The Rush Album Art Gallery

"I used the explosion graphic because I felt that it represented the nature of the band. For a three-piece group they had a lot of power and force in their sound...We agreed on a concept and an approach. In Rush's early days they didn't have much money and so I kept it to a 2 colour job (black and red)" - Paul Weldon, Chemistry

"One of the first lyrics I submitted to Alex and Geddy was 'Fly By Night,' and when the time came to make our first album together, we decided that was a good title. (Our other candidate was Aurora Borealis, so we probably made the better choice.) As a bird lover since childhood, I remembered an illustration of a snowy owl swooping down toward the viewer with fierce eyes, and I suggested an image like that for the cover, maybe with the northern lights in the background. It fell to me to talk on the phone to the record company artist in Chicago, and try to describe this picture in words. In the same way that writing those few lyrics for the band would lead to me becoming the band’s chief wordsmith, that phone conversation led to me becoming the 'graphic arts supervisor.'" - Neil Peart, The Complete Tour Books 1977-2004, 2005

"In 1975, just before we recorded our next album, Caress of Steel, our manager, Ray, showed me an illustration by the keyboard player with one of Ray’s other clients, Ian Thomas. The keyboard player was Hugh Syme, and thus began a 30-year collaboration between Hugh and me, on album covers, tour books, my own book covers, instructional videos, Buddy Rich tribute albums, concert DVDs – basically anything with my name on it, would have Hugh’s name on it. Hugh and I learned some lessons early on. We discussed ideas for the Caress of Steel cover, and Hugh drew the illustrations and even made each of the letters from acrylic resin, cast in three dimensions. However, someone at the record company felt inspired to make a few 'creative' alterations, and when I first saw the completed album (in a record store in Winnipeg, as I recall), the illustrations were framed in bizarre fluffy clouds, and instead of the silvery, metallic look we had envisioned, the whole cover had an awful, washed-out tint of...let’s say cold tea." - Neil Peart, The Complete Tour Books 1977-2004, 2005

"The first one I did was Caress of Steel. They were pencil drawings, even though they don't look like it on the album. They printed them in a sort of pseudo-sepia tone. I had vignetted with an airbrush the blue area around the illustrations, which was later reinterpreted by the film strippers who were making the jackets in Chicago at the time. They took it upon themselves to cut a hard-edged mask around it. The lettering was cast, and chrome plated." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983

"All it means is the abstract man against the masses. The red star symbolizes any collectivist mentality." - Neil Peart, Creem, 1982

"The man is the hero of the story. That he is nude is just a classic tradition ... the pureness of his person and creativity without the trappings of other elements such as clothing. The red star is the evil red star of the Federation, which was one of Neil's symbols. We basically based that cover around the red star and that hero." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983

"All the World's a Stage, where you opened up the cover and, wow, there were three pages of pictures of us in action on stage...." - Geddy Lee with Geoff Barton, Sounds #66, Nov. 1981

"He was really a rake of a man, really, really thin and he was perfect for the part. He had a beautifully receding forehead already and all I had to do was go and retouch his mouth, should and knee joints to appear mannequin-like." - Hugh Syme, Chemistry

"The sky and the foreground are not in the same place. The buildings and the sky are from Toronto, and the foreground was a demolished warehouse in Buffalo. I would've loved a cathedral in the same condition, or something more worthy of the pathos you were intended to feel for an old building being in that state. We also began a series of puns with that album, in that the King is a puppet King." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983

"Well, that's basically a sore point with the marketing aspect of the management. They had the name of the package in mind as Archives, and I had every intention of making a look as much a part of the archives as possible-as opposed to being a rock 'n' roll cover. It's almost a library piece. It's changed a little bit: it was sort of repackaged again two years ago. For all the cover being very sedate-albeit a little boring and uneventful-it involved a special cover treatment which was actually more expensive than most covers." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983

"...we still don't talk about Hemispheres..." - Neil Peart, The Complete Tour Books 1977-2004, 2005

