Rush - Hemispheres
Listen to an audio version of this review by Greg
Recorded in 1978 at Rockfield Studios in Rockfield, Monmouth shire Wales, Rush once again chose this beautiful spot to record, Hemispheres. This is also where they recorded their previous 1977 record, A Farewell To Kings. The band wanted a change from recording their first four albums in Toronto, Ontario. They chose the beautiful UK countryside for “Kings” and “Hemispheres”. Most of this album was recorded outside among the sheep, horses, and cows. This was in true Pink Floyd style.
The reason I chose to review THIS album over other Rush albums, there are 19 of them ya know, was because we felt this record was likely the most difficult for the band to play and record. For I feel Rush is most likely the best technically skilled rock band of ALLLLLL time. I want to stay calm during this review because I feel like this is a no brainer. NOO brainer. I hope this review will also launch future debates over what the best Rush album is and who the best technical skilled rock band is. Because it’s Rush guys. Case closed. I think I might be revealing a little more than planned in this episode. I’ve been sort of hiding the fact I am an incredibly die-hard Rush fan to my audience. As much as I want to come off objective in these reviews, I think it’s important for people to hear my passion.
To make my point, if you recommended a restaurant to someone and were like, “ah, yeah, Joe’s Pizza is pretty good. Yeah. Check it out”, how enthusiastic would that person be to go there. On the other hand, if you were like, “Oh my God man. You HAVE TO CHECK OUT JOE’S PIZZA. Oh man, they have this three-cheese pizza with Pesto that is INCREDIBLE”….now how much more do you want to go? See..?
I originally decided I was going to pause on reviewing a Rush album when I started ALBUMREVIEW.NET. Why? Because although I usually put my personal and less objective opinion into these reviews, I feel the level of subjectiveness is at an ELEVEN….here.
Rush entered the studio in the summer of 1978 for the first time without any songs prepared nor any predetermined ideas for even writing them. This time they were going in cold. And the goal was to discover their chemistry organically this time and write while they record. Well, this posed as the greatest recording challenge of their career, which is precisely why I wanted to write first about this album.
Terry Brown would return for a 2nd time after producing A Farewell To Kings along with Rush and the band figured they would feel comfortable with him again. Due to the complexity of the arrangements, Hemispheres would take the longest amount of time to record to date for them. After taking only four weeks to record “Kings” and five weeks to record their prior masterpiece, 2112, Hemispheres took four months to record. The band would take just ONE day off during that entire four months. Just amazing.
After the four-month recording period, the band was ready for a break before getting back on the road. Like many touring acts of the 1970s, Rush was essentially touring non-stop, almost like “tour, record, tour, record, rinse, repeat” for about three decades before drummer Neil Peart and the band took a long break in 1997 when Neil’s daughter died in a car accident. Only a few months later, his common-law wife Jackie passed away from cancer. After Neil lost his daughter and wife in the same year, he lived the rest of his life with a “sense of fatalism”.
I think for me, growing up in the 80s, I became used to seeing albums with ten or twelve tracks on them, many times having a name that included the word, “baby” or with a picture of a poufy-haired group or a girl in a bikini.
When I saw the covers of Rush albums, they were different. Real different. These guys were NOT out to “get” fans. They did NOT set out to become popular. Please believe me when I say I really know this is cliché to say about a band, as I’m pretty sure I’ve said it about other bands in previous reviews. But just look at a Rush album cover. Turn it over. Look at the back. Look at what they were wearing. And for this review, I want to talk about….look at the NAMES OF THE SONGS.
The album cover for Hemispheres depicts a man, with no clothing, mind you, dancing on top of a brain while on the other side is a sharply dressed man in a suit with a cane, standing, looking rather “unimpressed with the naked guy”. The brain in the picture, by the way, was a picture of an actual brain that the artist who created the album cover, Hugh Syme snapped when he visited the Department of Anatomy at the Toronto School of Medicine. Pretty cool. That’s not just a drawing. The artwork was representative of the two conflicting sides of the brain, the right, and the left. The right side of the brain is synonymous with imagination, feelings visualization, rhythm, intuition, holistic thinking, and the arts.
The left brain is more synonymous with linear thinking, mathematics, facts, and logic. So, the naked guy clearly is on the right side of the brain while the guy in the suit standing still represents the left. Quite genius and unique when it came to what rock bands were putting on the cover of their albums in the 1970s. The WHOLE ALBUM is themed like this. A fight against oneself and our two sides.
