Rush- Moving Pictures @45- Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, the late Neil Peart

The Rush album Moving Pictures, Top Three seller on Billboard‘s album chart with ditto in the UK, had initial sales just shy of 5,000,000 copies sold in America alone. Regardless of those admittedly impressive numbers surrounding Rush’s eighth studio album, released February 1981, they don’t begin to convey Moving Picture‘s importance to the band’s long career, nor to rock music history over the last forty-five years.

“Music was changing,” Rush lead singer/composer Geddy Lee tells us in my In the Studio classic rock interview, and without Lee, guitarist/composer Alex Lifeson, and drummer/lyricist the late Neil Peart embracing the fresh musical ideas in the crosswinds of the early Eighties with songs “Tom Sawyer”, “Red Barchetta”, “Limelight”, “Vital Signs”, and “Witch Hunt”, it is doubtful that a path to mainstream success would have been cleared, both for the Rush followup  Signals  or for later major bands such as  Metallica, Queensryche, Smashing Pumpkin’s Billy Corgan, Dave Grohl’s Foo Fighters, Thom Morello with Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave, and Dream Theater. The combination of highly literate lyrics weaving tales both fantastic as well as personal, performed and arranged peerlessly by Rush in timeless fashion, all recorded and produced in a manner devoid of anachronism, allows me to comfortably  predict that Moving Pictures  will continue to impress and entertain well into the 21st century. –Redbeard