Rush - Roll the Bones
Listen to an audio version of this review by Greg
The element of chance. What does this mean? Nothing in life is certain. But there is always this existing element of chance. When someone takes a chance, there is no way to know for sure whether it will pay off or not. Some believe, no matter what you do, if it’s not going to hurt too much, you should always take that chance. Some disagree and rarely take chances. Others are more calculated and take chances only after they feel comfortable with their own personal risk assessment.
But due to the random nature of the world around us, there is no way that someone can properly determine what their chances of something are. I suppose a statistician could spend weeks collecting data, then present their hypothesis. But doesn’t taking that road lead you right back to the question in mind? Do I take a chance or not?
The element of chance was the initial theme drummer and lyricist, Neil Peart was going for when he first picked up a pen to write lyrics for his band, Rush’s 1991 album, Roll the Bones.
Rush, the trio who got their start in Ontario, Canada in the late 1960s, were coming off a successful world tour for their 1989 album, Presto. The band enjoyed the Presto tour so much that when it was completed in mid-1990, they cut their vacation time short to start writing and recording their next album, their 14th studio album. Bassist and lead singer, Geddy Lee wanted to implement stronger vocal melodies in each song and base the instruments and writing around those. If you are familiar with early Rush, from the 1970s, most of the albums consist of Lee’s screeching vocal range partnered with lengthy instrumentals. Throughout the 1980s, their music was more representative of the genre happening at the time; music consisting of synthesizers, electric drums, bad hair, and awful outfits.
For Roll the Bones, the album continues moving in the same direction as with Presto, with less of the 80s synthesizers, and more guitar and distortion. Like most Rush albums, Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson focused on writing the music, with drummer Neil Peart writing the lyrics. When Rush’s original drummer, John Rutsey, decided to quit the band in 1974, Peart auditioned to replace him. It only took Lee and Lifeson about 1 minute to decide Neil was the right fit.
In addition to his exceptional drumming, it was clear to Geddy and Alex early on that Neil was also incredibly verbose. He read a lot and displayed a strong sense of awareness, sensitivity, and intelligence. This was so apparent that Lee and Lifeson later asked Peart to write most of the lyrics for what would be their next album, 1975’s Fly By Night. The writing continued throughout the remainder of Rush’s career.
Peart shared his approach to coming up with a theme for the album, which he liked to start with each time. For Presto, it was magic. Next, for Roll the Bones, it was chance. The album contains a recurring theme of chance, in different aspects of life. Neil liked the idea of a “wild card” and what it represented. “Turn it up or turn that wild card down” were the very first lyrics he wrote for the album, which appeared on the song, Face Up. He followed this theme while writing other songs, such as Ghost of a Chance, Bravado, The Big Wheel, Neurotica etc..
Because Peart wrote so fast, Lee and Lifeson were forced to speed up their process of writing the music to go along with the lyrics. The band entered Le Studio in Morin-Heights, Ontario in February 1991 and would finish recording by May of that same year.
Neil found he had the propensity to create drum parts that were almost “too rigid”, “too organized” or “too architectural”. So, for Roll the Bones, he wanted to improvise more. In doing so, during many recording sessions, Neil would arrive without rehearsing and just add his drums into the song, leaving a less complex rhythm, but still left the song with a strong rocking groove.
Joining Rush again was producer Rupert Hine, who was also known for producing music for artists such as Tina Turner, Stevie Nicks, Suzanne Vega, and Thompson Twins. He also produced the score for one of my favorite 80s movies, well one of my favorite movies of all time, Better Off Dead.
The band was comfortable with Hine, as he had co-produced their previous album Presto. Hine knew the direction Rush wanted to continue moving towards with Roll the Bones.
The band had originally planned to release the album in January 1992, but writing and recording went so well, the date was moved up, to September 1991. On September 3rd, 1991, Roll the Bones was released (or nowadays you people say “dropped”) to record stores everywhere.
Hugh Syme, who designed several of their previous album covers, would also design this one. The cover of Roll the Bones portrays a boy in front of a giant wall of dice, several hundred different dice, kicking a skull down a street. This is a direct representation of the theme previously mentioned, chance. It also plays on many terms used in gambling card games and dice rolling. We’ve all heard the term, “roll the dice and see what happens”!
Roll the Bones was the Rush album that made me dive in deeper. It was not the first album I’d heard, but special in many ways. My buddy Zack made me an “Incredibly Rush” mixtape in 7th or 8th grade. With songs like Closer to the Heart, Bastille Day, Tom Sawyer, Spirit of Radio, among others, this mix tape was the genesis for my love of Rush. It made me instantly decide, I wanted more. I was hooked. Within a year of experiencing this mix tape, the band released Roll the Bones in September 1991. Like Zack, it was the first “new” Rush album I’d bought. I felt like a part of the club now. A part of the team!
If you listened to our review of their 1978 album, Hemispheres, you might remember Zack and me fawning over the band’s technical, instrumental talent. I’m not sure we have the time for me to go through it again, meaning “Is Neil the greatest of all time”. I just feel exhausted by that argument. And I don’t feel you have to agree with me. But if he’s not in your conversation, you need to sit down and listen to YYZ live from their Exit Stage Left live album.
