The first concert I ever attended was Rush at the old Rosemont Horizon in Chicago, supporting the Hold Your Fire album. Imagine my amazement when I found that the exact tour I saw was released as a live album! They didn’t record the same show (thank god - the sound at that place was similar to recording a live album inside a large oil storage drum), but they did capture the spirit with the fifteen tracks recorded for this CD. I think if I would have reviewed this back in 1989 when it was released, I would have given it a ten. I think it’s interesting to come back to this two decades later and give it a second look.

This is probably the cleanest recorded Rush live album of the five (or six) officially offered by the band. It’s hard to even tell it’s a live album during most of the songs, because there’s absolutely no crowd noise, and the conditions are absolutely perfect. It’s also important to note that Rush almost never deviates from the recorded version of the song, except maybe an extra “ba-bum” at the end of a song. Combine the two, and it’s sometimes hard to distinguish if you’re listening to the live version or the studio version through a lot of the album. Rush fanatics absolutely love this, and think it’s the highest form of perfection and a demonstration how well the trio can play. I’d be more impressed if they could mix things up a bit more, maybe not as much as Frank Zappa did on his ever-changing, ever-mutating setlists, but maybe an extra or different solo here or there.

This album captures the era of Rush after Moving Pictures, but before the band slowed things down and became more irregular with their studio and touring schedule. They blew their wad on the classic, rockable stuff over their previous two live albums, and the only old tune that survives here is the closer, “Closer to the Heart.” Yes, they did play “YYZ” and “Tom Sawyer” on the tour, but this album is just a 75-minute collection of the best parts of the evening, not a historical bootleg-type capture of the whole show. So they really trimmed back the tracklist to only showcase the new stuff.

That means you’ve got a lot of the more dire, more synthified, less guitar-oriented numbers. We’re talking half of Power Windows, a lot of Signals, and a lot of Grace Under Pressure (although not the songs I’d want, and they do “Red Sector A” toward the end of the CD, which usually puts me to sleep.) The one advantage is that the live sound is much better than some of the studio sound on some of these numbers. For example, “The Big Money” (the opener, after a track of the Three Stooges theme music) has a much crisper and a slightly bassier sound to it, and I like it better than the cut on the original album. This is consistent across all of the tracks; without spending hundreds of hours spinning knobs in the studio for that polished sound, they introduce more of Geddy’s bass and a good live guitar sound that challenges the synth-heavy landscape.

There are only four tracks from the album this tour supported, which is also strange. It’s a good grouping from Hold Your Fire, though. They all sound pretty much identical to the album version, which doesn’t do much, but it’s always enjoyable to hear them again. “Mission” was a remarkable live track, because that’s the song where they dropped a million red balloons into the crowd, ala the three red spheres on the cover of the album. It was sensational to be on the first deck of this auditorium and see all of these red spheres float down into the crowd on the floor and then spread out like crimson paint. Unfortunately, you can’t hear this on the live album, but the song’s a nice reminder if you were there (or saw a video).

The highlight of this album is “The Rhythm Method,” Neil Peart’s drum solo. Unlike other albums, this is a standalone solo, not merged in the middle of another song. Peart does a bit of the old-school stuff, but halfway through the solo, his drum kit turns to reveal his electronic drums, and he plays between both sets, using the e-drums to trigger MIDI synth beats that sound like stuff from a big-band number. It’s a completely unique sound and approach, and even though it’s less than five minutes long, it packs a tremendous amount of drumming in a short space.

This isn’t a bad live album. At first, I thought I’d give it a lower rating, because I seldom listen to it, and it’s not a lot of things. It’s not long, and it doesn’t have a tremendous amount of stuff on it. It doesn’t have the old favorites. It doesn’t do anything dramatic or weird or neat (aside from Neil’s solo). It’s a very straightforward capture of one CD’s worth of a concert that was recorded well, end of story. But looking back, it’s such a great-sounding capture of the band at a very key time in their career that’s usually forgotten. I don’t think most people would buy this album to get started on Rush, because there are all kinds of collections and compilations of the old stuff, and I don’t think a fan looking for a good live album would pick this, when they could get one of the older classics, or get a much greater value out of the 3-CD Different Stages CD. But for some reason, I keep listening to this CD, and I think back to when I got it, and it’s just such a perfect little time machine to then, that I realize I do really like this.

