Note: I am taking a look at my Rush scrapbooks, album by album (studio only). This is Part Four.
Ah, Permanent Waves (January, 1980). Rush fans could finally put down their armor.
No top 40 hits yet, but FM oriented stations played "The Spirit of Radio." Memory can indeed be a flickering light, but I remember driving in my car and hearing this new song. Wait a minute. That sounds like Rush. Oh, my God, it is!
I would never want to back to the old ways of listening to music, but I have to say, there was something really, really cool about hearing a new song like that for the first time. There was no publicity in those days, you learned about it when you heard it.
"The Spirit of Radio" reached number 51. Probably did not hear it a lot on the local station (Fayetteville), but hey, just hearing that once or maybe a few other times was something special.
In 1979, I had bought my first stereo system. It wasn’t as good as some of the others in the dorm, but I was happy to have my own so I could listen to 2112, ATWAS, AFTK, and now Permanent Waves. I had also bought Archives, the first three albums.
It’s worth taking a moment to point out the way albums were made back in the day. Side One had the best songs and the hits. I remember listening to Side One of PW for about the first few months. Then Side Two.
For my scrapbook, things picked up a bit. John Swenson wrote both a review and a piece about Rush’s "Heavy Metal Message Hits the Radio." Geddy figured prominently in the latter, saying:
In the early days people started liking us even though we didn’t consider ourselves good musicians. With every album, we get a little better.
And:
There are so many different elements to our music.
Washing away six years of bad press, David Fricke wrote the cover story for Circus. Fricke went on to become a foremost authority on rock music and can be seen in a number of rock documentaries and reviews of albums. He praised Neil as “an articulate speaker and avid reader.” Permanent Waves was “a near perfect marriage of heavy-metal and arty Britrock.”
The most remarkable thing I kept was a "Chu-Bop." Nostalgia Central dot com describes them as packs of record shaped pink bubblegum that came housed in a small, 3” by 3” replica album cover. They released nine series from 1980-1983 and I’m thrilled to have one of them. I think.
Rush was heard across the nation via NBC Radio Broadcast, The Source. I see now that it ran in the 1970s and 1980s. I don’t remember hearing it or knowing about it. But Rush fans were pleased. Things were getting better for then band. You might say they were “off on their way...”
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