The Rush album Geddy Lee thought stood the test of time: “I was amazed”
In 1981, Rush achieved the seemingly impossible.
The moments leading up to Moving Pictures were filled with equal parts playing it safe and chasing greatness. With Permanent Waves, it was all about maintaining loyalty to their progressive roots while having radio-friendly and commercial charm. But they took this even further on Moving Pictures, simultaneously capturing the feeling of an entire era while putting out a career-defining masterpiece people would talk about for years to come.
The thing about Moving Pictures was that the music was still quintessentially Rush. Songs like ‘Limelight’ and ‘Tom Sawyer’ have earned legacies on their own, but even the more ambitious entries, like ‘The Camera Eye’, showed off everything worth paying attention to about the band’s legacy, including Alex Lifeson’s guitar-playing precision.
As with most records, however, Moving Pictures also took on a bit of evolution when the band took them to the stage, with the strongest contenders becoming clear the second they started playing them in front of a live audience. Like most records, translating songs to the stage is one of the most difficult things, and also incidentally one of the most overlooked. It’s something audiences don’t really think about unless it translates badly, in which case it’s hard to figure out exactly why certain songs sound so good recorded and then fall flat in stadiums and arenas.
Geddy Lee had this exact feeling about ‘The Camera Eye’, feeling it didn’t really match up on stage but which also became so requested they couldn’t ignore the pull for it. It’s easy to understand why they’d be reluctant to play the song, not just from a technical point of view but from the perspective of setlists needing to have the right flow of intent with the songs chosen – it needs to tell a story almost.
All things considered, however, the difficulty of playing some songs off the record is almost a minor, insignificant detail in the grand scheme of things. After all, Moving Pictures is such a timeless masterpiece that it doesn’t even matter if Lee feels reluctant to play some of its songs. It’s how it feels as a member of the audience, even if it comes across as slightly different to the experience of listening at home on a record player. Because it’s magical in any sense, something Lee realised years later during the Time Machine tour when they played the album in its entirety.
“That was a real highlight of the tour for me,” Lee told Bass Player magazine in 2012, explaining how his biggest surprise was how much the record’s material still holds up. “I loved playing the whole album; I was amazed at how it still flowed after all these years, and I thought the material stood the test of time. I’m sure we’ll do something like that again. We’ve played a lot of the songs at various times, so nothing really kicked my butt; the bass lines all came back pretty easily.”
Clearly, Moving Pictures proved the value of two things for Rush – staying true to themselves while also moving forward. It sounds obvious, but those are actually fairly difficult to master while also making sure there wasn’t a general feeling that what they were doing was ultimately impossible.
As Lifeson later reflected to Louder, “If you think about it, Moving Pictures is the cute, sweet, happy offspring [of Permanent Waves]! We learned a lot about writing and how we work best to accomplish our goals so that an ambitious album such as Moving Pictures could be made without wanting to kill ourselves.”
