Rush - Moving Pictures (1981)

Dan:

My colleague in Florida, Bill, liked songs about different ways of learning. At the time, popular self-improvement gurus referred to the creative self as "right-brained," in contrast to the more structured "left-brained" self. This was a vastly oversimplified distinction, largely challenged by current neuroscience, but it led me to Rush. Bill liked their 1978 album, Hemispheres, because of its right/left-brained theme. He called it his "anthem," and he even played the 18-minute "Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres" for our class, which gave at least one student a headache. I wasn't sure the exercise was worth the time it took for unprepared listeners to plow through it, but I applaud the creative impulse of my dear colleague.

Hemispheres also included the song "The Trees," which also appeared as the B side of the single "Closer to the Heart." While the latter is a wonderful song from A Farewell to Kings (1977), "The Trees" somewhat clumsily celebrates Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy, using the forest as a metaphor for society. The solution to the "unrest in the forest" was to cut all the trees to the same size, which Rush reasoned was the solution prescribed by socialism. Most of the world had already seen through the veneer of Objectivism after its heyday in the 1950s when Rand's books The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged were favorites among wannabe intellectuals.

Politics aside, I learned a lot about Rush so when their classic Permanent Waves was released in 1980, I was ready. "The Spirit of Radio" was an obvious favorite for FM deejays and listeners, as was "Freewill." Some of Rand's philosophy remained but was packaged into better tunes and stronger playing, I thought. 

Moving Pictures, for me, is the best Rush album on the strength of its songs and playing. "Tom Sawyer" kicks off side 1 with an anthem to a modern-day version of Mark Twain's famous character. Today's Tom Sawyer is a confident, free-thinking lad who needs only to be judged against his own standards. Then comes "Red Barchetta," which is a story about a boy visiting his uncle who houses a red Barchetta automobile on his farm. The "rush" of driving the car is conveyed literally in the lyrics. 

The instrumental "YYZ" (named after the call letters of the Toronto airport) offers brief respite before one of the best songs on the album - "Limelight." It captures the mixed emotions of performance, not only by rock bands on stage but also in ordinary human interactions. My favorite verse is: "All the world's indeed a stage / And we are merely players / Performers and portrayers / Each another's audience outside the gilded stage."

Side 2 continues the run of great songs with "The Camera Eye," whose lyrics are more poetically obscure, involving contrasts between New York and Westminster. The instrumental intro states an ominous theme with deep synthesized sounds. The multi-part suite returns to the intro midway through, a typical arrangement for many prog compositions. There's so much here to digest, but it's worth spending time on it. "Witch Hunt" and "Vital Signs" close the album and seem like lesser material compared to all the other tracks. While their themes (fear and mental anguish, respectively) certainly belong on the album, I don't enjoy the music as much as the splendid earlier tracks.

Steve:

I was an enormous Rush fan in high school, particularly in the ninth grade, when I and several friends would constantly quote Rush lyrics. One of my proudest moments was approaching the basketball court during lunch hour, whilst others (including Peter, a Rush-fan friend of mine) were engaged in a game of Horse. One of the kids, Tor (short for Victor), had just gotten "out" and his friends jeered playfully at him, "Bye, Tor!"  Without missing a beat, I jumped into the scene and screamed, ".... and the Snow Dog!" in my best Geddy Lee voice. My friend Peter fell on the floor laughing - my timing couldn't have been better. Yeah, I know I'm a dork. [Dan comment: "By-Tor and the Snow Dog" is a song from Rush's Fly by Night (1975). I had to look it up because my own dorkiness is specialized in jazz trivia.]

Moving Pictures was and still is a perfect album. For the prior seven years and seven studio albums, Rush had been building up to something, first mastering the Led Zeppelin-esque hard-rock-with-a-brain style, then upping the complexity with sci-fi epics (e.g. "2112", "Cygnus X-1" Books 1 & 2), and finally introducing Permanent Waves, a more concise complexity where the dazzling musicianship enhanced radio-friendly and easy-to-follow songs with lyrics about real human concerns ("The Spirit of Radio", "Freewill"). With the first track on Moving Pictures, "Tom Sawyer", it is immediately clear that Rush perfected that latter phase in their development. It is still their most popular song, and the fact that it is also undeniably one of their best songs (i.e. at the top of both the artistic and the commercial totem pole at the same time) is a testament to how well Rush's sharpest instincts coincided with the "spirit of the radio" at this time.

Although Moving Pictures is their finest work, many of their numerous subsequent albums are quite fine too - first fully exploring synthesizers in the 80s without sounding foolish, then moving back to a guitar focus just in time for the 90s. Their final album, 2012's Clockwork Angels, was a fitting capper to their career, and I'm glad I got to see the tour.