If you owned the record, CD, or the cassette, the first side of Hemispheres is just one song. HAAAAAAAAAA, I love it! What’s the best way to scare off a pop hungry music fan when they were scrolling through albums in the record store? Write songs that are called, Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres. And not only that! Then add another piece to it where you break that song into “parts”. Give them names like Apollo (Bringer of Wisdom) and Dionysus (Bringer of Love). Yeah, Dionysus baby…!
This is a sure-fire way to scare off the casual fans. My apologies if I am coming off “holier than thou” in this review. It is not my intention per se. I guess I just needed ONE review where I put it all out on the table and communicate how I cannot find one other band that technically keeps the beat, as Jack Black would say, “to the ATOM”.
So, the album’s first side is made up of essentially one song called Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres, which is split into six parts but all of them blend together. You don’t really know when one is ending and the next one is beginning. Sounds like too much effort for you listeners, right? Not for me. This got my attention even more when I was a kid. Who does this? I had to find out and learn more.
Part 1 of Book II starts off with just a ridiculous instrumental. Even after 30 years of listening to this album, I still have trouble determining when each part changes from one into another. But you can hear the similarities between this and Cygnus X-1 Book I which is on their previous album, Farewell to Kings. I just remember sitting in my room listening to this and trying to wrap my head around what a “concept” album was. I was used to listening to hair metal songs which many times were written about drugs, booze, and sex. This was my first dive into a song being “continued” like a sequel to a movie in a Part 1, Part 2 type of concept. It blew my mind. Some of you may be like Jim Carrey at the bar in Dumb & Dumber,…IIIII don’t Ceaaaaarrrrrreeeeee……! But you must at least acknowledge the level of intelligence Neil Peart had with his song writing.
This whole eighteen-minute track brings you on a journey. A real journey. But this is not your 29-minute Grateful Dead jam. No, this is structured, organized, directed, timed perfectly and full of madness!!!
The idea of Hemispheres came from a book Neil was reading called “Powers of Mind” by Adam Smith. Neil noted the theme was related to a “Constant conflict between thoughts and emotions between your feelings and your rational ideas”.
Apollo and Dionysus have been used in a lot of books to characterize the rational side and the instinctive side. Neil was always interested in these things, wondering whether the instinctual side was right or was the rational side right.
Armageddon is the climax of this conflict. The hero Cygnus comes in and breaks up the conflict between Apollo and Dionysus. Neil notes this is in reference to the fact that, “the battle is inside each of us”. It’s not some abstract cosmic battle, it’s part of our everyday lives and so much of what we do every day is governed by a thought or a feeling, the rational side and the instinctive side, the battle of heart and mind.
The song starts “digging into your hip”..around the eleven-minute mark when Geddy starts singing:
Some who did not fight
Brought tales of old to light
'My Rocinante sailed by night
On her final flight'
To the heart of Cygnus' fearsome force
We set our course
Spiralled through that timeless space
To this immortal place
Then it gets ridiculous:
“I have memory and awareness
But I have no shape or form
As a disembodied spirit
I am dead and yet unborn
I have passed into Olympus
As was told in tales of old
To the city of Immortals
Marble white and purest gold
So heartfelt and different. Just reminded me of Floyd a little bit but waaay more “spaceshippy”
The track shifts back into a rock song as it flows like a river into the next section, Dionysus (Bringer of Love).
Then the ending. Man, this ending.
“We can walk our road together,
if our goals are still the same.
We can run alone and free
if we pursue a different aim.”
That my friends,….is the album opener!
Track two, (Ha Ha….Track TWO. It’s like 45 minutes later)… Circumstances was written after all the other songs had been finished. Neil wrote it in his hotel room while they were recording the vocals to the other tracks. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Ya think he might be well read? (i.e. – Neil).
A boy alone, and so far from home
Endless rooftops from my window
I felt the gloom of empty rooms
On rainy afternoons.
