Rush - Moving Pictures
#68
by Brian Kushnir
February 12 1981
Rush
Moving Pictures
Genre: I Love You, Man
Allen’s Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Brian’s Rating: 2112/5 points
Highlights:
Tom Sawyer
Red Barchetta
YYZ
Limelight
Camera Eye
Witch Hunt
Vital Signs
I was still 13 when this came out and Rush first got on my radar, with friends buzzing about Rush concerts and at the same time catching the unmistakably different and mysterious sound of Tom Sawyer on my local rock stations (KOME, 98.5 or KSJO, 92.3). What is this sound and what is this band? Soon, my drummer friends and I were endlessly arguing over who was the best in rock, and Neil Peart was always in the mix.
40 years later and I’m tripping all over these lost liner notes.
Dig the scene in Le Studio outside Montreal, circa winter 1980. The members of Rush - Geddy Lee on Bass, Neil Peart on Drums, and Alex Lifeson on Guitar are straight off the success of their last outing for Mercury, “Permanent Waves,” itching to further streamline their sound.
Le Studio is a retreat - a famously hermetic liveaboard log cabin outpost surrounded by bucolic nature, built for creators to escape the every-day trappings and just focus in and make things. Outside the picture windows in the studio the forest and snow on the ground creates an atmosphere of silence. It’s a monastic existence for the trio, just in their late 20s and already with 7 prior releases under their belts and a feeling they have something to prove.
Each track here in Moving Pictures is a self contained travelog, lyrical screenplays each that could later be written, optioned, filmed. Throughout you’ll hear muscular, tight, assured playing, this is a power trio that has through tour after tour honed its sound to an unbreakable damascus edge. The character of each player is simultaneously featured prominently in the mix. Otherworldly vocals. Punched-up, distorted bass played with verve and a kind of reckless precision that wants to strain the limits of your speaker box. Melodic, shimmering guitar tones. Drums with the force of cannon shots. Rush will cut, and they will kill.
Close your eyes and take for example this: the instantly iconic opening sound Tom Sawyer. It's the ur-Rush, the essence of this band’s past present and future distilled into a sonic big bang, from which everything now and forever emanates. Neil Peart lays down a groove as Geddy Lee experiments in the verse with his take on spoken word bop-prosody, an assured nod to the hip hop sounds that are taking the cities by storm. But wait! ‘His mind is not for rent,’ in call and response with the band, ‘to any god or government;’ words, written by the brooding and cerebral drummer Neil Peart, that speak to every generation of discontented youth angling down the river of life in search of freedom. And in a stroke of Rush genius they also talk to the heads, the fans that have been ripping bong-loads with them from the beginning. “The world is, the world is… love and life are deep…”
And though it’s been said that no-one ever raps in odd-time signatures, Rush is here to challenge that notion with a palindromic 7/4 interlude heading into the bridge that gives Peart time to demonstrate the maximum dynamic timbre of every drum in his massive drum-kit.
Let’s agree that Geddy Lee’s voice is one of the most unique in all of music, and together with the band’s incandescent musicianship and lyrical narratives it is one of the band’s signature elements. Naturally high pitched with an instantly recognizable tone, he himself has called it polarizing, and for some listeners it has been problematic, especially in their earlier albums where he consistently stayed in the highest of high registers. On Moving Pictures he regularly finds a sweet spot squarely in the pleasant lower-middle section of his range. You instantly recognize THAT VOICE, and now it is delivered in a way that seems well-positioned to invite new listeners in.
Red Barchetta takes us further on the road, even more literally here as we hop along-side a rebel in some dystopian future who breaks the ‘motor law’ and slips past the ‘eyes’ to take a fantastic joyride in a Red Ferrari his uncle has been secreting away. Rush let’s you hear it all: the sound of the engine, the shrieking tires, and your heart pulses along with the song’s hero as his journey reaches its climax. Producer Terry Brown has worked on everything they’ve ever released, and he helps deepen the band’s sonic impact, adding effects on Lifeson’s guitar solo to make it sound like he’s in a tunnel, and allowing Peart to sound like he’s attempting to put the pedal to the metal with the force of the bass drum.