"The band told me, 'Go ahead, we'll see it when we get back,' because they were in Wales for the whole album and all my conversations with them were over the telephone. They didn't see it until it got out. Technically, it's an abomination. Once again, it's an effort in the progressive area of punning. They talk about Apollo and Dionysius in the lyrics, so I figured that Apollo would be the severe, Magritte business man, and that Dionysius would, again, be the reinstitution of a figure." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983

"There are always the inevitable last minute crises, such as the Chicago Daily Tribune being still so embarrassed about their 'Dewey defeats Truman' error of more than thirty years ago that they actually refused to let us use it on the cover!" - Neil Peart, "Personal Waves", Permanent Waves Tourbook

"We shot the newspaper with the headline 'Dewey Defeats Truman,' which now looks like '(Arabic)-Daily-(Arabic),' because we got a threat from the legal people at the Chicago Tribune, who are still embarrassed about their over-anxious printing of that headline...anything that pertains to that headline, according to the Chicago Tribune, is an embarrassment, and is subject to litigation if we were to print up any facet of it. To boot, Coca-Cola asked that we strip out their billboard way off in the background because it was too close to a cotton-clad mons pubis." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983

"Permanent Waves is the result of a conversation which I had with Neil out at his home in the country. We spoke all evening about Rush growing up, and how we were going to do these EKG readings of each member as they were recording. We were going to tape their temples and chests and have real heartbeats of them while they were playing. So Permanent Waves was going to be a technical statement, and we were going to treat that with red and gold foil, and do a nice study in design- as opposed to a photographic thing. I walked out and, in the doorway, said 'Wait! Let's try something with Donna Reed, with her permanent Toni hairdo, and have her walking out of a tidal wave situation.' Neil gave me this blank look and said, 'Get out of here.' The following day, he asked me to consider doing just that because he'd discussed it with the band, and they'd all thought it was more likely for a cover than the serious approach." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983

"We finally came across a photo by a man called Flip Shulke. Flip had been known to strap himself to telephone poles to grab the worst of the weather on the Florida coast and this was one of those images. I was able to work with that as a foundation." - Hugh Syme, Chemistry

"The woman on the cover is really a symbol of us. If you think that's sexist in a negative way - well, it's really looking at ourselves so I don't think it can be. The idea is her perfect imperturbability in the face of all this chaos. In that she represents us. In the basic sense, all that cover picture means is forging on regardless, being completely uninvolved with all the chaos and ridiculous nonsense that's going on around us. Plus she represents the spirit of music and the spirit of radio, a symbol of perfect integrity and truth and beauty." - Neil Peart, Sounds, April 5, 1980

"A pun, a pure pun. It became pertinent to me later that the Queen's Park building In Toronto where it was shot had all the right elements: three arches, three pillars per arch; there are three members of Rush, and all of that. I asked that the witch be in there, only because of the song 'Witch Hunt', which I played on. The one painting had to be of Joan Of Arc as far as I was concerned - which ended up being a bit of a nightmare because I couldn't find any archival pictures or paintings which were suitable. So I ended up getting some burlap, and a pine post, two sticks and a bottle of scotch. Deborah Samuel, the photographer who I used on that session, got wrapped up in burlap so she could make her cameo appearance. We just lit lighter fluid in pie plates in the foreground. It was basically a half hour session because we had no other alterative but to do it ourselves." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983

"When Hugh Syme was developing the multitude of puns for the cover, he wanted the guys 'moving pictures' to have some 'moving pictures' to be moving past the people who were 'moved' by the 'picture' - get it? The card-playing dogs [C.M. Coolidge's "A Friend in Need"] are there because it was a funny, silly idea - one of the most cliche'd pictures we could think of - a different kind of 'moving picture.'" - Neil Peart, "Backstage Club Newsletter", December 1985.

