We're Not Who You Think We Are
Album: Moving Pictures
Year: 1981
. . .
Back in my arcade-haunting days — approximately 1978-1982, ending abruptly when we discovered one of our CB radio friends had rented a house with three other women — my favorite thing to do was play the racing games. Night Driver was my first love, of course, followed soon by things like Monaco GP, Pole Position, Turbo and, of course, Red Barchetta.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2145: Rush – “Red Barchetta”
Album: Moving Pictures
Year: 1981
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It’s funny: Rush are known for getting a big sound out of just three guys — though Geddy Lee is three guys just himself, I guess — but they never met a musical space they couldn’t fill to the brim. I mean, that’s their thing, right? And so it’s ironic that their most feted song has plenty of space in it. And that space is created almost immediately: “Tom Sawyer” opens with an instantly iconic drum beat / synth wash which immediately got your attention seconds before Geddy starts singing.
Album: Permanent Waves
Year: 1980
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While one might assume that calling your album Permanent Waves might be a dig at what folks called “new wave” music, Rush would spend much of the 1980s making records that were their spin on new wave as surely as their earlier records were their spins on metal and prog.
That said, very few new wave bands — the Police, yeah, X possibly, Hüsker Dü or the Minutemen probably — had the chops to mix all of the different time signatures that Rush crammed into a song like “Freewill,” which, on Permanent Waves, spins out from “The Spirit of Radio” with a cool Alex Lifeson opening that lands into the main guitar riff for the song.
Album: Permanent Waves
Year: 1980
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The thing about writing album-side long multi-part epics and/or concept albums is that they’re hard. Which is one of the reason that a lot of the biggest prog bands of the 1970s abandoned them as the 1970s crashed into the 1980s. Instead, they subsumed their considerable chops into shorter songs, some of which were pop songs, and in the cases of Genesis and — for one weird moment, Yes — incredibly successful pop songs. Hell, an entire band, Asia, formed specifically for this purpose.
By the way, this isn’t necessarily any easier. Genesis’s pop success was initially viewed as a fluke, even as they’d been traveling in that direction since Peter Gabriel left, Asia crapped out after their second album, and Yes were essentially one-hit wonders for the second time in their career. And, lets not let Emerson Lake & Palmer off the hook for their still dogshit Love Beach, which tried to “balance” six terrible pop songs on one side with a side-long epic that was somehow even worse. (And they didn’t do themselves any favors with that album cover, either.)
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2142: Rush – “The Spirit of Radio”
Album: Hemispheres
Year: 1978
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In the summer of 1977, I started doing something that we called “mobiling.” I’d gotten on the CB radio and basically discovered a bunch of other weirdos on it — my first foray into social media! — and, naturally started meeting them face-to-face. It was called “mobiling” because people with CB radios in their cars as well as their houses would often be the ones making contact.
I, of course, didn’t have a car, but Craig from across the street as well as Larry (whom I met via the CB radio.) both had cars. And so we drove around northwest Fresno that srping and summer putting faces to voices. It was during one of those forays that I met my first Rush Guy, who turned me on to their double-live album, All The World’s a Stage.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2141: Rush – “La Villa Strangiato”
Album: The Runaways
Year: 1976
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There are a lot of contradictory messages inherent in the self-titled 1976 debut album by The Runaways. On one hand, they were a teenage all-girl band who wrote or co-wrote nearly all of the songs on the album. And, not only that, with the exception of bassist Jackie Fox (whose parts were played by Blondie’s Nigel Harrison), they all played on it as well.
On the other hand, it was their manager, the ever-dubious Kim Fowley, who made the decision about Fox not playing on the album, and probably also made the decision to list each of their ages on back cover on the album, which might have been so you could marvel at the fact that the hard rocking music inside was made by teenage girls, or for more prurient reasons, as the image the Runaways seemed to be going for was somewhere between tough chick and cheesecake.
[Read more…] about Certain Songs #2140: The Runaways – “Cherry Bomb”
Album: RTJ4
Year: 2020
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A while back, someone on Twitter — someone who I don’t know IRL and is a relatively recent follower to boot — messaged me and asked the following question: “Am I sort of right in thinking that you have not much listened to music made after 2000 (or earlier)?”
I was incredibly flabbergasted by that question, because, if anything, I’ve been listening to more and more music since the turn of the century as the barrier to discovering newer music has gotten lower. For example, my “1980s” & “1990s” iTunes playlists have about 12,500 songs combined, but my “2000s” and “2010s” playlists have over 14,000 songs combined.