With so many odd time signatures in these tunes its a topic that has to be mentioned: Rush like to mix it up. Case in point: YYZ starts off with an intro played on triangle (natch) in 10/8 (double natch). According to the boys the Z is pronounced “Zed” and the letters refer to the airport code of Toronto International airport. Nothing, not even a song intro is wasted here, everything serves the song with intention. And so, three songs into Moving Pictures, we are on the road again, though this time we are coming in for a landing to the band’s hometown. This song got its start as a soundcheck jam between Lee and Peart, and it shows when they begin a flashy bit of one-upsmanship less than halfway through by trading 4s between them for a few rounds before heading into the guitar solo, an exotic, melodic Eastern rip that once again places you in another moving picture just in time for the main verse song to re-emerge .
Limelight rounds out Side 1, the most straightforward song of the bunch and about as Pop as Rush has ever been to this point, shifting time signatures notwithstanding. Here we have Peart riffing on Shakespeare’s with “All the world’s a stage and we are merely players” and crafting what is essentially a protest song against the trappings of his recent fame. Though the music doesn’t sound especially complex or challenging after what we’ve just been through in the first three songs, Lifeson’s guitar solo here is a masterpiece of understatement, which through subtle use of feedback and vibrato evokes longing and loss and heck the tension between the artist, their art, and their audience.
Side 2 almost seems unnecessary after such a powerful start, but keep listening because Rush still have a bunch more to say. You will first be treated to The Camera Eye, at nearly 11 minutes the longest song here. Ease into this picture - cars in traffic, police whistles, and then a synthesizer fanfare and drums approaching as if marching in from a distance, let’s call it a Bolero, setting the cinematic stage over the first few minutes. Two and a half minutes in the scene you’ve arrived into a rocking groove …if you stupidly count the beats trying to catch me in a time-signature ‘gotcha’ you may find its in 11/4, or 12/7, or 13 whatever, but pay no mind to the time signature and just get moved by the picture that they are showing you, for here Rush are training their Camera Eye on street scenes in New York and London. Again Peart’s lyrics grapple with the longing and hope of the individual amidst the scale and relentlessness of the modern city, and there’s no clear resolution - we’re left in between ‘the sense of possibilities’ and ‘the wrench of hard realities.’
Witch Hunt is next and is audaciously subtitled “Part 3 of “Fear” (at this time Parts 1 and 2 have yet to be released…) and opens with Peart in use-it-or-lose-it mode hitting all of the percussion he has in his kit, especially the bells, bells, bells (E.A. Poe eat your heart out): orchestra bells, tubular bells, bell tree, cowbell (curiously, also a cow necklace in some parts of the world for those who are keeping score at home), not to mention wind chimes, glockenspiel, and wait there’s more: gong, crotales, plywood,… the list goes on. We’re still in Moving Pictures here and this Witch Hunt deals with vigilantes and madmen, righteous mobs full of hatred, immigrants, infidels, and ultimately turns out to be a parable calling out groups that define themselves in opposition to an unattractive ‘other.’ The money quote here: “Quick to judge, quick to anger, slow to understand. Ignorance and prejudice and fear walk hand in hand.” For Peart and by extension Rush the biggest fear is of ‘those who know what’s best for us.’ It's a timeless sentiment.
Finally, Vital Signs. If Moving Pictures were a fancy meal this would be the petit four, the fun sweet little thing you get as a bonus after the main courses and deserts are done. An opening sequencer loop merges neatly into a reggae riff, territory that Rush had dabbled into a bit in their previous release, Permanent Waves, and not too far off from something The Police might drop. No time signature acrobatics here, Vital Signs is straight ahead, synth driven reggae-infused pop. Peart’s lyrics are less weighty but closer to the heart of what is going on with the band as they’re wrapping up their latest and thinking about the next move, one that is increasingly building more electronics and synths into its sound. Signals of where Rush is heading from here, he argues for the need to go beyond where they’ve come from. “The impulse is pure,” and “everybody got to deviate from the norm.”
https://open.spotify.com/album/2xg7iIKoSqaDNpDbJnyCjY?si=1alRNs2LSTCw25ISpanTxg
Reference:
Tom Sawyer Official Video, shot at Le Studio https://youtu.be/auLBLk4ibAk
Limelight Official Video, at Le Studio https://youtu.be/ZiRuj2_czzw
Vital Signs Official Video, at Le Studio https://youtu.be/Yh5RSv52g6U
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