Chapter 2: Moving Pictures

“The right time, the right place, the right song, the right parts.”

Pleased with the living/working arrangements for A Farewell to Kings, Rush tried it again for Hemispheres. Pleased with the living/working arrangements for Permanent Waves, Rush tried it again for Moving Pictures. Fortunately, the sequel effort this time didn’t disappoint, and the guys found themselves more Canadian than ever. Living and raising families in Canada, writing on Canadian farms, recording immersed in the Canadian forest, bridging the divide between English Canada and French Canada, winning Junos and paddling canoes . . . Rush were celebrating everything it meant to be Canadian.

“We went out to Ronnie Hawkins’s farm, out in the Stony Lake area,” begins Alex, on preparations for the record that would serve as Rush’s Machine Head and Paranoid, or Fragile and Not Fragile, as it were. “I guess it’s just north of Peterborough. He had a really nice little home up there, nice cottage with a big barn on it. We converted the barn into the studio, and set Neil’s drums up, and had areas for Geddy and myself. And it was a really nice location.

“We were there in the summer, and everybody was in good spirits. There was a good energy to the work. We started writing there and basically wrote everything in rehearsal there, and then moved into Le Studio later that fall and started recording. There was a real positive energy, not unlike what we went through with Snakes & Arrows years later. But at that time, there was just something that was very strong and positive about where we were with that record. I don’t want to say it was effortless, but the effort seemed to be very smooth. We had some guests visit, and we had a lot of fun across the whole process. It wasn’t just in the studio — it was a really nice place to be at that point in our lives.”

The guys were enthusiastic about carrying on the concept kicked off with the last album. “Yeah, it was great, really exciting,” Alex continues. “Because instead of one story you had five stories in the same time span, but you could link them with a sentiment or with an idea. A little bit less so with Permanent Waves but more so with Moving Pictures — that whole idea of a collection of short stories is what we were after and that’s what Moving Pictures is.”

Consensus is that Moving Pictures is the record where Geddy toned down his patented high shriek. “I bought it at Kresge’s,” laughs Lee on coming up with it in the first place. “I keep it downstairs in my studio for when I need it. Lifetime guarantee.

“I think I can still shriek if the music requires it,” figures Geddy. “I have no conceptual adverse feelings about it. As the music changed, it became more interesting for me to write melodies as opposed to shrieking. It was basically used for cutting through the density of the music. And sometimes we would write without any consideration for what key we were in in the early days, and I would find myself with twelve tracks recorded in a key that was real tough to sing in, so I didn’t have a choice at that point. Re-record the record in a different key or just go for it.

“Alex started getting really heavily into model airplanes,” says Geddy, offering further glimpses into Rush’s release valves during writing and recording. “It started when we were writing Permanent Waves, when we were at Lakewood Farms, in a little farmhouse out of the city. And even Terry Brown got into it. In fact, we had a lot of fun. In August of ’80, writing Moving Pictures, we were working on Ronnie Hawkins’s farm out near Stony Lake, and Alex was really into these remote control airplanes. He would spend hours building them. And of course, they would always go haywire, where they would get up too high, or lose control or something. And I remember, there was one that went completely haywire and ended up crashing and exploding on the top of Ronnie Hawkins’s truck, put a big hole in the top of it.

“And then Terry Brown had this fantastic giant one, this giant plane he had been working on. It was so big you had to have this kind of tether so it would fly around in circles. And it had a huge engine on it. And I remember he finally cranked it up and man, it took off! And suddenly, we all had to hit the deck! It was like this charge went out, and everybody is diving for the ground, and poor Broon is holding onto this thing going around in circles. He’s going around and around and around [laughs]. Finally the plane ran out of gas and landed, and he basically fell over in the grass. He was completely dizzy; it was hilarious.

“And we continued that at Morin Heights. Alex, and in fact, Tony Geranios, who is also known as Jack Secret, started working on rockets, and we would have these rocket launches, sometimes at dinner, sometimes at breakfast. I remember one time he launched one in the backyard, and the thing just took off the wrong way completely and missed exploding in Alex’s brand-new Mercedes by inches. It was always great fun. And Alex got into water planes at Morin Heights, because they had a lake. He would land it in the water and take off from the water.”

Notes Terry, on the way the band had been evolving at this juncture, “We went for a bigger sound. But then looking at the instrumentation, there were more keyboards. So the guitar needed to be textured differently. But then we used chorus for many, many years; this was not something new. It was just the way it was used. Alex was always into delays. I loved working with him for that reason. He had all these delays he would put through the amp, so we were always getting these great guitar sounds right through the amplifier — we weren’t adding delay afterwards. But yeah, the guitar sound changed, and it needed to change. The material was different. You can’t go back in and do the same thing every time. You’ve got to move forward.

“We were working forty-eight tracks,” continues Terry, “and we would cut the drums and some guide guitar and bass parts on one twenty-four and put it away until we were finished, and then put a guide track on another twenty-four-track and then fill it up with all our overdubs. So we didn’t really approach it a lot differently than we had before, but there was some magic going on, certainly that day when we loaded in and set up the drum sounds for ‘Tom Sawyer,’ and it just blew everyone away. It was very, very exciting. It’s a hard thing to break down though. It’s a combination of the right time, the right place, the right song, the right parts and the energy that was around us at that time. But it definitely has a magic to it.”

Geddy explained this process further to CHUM-FM’s Rick Ringer: “What it really did for us was we were able to get a bass and drum sound that we like, put it on one twenty-four-track. On one of the twenty-four-tracks we recorded bass and drum tracks, and then we transferred from one machine to a couple of tracks on the other on a fresh piece of tape. And then we took the original bass and drum tape and we put it away so that we would not lose any quality in running the tape over and over again, because the more you run a tape the more quality you lose, the more oxide you lose. This might be getting a little technical but anyway that was the process we utilized, and it enabled us to preserve the bass and drum tracks to as close to the original sound as possible. That was really the whole concept behind this album, to try to preserve the sounds as much as we could, the way they were originally recorded. Because as most albums are done, by the time it gets to the consumer through the various means and methods of tape copying and mixing down onto another piece of tape and dubbing this and that, you end up losing a lot of quality, and so we wanted to avoid that loss.”

Moving Pictures also represented another step with respect to the band’s use of keyboards. This was an incremental evolution — at this point more textural than anything but still present in greater quantity and quality. “Tom Sawyer” serves as a perfect microcosm of this idea.

“That’s right,” reflects Terry, “and keyboards were Ged’s department; he was always on top of the new keyboards. It was cutting edge, as far as having everything we needed. If we wanted a particular sound, we just needed to find it. Keyboards were already becoming more and more important, and they had been right from the days of Farewell to Kings, I think. We had lots to work with in the studio, in preproduction, and parts were now being written specifically for keyboards. I know Geddy was using keyboards to write.”

“The thing that was probably the most significant was that the studio had changed,” explains Paul Northfield, comparing the recording of Moving Pictures to Permanent Waves, “because we had just got in a brand-new SSL console, one of the first in North America. Which, although it’s just a recording console, was a step toward a more high-technology approach to recording. The automation on the computer was superior, and we were using forty-eight-tracks. Permanent Waves was twenty-four-track. We moved to forty-eight-track, or two twenty-four-track machines locked together. We added more tracks to the drums, more tracks to everything.

“In terms of their mood, I think they were excited to be back. Permanent Waves had been such a successful record for them that there was a buzz. They came in fully prepared. Preproduction had gone well, and they’d gotten great stuff. They came in and we did that record in ten weeks, every day, seven days a week, from beginning to end. Recording and mixing. Because they’d had such a good experience before, and also because of the nature of the new console that was in the studio, they decided they were going to do the whole thing then, from day one. I think had the mixing not gone as well as it had, they would have done other things. But they liked the studio environment so much, and we all got along great, so we just did the record and that was it.

“It’s only in retrospect that you deconstruct the record and go, ‘Well, why was Moving Pictures so significant?’ And I think it’s just a time and place that the band was at musically and where tastes were at. Plus that simplicity and power of the three-piece at the same time as the sophistication, just the right balance between new technology and the raw power of the band. And their more refined song approach and finding it to be a fruitful direction for them. So even though they had some longer songs on Moving Pictures, I think the difficult part of the album was technical. At that time, when you did forty-eight-tracks of recordings, you had to lock machines together to do it. All the technology was relatively new and unpredictable, and we had nightmares trying to keep everything together.”

As for the increased use of keyboards, Northfield theorizes that “everybody involved in making music was interested in what new things were on the horizon. In retrospect, we see keyboards as being in some kind of conflict musically with the raw three-piece drums, bass, guitar situation. But at that time, that wasn’t even the discussion. It may have come later, but in the early days, it was really, ‘This is interesting stuff.’ There were some profoundly unusual sounds, and when I say profoundly, some of the sounds these keyboards were able to produce had never been heard before. And for that reason alone, we were all excited about it. We were all waiting for the latest, newest toys that we could add to the arsenal. And that was true in the studio and it was true for the band.

