The one Rush song Geddy Lee said “didn’t age very well”
There wasn’t any kind of trend that Rush didn’t want to welcome with open arms back in their prime.
No one should have been expecting them to hop on the disco bandwagon by any means, but if something caught their ear in the right way, it wasn’t hard for them to translate that down to their fingers when they started working on new material. But even on classic albums, Geddy Lee could find that little bit of fluff that never needed to be there in the first place.
Because at the risk of alienating every single Rush fan in existence, no period of their career isn’t without fault. A lot of people could easily point to the keyboard era as the only time the band “went wrong,” but Grace Under Pressure is a masterpiece of the 1980s, especially when measured next to the more nutty stuff they created at the very beginning of their career. Caress of Steel may be a fine album, but a song like ‘The Necromancer’ is bound to apply only to a handful of Tolkien nerds rather than any prog fans.
The band clearly needed to streamline themselves, but since 2112 became one of their best-selling albums, there wasn’t any need for them to change things up too drastically. They had made a masterpiece of a song that didn’t need to rely on the biggest sounds of the time, and yet when they got even more cerebral on their next albums, the rest of their cult audience managed to carry them through every single record cycle.
So, really, the only people who could stop them were themselves, and after Hemispheres, they were in need of a shakeup. They had many moments where they could have made prog epics, but when they began work on Moving Pictures, they finally found the perfect balance of keyboard textures, rock and roll swagger, and the subtlest hint of prog grandeur to put them in everyone’s good graces.
Although most of the album is absolutely stellar, Lee did have a few albums when returning to songs like ‘The Camera Eye’, saying, “For me, it didn’t age very well. That’s one of the reasons that it didn’t make it into our show for so long. Doing the album in its entirety enabled us to revisit it. And I have to say, rather sheepishly, that I’ve found myself really loving playing that song every night.”
Then again, what was stopping them? Sure, some of the keyboards might be overbearing when transitioning between sections, but that’s what the song calls for. Neil Peart had written the entire tune based around his trip to New York and London, and the central riff is the epitome of what it feels like working your way through an airport trying to figure out which terminal you’re supposed to be arriving at.
Granted, there are more than a few times where the keyboards are a bit too squelchy for the average fan, and it’s not like you can’t hear the influences on display. The band clearly had a love for bands like The Police, but whereas a song like ‘Invisible Sun’ works perfectly in the right context, the keyboard lines on a few of the sections seem to have the year ‘1981’ tattooed across their forehead.
If we look at it in the context of the record, though, ‘The Camera Eye’ does serve its purpose as a farewell to the more epic side of their discography. They weren’t going to get another opportunity to make this kind of gargantuan tale again, so they might as well go out with a song that’s all about traveling to pastures new.
