Grace Under Pressure - The Album
Grace Under Pressure - The Album
Rush -
Grace Under Pressure (1984)
Released on April 12, 1984
Mercury/Polygram
Produced by Rush and Peter Henderson
Time/Songs:
(4:59) Distant Early Warning
(5:04) Afterimage
(5:10) Red Sector A
(4:34) The Enemy Within (Part I of Fear)
(5:00) The Body Electric
(4:18) Kid Gloves
(4:42) red lenses
(5:44) Between the Wheels
On the Grace Under Pressure cover
Tying in with the Lp title, the inner sleeve depicted an egg, held
within the menacing jaws of a metal C-clamp. "The important thing is not to
crack," said Neil to one reporter. Once again, the front cover artwork was
designed by Hugh Syme, but the back sleeve photograph was taken by the 75-
year old internationally renowned portrait lensman, Yousuf Karsh. The photo
session took place in an Ottawa hotel room and, despite Karsh's impressive
track record with royalty, presidents, astronauts and film stars, the end
result was generally considered an extremely unflattering photograph of the
band. However, Geddy told a critic from the _St. Paul Pioneer Press_: "I
think the picture brings out our personalities quite nicely. But it also
looks like a bar mitzvah photo, doesn't it?"
- from the book Grace Under Pressure
Album Notes
Neil Peart's Pressure Release
"Our records tend to follow in cycles, some of them exploratory and
experimental, others more cohesive and definitive. I think that this one,
like _Moving Pictures_, _Hemispheres_ or _2112_ before it, is a definitive
one of its type. Really, it defines its type. An indefinable thread, both
musical and conceptual, emerges in a natural way and links the diverse
influences and approaches into an overall integrity."
- Neil Peart 1984
Geddy Lee reflects back on Grace Under Pressure:
Have you ever been unhappy with an album immediately after recording it?
"Yes -- I wasn't happy with Grace Under Pressure. But it was a no-win
situation in that case because that album was extremely difficult to make.
We went through tremendous turmoil and pressure making it, and I don't think
I could have liked it given the circumstances. As soon as the record was
done, I wanted to get away from it -- and I've rarely listened to it since,
because it's attached to too many difficult memories.
- Geddy Lee, Bass Player Magazine Interview 1993
This song was also released as a single.
What is the main theme behind Distant Early Warning?
The main theme of the song is a series of things, but that's certainly one of
the idea[s] (our very tense world situation), and living in the, living in
the modern world basically in all of its manifestations in terms of the
distance from us of uh, the threat of superpowers and the, uh, the nuclear
annihilation and all of that stuff, and these giant missiles pointed at each
other across the ocean. There's all of that, but that tends to have a little
bit of distance from people's lives, but at the same time I think it is
omnipresent, you know, I think that threat does loom somewhere in everyone's
subconscious, perhaps. And then it deals with the closer things in terms of
relationships and how to keep a relationship in such a swift-moving world,
and it has something to do with our particular lives, dealing with revolving
doors, going in and out, but also I think that's generally true with people
in the modern world where, uh, things for a lot of people are very difficult,
and consequently, work and the mundane concerns of life tend to take
precedence over the important values of relationships and of the larger world
and the world of the abstract as opposed to the concrete, and dealing with all
of those things with grace. [more of the song is played] And when I see a
little bit of grace in someone's life. like when you drive past a horrible
tenement building and you see these wonderful pink flamingos on the balcony
up there, or something like, some little aspect of humanity that strikes you
as a beautiful resistance if you like.
- Neil Peart, Jim Ladd Innerview 1984
Who was Absalom?
He was a character from the Bible, son of King David (the one who killed
Goliath). He killed his half-brother for raping their half-sister. Then,
he tried to over-throw David and get the throne. A battle resulted, and
(against David's wishes) Absalom was killed by King David's Mighty Men,
when his hair was caught in a tree and suspended him above the ground.
David grieved for his son by lamenting, "Absalom, Absalom, my son." I
have thought about this story's connection quite a bit. Perhaps it is
about David, and how he had the "weight of the world" on his shoulders and
he was worrying about Absalom.