“It’s only later that you realize maybe there is a pact with the devil. When that technology starts to be more important than the music or the songwriting or the basic performance, then you start to realize there is a place for it. I think the recording industry has matured to the point where we no longer really care what the latest toys are. Some of our favorite toys are old toys that have existed from thirty, forty years ago. But at the same time, we wouldn’t be able to make records without some of the new toys, computers being a major part of making music now. But that was just the way it was. We were all waiting for the latest, newest thing, and that became part of the record; very straightforward, really.”

Album safely whacked together, it came time for packaging it and putting it in the shops, which in hometown Toronto meant big chains like Kelly’s, A&A, Sam the Record Man and Records on Wheels. The cover shot, featuring movers actually moving pictures, was the Ontario Legislative Building at 111 Wellesley Street West. Toronto is the capital of the province of Ontario, and this is the government’s front door — it was shot on Sunday when the building was closed. The guys liked the power trio symmetry of the building, consisting of three arches and three pillars between each arch.

We don’t see that the scene of the movers is being filmed until we flip over to the back cover. The sense of plush class exuded is very much on par with A Farewell to Kings and Permanent Waves, with the listener tacitly feeling the quality, also represented by the staunch fonts and the regal red and black theme. The cost of putting together the cover was about $9,500 according to Hugh Syme, and the label was none too pleased, charging back some of it to the band. Hugh was validated when it won him his first Juno for cover art. Years later, it became apparent that the front cover shot was actually a still from a film that was made of the scene (by the crew on the back), when the scene suddenly became animated in a video montage.

At the far left of the image is Hugh’s design assistant, Bob King, who was also the model for 2112’s Starman as well as Dionysus on the front cover of Hemispheres. Mike Dixon, the man with the bushy mustache and high forehead, would reprise his role on Exit . . . Stage Left; he got involved at the behest of King, as the two were friends. Carrying the Starman painting (ergo King is on the cover twice) is the lead singer of ’70s Toronto mainstay Crowbar, Kelly Jay. The model in the Joan of Arc painting is photographer Deborah Samuel, who was also working the session — Neil has acknowledged the tie-in of this painting with the record’s “Witch Hunt.” Hugh explains he couldn’t find a Joan of Arc painting, so they staged the scene over a half-hour session with Samuel, photographing her in burlap with lighter fluid being lit in pie plates in front of her. Another artwork being moved is less serious, one of the famous kitsch paintings of dogs playing poker; the guys chose this simply because it was silly and cliché.

Also a nice touch, the album got custom thematically consistent record labels, as was the case with Hemispheres. Also included were artful black-and-white live shots, which perpetuated the upper-crust presentation of the band as seen within A Farewell to Kings and on the back of the Permanent Waves jacket.

Moving Pictures opens with a song that would go on to become the biggest and boldest of the band’s long catalogue. “Tom Sawyer” began life as a synthesizer lick that Geddy would play at sound checks. In its final form, it would be a Neil Peart showcase. Ironically, Neil has to play fast on a very slow song, at least when it comes to hi-hat. His part during the surging, languid verses is notable, but it’s his fills on this track that propel this song to the top tier of air drumming classics. “Tom Sawyer” would become a huge hit in no small part due to the drama Peart creates, although really, the track’s big hanging chords repeatedly create thespian thrills.

“I love that song, and I never get tired of playing it,” muses Geddy. “The fact that it is so popular still just confuses the hell out of me. I love the fact that it begins with such a great backbeat and there’s this kind of faux rap part. To me the song is just about innocence more than anything, and I think that comes through. And it still holds up somehow; the slightly inscrutable lyrics still deliver that message to people, and people identify with it and they dig it. And it’s got this weird middle part. And if you can get away with that in a popular song . . . geez, it’s a major victory.”

Geddy may love “Tom Sawyer” now, but at the time of recording, the band thought it was one of the weaker tracks slated for the album.

“The drum part for ‘Tom Sawyer’ — infinitely detailed — and I played it five thousand times,” laughs Neil, who said he was red, raw and aching after the day and a half it took to get the song acceptably down on tape at Le Studio. It never lets up for him; Neil says in particular that his toes were all mashed because he was hitting the bass drum so hard. Alex was all too aware of that, marveling in his playing at the beginning, where it’s essentially just drums and synth, and then drums and synth and vocal.

Touring the ruin of the complex, Peart says, “I would be set up over here, and going into it again and again, and the next time I’d add one detail, add a detail, relate this detail to the third . . . all those things happened that way by playing the songs over and over again. Nowadays my approach is the opposite, where I go for as much spontaneity as I can. But I was about composition then. And it was, of course, a great way to come up, through composition to spontaneity. But really, we had the idea and we had to all get a good take. And then they might redo bass parts and guitar parts and the overdubs and so on. But the idea was that the basic track was all three of us. So those songs were played over and over again, some of them, and I think those are the triumphant ones.”

Neil confirms that “Tom Sawyer” is one of the tougher Rush songs to pull off properly from a drum standpoint. “It’s more so due to feel, always, the subtleties of music. The more sophisticated your knowledge and tastes become, then the subtler are the things you’re looking for. And there’s a fundamental feel thing that I’m always seeking in it and in all songs. It’s the reason I keep listening to live tapes on days off on the road, to make sure I’m nailing that tempo. A small shift in feel affects everything so much, and I’ll hear where Geddy’s having to sing that line too fast — I should pull the tempo back a bit and let it breathe. There are subtleties like that that are hard-won, to nail that every night onstage.

“A movie called The T.A.M.I. Show is one of my earliest influences, from ’65. It had everybody from Chuck Berry to James Brown to Lesley Gore to the Beach Boys to the Rolling Stones, who headlined. And I noticed the bands with their own drummers playing live on TV, they’re all a little bit speedy and the singers are getting a little breathless. It’s subtle; I don’t mean that everything was raging fast. But it was just on edge. Whereas, Hal Blaine, who played in the orchestra that was backing up all the singers . . . the tempo was just perfect, just laid right down, you know? So there’s a hard-won mastery of a guy like Hal Blaine who can do that, all the time, anywhere, as opposed to seeking that and trying to achieve it, recognizing it even, those kinds of subtleties. It’s that kind of a subtle, overall consistency in the feel that I’m looking for.

“To me, a lot of it is ambition that makes me accomplish things,” continues Neil. “The drive factor. I really want to play the drums, so I’ll put the time in it takes to play the drums. I really want to write a book, so I’ll spend a year writing a book, and make it the focus of my life and reward of its own, a daily satisfying work in progress. It’s a matter of character. Once somebody said, ‘No failures of talent, only failures of character.’ Those are character issues.”

The “Tom Sawyer” lyric is wonderful, the definition of enigmatic, as Geddy says, “slightly inscrutable,” and incidentally, a cogent precursor to that of “New World Man.” It was the first collaboration between Neil Peart and Max Webster lyricist Pye Dubois, and it paints a piecemeal portrait of an edgy, cynical outsider who just may have found some good within himself.

The working title of the piece before Pye handed his bits over to Neil was “Louie the Lawyer.” “Pye’s method is that he just kind of sends me pages of scribbles and I impose order on them,” says Neil. “So it’s a perfect meeting of personalities, in that he dwells in an imagistic universe and an impressionistic universe and expresses it as such, whereas I live in a much more ordered universe and impose that structure and rhythm and parallel construction on it. I think right from that foundation, it’s a collaboration of personalities, as much as it is of words. For example, I’ll start with the way he set up the framework for a song like ‘Force Ten,’ and I’ll respond to that. I’ll start creating images in his voice, as it were, just because that’s the character of the piece. And I adapt it like a language. I translate my thoughts into his kind of images or his images into my kind of language, and it becomes a kind of interwoven, interpersonal collaboration.”

“I think we do the song injustice if we start to pick it apart,” demurs Pye. “It doesn’t make any sense. It was just two people painting a picture, wasn’t it? The original was ‘Louie the Lawyer,’ sixty, seventy lines or something, very typical of what you see here,” Pye says, stopping to show off his journals. “I had this idea, had ‘Louie the Lawyer’ at the top of the page, and I was just writing these lines. Here was ‘Louie the Lawyer,’ and over here was maybe ‘All We Are.’”

Pye confirms the handover happened when the two bands got together to work on “Battle Scar.” “Yes, that’s where it started with Neil. But it wasn’t, ‘Oh my God, I hope Neil wants to read this.’ We were just in the studio hanging out. It may have just been a simple social situation of Neil saying to me, ‘What are you writing there?’ Or me saying, ‘Hey, Neil, wanna hear this line?’ It was very innocent. It was never meant to be a song. All I can say is there were four or five minutes of, ‘What are you writing?’ ‘Well, I’m writing ‘Louie the Lawyer.’ And Neil said, ‘Well, that’s nice.’ He probably didn’t mean all of it’s nice [laughs]. There were probably just a couple of ideas in there he liked.