"We looked at all those songs as little films, I think. We loved the play on words about moving pictures, and the fact that we were taking cinematic approach to writing that kind of rock music... At the same time we were trying to make these stories that we were telling affecting and having some kind of emotional impact and moving to the listener. So that was really the inspiration behind the title, and the title really suited what we were trying to accomplish on that record." - Geddy Lee, "Moving Pictures In the Studio", 1981

"Hugh's cover concept was his most amusing to date, but it was also expensive, and Mercury would not pay the extra cost. So Rush ended up spending $9,000 of their own money to ensure the cover's quality." - Visions

"For extras, Hugh borrowed friends, neighbours and even his hairdresser's parents - 'I had to call in a lot of favours,' he says." - Chemistry

"I knew immediately I wanted to do something that was simple, a Felliniesque interpretation of moving pictures. We had a couple of ideas, one was to have a faded place on a wall where a picture had been and there was still a nail and a string hanging there, like the picture had been there and had been moved. Simply that, but it was a bit dry and retireing and we decided it would be more interesting to do something a bit more cinematic." - Hugh Syme, Chemistry

"Released by the German company entirely without our knowledge or consent (not that they need it), and certainly contains nothing of any interest - not even the cover, and certainly not that title. We wouldn't do that. Have you noticed that everyone puns with our name except us?" - Neil Peart, "Backstage Club Newsletter", September 1988

"The theatre scene was captured at Toronto's Winter Garden Theatre, which had been closed since 1928 and had fallen into disrepair. The plan was to use the original people from previous album covers, which caused no end of problems. 'We discovered the perils of having people waiting,' says Hugh Syme; worse, some had unexpected expectations. 'Paula Turnbull [the same model pictured on Permanent Waves] became a noted model in Europe - enough that when I brought her back, she was appalled to know that I didn't have a trailer for her.' Josh Anderson, the original "king" on A Farewell To Kings couldn't get there at all: his plane was delayed due to weather...'We had owls, we had a of of people in attendance but no puppet king. I, believing with the blind optimism that I have, that if I go down Yonge Street in the middle of a blizzard, I just might lucky. So, we were touring down Yonge Street, between the windscreen wipers I could see peoples' faces vaguely through the blizzard and I saw this guy like a beacon. There he was, a thin man in the midst of our panic, on Yonge street. I jumped out of the car, went up to him and he was pretty taken aback, because I was not in the frame of mind to being sensitive to what a passer by may think of this request, I was hell bent on having him come to the session and do this. He said he was en route to the stereo shop to buy a stereo and I said, can it wait, can you come, can you go into makeup. He went into makeup for two hours and he came out a puppet. No one has ever noticed that it was not the same character and I bought the man his stereo for his services.'" - Chemistry

"We decided to go with the girl pulling the curtain back on the front instead of the back. It was originally intended to be the other way around, so when I flipped the photograph over, I had to write 'RUSH' on the equipment box in the foreground, and I had to strip out the information on the Stage Door and write in the word 'EXIT.' [The crowd shot is from an actual Rush concert in Buffalo, N.Y.], we really wanted the band. Believe it or not, we went to about 15 shows, trying to get the band saying 'Thank you, good night,' and at the same time, walking towards the camera." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983

"The pictures on the inner sleeve of Exit Stage Left are unidentifiable as Rush group members. Guitarist Alex Lifeson's face is obscured by his arm, Peart has his back towards the camera and is almost obscured by assorted timpani, and Lee is just a murky blue silhouette. Geddy: 'That was sort of accidental, but in the end it worked out real well. We just picked the photographs we thought were neat and different. But I take your point - and after all, it's a complete departure from All the World's a Stage, where you opened up the cover and, wow, there were three pages of pictures of us in action on stage. This time we wanted to be a little more subtle..." - Geddy Lee with Geoff Barton, Sounds #66, Nov. 1981