Rating: 7

Okay, before I start, I remembered this tiny bit of trivia, and it took me forever on google to confirm it, so I better just paste it in. This album, in the original LP form, had a bunch of city names under the names of each track. Turns out that the album was written on the road, and those are the names of the cities where that specific song was hashed out. I only find this interesting because a couple of these were written just down the road from where I grew up, in South Bend, Indiana. Here’s the full list, since this has been long-since deleted on CD reissues, as far as I know:

“Bastille Day” - Beamsville, Pittsburgh, Louisville “I Think I’m Going Bold” - Saginaw, Fort Wayne, Lansing “Lakeside Park” - South Bend, Saginaw, Terre Haute, Cincinnati “The Necromancer” - Los Angeles, Toronto “The Fountain Of Lamneth” “In The Valley” - Beamsville, Atlanta “Didacts & Narpets” - Beamsville, Toronto “No-one At The Bridge” - Beamsville, Dallas, South Bend “Panacea” - Beamsville, Corpus Christi, Atlanta “Bacchus Plateau” - Atlanta, Beamsville, Northampton Penn “The Fountain” - Beamsville, Chicago, Dallas, Lansing, Detroit, Louisville

On to the review. This is a really lopsided album, I hate to say. It’s as if the band simultaneously realized they could write long-length prog rock epics, but needed to write short little AOR ditties to get on the radio. How did they reconcile this? By writing three little songs and two really big ones. They did some good stuff in here, but as an album, it’s not balanced. And the record company thought the same thing, especially since this album did not outsell its predecessor.

Both of the long tracks (“The Necromancer” and “The Fountain of Lamneth”) remind me entirely of playing D&D in my mom’s basement. Actually, they remind me a little more of the days before my driver’s license or the invention of the opposite sex, when I used to build model airplanes (when they still had the good glue) and listen to Rush tapes on repeat, over and over. Both of the long tracks are excellent and overly geeky, with lots of weird drumming and some strange vocal effects and stories of mystical times and places. “Necromancer” is totally about Lord of the Rings, while “Lamneth” is a more philosophical take on addiction and life. The former even includes a short tie-in to the last album, aka the song “By Tor and the Snow-Dog,” also a long-format tune that I guess needed just a little more.

It’s great to listen to this stuff for the pure nerdiness of it, and to also see a precursor of what would later lead to 2112, among other things. My favorite little bit is “Didacts and Narpets,” which is nothing more than a really quick drum part from Neil Peart, with Geddy shouting a bunch of weird, unintelligible stuff over it. (Yes, I know there are exact lyrics and even a meaning for the title, but I’m too lazy to google for it, and I’m to afraid that if I paraphrase, I’ll get a million Rush fanatics correcting me. The truth is out there.)

Of the other three songs, “Bastille Day” is strong, and gives us a little history lesson wrapped in a Zep-like rock number. It’s solid, but never landed with me for some reason. “I Think I’m Going Bald” is absolutely silly, and evidence that the band ran out of material in the studio. (It was actually written for Canadian band Max Webster.) “Lakeside Park” (written in South Bend!) is a mellower tune, talking about hanging out on Victoria Day at St. Catharine’s, on Lake Ontario. It’s a very sweet little song talking about hanging out with friends on the holiday, and I’ve always liked it. It got the band a fair bit of airplay, especially in their native Canada (although Geddy Lee, in a 1993 interview, says the song now makes him cringe.)

Overall, this isn’t a bad album, although back in the days of cassette tape, I had to do some careful fast-forwarding for each listen, to avoid the bits I didn’t like. It’s dated, and it’s not perfect, but it’s a good effort, considering all of these songs were written in hotel rooms after the band put in a full night gigging on the road. I wish I could like this more, but it’s not exactly like the kind of thing I’d leave in my car and listen to every other day. It’s probably my favorite of the pre-2112 albums, but that’s when things suddenly took off in full-prog-ahead mode, so this is more of an overlooked era for many.

Rating: 7

Every band has to start somewhere. What’s amazing about Rush, after listening to their self-titled first release, is that it’s so far removed from their later core releases, and they went through such a giant transformation by their second album. If you take their second or third album and remove the monster-solo prog-rock geekfests and the Tolkein-meets-Ayn Rand lyrics, you still aren’t anywhere near this one. It’s a miracle this obscure band, scraping by on a self-released album, even got the chance at a second one.