- from Teri Piatt (tpiatt@lazy.helios.nd.edu)
"Before I ever knew who or what Absalom was, I always loved the sound
of it. I had thought perhaps it was an ancient prayer or something.
There is a book by William Faulkner called Absalom, Absalom, which,
again, I loved the sound of. I wanted to put it in the song, as a play
on words with 'absolute' and 'obsolete,' but I thought I'd better find
out for sure what it meant. So I called my wife and asked her to look
it up in the encyclopedia. When I learned the real story, and its
Biblical roots, I decided that it was still appropriate, as it was the
ultimate expression of compassion, which is what the song was really
about. 'Absalom, Absalom. My son, my son. Would God I had died for
thee.' (Now don't anyone go reading any religion into that!)"
- Neil Peart
Who is the boy in the "Distant Early Warning" video?
He is Geddy's son, Julian.
- from the Rush FAQL
Distant Early Warning
------- ----- -------
An ill wind comes arising
Across the cities of the plain
There's no swimming in the heavy water --
No singing in the acid rain
Red alert
Red alert
It's so hard to stay together
Passing through revolving doors
We need someone to talk to
And someone to sweep the floors --
Incomplete
Incomplete
The world weighs on my shoulders
But what am I to do?
ou sometimes drive me crazy --
But I worry about you
I know it makes on difference
To what you're going through
But I see the tip of the iceberg --
And I worry about you...
Cruising under your radar
Watching from satellites
Take a page from the red book --
Keep them in your sights
Red alert
Red alert
Left and rights of passage
Black and whites of youth
Who can face the knowledge
That the truth is not the truth?
Obsolete
Absolute
Absalom, Absalom, Absalom
Is "Afterimage" about anybody in particular?
The song is about Robbie Whelan, a good friend of the band who died
in a car accident. He has the "Right Field" credit in the
Signals liner notes.
Afterimage
----------
Suddenly --
You were gone
From all the lives
You left your mark upon
I remember --
How we talked and drank
Into the misty dawn
-- I hear the voices
We ran by the water
On the wet summer lawn
-- I see the foot prints
I remember --
-- I feel the way you would
-- I feel the way you would
Tried to believe
But you know it's no good
This is something
That just can't be understood
I remember --
The shouts of joy
Skiing fast through the woods
-- I hear the echoes
I learned your love for life
I feel the way that you would
-- I feel your presence
I remember --
I feel the way you would
This just can't be understood...
Neil Peart on the song:
I was moved to write it by the, I read a first person account of someone
who had survived the whole system of trains and work camps and Dachau and all
of that, and this person, she was a young girl, like thirteen years old when
she was sent into it, and lived in it for a few years, and then, uh, through
first person accounts from other people who came out at the end of it, always
glad to be alive, which again was the essence of grace, grace under pressure
is that though all of it, these people never gave up the strong will to
survive, through the utmost horror, and total physical privations of all
kinds, they just never, ever wanted to be the ones who were shot, you know,
they were always the unlucky ones, which was an important thing that I wanted
to bring out. And also, what I learned from the first person nonfiction
accounts that I read was that these people would keep their little rituals of
their religion, and whatever, and if it was supposed to be a fasting day,
even if they were starving to death, they would turn down their little bit of
bread and their little bit of gruel, because this was a fasting day, and they
had to hold on to something, some essence of normality, you know, that was
important. And that moved me, you know. That's, that's intense.
I wanted to give it more of a timeless atmosphere too, because it's
happened, of course, in more than one time and by more than one race of
people. It happened in this very country in which we sit, it happened, you
know, the British did it, no one can set themselves above that, slavery
rather involved how many countless countries in terms of the commerce of it
all, and people shipping them around like animals and all of that. And no
one can set themselves above that in a racial or nationalistic way. So I
wanted to take a little bit out of being specific and, and just describe the
circumstances and try to look at the way people responded to it, and another
really important and to me really moving image that I got from a lot of these
accounts was that at the end of it, these people of course had been totally
isolated from the rest of the world, from their families, from any news at
all, and they, in cases that I read, believed that they were the last people
surviving. You know, the people liberating them and themselves were the only
surviving people in the world, and it sounds a bit melodramatic put into a
song I realize, but the point is that it's true, so, you know, I didn't feel
like I needed to avoid it as being over-dramatic, because, you know, I heard
of it and read of it in more than one account.