“There was a lot of editing before I gave Neil a new ‘Louie the Lawyer’ version,” continues Pye. “It never came back to me. It was ‘Louie the Lawyer,’ when I gave those pages to Neil, and then it was ‘Tom Sawyer’ all of a sudden. He didn’t like ‘Louie the Lawyer.’ It was completely different. Well, not completely. It was the same with respect to some of the lines I had written. I had just grabbed lines from the original that I thought were nice. I don’t remember putting them in any kind of order. In some respects, that’s how we wrote songs subsequently too. I would have the general idea, but I would have it very modular. I would just change the syntax or the verb, and it shows up in a new form.

“But the original was, I’m sure, eighty lines. Those eighty lines didn’t go to Neil. I might’ve given him twenty-five or thirty lines, and two or three versions of the one line. And then it came back to me in finished form.”

Pye says of the finished classic lyric: “There is a wonderful, steely Rush sense to it. It’s a bit ambiguous but hard-edged. If you use the word government in a song, you open up the door to feedback, in that you’re making a comment, a political statement. Or a comment about politics. I think the lyric really speaks for itself. ‘Today’s Tom Sawyer, today’s warrior.’ Tom Sawyer had his own battles back then, probably just the waves in the river and the marsh. And I was young enough then to have people in my life that were lost and confused with things in our culture, or with the way their life was going. It was a fight or flight kind of experience growing up at that age. You know, how do you not buy into the system, or how could you be different from the system? That’s all.”

Though Kim Mitchell at times has offered a different version of the “Louie the Lawyer” / “Tom Sawyer” story, implying a little more forethought, Neil recalls the situation much the way Pye explains it.

“I saw real love and respect,” recalls Max Webster manager Tom Berry, on the interaction between Rush and Max. “And the ‘Tom Sawyer’ thing, I remember when that went down. I know that Neil always respected what Pye did with lyrics. And I think, actually, the band wanted to work out a tune with Pye, and there you go, they did, and it’s one of Rush’s biggest songs.”

Geddy speaks of his own necessary collaboration with Neil regarding phrasing, turning Neil’s musings into something rhythmically sound and linguistically possible within the context of the song at hand. “I just think the style changed over the years,” Geddy says. “But it’s not quite as simple as that. In the early years the music was ambitious and adventurous and, yes, sometimes the lyrics were unwieldy, but it didn’t seem to be a problem in the context of the bombast we were throwing together. But of course as songs became more melody-oriented and less of a furious onslaught, the requirements lyrically and melodically changed as well. Neil’s great to work with in that regard. After the first draft of lyrics are given to me, obviously I have to shape them into a melodic thing. And I have to feel comfortable with them. And if I don’t sound comfortable, it’s obvious. So the two of us have always worked closely.”

Terry recalls the magic that happened with “Tom Sawyer” once the band presented it at Le Studio. “Morin Heights is a beautiful environment and it suited the boys because they don’t get distracted. I was talking to other bands that went to Morin Heights, and all they did was party their brains out and then make the record in the last week — and it sounded like it. Whereas with Rush, we would start day one and we would work. ‘Tom Sawyer’ was cut on the night we loaded in. We were all excited about this new tune, the new drums and getting started on this five- or six-week journey. We were all blown away with the drum sound and we just cut the track.

“Everything would be perfectly in place from the time we kicked off, say two in the afternoon, which was their usual start time. We worked from two to two every day. If it was vocals, Ged would be there and he’d be ready to sing. We’d vet parts as we went through it, but he would know the songs. I have had artists that would come through and they’d sort of look at me like, ‘What am I doing?’ But Rush were always hard workers.

“Obviously ‘Tom Sawyer’ was an amazing song and has a real signature sound to it. We mixed it digitally. I know that doesn’t really change the fact that the songs and the material on that album have a certain sound to them. But we did take that step, and I think it made a subtle difference to the way things sounded, to the way the drums sounded. I finally felt I had gotten the drums captured optimally. Which we’d done really well before, yet there was just something subtle about the way the drums and the bass and the guitars projected on that record. When you listen to the record they did after me, Grace Under Pressure, it was done in an analog way and has a completely different sound to it. So, you know, we had something on Moving Pictures.”

Neil spoke to Jim Ladd back in 1981 about the song. “There’s a lot of different ingredients in that song lyrically. It began as a song by another writer, a friend of ours who writes for a group called Max Webster. His lyrics we’ve always admired very much, and we have a close working relationship with that whole band. So he gave me this song and suggested it might be suitable for us. I added a certain amount of rewriting on it and it came out to be 50/50 his and mine. The stance of it does definitely have a modern day’s rocker persona about it.

“It always surprises me how certain songs tend to become more popular than others,” continues Peart, “and you can never predict the ones. It was always one of my favorite songs, right from the rhythm track of it, because that’s the part I really liked. And that song exemplifies a change in our writing style that we’ve tried to institute on this album. We’ve tried to write more from the standpoint of rhythm; we’ll establish a rhythmic feel that we like and work the musical changes around that. In the past we would often find a musical pattern we liked and then work rhythmic changes around that, which made the strata of our music very much different in that respect because there’d be shifting rhythms all the time, and it gave the music a certain twitchiness. ‘Tom Sawyer’ is an example of a really steady, confident song.”

Asked about his favorite Rush song, Neil’s father, Glen, picks this one. “I like a couple of the old-fashioned ones, of course, but especially ‘Tom Sawyer,’ which really gets the audience going whenever they’re at a concert. Plus a couple of their older songs that everybody knows all the words to. I really enjoy those songs because you’ve heard them so often, they feel like old standards now.

“Funny story, when I went to the local dentist in our town here, when I gave him my name, he said, ‘Would anybody in your family be a relative that’s a drummer?’ And I said, ‘Well, yes, there happens to be. Our oldest son Neil was the drummer in Rush.’ And he said, ‘Well, do you want to hear my Rush stories now or at your next appointment?’ And I said, ‘No, let’s hear them now.’ And he had actually studied Rush lyrics and was given one of Rush’s songs in a class project. He said their teacher was a Rush fan and he took the lyrics of one of Rush’s songs and he said, ‘Now I want you to study these lyrics and I want each of you to give me the impression of these lyrics.’ And I’ve heard that story more than once. Maybe it was more academic than Betty and I were into, I don’t know, but obviously there was a point there where people were reading what he had wanted into these lyrics.”

When informed that Neil has called “Tom Sawyer” his favorite song to play, Glen says, “Oh, is it really? Well, that rhythm gets me going. I’m surprised to hear him say that because I never knew that. I guess that’s one thing we’re thinking alike on.”

Next up on Moving Pictures is “Red Barchetta,” an exquisite little futuristic story, not so much science fiction, but Orwellian fiction like 2112. It seems it’s not music that is outlawed in this one but cars, which, in the days of fees to enter the city, speed-limiters placed on trucks (and now Volvos) and self-driving cars, no longer seems too far-fetched. The Rush guys have always had a weakness for fast cars, and so this is right up their “one-lane bridge.” It’s not clear if the “gleaming alloy air-car” that swoops over the mountain is in fact the authorities, but it’s probable. Still, it’s nice to hope it’s merely another auto enthusiast driving a sanctioned car that has just buzzed by to admire this ancient ground-and-pound Barchetta.

Neil’s tale was inspired by “A Nice Morning Drive,” a short fiction story by Richard M. Foster that appeared in the November 1973 issue of Road & Track. In the story, the car is an MG, but Neil chose to go with a Ferrari 166 MM Barchetta, which Geddy pronounces wrong. In 2007, Neil wrote about meeting Foster (he had tried to find him in 1981 but to no avail) and discussing motorcycles, in an article called “The Drummer, the Private Eye and Me.”

At the musical end, like “Tom Sawyer,” “Red Barchetta” lays down a solid, headbanging 4/4 foundation (with a few added and missing beats here and there). Essentially this is a vigorous, melodic hard rock workout along the lines of “Freewill,” “The Spirit of Radio” or this record’s “Limelight.”

Alex told radio legend Redbeard that the intention with “Red Barchetta” was “to create a song that was very vivid so that you had a sense, if you listen to it and listen to the lyrics, of the action. It does become a movie. I think that song really worked with that in mind. It’s something I think we’ve tried to carry on — become a little more visual with our music — since then. But that one in particular was very satisfying. It was always one of my favorites. I think it’s probably my favorite from that album. I like the way the parts knit together. I like the changes. I like the melody of the song. I love the dynamics of it, the way it opens with the harmonics and creates a mood, then gets right into the driving, right up to the middle section where it’s really screaming along, where you really feel like you’re in the open car, and the music’s very vibrant and moving. And then it ends as it began, with that quiet dynamic, and lets you down lightly. It picks you up for the whole thing and drops you off at your next spot.”