The easiest way to sonically describe this is Led Zeppelin clone with a chick singer. The band blows through eight numbers that are straight-up, simple, forgettable AOR rock. And I guess that’s forgivable. I mean, listen to some of AC/DC’s early stuff and it sure isn’t Back in Black. It’s barely metal as we know it today. Same with KISS, same with a lot of other bands that started before things really got categorized and defined. So here are some tracks of simple bar-band blues, and that’s fine. And Neil Peart wasn’t in the band yet, so you’re trading the all-time best drum wizard for regular old guy John Rutsey clonking away the basic beats. (Rutsey quit the band after their first release, saying that they weren’t going anywhere, and also citing his diabetes as being a problem with extended touring. He, oddly enough, got into amateur bodybuilding after he dropped out of music.)

Probably the biggest problem on this album is the big love-it-or-hate-it of Rush, being Geddy Lee’s vocals. Some people are immediately turned off by his high-register singing, which sounds slightly feminine or falsetto. I personally don’t mind his singing a lot of the time, but there are usually a couple of runs or notes per album that grate at me a bit. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff on this first album falls under that category. Maybe it’s because there’s a lot more “oooh yeeah” phrasing in the hard rock style, and by the time they started singing more sedate stuff about Dungeons and Dragons and not “baby-baby” bar music, he stopped doing that.

There are a couple of gems in this album. One is the song “Working Man,” which became a live staple for a while, and rocks out well. It also, like many of the songs here, shows that Alex Lifeson is a damn good guitarist, and can really jam away like he just got done listening to a bunch of Hendrix and wants to do similar work. This song is the reason a DJ in Ohio started spinning the record, playing the song on Friday afternoons to their working-class fans. (This later resulted in the band’s deal with Mercury records, and the wider rerelease of this album.) “Finding My Way” is a good opener, and “In the Mood” is funny, but maybe a bit corny. The other stuff is so un-Rush-like it’s only interesting as a historical note. Probably the most interesting thing about this material is that it deals with straight-up, hey-baby sex stuff, which became taboo as the band went on to talk about inevitable nuclear war and starships vanishing into black holes.

The album itself has some interesting history, in that it was pieced together from two different studios. The band’s first release, a cover of the song “Not Fade Away,” was recorded with an original B-side. This work was done at Toronto’s Eastern Studios (where Gordon Lightfoot was putting down most of his mid-seventies albums, too) in a series of graveyard shifts, and included two other original songs, plus the versions of “In the Mood” and “Take a Friend” that ended up on the LP. The band also laid down some more skeletal work on other songs on the studio’s 8-track before becoming dissatisfied and moving to Toronto Sound Studios and self-producing the rest of the album. No record company would touch the album or the “Not Fade Away” single, so the band and manager Ray Daniels formed Moon Records to release both. When the album got picked up by Mercury, long-time Rush producer Terry Brown re-mixed the album into the form most of us have heard.

(Also worth noting: in 2008, the band found an old tape with a different version of “Working Man”, including an alternate solo. This was released directly to the Rock Band video game, and then later released on iTunes. It’s worth the 99 cents to hear this slightly different version if you’re a Rush fanatic.)

All I can really say about this album is that it got a lot better really fast. Completists will obviously want check this out, but it’s a tough sell for the casual fan of the later music. If you’re only familiar with “Tom Sawyer” and newer, a better dip into the old catalog would be starting with Fly By Night, and catching the couple of good tunes here on the first live album with Neil on the drums.

Rating: 6.5

[I feel I need to put some kind of disclaimer on this for giving a Rush album a 6.5 and I’m sure I’m going to hear about it. So, sorry or whatever.]

When I first got into Rush, my friend Derik Rinehart (now an accomplished prog-rock drummer) made me a tape from his LPs, with this on one side and Moving Pictures on the other. Of course, I played the hell out of both sides, and I probably liked Moving Pictures a lot more because it rocked, and everyone likes it more, right? But I still listened to Grace Under Pressure because I didn’t want to waste my precious Duracells rewinding the D-90 in my walkman, and the album burned it into my brain. And I’m not sure if it’s the content of the album, or the thoughts back to that era, but when I think of this LP, I think of a sterile bleakness. My pal Simms once told me, “It’s the Cold War, man. I love it!” And maybe he’s right. But it’s something that now, 20 years later, I can’t completely reconcile when I try to decide how meaningful this 39 minutes and 26 seconds of music is to me.