- Neil Peart, Jim Ladd's Innerview 1984
What is "Red Sector A" about?
Red Sector A is the area the band watched a shuttle launch from.
On the other hand ...
"It is one of the 'grace under pressure' themes which captured my
imagination on the last album, and is not meant to portray a specific
human atrocity, although many of the historical accounts which inspired
it were of course set in World War II. There have been many periods of
slavery and mass imprisonment in the world and also many fictional
accounts of the future. I was thinking of all these things, and wanted
to try to express something timeless enough to encompass them all."
- Neil Peart, July 1985 Backstage Club Mailing
Geddy talks about the song live:
"When we play a song like "Red Sector A" live, MIDI enables me to use the bass
arpeggiator part, and send it to more than one instrument. Then I can get a
really nice bass sound triggered by the arpeggiator that keeps the bottom end
rolling and feeling good. That song sounds better live than it ever did on
record, just because the technology has allowed me to get better sounds.
That's another reason for doing this up-and-coming live album. I think some
of the versions that we'll be putting on this live album are better than the
original versions.
- Geddy Lee, 1987 Bass Player interview
Red Sector A
--- ------ -
All that we can do is just survive
All that we can do to help ourselves is stay alive...
Ragged lines of ragged grey
Skeletons, they shuffle away
Shouting guards and smoking guns
Will cut down the unlucky ones
I clutch the wire fence until my fingers bleed
A wound that will not heal -- a heart that cannot feel --
Hoping that the horror will recede
Hoping that tomorrow, we'll all be freed
Sickness to insanity
Prayer to profanity
Days and weeks and months go by
Don't feel the hunger -- too weak to cry
I hear the sound of gunfire at the prison gate
Are the liberators here -- do I hope or do I fear?
For my father and my brother, it's too late
But I must help my mother stand up straight...
Are we the last ones left alive?
Are we the only human beings to survive?...
Neil Peart on the song:
It's part one of a trilogy but it's the last one to appear. The last
three albums have each contained a part of that trilogy, and I started
thinking about them all at the same time, but they appear in the order in
which they were easiest to grasp. In other words, "Witch Hunt" was the first
one, dealt with that mentality of mob rule, and what happens to a bunch of
people when they come together and they're afraid, and they go out and do
something really stupid and really horrible. That was easy to grasp, and you
see plenty of examples of that in real life as well as in fiction and in
films of course, too. So that was easy to deal with. The second one was
"The Weapon," and it was dealing with how people use your fears against you,
as a weapon, and that took a little longer to come to grips with, but
eventually I got my thinking straightened out and the images that I wanted to
use, and collected them all up, and it came out. And then finally, "The
Enemy Within" was more difficult, because I wanted to look at how it affects
me, but it was more than about me. I don't like to be introspective as a
rule. I think I'm gonna set that down as my first rule, as "never be
introspective!" But, uh, I wanted to, at the same time I wanted to write
about myself in a universal kind of way, I want to find things in myself that
I think apply.
- Neil Peart, Jim Ladd Innerview 1984
The Enemy Within (Part one of Fear)
--- ----- ------ ----------------
Things crawl in the darkness
That imagination spins
Needles at your nerve ends
Crawl like spiders on your skin
Pounding in your temples
And a surge of adrenaline
Every muscle tense -- to fence the enemy within
I'm not giving in to security under pressure
I'm not missing out on the promise of adventure
I'm not giving up on implausible dreams
Experience to extremes --
Experience to extremes
Suspicious-looking stranger
Flashes you a dangerous grin
Shadows across your window --
Was it only trees in the wind?
Every breath a static charge --
A tongue that tastes like tin
Steely-eyed outside to hide the enemy within...
To you -- is it movement or is it action?
It is contact or just reaction?
And you -- revolution or just resistance?
Is it living, or just existence?
eah, you -- it takes a little more persistence
To get up and go the distance...