What Alex says there is very much in keeping with Geddy’s stated concept for the whole album, that each song is like a short film, hence the title Moving Pictures. “Red Barchetta” was not issued as a single, but because of the ensuing popularity of the album and the radio-friendliness of the song, it become an airplay staple from the record, along with the rest of side one.

“YYZ” ranks as one of the most popular rock instrumentals of all time. It even garnered a Grammy nomination, which is no surprise, as it’s clever, humorous, an air drumming classic and mercifully short. Plus it’s energetic and electric — this is the work of a power trio, a progressive one at that, getting to the point and staying on point. Bass players especially love it because Geddy really gets to blow, sometimes in unison with Alex’s riff but most of the time peeling off riffs, licks and fills that are every bit as central and hooky as anything Alex is doing.

As Geddy explained to CHUM-FM’s Rick Ringer, “We wanted to do a short instrumental. After we did ‘La Villa Strangiato’ on Hemispheres, we really enjoyed working in an instrumental framework, so we wanted to do a shorter, more concise one for the past couple of albums, and we decided that now was the time to do it. Basically it’s a rhythmic tune. It was written by Neil and myself, by and large, and was just a lot of rhythmic ideas that we’d had floating around. We tried to emulate the feel of an international airport, namely Toronto International, ’cause that’s the one we fly out of all the time. The opening of the tune starts with this very bizarre rhythm, and all that is is the Morse code for YYZ translated into bass, drums and guitar. So we threw a lot of different little things to emphasize some of the different moods of the airport. I mean an airport is sort of a door to many, many places. That’s basically what the tune is about.”

“I always felt we were moving forward all the time,” comments Terry, on the idea of doing songs that were outside the norm, if Rush even had a norm. “And it was only one or two tunes; it wasn’t the whole album. ‘YYZ,’ for instance, is a whole different kettle of fish. That was an exciting song to work on, plus it was instrumental and something totally new. We hadn’t done one of those for some time, a number of years. So it was only a part of the whole. I could live with that.”

“‘YYZ’ is an interesting test case in quite a few different ways,” reflects Neil, “and in ways that resonate forward. Because often our most troublesome songs are the instrumentals, because we want so much out of it. We used to joke, we just took our leftovers at the end of writing the songs and put those into an instrumental. Which is partly true. Of course, there was a part we loved, and we decided, okay, we love that riff, but it doesn’t belong in this song, take it out. And then it would bother us.

“I have that with lyrics. My scrap yard. Things that I hate to set aside, but I save them. And these were things we would save and stick together. But the defining thing was that all three of us have to love it. In everything we do. So an instrumental can be quirky, it can be highly technical, but all of us also want it to be textural and made up not of a bunch of pieces. I think ‘YYZ,’ if you compare it to ‘La Villa Strangiato,’ is definitely more compact and more tightly arranged. Because we were learning. That’s one of the biggest things about that Moving Pictures period: we were really learning about arranging and really spending a lot of time on it, becoming more concise and more deliberate about that aspect of what we do. ‘YYZ’ definitely benefited from that.

“And it had an overall theme, with the YYZ rhythm at the beginning being the Morse code. We were flying into Toronto, and I heard that Morse code beeping, and I thought, hmm. So I thought that would be an interesting rhythm. And then we took the theme of airports, so there’s some exotic character to the music, deliberately. There’s the big sweeping, emotional middle A part, which is like the joy of reuniting, or the sadness of being separated. All of that was deliberately put in there.

“Then there’s the other stuff like the bass and drum interchange. That was so much fun, when we designed that, when we would trade the patterns, and I said, ‘You go first.’ ‘YYZ’ is a perfect example of the way Geddy and I work together. And I kinda think there’s three ways it comes about. One is direct communication where we talk about things. He’ll say, ‘Okay, I wanna do this little figure; it would be great if you could nail that for me.’ Or I remember like in the song ‘Force Ten,’ I was cutting short accents. He says, ‘This particular accent, I want to let the note ring, so, boom, don’t jump in.’ And we would talk about things like that.

“The other kind is paying attention. Listening to each other. And I’ll hear him hint at a figure and then I’ll jump on that. Then maybe the next time we play it, I’ll hint at something and he’ll hint back, and then we’ll soon have built a little figure out of nowhere. So I can always nab that inspiration for where that came from. The two of us were exchanging things, and again, just playing it over and over again. You know, working out those little details together. And Geddy is very responsive to little figures like that. He loves them as much as I do. And if I put a little kick in somewhere, or a little off accent, he’s all over that, with pleasure, same thing. I was thinking about the first time we ever played together, like in the auditions in July of 1974. I can remember him across the little rehearsal room with his eyes closed, just into it. And that’s one of my first and fondest memories of the relation that we would build, you know, sensing that he was so inside what he was doing. And that’s me too.

“The third is almost telepathic. There’s sometimes we look at each other, ‘How did you know I was going to do that?’ Or a song like ‘YYZ,’ again, there’s so many little decorations and the fills don’t repeat and the choruses, for example. That was a big thing for both of us at the time. Don’t play the same thing twice. Well, why should you? There’s lots of stuff to play. Repetition has its value, and it does appear in that song, with the power of the choruses coming back. Repetition is a tool, but it’s also too easily abused. There’s no reason why I have to play the same drum fill in three choruses, where I’ve got two other perfectly good ones.

“There’s also the building aspect that both of us are really into. Because I think both of us are a bit organizational in that sense. And both of us come out of that compositional idea. In recent years, all three of us are becoming much more spontaneous and improvisational. But especially in those times, when we were focused so much on arrangement, the two of us just sometimes looked at each other, were always listening to each other, and then were stopping to talk about it. And so the riffs like that would come through it, they’d become an expression of your personal taste, as this band is so much. You know, what we do is what we like, and we hope you like it too.

“We were trying to please ourselves all the way through, with parts that were technically fun to play,” continues Neil, “back specifically on ‘YYZ.’ It’s not just that they’re hard to play — they’re fun to play. Any young musician knows, as you start gathering new tools, it’s not just showing off or demonstrating that you have this new toy — it’s really fun. It’s really exciting. And there were things I was learning around that time rhythmically, and influences that I was building on, in the construction of the drum fill. For example, the opening drum fill, and the little drum/bass interchange, came from us opening for Frank Zappa, when Terry Bozzio was drumming for them. We had to leave and drive five hundred miles to the next show, so I only saw a couple songs. But I watched Terry doing this stuff, that I know now comes from Miles Davis, from Tony Williams. But at the time, I was like, what is that?! But I was hearing him doing this triplet feel over the time signature and I kind of took that away and had my own go at it. It’s nothing like what Terry did, nothing like what Tony Williams did, but it led me somewhere.”

Closing side one of the original vinyl is “Limelight,” one of the band’s most beloved songs, despite it’s being about Neil’s discomfort with pressing the flesh with fans and industry folk.

But as Peart explained to Jim Ladd, a fair bit of the focus within the lyrics is more about the oddity and stress of the job in general, the presentation of self in front of thousands every night, not just the socializing backstage. Asked by Jim what “the fascination, the real relation, the underlying theme” is, Neil says, “That’s coming back to music again. How difficult sometimes it becomes to maintain music as a focus. When you’re on the road, for instance, it’s two hours of every day that you spend onstage, and the rest of the day leads up to that or winds down from it. And it is definitely the focus of your life.

“When the day gets more complicated, there’s more and more demands on your time. Instead of time on your hands, you have hands on your time — I like that! That’s the question involved there: you have to put aside all that, and it’s songwriting that’s important, and that’s going to make the difference between feeling good and not feeling good. If I walk offstage knowing I haven’t played as well as I can, I feel bad. And it doesn’t matter how many thousands of people are telling me it was good — it wasn’t. On the other hand when I walk offstage knowing that I’ve played well or close to as well as I can, then I feel very satisfied. And it’s a sort of peace of mind that nothing can intrude on, negatively or positively. You just feel good about it and you don’t need external ratification or external approval for that.”

There’s an additional subtext in what Neil says. Peart is uncomfortable not only with the fawning but also with just being complimented. I’ve heard this from many famous people — they become exasperated because everybody always says they played well, the album is great, you killed. It’s hard for artists to solicit any good advice or invite blunt criticism. Everybody wants to be your friend, and they won’t risk ticking you off. And in the case of a fan interaction, it’s usually so brief, the typical course of action is a quick compliment and maybe an expression of connection or commonality. After about a thousand of those, Neil said enough, and left it to Geddy and Alex to do the glad-handing.

Late in the lyrics, Neil says “All the world’s indeed a stage.” It’s as if when that Shakespeare reference was used to title the first live album, it was all happy and with wide-eyed wonder. Now, adding the word indeed, Neil’s being a bit more rueful and ruminating about it.