Here’s what might be throwing me: This is the first album since their sophomore effort that wasn’t produced by Terry Brown. It’s said the switch to Peter Henderson had to do more with accessibility, which seems strange following Moving Pictures, which produced the only song for which 90% of the population knows of the band at all. (Henderson was previously known as the producer of Supertramp’s biggest albums, as well as an engineer for Frank Zappa, among others.) And I guess the soundscape might match pop back then a bit better. (It’s also worth noting that Steve Lillywhite was supposed to produce this album, but pulled out of the project at the last minute, almost derailing the entire project. Henderson was their last-second replacement.)

The easiest way to describe this album is to first go into the differences between it and previous albums. First, there’s not a lot of bass on this album. And while I mean thin-sounding bass, I also mean that there’s at least one song with NO bass, where Geddy Lee just plays synth and sings. And there’s a lot more synth on this album. Previously, the band just filled out their sound with bass pedals, and Geddy reached over to play a line or two here and there, like a solo opposite from Alex’s guitars. But here, there are more places where MIDI madness has taken over not only Geddy’s performances, but also those of the guitar. This album is the first to have markedly less guitar, or more “atmospheric” sounds of droning chords for a measure or two at a time, but less leads and powered strumming. The drums are still there, and Neil Peart still lives behind the 97-piece drum kit, but his playing is much more methodical and exact. There aren’t many stray or extra beats anywhere, and certainly no heroics in the solo department. It’s all very exact. And I guess that reminds me of the era, of everything becoming so exact. Computerized watches! Fuel injection! Mechanized assembly! Welding robots! 2000 would be here soon, and we’d all be living on the moon, so make your prog-rock as efficient and exact as possible.

The other thing is that this album takes a rather dark turn toward social and political issues. The opening song, “Distant Early Warning,” describes how the nuclear war is going to start in moments, and what humanity has brought onto itself. “Red Sector A” (the bassless song, for those keeping track) talks about concentration camps in World War II, a place where Geddy Lee’s parents survived before fleeing to Canada. “Between the Wheels,” “Kid Gloves,” and “Red Lenses” are all political gesturing to the superpower-driven Cold War.

All of these songs are interesting sonic paintings of the time. But if you’ve ever seen them performed live, they’re also very tedious. I seem to remember a videotape of a concert from this era, and it was seriously like sitting through the Canadian Socialist Worker’s Party convention. I’m surprised that “Distant Early Warning” remained a staple for live sets as long as it did. For me, I was always thankful for this song, because it was a good time during their live sets to get up and go to the can. (This was later replaced with “Nobody’s Hero.”)

Oddly enough, the album as a whole seems to be greater than its parts, despite the fact that it’s not a concept album in the strictest sense. When you play it from the beginning to end, it flows well, and has an even sound that carries you easily. When I’m working on some writing or taking a long car trip and I need something to kill some time, this album always seems to end up in the player. There are songs that I like (“Red Lenses,” “Between the Wheels,” “Afterimage”), and like I said, it’s a very true look at what 1984 was like for me (no Orwellian pun intended.) The only reason I can’t give this a higher rating is that it doesn’t rock. Go listen to “Tom Sawyer” or “YYZ” and then listen to “Red Sector A.” Where are the guitars? The solos? The rock? Rush is a rock band! They took themselves too seriously on this one, and that’s why I’m saying it’s only slightly above-average.

Rating: 8

You can divide the history of Rush into different discrete eras - in fact, the band did a good job of this themselves by putting out a live album exactly every four studio albums, wrapping up their career into nice little leather-bound volumes of history that chronicled their change from a Zep Clone band on the Toronto bar circuit to the prog-rock juggernaut they became by the 1980s. But if you had to look at their album output and find the one album that signaled (no pun intended) their high-water mark, the place the trio of long-haired, polyester flare-pant wearing Tolkein lovers switched into a tech rock genre unto themselves, you’d have to say Moving Pictures.

Listening to their eighth? studio album today, almost thirty years later, it’s surprising to me this was produced in an era before digital recording, compact discs, widespread off-the-rack solid-state synths you could buy at the neighborhood Guitar World, and personal computers that could fit in a room and boot up without dimming the entire neighborhood’s lights, let alone fit thousands of MP3s on a tiny hard drive. It astounds me that even Rush’s own albums later in the decade pale in dynamic comparison to this disc. (Listen to this and Power Windows back-to-back; PW is cleaner, but to the point of sterility, with no feel whatsoever in the guitar. It sounds like Lifeson did away with mic’ing the Marshall stacks and fed his guitar through a DI box directly into the mixing board, with no effects whatsoever.) There’s incredible depth, full range, and a complete sonic experience here. It’s the kind of disc you bring to the store when you’re shopping for a new amp or speakers for your car, because you know in three minutes, you can hit every conceivable combination of notes in every type of range, from laid-back noodling to frenetic soloing to groovy prog-rock, with a solid low-end from Geddy Lee’s bass, and a gutsy midrange of Lifeson’s guitars over the top of it. Add to it a crystal-clear drum kit from the professor himself, and you’ve got a seven-song Maxell tape commercial, with everything but the crystal glass to shatter when you turn it up to 11.

