Desert Island Discs: Moving Pictures, Part 1

[It seems that the poetry well has dried up for now (I can almost hear a sigh of relief!) so I'm introducing another semi-regular feature: my desert island discs column. Each entry will discuss one of my favorite albums. Of course, I'm aware that in doing so I'm certainly not helping to temper the blogging world's collective narcissism (as if that weren't the general raison d'etre for blogs, after all). But if it's fruitless to try to counter aesthetic narcissism per se at least I can hope to improve in some minor way the general level of taste and discernment out there (so, I'll save my discussion of Iron Maiden for another day)].

Album #1: Moving Pictures (Rush, 1981)

We all have a soft spot in our heart for those albums that came along at a crucial time in our musical development. Most of the time this happens in the teenage years, when we are learning what we like and what we don't and suddenly music comes to appear terribly important, often for reasons totally unrelated to the music itself: our own little (often semi-rebellious) identities are being formed; our friends come to exercise greater influence over our taste and preferences; we become dimly aware of social issues, and so on. Most of the music we discover at such a time will later come to seem shallow or uninteresting or irrelevant once the collateral issues have changed. And we tend to listen to that music later with a bit of nostalgia and vague embarrassment.

Nothing could be farther from the truth with Rush's eighth studio album, Moving Pictures, which I still find absolutely exhilarating to listen to. I still vividly recall hearing it for the first time. I was not quite fourteen and a group of us scouts were headed up to the mountains for a week-long camping trip. One of my friends had brought a cassette player (the old, bulky rectangular kind used for dictation) and a homemade copy of the album, which he played over and over again in the car. I'd never heard anything like it: the music was grating and loud and the singer didn't so much sing as shriek in a shrill falsetto. Coming as I did from a world in which ELO and Styx were pushing the musical envelope, this was like some kind of musical meteor falling from the sky and landing by chance on my (mostly empty) head. I hated it.

Fast forward a month or two and another of my good friends who had also been on the trip subscribes to one of those mail-order record clubs, where you get ten albums for a penny and commit to buying six more in the next two years. Unsure of what to get, he orders Moving Pictures. The records come and we play them incessantly as we play--you guessed it--Dungeons and Dragons. And when I join the same record club a few weeks later, I order it as well. And thus am I initiated into a world which I haven't really left. To be continued...