"The whole title came from a character in an American cartoon called Snagglepuss. He's a great little creature, a lion, and every time there's trouble he flees, uttering 'Exit...stage left' or 'Exit...stage right'. But the fact of the matter was that the album cover picture was taken from stage left. And coincidentally that's the direction in which Snagglepuss runs most of the time." - Geddy Lee, Sounds #66, Nov. 1981

"We wanted to have Snagglepuss's tail on there. You know, 'Exit Stage Left', with a picture of just his tail. Forget it! They wanted all kinds of legal hassles and tons of money." - Neil Peart, "Jam! Showbiz", Oct. 16, 1996

"We wanted the album to sound different and we also thought that the packaging should have a different feel. When we were talking about Signals, Hugh had this concept of taking the idea down to a basic human level - territorial or even sexual. So that's how the design with the dog and the fire hydrant came about. The little map on the back features make-believe subdivisions, with a lot of silly names and places. The red dots represent all the fire hydrants and basically the whole thing maps out a series of territories." - Geddy Lee, Success Under Pressure, 1984

"I was given the word 'Signals.' It was such a broad concept that it was baffling for all of us. We really had trouble with that one, and I decided that, with such a phenomenally important word with the kind of potency it potentially had, to go with something really dumb, really inane. But something which would still tie in with songs such as 'Chemistry,' and the subdivision aspect of the fire hydrants, lawns, and neighborhood dogs. The back cover's a little subtle, perhaps over-indulgent. Again, it's been fodder for some of those quizzes you hear on the radio. It hasn't been totally ignored..." - Hugh Syme, Creem, 1983

"The serene and peaceful bottom part of the picture represents 'grace', the turbulent and troubled top represents 'pressure'. Thus; 'grace" under "pressure', or 'P' over 'G'. The humanoid figure is just a symbol relating to the two conditions, but also relates a bit to 'The Body Electric.'" - Neil Peart, "Backstage Club Newsletter", Janurary 1988

"The background imagery simply mirrors the P/G symbol; grace UNDER pressure In a physical sense. Abstract, but simple. The head represents the onlooker perhaps, or an "everyman" symbol facing the world, and perhaps a hint of the character In 'The Body Electric'. That’s about it really." - Neil Peart, "Backstage Club Newsletter", September 1988

"...the people in 'Red Sector A', the concentration camp, are being graceful under pressure. Despite those horrific conditions, they tried to retain some semblance of normal living conditions - something they can hold on to. One idea for the album cover was someone reaching out from behind barbed wire to clutch a flower." Neil Peart, Music Express, June 1984

"I think the picture brings out our personalities quite nicely. But it also looks like a bar mitzvah photo, doesn't it?" - Geddy Lee, St. Paul Pioneer Press

"We enjoyed a pleasant day in Ottawa, having ourselves immortalized by the famous portrait photographer, Yousuf Karsh. It was an inspiring and elevating experience to sit before the lens of the portrayer of kings, queens, presidents, popes, astronauts, authors, scientists and film stars. And there he was, taking an album cover photo for bums like us! It was wonderful to see, at his seventy-five years of age, his tremendous energy, creativity and swift changes of mood. He provided us with a memorable and broadly applicable quote when told that the lights in the room were not independently adjustable: 'That is not an answer that I can accept. That is not an answer that I can accept!'"- Neil Peart, "Pressure Release", P/G Tourbook

"It is pretty abstract...I love the scene of this sort of Billy Bibbit-like character confused as to his reality. The windows that he's looking out are in a sense very powerful windows. This is an album of power. We are talking about different types of power and the way they affect us, and the way they affect him. The boy is a little shaken as to which way he should look and which window is his reality." - Geddy Lee, "Rockline", Nov 18, 1985

"The three [television] sets represent Alex, Geddy and Neil, the boy has a power window to Rush. But is the boy closing the window to reality and just living in Rush world?" - Visions

