Moving Pictures

Lately I've been doing some redecorating in the RUSH room. Yes we have a room in our house dedicated to RUSH. What, you don't have one? Well, then you'll have to come over and see it some time. It's fabulous.

You see, after following RUSH for over 26 years, I have collected a whole lot of stuff and I have always had to have a place to put it. When I was in my teens, I developed a method of decorating my bedroom with posters and album flats. Some were actual album covers and some were the square covers from RUSH tour books. I always bought multiple copies of tour books at the shows just for this reason. Some are also known as flats and are used to help promote an album in a record store. Now, most other bands are around maybe 5 or 10 or 15 years if they are lucky. Popular music can be very disposable with the decades. If a band is really fortunate, they can develop a hardcore audience that will give them reason to keep going. In RUSH's case, that's what has happened. As I grew up through my teens and into my twenties, RUSH's music changed and evolved enough to keep my interest, so I kept buying their albums and going to their shows and the ongoing chain of album squares on my wall just grew longer and longer.

Now, the pictures on the album covers aren't glamorous photos of the band in satin kimonos and platform shoes in the 70's or thin ties and bright colored sport coats in the 80's. No, we all know that RUSH is way "Too Sexy" for their album covers. Instead, the covers are visual statements reflecting the music that was marking a particular period in time. Some of the pictures even had naked men in them! ("Hemispheres" is just so, so gay!) Other covers had things on them like a dog sniffing a fire hydrant, a boy alone in a room with a bunch of TV's, an egg in a C clamp, a woman taking a walk during a hurricane with her dress blowing up in the wind, a bunch of professional movers moving works of art into a museum. Each picture reflects a certain time in my life. Each album square tells me the same thing. "The more that things change, the more they stay the same."

Time kept going, and so did I into my 30's. RUSH kept going as well into their 30's. (Or, is that their 50's?) The same 3 guys and all these album squares just keep piling up on my walls. I originally had them hung up with a gummy-like substance called poster tack, but the pictures eventually would move in a downward motion (known as falling) and come off of the walls. At this point, some of these pictures are getting up there in age. Some are 20 or 25 years old and have been moved to a few different walls in a few different homes. I had always thought that it would be great to put them in album sized picture frames, but the cost of the frames that I had seen was somewhere around $25 each. Let me see, $25 times 25 or more album squares = OUCH!

Then, one day recently, we were visiting our sister-in-law at work. She works in a craft store. We were making plans to go out to dinner with her and Jason's brother and we noticed that they had album cover frames. The package said, "Now you can turn all your old albums into works of art." They were priced at $10 each but since we were going to buy a bunch of them, the store manager gave us a 40% discount which made them only $6 each. So, I bought 30 of them and I've been spending the past few days putting my pictures into frames and getting moved by a sense of nostalgia. I have been hammering nails and moving the pictures to their correct spots on the walls. Fortunately, I decided not to pull out my movie camera and film this event, because that would have meant way too many word plays on the title of this blog.