Ye Olde Hit Parade: Tom Sawyer

1981: Rush - Tom Sawyer

When you look back at your life, certain years stand out more than others for good or bad reasons. With 1981, it was a little of both for me.


In terms of news, it was a pretty eventful year. Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as president of the U.S. in January and two months later, a Jodie Foster-obsessed lunatic nearly killed him. I remember coming home from school and turning on the TV to watch the Happy Days rerun (aka "Happy Days Again") at 4 p.m., only to find a breaking news bulletin about the assassination attempt. Then in May, Pope John Paul II was shot. It was the year of the failed assassination, I guess. Other stuff happened in '81: The Space Shuttle Columbia successfully completed a space mission, MTV and USA Today made their debuts, there was a strike in Major League Baseball.

The year started off well for me. I was in 8th grade, which in my k-8 school in Pickering, Ontario meant I was in the class that ruled the school. Having gone there since second grade, I remember thinking those 8th graders were so old. Anyway, it was a fun year. We graduated in June, I won an academic award, thoughts turned to high school in the fall and I even got to slow dance with the super-hot girl I had a monster crush on (it was a pity dance, but nevertheless).

But things were about to get weird. My dad got a new job in Washington state and ended up moving out there a few weeks after I graduated; my mom, my brother and I stayed behind for the time being. The plan was for us to follow him out there, but I think we were all hoping against hope that he would hate it and come back. The summer passed uneventfully and I started to attend Pickering High School, one of the town's two high schools, in the fall. It's a strange feeling to go from being a big deal in your school (or at least thinking you were one) to being at the bottom of the barrel as a high school freshman. There were kids from other elementary schools there, so while there were some familiar faces, there were mostly new ones. Just as I started to get the hang of it by November, we moved to the U.S.

We moved all our stuff into this tiny duplex my dad was renting in Richland, Washington. He worked at the Columbia nuclear plant as an engineer (very Homer Simpson-esque in retrospect). It wasn't from the Hanford nuclear reservation, which was established during World War II as part of the Manhattan Project to make plutonium for nuclear bombs. Fun stuff. It has since been decommissioned and the whole thing is a toxic waste site. Anyhoo, I went from Pickering High to Columbia Junior High in Richland, where I spent a month before we moved to a bigger house across town. Then I transferred to Hanford High School, which was a better school. But still, three schools in the first four months of freshman year? Not ideal, to say the least.

At least it was a good year for music. I really embraced harder-edged rock for the most part: Van Halen, the Who, the Rolling Stones, Black Sabbath, Ozzy, Billy Squier, April Wine, etc.., but also artists like the Police, Genesis, Foreigner, Hall and Oates, Steely Dan and the Moody Blues. There was a definite lean toward more established artists, but at the time, the elder statesmen of rock like the Who, Stones, etc., were still only in their 30s. There were a lot of articles about how crazy it was that "aging" rockers like 38-year-old Mick Jagger were jumping around on stage, with some pundits wondering if it was time for him to call it quits. If only they knew he'd still be at it 40 years later.

Still, for me as a teenage dork living in the Toronto area, 1981 was the year of Rush. The power trio had been releasing albums steadily since 1974 and certainly doing well in Canada, but with the release of Moving Pictures in February of '81, they broke through in a big way. I was buying vinyl fairly regularly by this point and I picked up the new Rush record the first week it came out (still have it). The band had moved away from side-long songs about wizards and futuristic dystopia to more digestible music that spoke to an entire generation of disaffected dudes, and no song exemplified that more than "Tom Sawyer."



The song has gone on to be the band's most recognizable tune, but when it was released as the first single from Moving Pictures, it made an immediate impact. Granted, I was living in the band's home region, so there was plenty of press coverage and airplay. I'm sure it wasn't as big across the U.S., although they were an established arena act by this point. The lyrics, which drummer/lyricist Neil Peart co-wrote with Pye Dubois (who wrote lyrics for fellow Canuck rockers Max Webster), looked at individuality, one of Peart's favorite topics. Surrounded by thunderous drums and an anvil of a riff, the song was and is a powerful statement that has withstood decades of classic rock radio play. It ended up being a minor chart hit in the U.S. (#44 on the singles chart, #24 in Canada), but Rush was an album band. Moving Pictures went #1 in Canada and #3 in the U.S. and has since gone quadruple-platinum in America. It's still an air drum classic.

Listening to Rush helped get me through some tough, depressing times after the move to the U.S. (Although it almost got my ass kicked when my brother and I were cranking the band's live album Exit Stage Left and the guy who lived next to us in the duplex angrily came over to make us turn it down.) Eventually, I started to like living in Richland...so, of course, we moved again a few years later. But that's a story for another day.

Honorable mentions: The Rolling Stones - "Start Me Up"; The Who - "Another Tricky Day"; The Kinks - "Destroyer"; Queen and David Bowie - "Under Pressure"; The Police - "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic"; Foreigner - "Urgent"; Diesel - "Sausalito Summerlight"; Phil Collins - "In the Air Tonight"; Van Halen - "Unchained"; Van Halen - "Mean Street"; Ozzy Osbourne - "Flying High Again"; Black Sabbath - "The Mob Rules"; Blue Oyster Cult - "Burnin' For You"; Saga - "On the Loose"; Triumph - "Magic Power"; AC/DC - "Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap"; Rush - "Limelight"; Stevie Nicks - "Stop Draggin' My Heart Around"; Jon & Vangelis - "The Friends of Mr. Cairo"