“He always was very uncomfortable with the media,” says Glen Peart. “He would be much happier sitting here visiting with the group of us. Neil is still very much a sit-down type of guy who likes to talk with people. And unfortunately, a lot of the media people — and no insult intended — tend to be very pushy. Neil can’t stand that. I don’t think he’s ever changed over the years. That’s still his personality today and still the way he feels about people who try to push their way into his life. He’s uncomfortable with that.”

“Most definitely, he is more of a recluse,” adds Liam. “He just enjoys his privacy. We’re all different in that perspective. Neil may appear to be standoffish or rude to people, but that’s not the case. He just doesn’t feel obliged to be as open as some people think he should be, or to be as approachable as some people think he should be.”

“Neil’s a super guy,” agrees Terry, “but he doesn’t like to be thrust into the limelight when he’s not on the stage. But that’s his prerogative and I admire that in him.”

“That was kind of the turning point for Neil,” seconds Alex. “I think that’s when he started to really have a difficult time with being on the road, and being in the limelight, obviously. I’m a little, you know, softer in that way.” On a more positive note, Alex adds that onstage, “the solo in ‘Limelight’ is probably my favorite solo to play, and if I feel I’ve really got the fluidity nailed, then it’s very, very satisfying, personally. The whole thing is just very elastic. It’s not always easy to get everything to be very circular from one part to the next. But when it happens, it’s really a treat. Also Geddy’s vocals settled down a little bit. They weren’t so screechy and screaming as they were in the ’70s. There was a wonderful energy when we made that record. We were still quite young. I guess we were in our late twenties, so there’s a lot of positive stuff going for it.”

Adds Neil on the music itself, “They were not commercial songs per se. Perhaps only one — ‘Limelight’ — has verses and choruses in a sort of conventional way. But the rhythm is all off; the other guys are playing 6/4 and I’m playing 4/4 over top of it.”

On top of the second use of the Shakespeare As You Like It quote, Neil also references the next song on this very record when he writes “caught in the camera eye.” In the song “The Camera Eye,” the photographer is celebrated, whereas in “Limelight” he’s a source of irritation.

Four songs in and, surprise, it’s been wall-to-wall hard rock. “It’s funny you should say that because I never thought of it quite that way,” continues Neil. “They were heavier. But the whole attitude was always this, you had to make it fatter and tougher. It was heavy in a very controlled way, I thought. The sounds weren’t ugly; they were sophisticated. It’s like that balance between progressive and pop — it’s all part and parcel of it.”

Side two of Moving Pictures opens with “The Camera Eye.” At 10:55, it would be Rush’s final song exceeding ten minutes. Fading in peacefully with piles of synths, Neil soon joins with snare rudiments, slowly building the drama with cymbals, bass drums and toms. Interestingly, Neil admits to being “a bit of a bluffer” with rudiment work, despite appreciating marching band drums.

“The latest equipment tended to drive creativity,” notes Paul Northfield, “because it was an opportunity to play with a new palette, whether it be recording equipment or actual instruments. Moving Pictures was the first time we had a polyphonic synthesizer, because Geddy had gotten an OBX, which makes its presence felt on ‘The Camera Eye’ in particular. That was the first time any significant keyboards were happening. There was a piano overdub done by Hugh Syme on ‘Different Strings,’ on Permanent Waves, but that was a guest appearance. In the case of the band themselves, all the keyboards prior to Moving Pictures had been just a Minimoog melody line, single high strings and Taurus pedals, which provided a backdrop for a three-piece. Once we got to Moving Pictures, the OBX appeared and gave them the opportunity to have more textured keyboard sounds. That was what was current then. That was one big change, although the three-piece guitar, bass, drums dynamic was very strong at that time.”

Nearly four minutes of music elapses before we are into the lyrics, placed atop an odd time signature, distinguished by Alex’s acoustic guitar strumming. Ascribing to the theme of the album, the song is quite cinematic, expressing the hustle and bustle of New York in the first part, and London in the second. The image of a street photographer freezing the motion is lightly suggested. Underscoring the film theme, the band made use of a crowd sample from the first Superman movie. The title of the song is a nod from Neil to John Dos Passos, who used the phrase in his U.S.A. trilogy of fictional works, the third of which is called The Big Money, also the title of a hit song by Rush.

As Neil wrote in Modern Drummer, “A good example of the principle of editing is the pair of long fills that introduce each vocal section in the second half of ‘The Camera Eye.’ I wanted something really special and exciting there, but I didn’t want it to be organized and prearranged. The only way to capture that spirit of wild abandon is to be that way. Every time we did a take of the song, I would close my eyes to those sections, let go and flail away. This ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime, but I was able to choose the most successful, exciting fills for the finished track. What it really boils down to is that it’s always you playing. Editing just gives you the opportunity to choose the very best you can do. A good analogy between playing live and recording in the studio is the difference between talking and writing. When you’re writing, you can cross out unnecessary or inaccurate words and replace them or shift them around until you arrive at the essence of what you wanted to say. They are still your words. They’re just refined and distilled into their ideal form. In the case of ‘The Camera Eye,’ I had to go home and learn how to play the ‘accident’ so I could play it that way live!”

“Witch Hunt” is subtitled “Part III of ‘Fear.’” Neil posited three theaters of fear, this one relating to mob mentality, “The Enemy Within” relating to internal sources of fear and “The Weapon” relating to “how fear is used against us.” Way up into Vapor Trails, there would be a part IV, called “Freeze.”

Remarked Peart in the Moving Pictures tourbook, “‘Witch Hunt’ was the winner of the most re-written song award, being very difficult to get a handle on. But our intention had always been to use it as the ‘production number’ of the album, in the tradition of such pieces as ‘Different Strings,’ ‘Madrigal’ and ‘Tears.’ This frees us from our usual practice of writing as we would play live, maintaining the discipline of a three-piece band. It would serve as a sort of vehicle for experimentation and indulgence. For instance, we would be using Hugh Syme’s talents on the keyboards, and my entire drum part was recorded twice (as two drummers) in one verse, while in another, a percussion section was created by recording each sound differently. The introduction was a very strange endeavor, as we assembled a ‘Vigilante Choir’ out in the snow, and the sound of the ‘haunted child’ at the beginning. Although the main thrust of our work has always been directed towards its live presentation, it is nice to take a small dose of studio indulgence!”

Poking through the ruins of Le Studio in 2014, Neil explained: “These old, crumbling stairs here . . . on that stairway we stood on a night in early winter and recorded the intro for the song ‘Witch Hunt.’ And I was the rabble-rouser — ‘We’re here to protect our children!’ — all this stuff. There were a bunch of us from the crew and the studio staff and so on, all standing up on the stairs recording that intro to ‘Witch Hunt,’ right there.” Alex remembers the session as being bitingly cold, soon made tolerable by a bottle of Scotch that was passed around.

Musically, this one is slow and fairly heavy metal of riff, oscillating between anguished and then atmospheric when Hugh joins in on synth. Neil gets to play with how to make a slow track interesting, panning fills between speakers, changing up accents.

Explained Neil in Modern Drummer: “Being a cinematic type piece, ‘Witch Hunt’ also allowed a lot of atmosphere for unusual percussion effects, which I took full advantage of! I emptied my armoury using the gong bass drums, wind chimes, glockenspiel, tubular bells, conga, cowbell, vibraslap, various electronic effects and in one section I double-tracked the whole drum kit. It was fun. The ‘percussion ensemble’ in the second verse was very interesting to do. When we recorded the basic track, I left that section largely blank, and went back and overdubbed each drum separately. I used different sounds and perspectives on each drum to create the dramatic effect of things alternately being very distant and very near. I also removed the bottom heads of my toms on this track to get a darker, more primal sound.”

Moving Pictures closes on a futuristic note, with “Vital Signs” sounding like Gary Numan or Joy Division — a post-punk marriage between traditional heavy instrumentation and electronics. The Oberheim is used to create a sequenced lick that Geddy sometimes mimics on bass, sometimes not. Guitar is used to give the song a reggae twist, as is Neil’s slightly Stewart Copeland–like percussive construct.

Writes Neil in the tourbook: “We had purposefully left one song still unwritten, with a view to writing it directly in the studio, as we have had such good results from this previously. Songs such as ‘Natural Science’ and ‘The Twilight Zone’ have benefitted from the pressure and spontaneity of this situation, although then it happened by force of circumstances, where now our planning includes a space for no-plan. ‘Vital Signs’ was the ultimate result. Eclectic in the extreme, it embraces a wide variety of stylistic influences, ranging from the ’60s to the present. Lyrically, it derives from my response to the terminology of ‘Technospeak,’ the language of electronics and computers, which often seems to parallel the human machine in the functions and interrelationships they employ. It is interesting, if irrelevant, to speculate as to whether we impose our nature on the machines that we build, or whether they are merely governed by the same inscrutable laws of Nature as we are (perhaps Murphy’s Laws?). Never mind!”

