at 13:45 on March 10, 2009, EDT.
By Nick Patch, THE CANADIAN PRESS

TORONTO - Ray Danniels isn't used to standing in the spotlight.

The longtime Rush manager will receive an award from the Music Managers Forum during Canadian Music Week on Wednesday, and he said he's not quite sure how to handle the attention.

"I never called my company after myself, I never wanted to be a public figure, so it's hard for me to talk about myself," Danniels said in a telephone interview. "But I look at the recognition on this, and I say this is the recognition for what Rush has done in the last 20 years."

That's only half the time that Danniels, 56, has spent with the band. He began managing Rush when he was just 16 and was growing up alongside them in Toronto.

"It just happened," he recalled. "If you're going to quit school to manage a rock and roll band, you better have the right one."

Most 16-year-olds might prefer to be onstage with a guitar rather than bickering with promoters in the back, but not Danniels.

"You have to have talent to (perform)," he said. "I was only good on the phone. And I was driven. I needed to do something with my life and I loved music."

He would need that determination. Danniels aggressively shopped Rush's music to record labels but they weren't interested. So he released the music himself.

"No one wanted to sign them at that level, so I became a record company," he recalled. "Same on the publishing side, no one had any interest in them, and I was just determined.

"Listen to that first album (1974's 'Rush'), these were songs written by kids. To this day, it gets a ton of airplay. It still stands up. And these guys were barely able to get into bars. If they hadn't lowered the drinking age in Ontario, they wouldn't have been able to play a club."

Of course, Danniels has his share of regrets - including the career trajectories of a couple of other bands he handled.

"I was not happy that neither Matt Good nor the Tea Party were really able to make it in America," Danniels said. "Both of them didn't succeed for very different reasons. I thought both artistically were capable of it, but it didn't happen. Wrong place, wrong time."

But Danniels says he doesn't regret the way he handled Van Halen, which has proven a source of controversy. Former Van Halen frontman Sammy Hagar has publicly blamed Danniels for his ouster from the group, which replaced him with original singer David Lee Roth.

Years later, Danniels says he and Hagar still don't speak.

"Working with Van Halen was very different than working with Rush," he said. "Very different people, very different circumstances, very different expectations."

Rush, meanwhile, has been defying expectations of late. Their most recent album, 2007's "Snakes & Arrows," debuted at No. 3 on the Billboard charts, selling about 93,000 copies in its first week.

The band followed that with extremely successful tours in consecutive summers.

Danniels says he's astounded by Rush's longevity.

"I didn't ever think that I'd still be doing this with the same partners, same band, for so long," he said. "That's the best part of the story."


©The Canadian Press, 2009