Rush -- "Tom Sawyer"
In 1981, I was all of eight years old, but I was already drawn to rock music, and I'd spend some time nearly every day after school spinning discs in the basement of our house. Of all the albums my older brothers and sisters collected, Rush's Moving Pictures was the one that most effectively captured the attention of my second-grade mind. The lyrics were mystifying. I vaguely knew that Tom Sawyer was the title of a play(*) that my oldest brother had performed in, but whatever the band was trying to say about the title character was beyond me. The album artwork fascinated me and creeped me out. But I listened to this song over and over. I somehow knew that the sound the band achieved here was very contemporary, but I never would have been able to express this at the time except maybe to say that the song made me think of video games.
The Moog doesn't sound contemporary anymore, and the general Ayn Rand-meets-J.R.R. Tolkien sound of the band has not aged well, but there is something more than nostalgia that draws me back to this and a few other Rush tracks from time to time. When you get right down to it, this band had a lot of musical talent, they knew how to make a good rock track, and they also knew how to capture the attention of this eight year old.
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* I knew nothing of the Mark Twain novel at the time.
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