My cousin Al had a lot of Rush records and being a few years younger, of course you look up to your elder peers. He and my cousin Mike shared a room in their Berko Avenue home, and I would peer over admiringly at the artwork on the covers of those albums from 2112, to Grace Under Pressure. I likely didn’t know much about Rush at that point. I was probably only 8 or 9 at the time music wasn’t a big deal in my life yet. Rush started to change that and I didn’t even own an album of my own.
My dad was a Columbia House subscriber. Each month, you would receive a handful of club picks. If you didn’t like them, you would return them – postage paid – but if you did want to keep them, of course you would pay for them.
One day as I was admiring the collection of cassette’s that had arrived for my dad, a tape familiar cover art. It was of a Dalmatian sniffing a red fire hydrant. If you are a fan of Rush or even familiar with their work, you know that I am talking about their 9th studio album, Signals.
This became my favorite album and remains one of most cherished today. I still have a cassette although the packaging shows that this copy was purchased in the US which many of my cassettes were. I would buy them when we went down to visit family south of the border. Years ago, I also purchased the record to add to my collection.
Rush was a very synth-heavy bad, but this record and their next studio album, Grace Under Pressure, were my personal favorites of this era.
Subdivisions:
Nowhere is the dreamer
Or the misfit so alone