What inspired the writing of this song?
The song was inspired by the movie "THX 1138", which some of you movie
buffs know was George Lucas' first big film
"The Body Electric on this album is a little piece of, sort of science fiction
frippery..."
- Neil Peart, 1984 Off the Record
The Body Electric
--- ---- --------
One humanoid escapee
One android on the run
Seeking freedom beneath a lonely desert sun
Trying to change its program
Trying to change the mode -- crack the code
Images conflicting into data overload
1-0-0-1-0-0-1
S.O.S
1-0-0-1-0-0-1
In distress
1-0-0-1-0-0
Memory banks unloading
Bytes break into bits
Unit One's in trouble and it's scared out of its wits
Guidance systems break down
A struggle to exist -- to resist
A pulse of dying power in a clenching plastic fist...
It replays each of the days
A hundred years of routines
Bows its head and prays
To the mother of all machines...
Kid Gloves
--- ------
A world of difference
A world so out of touch
Overwhelmed by everything
But wanting more so much --
Call it blind frustration
Call it blind man's bluff
Call each other names --
our voices rude -- your voices rough
Then you learn the lesson
That it's cool to be so tough
Handle with kid gloves
Handle with kid gloves
Then you learn the lessons
Taught in school won't be enough
Put on your kid gloves
Put on your kid gloves
Then you learn the lesson
That it's cool to be so tough
A world of indifference
Heads and hearts too full
Careless of the consequence
Of constant push and pull
Anger got bare knuckles
Anger play the fool
Anger wear a crown of thorns
Reverse the golden rule
Then you learn the lesson
That it's tough to be so cool
Handle with kid gloves
Handle with kid gloves
Then you learn the weapons
And the ways of hard-knock school
Put on your kid gloves
Put on your kid gloves
Then you learn the lesson
That it's tough to be so cool
red lenses - a tribute to some of Neil's favorite writers
In a deeper level, without wanting to get too profound about it, but it's
a style of writing which I've been wanting to get towards, which I've read
with John Dos Passos is a prose writer who exemplifies it, T.S. Eliot is a
poet who exemplifies it, where they throw so much at you, so many images and
so many pictures that are all individually beautiful, not necessarily
interconnecting, but they just come at you and they come at you, and all the
way through it your head is spinning, and you think, "oh, I'm not
understanding this, why am I not understanding this, am I stupid?" And then
at the end of it, you sort of put it aside and after the dizziness subsides,
you're left with something. You're left with something beautiful. And when
one will mention that book to you or that poem to you that story to you, then
this beautiful thing, indescribable, intangible, image which you have drawn
out of all that comes into your mind. So I just, just wanted to get towards
that style of writing where its carefully refined, each little image is
worked out so that on its own its something, but all together its a little
bit obscure and a little bit vague, so you almost seem to be saying nothing,
but in fact you're saying, you know, a great many things.
This was probably the hardest song I have ever worked on, it just, in
spite of the pleasure it gave me and how much I enjoyed doing it, it went
through so many rewrites and changed its title so many times, everything
about it just went through constant refinement, each little image was juggled
around and I just fought for the right words to put each little phrase
together and to make it sound exactly right to me, so that it sounded a
little bit nonsensical. I wanted to get that kind of Jabberwocky, uh, word
games thing happening with it and also there's little things going on that
your mind sort of catches without identifying, like a lot of poetic devices.
You take the, uh, number of words that sound the same or start with the same
letter or whatever, you just certainly don't start in the middle of it and
go, "oh, that's alliteration!" But those words fall upon your ear in a
melodious way, or if you're reading them they, they run through your mind in
a rhythmic and attractive way.
- Neil Peart, Jim Ladd's Innerview 1984
"red lenses" [Grace Under Pressure] has a really different feel for a Rush
song, more of a groove. Was it done in a different way?
It's a different kind of song. It was the last thing we wrote for Grace
Under Pressure. Usually the last track we write on each record is different
from everything else. It's probably a reaction against working so hard,
and all of a sudden you want to do something different to round-out the
record, give it some more variety. I like it a lot because it is different,
but it's very indulgent. I'm always surprised when people like those tracks.