“Usually on every album there’s one song we write spontaneously, just at the last minute, and that’s the one for that album,” seconds Geddy. “And those songs usually end up taking us in a totally different direction, as that one did. It’s kind of a precursor for us getting more involved with sequencers. It’s a last-minute tune, and I love those last-minute tunes, because you write them and record them in a short period of time and it’s kind of minimal brain work. Lots of spontaneity — you just kind of go for it — and it ends up being a lot of fun.”

Terry, perhaps because he’d seen it all in the U.K., was not on board with the creeping reggae influence on rock and Rush — see tour mate and fellow Canuck Pat Travers and the ganja vibe applied to his 1980 album, Crash and Burn.

“No,” laughs Brown. “Frankly, it had been done before. But I think by the time we finished producing the tunes, they did have their own unique Rush qualities. The reggae thing was just . . . The Police were doing it, and doing it really well, and having a lot of success with it, so I wasn’t totally convinced it was something we should spend too much time developing. But I think what we did, we did well. It wasn’t the mainstream thing; it’s just that I wasn’t sure it was uniquely Rush and original at that point. I had doubts, but the tunes were good, and it was just a question of massaging these influences into something that was more uniquely Rush. I think we achieved that in the end.”

Says Neil, “In ‘Vital Signs,’ I wanted an electro sound for that one verse of it. So yes, Moving Pictures I used electronic snare for the first time; I must have had pads to play that on. Before that, Permanent Waves still has a lot of organic percussion on it — no electronics.” It’s an interesting gesture, which actually serves to make Geddy’s and Alex’s unison chug sound heavier. Quite amusing really, because it’s the most twee of snare sounds, with no hi-hat, electric or otherwise, and just the faintest suggestion of bass drum. By the end of the track, Peart’s back on a massive kit, demonstrating what progressive heavy metal reggae will sound like in the future.

Explains Neil, addressing these new musical avenues: “Not to discount the late ’70s, because there was so much ferment around us. The fact that we survived that was only because we were young enough. I was a huge fan when I first started to hear Talking Heads, and when I first started to hear the Police and Ultravox and all these new English bands. I loved them. As a music fan, this was now the music of my generation. I was still only in my early twenties then and a huge music fan, listening to new music all the time. So I went with that right away — we all did — and it became a part of our sensibility. Geddy was a big Elvis Costello fan.

“And unlike other musicians a little older than us who went, ‘That’s just trash. What am I supposed to do, forget how to play?’ We wanted to write shorter, punchier songs, but we still really wanted to riff out. We wanted to use the crafts we had developed individually and among ourselves. We didn’t see that as mutually exclusive. We could grow into ‘The Spirit of Radio’ and shorter songs then, after having put together the epics. But electronic music and reggae, that’s all the stuff I was listening to, that we were listening to.

“We all had agreed that’s what we were going to do. And yeah, that did lead us to Moving Pictures where, as I define it, that’s when we became us. All the rest of it was great — some of it I’m very fond of and some of the songs we still play and I’m glad we did it that way — but Moving Pictures, we rented Ronnie Hawkins’s farm in Ontario, worked there on the week and went home on the weekends, very civilized. And now when I look back on those songs, I can remember a lot about how they were born. The emblematic song in that way really is the last one, ‘Vital Signs.’ All those other songs, again, we still loved playing them; there’s no closed loop on that. ‘Red Barchetta’ is a joy to play always. It’s always hard and it’s always satisfying to get it right. But the most different song was ‘Vital Signs,’ where we used a sequencer for the first time and used a lot of reggae-influenced, ska-influenced beats, and drew upon what was around us. That is the critical part of the band as a synthesizing unit of drawing upon what’s around.

“What I learned to do more and more lyrically,” Neil continues, “and what we did stylistically, was listen and learn from a lot of other great music. I remember reading at the time Ray Davies saying, ‘I never listen to music because it might influence me.’ And that’s such a weird thing to say. It’s weird in the same way as when Eric Clapton said, ‘When I heard Jimi Hendrix, I wanted to burn my guitar,’ or some trumpet player say that ‘When I heard Miles Davis I wanted to . . .’ That’s so wrong. When I hear somebody great, I want to go home and practice, and you know, not out of any intimidation. It’s like, ‘That’s how good I want to be.’ I really do feel like that.

“I remember groups like the Thompson Twins and all these elitist British artsy bands saying, ‘Oh, guitar music is dead,’” continues Peart. “You know, nothing against them, but it was a transitory thing. But the pop music of the ’80s I loved at the time, as it went through the Trevor Horn phase of orchestrations, and when sampling came along and they could do all these amazing things with production. I loved all that, and some of it even stands up now. And yes it did influence us in a way, but we were still us. We were still basically a rock band and we were still going to use our chops that we won with such difficulty. The intricate stuff was never going to go, but it could be framed differently. As we learned more about arranging, we would admire someone’s style in arranging, and we’d be influenced by that.

“I was interested in African music at the time, so I would hear King Sunny Adé — who was a Nigerian artist — and I would bring those rhythms into Rush. That’s one reason why there’d be so little solo activity from all of us, because we really get to do everything we want. If I got interested in African drumming or reggae drumming, I could bring it into this band. Or if I got interested in the British New Romantic bands or big band drumming, what have you. If Alex wants to play classical guitar, he can have that. If Geddy wanted to create a keyboard symphony, he can do that. Everything fits.

“So none of us have had the frustration of someone being the songwriter, for instance. It’s all collaborative. Everyone feels equally appreciated and equally fulfilled and those are both important. A lot of bands have been torn apart by either a sense of aggrieved lack of appreciation — ‘No one appreciates me; they just look at the singer’ — or the fact that on the other hand, they had all these songs that no one wanted to make as part of the band. All of those things going on at that time were part of the ferment that kept us healthy as a band. We could be drawing broadly and opening ourselves to all experiments.”

“It’s the job of every musician to keep their ear to the ground,” agrees Geddy. “You’ve got to learn what’s going on, especially if you want to consider yourself to be current, topical. You have to listen, and you have to absorb. I’m still influenced by people I listen to. But there’s so much of my own personality in what I do that as I absorb new influences, it just gets swallowed up in our own thing. The Rush sound is established, so now we can bring influences in and shift direction or move here, with it not being very obvious, because our influences are so diverse and sometimes obscure, sometimes not so obscure. But I listen to certain things. Sometimes I hear a vocal phrase and I’ll go, ‘Fuck, I sang that just the way Björk would.’ But nobody’s going to make that connection because why would they associate? But I love Björk and I listen to her vocal stylings all the time, so it’s natural that it would come out subconsciously. It’s not intentional, but your influences aren’t intentional generally. So I think it’s important to keep your ear to the ground. I also think it’s important that it not be obvious.”

With “Vital Signs,” Rush’s quirkiest and most cutting-edge track to date was now in the books, and it was time for mixing. Here, the album experienced a bit of a hiccup.

“We had problems with a bad batch of tape,” explains Paul Northfield. “At that time, we were using Ampex tape. At the mixing process, it started to shed oxide. So every time the tape would pass the heads in the tape recorder, on the multi-tracker, you would have to clean the heads, because the oxide would be scraped off onto the heads. And that’s a scary proposition because the more times you play the tape, the more it’s going to deteriorate. Fortunately, it was only a few reels that it happened to, and we managed to get through the whole process. But it was quite disconcerting and tended to cause huge headaches. I remember the last few days of mixing were torturous with downtime and technical issues with the machines not working, and the tape shedding, and the console playing up — all teething troubles of new technology.”

Continues Paul, “I remember Alex and I got profoundly drunk at the end of it. When they were putting the album together, I was completely incapacitated. I was just sitting in the chair the day after we had finished mixing, while it was being sequenced and chopped into order, because I could barely stand. When we were making copies to take home and everybody was packing up, it was pretty intense. It was the combination of ten weeks of twelve hours a day. Aside from the twelve hours a day at work, we invariably played volleyball until sometimes four or five in the morning, to get back into the studio for twelve or one o’clock to start the next day. Nobody questioned the sanity of working twelve to fourteen hours a day and playing two or three hours of volleyball at one o’clock in the morning. It seemed like a good idea at the time, and so that’s what we did.”

Moving Pictures was an immense success, hitting #1 on the Canadian album charts, #3 on Billboard in the U.S. and #3 in the U.K. The album currently sits at four times platinum in both Canada and the States. Rush had arrived on a grand scale, and that was reinforced by the band’s lighting director, Howard Ungerleider, who made the show bigger and more beautiful.