The album opens with Dreamline which was inspired by thoughts and feelings Neil had frequently during motorcycle travel from gig to gig on the Presto tour. “We’re only immortal, for a limited time”. This song is really about “going for it”. Going for your dreams. Whether they work or not. As a 14-year-old, this spoke directly to my heart. As a high school freshman, I was knee-deep in dreams every day of becoming a rock star.
The album’s slower track, Bravado makes me homesick. It brings back memories of listening to this record over and over and over again in Zack’s room. As simple as this song is instrumentally, it speaks louder than many of the other tracks on the album. Geddy, Alex, and Neil were excited about the song’s arrangement and didn’t want to “overwork” it as they had with other songs in the past (I’m talking about you La Villa Strangiato!). Eventually, they decided to keep it simple, which they felt resulted in a deeper track.
If you listen carefully to the lyrics in Bravado, you realize the pondering and eventual rejection of suicidal thoughts is the theme. “Though everything is lost, we will pay the price, but we will not count the cost”. The message I received was, “if you fail, try again. Keep going. Don’t ever give up. This had a deep meaning to the band, following similar themes from their song, The Pass, which was part of the Presto album.
In some ways, my emotional attachment to Roll the Bones goes further than just the music. I’m attached to the past. I’ve spent many years trying to figure out why because quite honestly, I have a lot more today than I did 32 years ago. But after looking inside and doing a lot of self-reflection, I suppose what I miss most of all is that feeling of excitement when you were a kid, wondering what things are going to be like when you grow up. As a kid, we didn’t think about school shootings or politics, injuries, or death. At least I didn’t. We, or maybe I, just thought about the future and of course, music. I thought about music every day of my life.
I’m not sure if this makes sense to you, but it does to me.
My favorite track on the album, Where’s My Thing is the first instrumental the band would record since YYZ on 1981’s Moving Pictures, regarded by many as the band’s greatest album.
I laugh when I think of instrumentals because I love them. And I love how they scare many pop music fans. I think it’s an attention span thing. I never thought that a song had to have lyrics to have meaning.
Where’s My Thing forces me to air drum every single time I hear it. I’ve ambushed several Rush haters with this song when they cannot leave the room (usually in the car). Each time, the haters have commented, “Dude, this is good. What is this?” I live for experiences like that.
While researching this album, I listened to an interview Neil gave in 1991 on the set of the Roll the Bones video for MTV. During this interview, he said:
“I’ve always had a sacrilegious view of pop music, that it’s eminently disposable, that it’s meant to be topical. It’s kind of the journalism of the arts. I don’t mean this to be falsely humble at all; that’s the way I look at all pop music that I like, however much I like it. It’s a part of my life now and that it’s meant to be topical. It’s meant to reflect on my life”.
“A friend of mine used the phrase recently of the “soundtrack of your life”. That’s what he expects from a good album. That it should come at a good time in his life to reflect his concerns, his passions, and it should occupy that place in his life and then he moves on and needs a new soundtrack for a new period of his life. That’s what it’s meant to be; a reflection of now, and then in a year or two it’s in the past”.
This is precisely how I feel this album exists in my life. Is it Rush’s strongest album? Ehhhh. Well, maybe not. But it certainly is strong. And again, I chose to review this album because it represents that time in my life, 1991-1992. I was a freshman moving up to being a sophomore in high school. We weren’t old enough to drive yet, and our musical ears were fast maturing. We weren’t JUST listening to whatever was playing on the radio at any given time. Roll the Bones became that first Rush album that was released after I planted my flag in the ground, telling the world, “I’m a Rush fan”.
In the same interview, guitarist Alex Lifeson commented on the crowd during their 1991 tour so far. That it was “a mix of 13- and 14-year-olds and 40- and 50-year-olds.” And that was back in 1991. Lifeson continued,
“that’s just a testament to our fans’ loyalty. Our fans are passing down their passion to their children and so forth. And that just blows our mind”.
With Roll the Bones, there seems to be more of a 3-piece approach and more of a hard edge to it, compared to many of their albums during the 80s.
Geddy intentionally kept his voice in a more natural, lower tone that helped the melodic character of the band. He said there’s so much scope, so much music available when he sings in a lower key.
Neil credited LL Cool J and Public Enemy as rap writers he respected who inspired him to write the rap part to the title track on the album, Roll the Bones. Ultimately, they found using Geddy’s voice “treated” in a lower tone. This is new to me. I can remember Zack telling me it was KRS-One. The rapper from Boogie Down Productions. But I guess it’s not!
The Big Wheel is a song Neil wrote keeping in mind the tradeoff between innocence and experience. It’s not autobiographical. He wanted to find universal things that people could relate to. He enjoyed riding his bike from town to town, city to city between gigs, stopping at the smallest diner in the middle of a rural spot, having breakfast and just listening to the people around him talk. Just regular people embarking on their regular day. This, Neil said, is what kept life on the road for him leveled.
