| By the end of the summer of 1971, Alex, Geddy and John had all turned 18. At last Rush was able to start performing in bars. They took to it with gusto. They also added a number of new original songs to their set: �Feel So Good,� �Garden Road,� �Love Light,� �Margarite,� �Morning Star� and �Sing Guitar.� Not long after turning 18, Geddy and Alex dropped out of school to devote themselves full-time to their pursuit of a career in music. �All of a sudden there was a whole new area to play in,� Lifeson said. �It wasn�t just two gigs on weekends; it was six gigs a week, five sets a night.� By the end of the year, Ray Danniels was pouring a great deal of his time into handling Rush�s bookings. Rush was only one of many bands Danniels managed, but they were becoming a good portion of his total work. Not only was he booking their gigs and managing their accounts, but he was also investing a good deal of time into efforts to convince one of Toronto�s record labels to consider giving Rush a recording contract. None of the labels were showing any signs of interest. Soft rock was big in Toronto. Heavy metal was kid�s music; it didn�t get played on the radio. Toronto radio was for artists like Gordon Lightfoot and Anne Murray. Said Lifeson, �We got a pretty strong following after a while in Toronto, and we made lots of friends.� In early 1972, Rush�s schedule continued to grow as they picked up more and more gigs in bars and school gyms around Ontario. They also added two more original songs, �Bad Boy� and �Fancy Dancer,� to their shows. Although he had passed up the opportunity to take classical and Flamenco guitar lessons some seven years earlier, Alex decided he would try taking some guitar lessons now. �I did start studying classical guitar in 1972 for about six months with a friend of mine, Eliot Goldner, who studied with Eli Kassner in Toronto,� Lifeson said. �But Eliot was in a motorcycle accident, which kept him going in and out of the hospital for two years. Every week I�d go over and study with him, until he finally went back in for six months. Then the lessons stopped, and Rush started gigging more.� The band was establishing itself around Ontario. Geddy and Alex were becoming increasingly serious about their musical pursuits. But John was beginning to wonder if music was really the right choice for him. The extensive traveling�sometimes hours of driving to get to a gig and then hours back home�was grueling, and John�s health was fragile; he was diabetic. Adding to that the mixed receptions and the general feeling of risk and uncertainty that goes with the music business and John was beginning to ask himself questions. Across the Atlantic Neil Peart was living on a minimal bottom-line income. Peart passed through another series of bands who have since been rendered nameless and forgotten. He also did �a bit of unglamorous session work� while in England. Neil played on some minor recordings. Unfortunately, which recordings he appeared on is now unknown. The gigs and the session work were not lucrative enough to support Peart. �When you go out into the big world, as any adult knows, you�re in for a lot of disillusionment,� he said. �So while I was there I did a lot of other things to get bread in my mouth.� To make ends meet, Peart sold cheap souvenirs to tourists on Carnaby Street. Peart delved deeply into books. �When I was in England, I was poor and couldn�t afford to buy books,� he said. �So, I was ransacking the closet where I lived and found alot of sci-fi. It reintroduced me to the genre and made me realize it wasn�t all about numbers and integrated circuits. It refreshed my idea of what the style was, and that led me into fantasy. It was a whole lot of reading at the time, of being young and interested in fantasy and science fiction and alternative universes.� After a year-and-a-half in England, struggling to survive on an irregular, meager income, Peart was forced by sheer necessity to face a hard fact: his dreams of making it big as a career musician in England were simply not happening. His optimism dashed, Peart caught a flight back home to Ontario. �I returned home the proverbial sadder and wiser man,� he said. �When I came back from there, I was disillusioned basically by the music �business.� I decided that I would be a semi-pro musician for my own entertainment, would play the music that I like to play, and wouldn�t count on it to make my living. I did other jobs and worked at other things, so that I wouldn�t have to compromise what I liked to do as a drummer.� Now back in St. Catharines, Peart got a regular job working for his father at Dalziel Equipment on St. Paul Street West. Although he was now treating music as a passionate hobby rather than a career goal, Peart didn�t give up on music. He soon hooked up with a few more local bands, such as J.R. Flood. Before long he became a stable member of a Niagara Peninsula region band called Hush. It would be his last amateur band. Just a couple hours� drive west and north around the tip of Lake Ontario, Rush felt ready to make their first amateur recording. Ray Danniels and Rush recruited Bill Bryant to produce a basic demo of the band. They planned to distribute the demo to record companies in hopes of gaining their attention and interest, and ultimately a recording contract. Late in 1972, Rush went into Sound Horn Studios, a low-budget recording facility at Toronto�s Rochdale College. With Bryant manning the tape deck, they recorded basic two-track demos of a number of songs from their live shows. The demo�a full album worth of songs�was recorded in a single eight-hour session immediately after a gig. �We were warmed up after the show,� Lifeson said, �so most of the songs came in two or three takes.� The demo encapsulated many of their best songs, including �In the Mood,� �Working Man,� and others. But Toronto�s record labels were interested in soft rock, not some loud, screechy heavy metal act. The labels weren�t interested in Rush�s demo. Unfortunately, the rough demos were later lost and have never been recovered. Rush continued to gig in bars, small hockey arenas, and school dances into 1973. Early in that year, Ray Danniels decided that booking Rush as well as his other acts such as Lighthouse and Edward Bear was becoming too much work for him alone. He brought in another Toronto rock act manager, Vic Wilson, to be his business partner. Wilson and Danniels now were a management team, calling themselves S.R.O. Productions. Together they were better able to handle Rush�s busy schedule as well as the other acts. In the summer of 1973, Rush decided it was time to make a more serious, more professional-quality recording to raise awareness of the band and gain the attention of one of Toronto�s record labels. They decided to record a 45 single. A local distributor, London Records, agreed to press and distribute the vinyl single, but the band would have to release it via a record label. If no established labels were interested, then Rush could form their own label. �Every record company in Canada turned us down,� Danniels said, �every last one of them.� �Nobody wanted to pick us up,� said Lifeson. �They said we were too heavy, and there was no market for the music the band was playing. So all the record companies in Canada passed on us.� Danniels and Wilson, as S.R.O., put up the money to buy studio time as well as to formally register a label for the band. Some paperwork and a few weeks� wait, and Moon Records was officially established as Rush�s own record label. Rush recruited David Stock to produce their first single. Stock was already established around Toronto as a producer for local radio and television commercial jingles. That summer Rush entered Toronto�s Eastern Sound Studios and made their first professional recording. They came out with a master mixdown of two songs. |
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