You can understand if a musician gets into it, but you don't think the general
public will.
- Geddy Lee, Guitar Player magazine, April 1986
red lenses
--- ------
i see red
it hurts my head
guess it must be something
that i read
it's the colour of your heartbeat
a rising summer sun
the battle lost -- or won
the flash to fashion
and the pulse to passion --
feels red
inside my head
and truth is often bitter --
left unsaid
said red red
thinking about the overhead --
the underfed
-- couldn't we talk about something else instead?
we've got mars on the horizon
says the national midnight star
(it's true)
what you believe is what you are
a pair of dancing shoes --
the soviets are the blues --
the reds
under your bed
lying --
in the darkness
dead ahead
and the mercury is rising
barometer starts to fall
you know it gets to us all
the pain that is learning
and the rain that is burning --
feel red
still -- go ahead
you see black and white --
and i see red
(not blue)
Neil on the song:
That was another real complicated one to work on. That one came
musically first, uh, when we first went up to northern Ontario to start
rehearsing. The first night we get together, we usually have some new
technical toys to play with, and we sort of get acquainted again and talk
about what we've been doing if we haven't seen each other for a couple of
weeks, and just sort of casually sit down and, and work at our instruments
and once everybody's sort of happening, in an accidental almost way, things
start to drift together. You know, in the same way that it sometimes happens
in sound check during the afternoon, where, uh, before we get down to the
serious business, we'll just be checking out our things and somebody will
start playing and someone else will join in, and something happens. And on
that particular night, that song happened, but not just one part of it, the
three movements of it, without talking about them, it was quite astonishing,
really, that we just started playing with this little piece of music, and a
modulation appeared. Somebody came up with a change, and the others heard
it, and the next time it came around, we followed it, and we started playing
that. By the next time we were going around with this little sequence of
ideas, someone got brave and introduced a third idea. Well, everyone goes,
"Oh, okay!" and the next time everyone jumps on it. So, we're playing around
this circuit of three little patterns which became the verse to the song, the
bridge of the song, and then the chorus of the song.
The idea of "Between The Wheels," it was really kind of the opposite of
"The Digital Man," in a way. In the case where, the Digital Man, the
character is running faster than life, you know, in the fast lane and all of
that, just moving faster than, than real time. And then there's the other
side of it, where a person is in harmony with time and their life moves
along, well, that's very rare. The opposite of that is the people for whole
life goes faster than they do, you know. That idea of being in the back
water, or watching the action go by, or whatever, to where, the wheels of
time, for instance that analogy, some people it picks them up and carries
them forward, you know, and it seems to work for them as being mobile wheels.
And other people in a real sense without being too melodramatic, are crushed
by those wheels. You know, the wheels of change or time or circumstances or
history or whatever just roll right over them, you know, obliterate them.
[unintelligible comment from JL] Yeah, so there's those two extremes of it,
but in the middle, there are the people who are untouched by it, and the
wheels of time just roll right past them, and that's what I was getting at
with "Between The Wheels" was the fact that these people were neither hurt
nor helped by it, but it just rolled, they were observers, sort of, it just
rolled right by them and they were in a very sedentary position.
- Neil Peart, Jim Ladd's Innerview 1984
Between the Wheels
------- --- ------
To live between a rock and a hard place
In between time --
Cruising in prime time -- soaking up the cathode rays
To live between the wars in our time --
Living in real time --
Holding the good time -- Holding on to yesterdays...
You know how that rabbit feels
Going under your speeding wheels
Bright images flashing by
Like windshields towards a fly
Frozen in the fatal climb -- but the wheels of time --
Just pass you by...
Wheels can take you around
Wheels can cut you down
We can go from boom to bust
From dreams to a bowl of dust
We can fall from rockets' red glare
Down to "Brother can you spare --"
Another war -- another waste land --
And another lost generation...
It slips between your hands like water
This living in real time
A dizzying lifetime
Reeling by on celluloid
Struck between the eyes
By the big-time world
Walking uneasy streets --
Hiding beneath the sheets --
Got to try and fill the void...