Ghost of a Chance is not really a love song or ballad. It fits in with his overall theme of randomness. All these things we go through in life and the people we meet are all by chance. The places we go and the people we meet there, all those things are so random, and yet, through all that, people do meet each other. There’s a “ghost of a chance” something special can happen when two people meet. The odds are usually against it, but at the same time, that ghost of a chance sometimes does come through and people will find each other and stay together. This was an acceptable theme for Neil to write in terms of a “love song”. You wouldn’t catch him writing a Poison or Motley Crue-type love song.
Neil noted in the same 1991 interview when writing Roll the Bones, he went back and listened to one of their older albums, Power Windows, which they released in 1985. Power Windows was the first album they produced with Peter Collins. Collins’ approach was to put tons of different sounds, instruments, synth, etc. on the album. I think Neil made a really interesting comment when he said, and I’m paraphrasing here, “I still really enjoy Power Windows but when I listened to it the other day, it’d been several years, and I was distracted by how many sounds were coming at me at once. I found it dizzying. I have no regrets, but I’m glad that phase of our career is sort of “over”. He went on to say that the band’s approach on Roll the Bones, maybe minus Geddy, who’s famous for admitting he was sad to say goodbye to all the synth, was really to break it all down, take out a lot of the sound, and just make a rock record with “less going on”.
With the exception of the rap part of the song, Roll the Bones, Neil didn’t use any electric drums on the album, just acoustic.
Neurotica might be my least favorite song on the record, but you know what? Every time I listen to it, I still smile. It reminds me of driving around our hometown. The lyrics are powerful however the repetition in the chorus diverts my attention to stronger songs on the record.
The band has always been transparent that they listened carefully to the music of the present-day each time they were writing new records. They were also upfront that they responded to present-day music as well. You can hear this in virtually EVERY Rush album, from Fly by Night to Hemispheres, from Moving Pictures to Hold Your Fire, from Counterparts to Clockwork Angels, the band always kept their lyrics and technicality at a peak level. When you listen to each album, it’s obvious they were incorporating present-day music.
Heresy brings that same feeling to me that Neurotica does. Although I do enjoy this track more than Neurotica. I think Heresy is a beautiful song. I forgot how much I loved it. I’m not sure they ever played it live. I don’t recall ever seeing it. The marching drums give way to a synthesizer background, led by Geddy’s soft vocals. This is a song that could inspire a generation with its lyrics. I could see this backing up a news clip on a war-torn Ukraine. The song transitions to a faster beat and if you listen to Neil’s drums in the background, he’s still blowing your mind, lest we forget!
I think freshman year of high school is one of the most impactful parts of one’s life. At least in America. This is why I loved the movie, The Perks of Being a Wildflower so much. It’s about a boy who goes to high school and is trying to fit in. Really all he wants are friends. I can remember, that was all I wanted; to find my group, regardless of who they were. I just wanted to find them. And then I wanted to share my love for music with them day after day to make going to school tolerable.
Another impactful time is freshman year of college followed by freshman year of GROWNUP LIFE. Because they both force a major change in oneself, they’re like a smash of reality in the face. You learn everything you knew in middle school, then in high school, then in college, is in the past. They’re gone. You then must take those experiences, learn from them, and move on. So, the music I first heard during these impactful times in my life certainly created vivid memories that stuck with me for decades. Even up to today.
Roll the Bones brought commercial success back to the band. The album reached # 3 in the US, which was their highest since 1981’s Moving Pictures, which had the radio hit, Tom Sawyer. The album also went as high as #10 in the UK, and # 11 in Canada. The song Dreamline reached #1 in the US, and Where's My Thing became Rush's second song to be nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental. It lost to Eric Johnson’s Cliffs of Dover, who interestingly enough opened for Rush during the 1991 leg of the Roll the Bones tour.
Rush toured on the album between October 1991 and July 1992. Because they had such a positive experience recording the album, they stayed on the road for longer than their previous Presto tour. Zack and I had the opportunity to see them on June 17th, 1992, at Great Woods Performing Arts Center in Mansfield, Massachusetts. Being the first Rush show for both of us, this experience made our love grow deeper and wider. We would get to enjoy 23 more years of seeing the band live in concert. Combined, Zack and I attended at least one show on every tour that followed, all the way up through the R40 Farewell tour in 2015, which knocked our socks RIGHT OFF with songs such as Xanadu, The Camera Eye, Jacobs Ladder, and the ENTIRE Cygnus X-1 books I AND II. It would also be the last time we’d see Neil’s drum solo and the last time we’d ever see them live.
I know for many out there, Rush is an acquired taste. There aren’t many who “kind of” like the band. You either love them or hate them. That is clear. I am so grateful the element of chance played a part in turning me on to the band. Because of this, I enjoyed decades of hard-thumping, tight-sounding, melodic music that made me consistently check my heart to ensure it wasn’t going to jump straight out of my chest. Because of this, I developed friendships with other Rush fans around the world and grew an even deeper bond with my oldest friend Zack.
So, I invite you to take a chance. Listen to Rush. You won’t be disappointed.