Notes Vic Wilson, co-founder of Anthem Records with Ray and manager of touring duties back at headquarters, “The money went up, and of course the production went up too. We used to produce albums very, very reasonably. But then they started doing the trips to England, and it started to get expensive, but there was enough money to cover it. The show got more intense every tour. The stage show was one of the best out there at that time. We were using aircraft landing lights before anybody. Flash pots too, although everybody had those in those days. But Howard was the best light man in the business. And he did all the lights and road managed the band.”

“We were feeling that with Permanent Waves. ‘Spirit of Radio’ was a pretty important song for us, if not all over America, in pockets of America and pockets of Canada and pockets of Europe,” explains Geddy, putting the success of the new record in context. “Commercially and as a touring band, our reputation was being cemented and we were becoming a headliner through that. So when Moving Pictures came, it just started moving faster. Records kept selling and our audience just kept uniting and we were clearly a headline act then. It was really gratifying. Because we expect failure with everything we produce [laughs]. I don’t know whether it’s my background, as someone who’s torn between being a pessimist and an optimist, or just so many disappointments as a young musician, but you just stop expecting success and expect the worst, and anything you get makes you feel good. It’s a very Jewish way to be, I have to tell ya that. I know it’s a little depressing if you think about it. But we didn’t expect it really, and yet it just kept going. That record just never stopped. There was no turning back after that.”

But that didn’t mean the band would be accepted by the critics. Neil got into a famous row with Creem magazine, and the simmering war just continued. Now there was occupational jealousy to contend with. Not only were Rush ridiculous, they were rich and ridiculous.

“Yeah, I mean critically, we’re put in a category of unhipness,” reflects Geddy. “And that has prevented us from being overtly mainstream, strange as that sounds. It’s also prevented us from getting any real critical acclaim, because the hip factor is really important from a critical point of view, from a writer’s point of view. We were designated terminally unhip, and no writer was really going to change his view of that. Now mind you, I’ve gotten letters from writers since then that said they finally get it. I got one letter recently from an ex–Globe and Mail writer who was apologizing for all the bad reviews he’d given us because he finally gets it; it took him a long time.

“So you’re saddled with terminal unhipness, and that prevents you from getting mainstream press and mainstream radio acceptance. Our songs were too long to go on mainstream radio, so what the hell are we? We’re a touring band that is reaching out to more and more people, yet not mainstream. In Canada, I think we were viewed more as a mainstream band. We didn’t have quite the same barriers on radio due to the Canadian content thing — CanCon.”

What Geddy is referring to here is the government mandate that radio in Canada play a certain percentage of Canadian content, which was determined by a few factors. Rush checked every box, being as Canuck as they get. This mandate is a spot of ingenious protectionism that allowed many Canadian bands to flourish, though many critics and radio programmers gripe that certain bands don’t deserve the attention.

“Our radio was friendlier to Canadian talent, so we got the benefit of that,” continues Geddy. “We got the bounce from the CanCon thing. You know, with all good intentions they tried to legislate Canadian music to be more featured, but what it does in essence is feature more successful Canadian music more often, so the successful bands in Canada become more successful due to CanCon, but the smaller artists still have the most difficult time getting in that thirty percent range.

“So you’ve got a band that’s got a different image in a lot of different regions of the world and yet not able to be a kind of collective mainstream band. And it’s an interesting point, but in a way, not worth lamenting over. Critics aside, one way to feel comfortably part of the mainstream is ticket sales, and in this department, Rush was certainly a people’s band. A people that were trying to better themselves, to learn some stuff. What’s wrong with striving from whatever level you are starting from?

“We’re kind of our own stream,” muses Ged, “and it wasn’t the main one, but it was not too far away from the main one. I always like to consider us the world’s most popular cult band, in a way. But it all seems to be changing now. We’re leaking into movies and magazines, and I think that’s just our fans coming of age and now being in positions of power.”

And it all started with Moving Pictures, says Terry. “That was the record, wasn’t it? Certainly, for the mass audience that weren’t diehard Rush fans. That would be the record they would mention, probably above all of them. That’s the one that really hit radio and became part of the mainstream. It made a huge difference to the way the band was going to progress from there.”

But Alex brings us back to the reality of the situation. Fact is, Moving Pictures came out at a time when the band was crawling out from under a mountain of debt due to the expense of making their records and then plowing all their profits back into their show. Not only is touring costly and marginal at every level, now the stakes were higher, with as much downside as upside and wilder mood swings between risk and return.

“To say it didn’t make a big difference would probably be inaccurate, but at the same time, I don’t recall really changing that much. Yes, we got a slightly bigger paycheck, we moved into a bigger van, or into a bus, I think, from a motor home. But we still worked a lot. We were still dead tired by the end of the tour, as ever. It was great to play to full houses and to go that next level up, where you are playing larger venues and filling the place through multiple nights. That was certainly exciting. We were still so young. I’m just trying to put myself back in that time. It was really, really exciting, now that I think about it. We did some really big gigs, Texxas Jam and some of these enormous shows.

“I paid off my mortgage,” laughs Lifeson, looking for more good news. “The house we moved into, we had no furniture for two years. I had two kids at the time, so it was nice to get the start of some financial security. I bought a station wagon, I think. As a second car [laughs]. I didn’t go buy Ferraris or any of that. But you know, there were six, or maybe four, very lean years. We incurred an enormous debt in that period, touring as much as we were. Because we were losing money every night, and we were being financed by management. I mean, we went a whole year without getting paid, and that was hard. With family, apartment rental, all that stuff — in my case, we lived off our wedding proceeds, you know, wedding gifts that we got, and had five bucks at the end of the week for cigarettes and whatever. You just didn’t do anything. You walked to a park and played with the kids — that was what you did. And it was fine, I was perfectly happy, that’s just the way your life is.

“But it took us a while to reduce that debt and get on a solid footing. It really wasn’t until the end of the ’70s that we managed to reach that point. Of course, it felt great, but we were worried. I mean, I bought a house in 1977 with my first royalty check, and it wasn’t that big. I used the full amount to put a down payment on a house. We had no money other than our salary, which was quite modest at the time. And I remember we had cases with burlap boxes, cardboard boxes with burlap on it, and we had a little tiny twelve-inch black-and-white TV, and we had a couch in our living room, a kitchen table and a couple of beds. And really, that was it. Two mortgages and worrying that if anything happened, we’re going to be in a little bit of trouble. But fortunately, everything worked out fine.”

To represent how hard the band continued to tour, Vic recalls getting a pen set from the guys with a little plaque that said, “Can we come home now?” “Yes, my pen set,” laughs Vic. “They knew they had to tour, as they knew that’s what sold the albums. It was never a problem. Maybe making demands like, ‘Okay, we only want to work four days of the week instead of seven.’ You know, that’s not unreasonable [laughs]. But they were easy to work with.”

There were clues that Moving Pictures was making a big impact, according to Alex. “Well, we always had good relationships with the promoters we worked with. They became very generous around that time, and so that was one tangible thing you could see — all these gifts. And not that no one does that anymore, but the smiling faces. Crowds had changed. The fans had changed. They hung around the hotels a lot more.”

But, says Alex, the press stayed critical. “We were used to the majority of our reviews being negative. Not all of them, but the typical stuff, Mickey Mouse on helium for Geddy’s voice.”

When you talk with the guys, you really get a sense that the bad reviews ticked them off. At least for Alex and Geddy, since Neil didn’t read them. At the same time, Neil was getting into tussles with critics about politics and this very real debate: What constitutes good music? The classic example of this was his back-and-forth in Creem about the Rolling Stones. Essentially it came down to whether artists were people who tried really, really hard, like Rush, versus those who wrote songs that obviously connected (otherwise, why talk about the Stones?). In a sense, in this context, Rush was realism and the Stones were abstract art. It’s a debate that is impossible to resolve. And yet the public was clearly on board.

“I think Moving Pictures entered the charts at #2 or something?” Alex says. “Which was a really big deal at the time. And the record company was quite excited, as management was. But honestly, for us, at the end of the day, we were just on the bus going to the next gig. And that’s what counts, or that’s what we’re focused on. In so many ways, we’re still just that little band of some friends that got together. That’s what it feels like at sound check when the three of us are just up there goofing around. We might play something, whatever, before we get into the song for sound check, and it reminds me of when we were younger goofing around. That’s still that essence of who we are.”

Continues Alex, on the new success: “We were still touring as much as we ever toured. We could now take a nicer holiday, to the Bahamas or something, with the kids. But other than that, it didn’t really change that much. It’s just that some things got a little easier.”

Alex eventually got to help out his parents as well. “I don’t really like talking about it, but you just feel, certainly with your parents, you try to give them back something. Eastern European parents coming from the war, they are always so focused on feeding their kids and giving them a good home. Money was always an issue. Money didn’t become much of an issue after that. Giving is a wonderful thing to be able to do, whether it’s a big thing or a small thing. It’s very rewarding.”