"From a commercial standpoint, the icons of those old televisions were lovely, recognisable. It also had a Marshall McLuhan nod to the power window that television is, so it all made sense. [Photographer] Dimo Safari and I tirelessly searched locations to find the right window and cedar floorboards. We 'auditioned' several vintage televisions from several collectors that Dimo had been acquanted with." - Hugh Syme, Chemistry

"Perplexing as it was for management to comprehend (who were approving the budget for this street scene extravaganza), Hugh decided to retire the street scene to the inner sleeve, replacing it with an outer cover that was shocking in its simplicity. In these pre-digital days, however, even this was not simple to produce. 'The "Rush" type was vacuum formed and inset into a 4 x 8 feet plastic surface that was then painted by an auto body shop,' explains [photographer] Glen [Wexler]. 'The red balls are a repetition of a suspended billiard ball.' There was plenty that could be read into sympolism fo the three balls, caught in a mutual, perpetual orbit. 'Sure, you can look at it as three people, three balls, but it's all that and more,' said Geddy." - Chemistry

"We began with the idea which appears on the inner sleeve, then decided it would be graphically interesting to simplify it down to the image which appears on the cover, and let the full image be revealed in a secondary manner. Reverse reduction." - Neil Peart, "Backstage Club Newsletter", September 1988

"The three balls, geometrically and physically create a tension in the way they're suspended. They relate to the balls of fire, as it relates to holding your creative fires." - Geddy Lee, "Only Music", December 1987

The inner sleeve's "juggler" image has been greatly altered and enhanced so the wallpaper image would fit the 4x3 proportions of your monitor. Created by merging scans from the Hold Your Fire tourbook and the "Prime Mover" single (which offers more of the street than the album version, including the equipment crate on the far left of the image), I also brought back the Signals dog and the boy from Power Windows which were removed from the album version at the band's request (see below), and filled the empty space in the upper third of the image with additional floors to the buildings and additional album art elements from pre-Hold Your Fire albums not originally represented with imagery (Fly By Night, 2112, A Farewell to Kings, Hemipsheres, Exit Stage Left and Grace Under Pressure). For a list of Rush references found within the juggler image, click here.

"The cover of Hold Your Fire was art-directed by Hugh Syme as a pun-filled street scene. To tie up a city street was considered extortionate, so Hugh, living in Los Angeles at the time, decided to go small, engaging photographer Glen Wexler and three miniaturists, Patrick Johnson, Scott Alexander and Olivia Ramiriez to help bring the dark, wet street to life. 'The main building was built at 1/12 scale, as were the Jackson alley buildings (left over from a Michael Jackson shoot. 'Glen still had the buildings, so we used them to create an alley to the left of the foreground building')' explains Scott. 'The diner and the other details to the right side of the main building were done at 1/24 scale, as forced perspective elements.' Apart from working with Scott in the painting and finishing of the set, including the neon sign on the Chinese diner, and a cat in the alley that Hugh cut out of some black paper, fraying the edges to catch the light, Hugh and Glen worked for several days to light the finished set. The 'water' on the street was paint thinner, continually having to be reapplied as it kept evaporating, and the juggler's fireballs were basketballs, coated with highly flammable rubber cement. 'I combined several individual photographic images by reexposing them on 8x10 film in my darkroom,' says Glen Wexler. For characters, the original plan was to use actor Dennis Hopper as the juggler but a schedule conflict prevented this. 'We ended up casting Stanley Brock, best known for his role in the movie Tin Men, says Glen. The boy in the window with his binoculars was the same Toronto stockbroker as Hugh had sit for his painting for Power Windows, flown down to LA for the shoot. 'The final photographic components (the juggler, the three fireballs, the boy in the window with the binoculars, the Dalmatian, his fire hydrant and the shot of the minature road cases in the loading bay) were sent out to the lab for what was then called emulsion stripping, where the film for all these separate elements is literally cut to create one composite transparency.' says Hugh. 'This was then exposed to separate full scale film sheets that were each impregnated with ink. These were then each laid onto the paper to create the final dye transfer print. I would then, using bleach and dye, retouch the print to create a (hopefully) seamless sense that the final shot was taken all "in camera" as a believable study in "improbable reality".'" - Chemistry

