back.”
Le Studio, set on Lake Perry and in the foothills of the spectacular Laurentian Mountains (“It was truly a part of the great Canadian landscape,” says Geddy), not only marked a new decade and studio for Rush, but also an era when they would change the way they worked, how they wrote songs and, not to overstate things, their place in the world.
To understand how Rush were moving forward in 1980, you first have to go back to the tail end of the 1970s. After the relative ease of the recording of A Farewell To Kings, Rush returned to Rockfield Studios in Wales in the summer of 1978 – and hit a wall. Songs came slowly, creative energy was sapped, day became night, their working habits inverted.
“During Hemispheres we were like these monks,” says Lee. “At one point during that album we stopped shaving, we sort of turned into these fucking grotesque prog creatures in this farmhouse making this record, working all night, sleeping all day. Permanent Waves was quite the opposite.