Sometimes in confusion
I felt so lost and disillusioned
Innocence gave me confidence
To go up against reality
All the same
We take our chances,
Laughed at by Time,
Tricked by circumstances
Plus ça change,
Plus c’est la même chose,
The more that things change
The more they stay the same
Now I’ve gained some understanding
Of the only world that we see
Things that I once dreamed of
Have become reality
These walls that still surround me
Still contain the same old me
Just one more who’s searching for
The world that ought to be
The band included this song off and on during their 1978-79 Hemispheres tour, BUT it did not return to Rush's setlists until the Snakes & Arrows tour in 2007. After 19 years, the band had to play the song in a lower key than the original recording, to accommodate Geddy’s changing vocal range that obviously decreased by age. Even after 40 years, on the R40 tour, although Geddy wasn’t hitting the EXACT same high note, he was doing well for a guy in his late 50s, early 60s. By the way, Geddy is going to be turning 70 in a year and a half. Cray Cray…
Circumstances is one of a few Rush songs with French lyrics, these occurring in the chorus: "Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose" (the more it changes, the more it is the same).
Hemispheres was the peak of their progressive power. After this album, the band admitted they needed to take a step back and although focusing on technical instrumentation was important, they just couldn’t continue to write it at this level. That is beyond cool to me. The fact the most technically proficient band had to tell themselves to chill out.
The Trees which was included as a single from this record along with Circumstances, was written about the conflict between the maple trees and oak trees.
The song opens with a soft, delicate classical guitar played by Alex Lifeson. It then transitions into a loud rock song as Lifeson steps on his distortion pedal and kicks things into high gear. The lyrics relate to a short story about a conflict between maple and oak trees in a forest. The maple trees want more sunlight, but the oak trees are too tall. In the end, "the trees are all kept equal by hatchet, axe, and saw."
There was an interview with Neil Peart in an April/May 1980 issue of Modern Drummer Magazine where he was asked if there was a message in the lyrics, to which he replied, "No. It was just a flash. I was working on an entirely different thing when I saw a cartoon picture of these trees carrying on like fools. I thought, 'What if trees acted like people?' So, I saw it as a cartoon really, and wrote it that way. I think that's the image that it conjures up to a listener or a reader. A very simple statement”. Neil claims the lyrics have no deep meaning while many fans refute that claim. As you read the lyrics, they do sound like a depiction of a political battle written in the world of just trees.
There is a version of this song included in the live album, Exit Stage Left, where they do a “Scarlet>Fire” type of transition into Xanadu. THAT version my friends, is the greatest recording of a Rush performance. Check it out sometime after listening to this episode. Anyways, getting back to this album, Hemispheres,The Trees offers you another solid track that leaves you wondering if this is stronger than the others. It goes down as probably top 10 best songs in Rush’s 400+ song catalogue.
La Villa Strangiato. OK let’s settle this. Is it La Villa or La-Vee-Ya?
This is the song that I play for any musician who doesn’t like Rush. Because this is,…well, enough said.
La Villa Strangiato means either “weird city” or “the strange house” in Italian according to Alex in a 1978 interview. Spanish guitar was used on the album’s closing track, the tour de force “La Villa Strangiato,” arguably the finest instrumental the band ever recorded. The piece was based on dreams Lifeson had been having. He told the band about them, and the nine-minute instrumental – subtitled “An Exercise In Self-Indulgence” – was written while they were touring. Apparently Geddy and Neil joked that this was a description of what they went through every time Alex would tell them about his dreams every morning. The band spent more time working on this one song, then the entire Fly By Night album they released in 1975. Crazy.
Hemispheres did fairly well on the Music Charts. It received much acclaim from music critics. It reached number 14 in Canada and the UK, and number 41 in the United States. In 1993, the album was certified platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) for selling one million copies. As I mentioned earlier, the band went out on the road in October 1978 all the way through June 1979 in support of the album.
As I listen to this masterpiece, I shake my head. I shake it with just confusion. Confusion as to how is there a band that was this good. Confusion as to how musicians out there still do not give the band and this album the respect it deserves. For what I preach is not a “right brain” creative opinion. Although I am more right brained, this is a left brained claim. For Rush is not only creative and progressive. For they are mathematical. I beg any of you to test them. Test their time signatures. Test their songwriting skills. Test their desire to push the sex, drugs and rock n’ roll to the side to just focus on making perfect music. Rush wasnever happy staying in the same place (album-wise). Despite Neil’s magnificent lyrics, the band always put music first, lyrics second. Rush’s breakthrough album that put them on the map, 1976’s 2112, was word heavy in addition to its heavy metal connection. On Hemispheres the band claimed they learned their instruments better. They all came to the surface. Every month, every year, every recording session, Rush focused on nothing but getting better. Who does that? For they sound like a different band on every album.
