Last October I saw Rush again at Wembley — just a few weeks short of the 27th anniversary of the last time I saw them (and 23 years since my only other trip to Wembley Arena). Thanks to James, I had a ticket in the eighth row. Combined with the big screen projections, which have advanced considerably since I was last at a gig big enough to warrant them, this made for an almost intimate experience. It's not like I'm counting down to the next tour in 2011, but it was really quite enjoyable. And they played four of the six tracks from Permanent Waves.
They probably didn't even play that many songs on the Permanent Waves tour, which Jeremy and I saw at Hammersmith Odeon on 5 June 1980, the night before our French Oral 'O' Level. "Ils s'appellent Rooche," I explained the next morning, after four or five hours sleep and with my ears still ringing. "Et ils sont tres… lourd." I was desperate to change the subject, since I sensed it wasn't doing me any favours, but I didn't know have sufficient ability to seize the initiative. I was asked about the players in the band. "Il y a un guitariste, un percussioniste [ooh, sounds good that, I wonder if the word exists] et un… [struggling now]… [oh fuck, just jump in with both feet] bass guitariste." I got an A. I still have the t-shirt from that tour, and can still fit into it: I wore it at Wembley, to James's admiration. Somewhere in the loft I've got the tour brochure — here's the text from it. I think our tickets in the second row of the circle cost £3.50 (one twentieth of the price of the same seat at Neil Young's gigs this week).
I'm pretty sure I bought this record in January 1980, in Spinning Disc in Tonbridge, just a month or two after I'd become a Rush fan through Hemispheres and A Farewell to Kings. I never liked it as much as those albums: too many songs under ten minutes long, and not proggy enough!
Nevertheless, once I'd memorised the lyrics and bass runs, I moved onto the cover photo. I was sure there was some allegory lurking in it, and my 14-year-old self took this so earnestly that I set about researching the clues. But no Google or Wikipedia back then, just my parents' copy of Pears Cyclopaedia. I tracked down the date when Harry Truman was elected president and established that, around the same time, there was some very rough weather over the east coast of the UK (my father even told me that his flight to a skiing holiday had been disrupted by it). Hmmm, but that architecture and pedestrian crossing sign look distinctly American… I never did quite crack the hermeneutic code.
If you think that sounds train-spotterish, there was another story about the different versions of the cover, and how they represented the Dewey Defeats Truman headline on the newspaper in bottom left of the cover, as Dave Weller explains in his account:
The album cover features a model walking away from the scene of disaster, her skirt blown to one side. According to Neil Peart, "The woman on the cover is really a symbol of us… The idea is her perfect imperturbability in the face of all this chaos. In that she represents us". To her left is a newspaper with the headline "Dewey Defeats Truman". In fact the headline doesn’t appear on the US version of the sleeve. The reference was to an actual headline from the Chicago Tribune who wrongly, and with much embarrassment, published the result of the 1948 US presidential election. The threat of legal action meant that it was either blanked out on the sleeve or, in some countries, 'Dewey' was replaced with 'Dewei'. The appearance of the model wasn't without controversy either, attracting charges of sexism and also resulting in the removal of the words 'Coca Cola' from a billboard behind her. This means that there are a wide variety of subtly different versions of the sleeve on both vinyl and CD. One further anomaly is that the first pressing of the album in the UK has the second track on side 2 incorrectly labelled as "Between Us" rather than "Different Strings". The original title of "Different Strings" was indeed "Between Us" but was changed at the last minute as it was thought it would be too confusing with "Entre Nous" which can be loosely translated from French to 'between us'.
For 28 years I've thought that I had one of the original copies that featured the Dewey Defeats Truman headline. But it turns out it was Dewei Defeats Truman after all. Likewise the second track on Side 2 is labelled as Different Strings — what a disappointment.
And to cap it all, I guess there never was a secret code to crack. Just a rather tacky visual pun on the album title, much like the following year's Moving Pictures.
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