FEATURE:
Vinyl Corner
Rush - Moving Pictures
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BECAUSE the Canadian band Rush…
IN THIS PHOTO: Rush in 1981/PHOTO CREDIT: Lynn Goldsmith
released their eighth studio album, Moving Pictures, on 12th February, 1981, I wanted to mark forty years of a classic. After touring to support their previous album, Permanent Waves (1980), the band began writing and recording new material in August 1980 with co-producer Terry Brown. They continued to write songs with a more radio-friendly format, featuring tighter song structures and songs of shorter length compared to their early albums. I wanted to bring in a few reviews and an interesting article about Moving Pictures. This is another case where the vinyl edition of Moving Pictures is a little dear. I would urge people to buy it, as it is an impressively memorable and wonderful album from Rush! In their review, this is what AllMusic wrote:
“Not only is 1981's Moving Pictures Rush's best album, it is undeniably one of the greatest hard rock albums of all time. The new wave meets hard rock approach of Permanent Waves is honed to perfection -- all seven of the tracks are classics (four are still featured regularly in concert and on classic rock radio). While other hard rock bands at the time experimented unsuccessfully with other musical styles, Rush were one of the few to successfully cross over. The whole entire first side is perfect -- their most renowned song, "Tom Sawyer," kicks things off, and is soon followed by the racing "Red Barchetta," the instrumental "YYZ," and a song that examines the pros and cons of stardom, "Limelight." And while the second side isn't as instantly striking as the first, it is ultimately rewarding. The long and winding "The Camera Eye" begins with a synth-driven piece before transforming into one of the band's more straight-ahead epics, while "Witch Hunt" and "Vital Signs" remain two of the trio's more underrated rock compositions. Rush proved with Moving Pictures that there was still uncharted territory to explore within the hard rock format, and were rewarded with their most enduring and popular album”.
I am relatively uninitiated when it comes to Rush, but I do really love Moving Pictures. It is an album that I have been listening to for a bit recently. I really enjoy the songs. I think that Red Barchetta is my favourite – though each of the seven tracks is excellent! This is what Classic Rock noted when they reviewed Moving Pictures:
“The best known song on the album, and probably the band’s most popular song ever, is “Tom Sawyer”. The song was co-written by Canadian lyricist Pye Dubois, who gave a poem to the band entitled “Louis the Lawyer” and asked if the band would be interested in putting it to music. Peart then added “the themes of reconciling the boy and man in myself, and the difference between what people are and what others perceive them to be”, by using the American literary metaphor. Musically, this steady but complex song incorporates a heavy use of synths, differing time signatures and accessible melodies. “Limelight” was another hit off the album, which portrays Peart’s uneasiness with fame. It contains one of rock music’s most famous riffs, delivered by Lifeson in a perfectly cultivated crunch of distorted guitar that sounds as good as any sound he had ever cultivated. Peart’s lyrics speak of his slight disillusionment with fame and the growing intrusions into his personal life, complete with Shakespearian references.
The tour-de-force of the album is the fantastic “Red Barchetta”, a vivid action story about a joyride in a car taken during a dystopian future where such actions are unlawful. The song was inspired by the futuristic short story “A Nice Morning Drive,” by Richard Foster, published in 1973, which Peart adapted with his own love of classic automobiles. A true classic jam, this complex song was recorded in one take and contains some of the best bass playing by Lee, who really shines on this track.
Moving Pictures was the first Rush album to top the Canadian album charts and nearly did the same in the US and the UK, reaching the Top 3 in both those countries. The album went on to reach quadruple platinum status world wide and it still sounds as fresh and relevant, multiple decades after its release. During Rush’s 2010–11 Time Machine Tour, the album was played live in its entirety for the first and only time”.
Just before rounding things off, I want to source from an interesting article that looked back on a magnificent album. Some wonderful albums turn forty this year; I think that Rush’s Moving Pictures is among the best:
“As had always been the case where rock was concerned, function and form were of inarguable importance in 1981. If you’re predisposed to like certain kinds of music, and certain bands who exemplify certain kinds of music, it’s perfectly reasonable to seek signifiers so you can align yourself with your chosen tribe. Prog rock had represented a deeply engraved line in the sand – more of a fissure – even in its grandiloquent heyday, and it is generally accepted that punk ushered it smartly off the premises (though nothing is ever quite so cut-and-dried).
Certainly, by 1981, it didn’t seem at all unreasonable to conclude that the hirsute “dinosaur” rock bands who had tottered at inordinate length across prop-littered stages were laughably antithetical to the antsy, sharply-etched, pop-conscious combos who succeeded them. Concision was a key differentiator, whether this applied to song duration, hairstyle or hem width. But it would be wrong to assume that all old prog hounds were grimly set in their ways by the tail end of the 70s, deaf to the alarms raised by the changing guard, heedlessly blundering towards an unlamented demise behind the Diminishing Returns store. Rush, for one, had been listening very carefully indeed.
‘Red Barchetta’, meanwhile, is an open-road parable inspired by Richard Foster’s 1973 short story A Nice Morning Drive, and set in a future which now doesn’t seem too far away, in which cars powered by fossil fuels become outlawed relics. It is clearly written from a health-and-safety-gone-mad perspective (“A brilliant red Barchetta from a better, vanished time”), and the dichotomy it now presents, pitting aesthetics and visceral thrills against the custodianship of the planet, may be a discussion for another day. As an overall composition, however, it’s a Rush cornerstone, with guitarist Alex Lifeson supplying a pointillist constellation of glittering harmonics.
‘YYZ’, named for the identification code of Toronto Pearson International Airport, is another Rush lynchpin: a jackhammer, bravura instrumental with a tritone interval straight from the King Crimson playbook. To these ears, it contains Lifeson’s finest recorded solo, an ecstatic, middle-Eastern ululation of whammy-bar-assisted dips and swoops.
Best of all, ‘Limelight’ rides in on such an appealing, immediate and compact riff that it can only be classed as pop music… albeit pop music with a characteristically insular lyrical agenda (“One must put up barriers to keep oneself intact… I can’t pretend a stranger is a long-awaited friend”), and, as it’s Rush, bars of 7/8. In many ways, it’s a song that defines them: decent, diffident men, permanently enshrined in memory on the world’s stages but bemused by the devil’s bargain that this always entailed”.
Go and get Moving Pictures on vinyl if you can. Stream the album if not, as it is a really fantastic listen. Rush has been awarded fourteen Platinum and three multi-Platinum albums in the U.S., plus seventeen Platinum albums in their native Canada. They have been nominated for seven Grammy Awards. The band was inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1994 and the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013. Take some time out to listen to Moving Pictures and immerse yourself in…
ONE of Rush’s finest albums.