“Moving Pictures, in particular, was a godsend,” reflects Ray Danniels, clearly remembering the financial relief the album brought. “It was the right place and the right time. When I got the record, Geddy and I, and my girlfriend at the time, and his wife, went to Barbados. I had it on a cassette Walkman, and I listened to that record for a week while we were down there. And my partner and I weren’t getting along very well — he wasn’t working as hard as I was, and a lot of other things — and I listened to the record, and I thought ‘It’s now or never.’ I came back home, bought him out, and I basically had to start over again.”

“They changed,” muses Vic Wilson. “Everyone changes. What can I say? They all change. You start making money, things change! Everybody . . . it happens to everyone. They were making the money, and we were all using the same accountant. They didn’t like that, and then they got their own accountants. It was all there. Their money was all accounted for.”

According to Liam, it got to the point where Geddy started to learn accounting, implying that maybe he didn’t think the business was being run optimally. “In the late ’70s, Ged and I were sitting around a hotel room on an unusual off day. He had his bass with him and he was practicing, and I think I was just doing up my receipts for the week. And Ged approached me with a novel concept: if I was to teach him how to do the books on the road, he’d teach me how to play bass. And I thought, ‘Well, I’ve always wanted to learn to play an instrument.’ I was never satisfied with the one year of trombone I had in high school, which should have been drums but the teacher didn’t listen to me. At any rate, for a few days, I think Ged and I toyed with the idea of me teaching him a little bit about bookkeeping and he actually gave me a couple of bass lessons, but that was the end of it all.

“All three guys are that way,” continues Birt. “They’re all in some ways restless individuals and they’re always pushing themselves to the extreme. Geddy got involved more on the business end of the band. It’s partly because of a lack of interest from the other two; they’d rather not deal with it. Not truly a lack of interest, but they’d just rather let Ged deal with that side of it, you know, let him deal with Ray, let him push those buttons, just come back to us with answers we like to hear.

“Ged also likes to oversee the big picture of the tour prior to it going out, all the preproduction aspects, dealing with Howard and Alan and the filmmakers to make sure all the elements are there and that they all fit. And also dealing with the sense of humor that all three of them have, sometimes coming up with different prop ideas for the tour. Geddy’s had his dryers at certain phases, the vending machines, the chicken rotisseries. There’s always something just to make people think, and more so to make them laugh. They all kind of assign themselves roles inside the band. Neil works very closely with Hugh Syme on the album artwork and the credits and that type of thing. Alex is probably the funniest person you’ll ever meet in your life. He’s just naturally funny. He can put anyone at ease, anywhere. He’s the most approachable of the guys if you’re just a man on the street coming up to say hi. Alex will sit down and talk, and he’s very open. None of the three of them have a pop star personality, but Alex is Mr. Man on the Street, he really is. They all just take a little niche and it all blends together and it results in an end product.”

For Vic, leaving the Anthem mothership was more of a personal decision. “December 1980,” begins Wilson. “Our last child, James, my son, was born in October of ’80. The two girls, Tanya and Heidi . . . Tanya had just started school and Heidi was two and a half years younger than that. And I just made a choice — step off. Because it’s always nice to step off on a high. And that’s how I spent the rest of my life. I was there for breakfast and lunch and dinner, with my children. They grew up with their father at home. And I got to go out on all the school trips, because I had a van at that time. I would drive all the kids.

“But I was a lot older than them too,” continues Vic. “I had just had enough. I told Ray I was leaving. So we sat down, hashed out a price and that was it. I left. Got in my car, drove home. Left all my furniture there. Not difficult for me at all. It was a business decision. Family decision, I would say, a personal decision. Not many people can do that. And I was fortunate enough to be in that position.”

As for how Ray reacted, Vic says, “He had everything then. How would you react? [laughs] He had to get the money together.”

Now Danniels was running the show himself. Ray says, “Listening to that record, it was obvious that this was a hit. I was so blown away by that record — as a fan and as a manager, I just knew it. I can’t say I knew 2112 would be as big as it was, but I knew Moving Pictures was going to be huge. And rock radio had gotten to the point where, for a band who had to fight to find a station in every market, suddenly that was the dominant format in the early ’80s. And to use Toronto as an example, there were two stations like that, plus one just outside the city. And in other markets there were two, sometimes three stations we could get played on at the time the band delivered a record that would have ‘Tom Sawyer’ and ‘Limelight’ and some of the most successful songs they’ve ever written.

“And we’d started to get out of the debt from the 2112 era,” continues Ray. “It got better, no question; it was night and day. We could do arenas. Rush was not a mainstream act, but Rush was starting to become big enough that there were other acts that wanted to sound like Rush. And there are younger bands coming up that are citing Rush as one of their favorite bands, or one of their influences. That starts happening around that era. So you see a shift. You’re not in your late teens anymore; you’re suddenly closer to thirty, and you are a man, not a boy, and you’re starting to get back some of what you used to get as a fan. You’re getting it back from young guys now.”

On the other hand, Neil was not as confident as Ray that the album would be a hit. “We didn’t expect it to be any more successful than the others,” he figures, looking back at Moving Pictures. “You never do, you know? Like I said, we loved every record we ever made, but it doesn’t mean other people are going to. You hope they will, and you put all that into it, thinking, ‘Well, how can people not?’ You know, we love this so much, other people should too. You really do tend to see it that simplistic. The upshot of that is, well, when people don’t, you don’t ever take that for granted again, and honestly I still don’t. But the bloom of popularity: where previously if we had done one night in a city, suddenly we were doing two nights in the arena.”

Neil essentially makes the point that in 1980 and 1981, Rush was sort of the “it” band, the band everyone was talking about. And it’s kind of true. The tail end of the ’70s had been kind of fallow for rock and prog — the old decade becoming the new really did represent some kind of demarcation. On the rock side, Van Halen was keeping the flame, AC/DC was renewed and doing well and suddenly, improbably, so was Ozzy Osbourne. There was also the new wave of British heavy metal (NWOBHM), and where Rush fit in this was weird. In essence, they’d run completely the other way from it in terms of influence. But for now, as Ray alluded to previously, they became a prime influence and a beloved legendary precursor.

In prog, Genesis was doing good business, but Yes was in transition and would not make a strong return until 1983 and 90125. But both Yes and Genesis would modernize drastically — maybe prog really was dead. Asia wasn’t particularly prog, and out of the new wave of British progressive rock movement, only Marillion made a dent. Running parallel was the founding of MTV in 1981, and then a couple of years later, a massive uptick in heavy metal’s prospects with the rise of hair metal and thrash, primarily in California. Rush would run away from all of this (save for MTV — in this they would participate), even if what they were about to embrace possessed its own ’80s tropes.

Continues Neil with respect to the band’s moment in the limelight: “It really was only those couple of years, as it kind of dwindled away with Signals, a record that people didn’t like so much because that was a keyboard experimental album with a lot of bizarreness on it. And from there to Grace Under Pressure, which is even more of a polarizing album. But Moving Pictures just hit the right summer with the right kind of music. And I remember being all kinds of places and hearing ‘Red Barchetta’ on the radio and thinking, ‘That song’s on the radio?!’

“I guess it’s that same synchronicity. 2112 happened to be the summer of Star Wars, and Moving Pictures happened to be at the right time too. New wave came along, and that killed a lot of bands. Just like the late ’60s killed a lot of bands from the early ’60s, an awful lot of bands that we started out with in the mid- to early ’70s did not survive that attrition. Because the only word is adapt — or perish. We were light on our feet because we had no preconceived notion of what we were supposed to be. We were not a hard-core rock ballad band or something, and our hair was subject to change — all of that.

“So many of the bands of the ’70s, they were all what they seemed to be in the true sense. And if you take that away, what were they going to do? That’s the trap they found themselves in. They couldn’t pretend to be a punk band. Well we couldn’t either, but we could pretend to play the music we loved. And that was why we could adapt through that time when so many other bands didn’t. We did manage to tiptoe through all the changes of the ’80s. We were very unfashionable, but maybe as a side note to this idea of us tiptoeing along the mainstream, the mainstream is what’s fashionable and enough of that crept in to keep us and probably also a certain fringe audience entertained, people who were walking along the median of the mainstream, as it were.”

Neil makes a good point here with his reflection on where the band exists relative to the mainstream. But it takes on different connotations depending on which arc in the trajectory we’re looking at. At the time of Moving Pictures, Rush records were being bought by a teenaged male hard rock crowd. But as Neil articulated, that demographic was joining the band on the edge of the mainstream, with Geddy, Alex and Neil politely prodding them to read more, care more about craft and get a little progressive in their lives. And if they aspired to be musicians themselves, well, the guys were enthusiastically offering up a clinic, showing kids not only where hard work will get you but also how purely fun it is to play “YYZ,” “Limelight” and “Tom Sawyer.”