This album isn’t about loud, and it isn’t about prog-metalling through every major and minor mode scale at the speed of light to let everyone know you can jerk off with your four or six string as well as they jerk off in their parents’ basements. It’s one of those ‘perfect storm’ moments that the band could record an album with more pop sensibilities than when they were trying to record AOR pop albums that charted, and yet they still managed to write things like the one prog-instrumental track (“YYZ”) that both carved the mold for every prog-rock band that wanted to record a complicated yet jamming instrumental track, as well as instructing a generation of music fans what the IATA three-character airport code for Toronto was. Every drummer that I’ve ever known that could play worth a damn went through a phase where they thought this was the greatest drum album ever recorded, and for good reason. Neil laid down absolutely perfect percussion here, including his innovative use of plywood, which is listed in his musical credits. (How do you play plywood? Wear gloves, hold it by the edges, and hit a metal chair sharply. It’s that bullwhip-meets-shattering-glass sound in “YYZ”.)

One thing that’s firmly gelled in this album is a lyrical sense that examines the 80s more than it examines comic-book scifi and the land of talking trees, magic elves, and twenty-minute epic concept songs. “Limelight” takes an honest look at a life of stardom and the road, in a more sincere way than your typical Motley Crue long-road-ahead-of-us-baby-baby sense of the theme. (It’s also helped by one of the most warm and emotion-piercing feedback-touched solo by Alex Lifeson, one that he claimed was his favorite ever, well after this was released.) “Witch Hunt” and “Red Barchetta” metaphotrically compare future fiction and possible past of Orwellian and MyCarthyist society, something everyone would be whining about in Reagan era new wave pop saturating the MTVs at the same time. Peart output a solid Humanist theme in the album’s lyrics, the kind of thing that works on multiple levels and opens up the band to a wider audience, even if the underlying musicianship of the band is still math-rock odd-meter and blindingly complex instrumentation.

Rush is and always will be a band of the Eighties. Yes, they’ve released many good albums in the nineties and beyond, and there was some pretty solid output in the seventies, too. But with the “one hit” track “Tom Sawyer”, the one song that much of the population equates with the Canadian Trio lands you right to this 1981 classic LP. And most of what I equate with Rush - the synthesizers, the electric drums, the high-tech recordings, the sound of my childhood and when I stopped listening to my parents’ Billy Joel records and started building my own musical identity, this all puts every Rush album as some extension of the Eighties. And if you’re looking at Test for Echo or Caress of Steel, you’re looking at some genetical precursor or successor of that one cornerstone album. Moving Pictures is that fly trapped in amber that will forever be used to carbon-date the crest of this movement in music.

There’s little I can say that’s bad about this album. I can still listen to it from start to finish, which is pretty much rule zero for good album-oriented rock. Maybe if I had to pick nits, I’d say “The Camera Eye” is a little bit repetitive and adds a side two lull that’s slow to pick up until “Witch Hunt” breaks out in its second half. And for the longest time, I held some sort of generic resentment toward the song “Tom Sawyer”, because so many people that didn’t like Rush liked that song, so naturally, I had to not like it, and would skip forward to “Red Barchetta”. But that faded, and not just because in the era of tape, it was such a pain in the ass to fast-forward past a song, and I eventually listened to this one from start to finish every time.

But “Red Barchetta” - perfect driving music. “Vital Signs” is the perfect mellow outro of a bookend for the tail of the album. “YYZ”, probably the greatest instrumental ever, at least in the rock world. The part of “Witch Hunt” that picks up from a slow dredge to a full blowout of rising energy still floors me every time I hear it. There’s so much thickness here, so much perfection, it’s hard to rate any other Rush album as being anything but an inferior product in comparison. It makes me feel old to pull the “they don’t make em like this anymore” shit. And it makes me even older to think about how much this transports me back to my teenage years, how much this album encapsulates the mid-1980s for me, and reminds me of every frustration and carefree moment of my early teens. But I just can’t think of another album that wraps it all up in a nice, seven-song package like this, which is why it easily gets a perfect rating.

Rating: 10