"The set [which is only 18-inches tall] was built by Scott Alexander. The road cases are only two inches square. When I look at this neighbourhood, one has to wonder, 'Where is this?' I couldn't resist putting the 'Signals' dog, Spot, next to the fire hydrant. The boy from 'Power Windows' makes another appearance, this time looking out the window, down the street, at something we're not yet made aware of." - Hugh Syme, Visions

"The band felt that the thematic 'tie-in' to the other covers was probably a bit too 'much' - where Mr. Syme had preferred the inclusion of these elements." - email from HughSyme.com explaining why the Signals dog and the boy from Power Windows were removed from the final printed version, Apr. 21, 2003

"Did you find the secret phone number in there?...You could win a million dollars!" - Alex Lifeson, Rockline, Feb. 6th, 1989

The cover features "The Rockin' Constructivists", created by John Halfpenny. I reworked the small live shots included in the CD liner notes for the collage image, arranging as many images as possible to fill the 4x3 proportion of your monitor. The 'constructivist' crowd images are from the DVD package.

"Isn't it awful when you have to explain your jokes? It's so awkward when the joke fails, and people insist you try - no one ever laughs at the explanation of a joke. Anyway, the idea was that these bunnies are taking matters into their own, um...paws, and making themselves appear from the hat, and flying around in it. Go on - laugh your head off!" - Neil Peart, "Backstage Club Newsletter", January 1994

"...the artwork was lame." - Neil Peart, Rollingstone.com Interview, June 5, 1997

Besides the cover, all remaining images were greatly manipulated to fit your monitor. I created the group photo by merging the three portrait images contained in the album art. To a greater extent, I extended the "flying wishbones" to fit your monitor by stretching the background without affecting the original wishbones, and added a few more to the formation. To the back cover (the "flying femurs") I removed the song listing and expanded the right side of the image.

"The cover art reflects a style of 17th century Dutch painting called vanitas, in which symbols, such as the skull (and also candles, books, flowers, playing cards, etc.), were used to remind the good Netherlanders of life's brevity, and the ultimate transience of all material things and sensual pleasures...No order [to the numbers on the dice], just descending into chaos." - Neil Peart, "Backstage Club newsletter", January 1994

"The whole cover is based around dice, and dice were originally made from ivory, it's as simple as that. I guess we could've put a piano on there too. Neil works closely with Hugh Syme on the cover art." - Alex Lifeson discussing the photo of the elephant's ass included on the inside sleeve, Kerrang!, Apr. 18, 1992

"I like the Roll The Bones cover quite a lot...it's one of my favorites." - Geddy Lee, Rockline, Dec. 14, 2005

"From Evanston, Wyoming, to Salt Lake City, it was 150 miles of mountainous riding...The elaborate fold-out booklet in our Counterparts CD showed a small black-and-white photograph of me standing in front of the band's tour bus with my bicycle. (Beside it is one of me with the Mohawk...) Andrew took that shot early on a frigid morning in the early summer of 1992, at a truck stop in Evanston, Wyoming. I was just about to set off on my second ride over that arduous route, during the Roll the Bones tour." - Neil Peart, Roadshow

"...the final stop on our Roll the Bones tour, in 1992. I was wearing bandanas on my head on that tour, to keep the sweat our of my eyes, and before the show, I got Andrew (MacNaughtan) to shave my head into a Mohawk, which I kept hidden until the encore. Then I pulled off the bandana and got a big laugh out of Alex and Geddy and the crew." - Neil Peart, Roadshow

The "Stick It Out", "Nobody's Hero" and "Double Agent" singles covers. The latter two were both altered to fit your screen. The "tortoise and hare" and "salt shakers" are also included in the Counterparts linernotes composite.

"I was up in Yellowknife last June on a motorcycle trip across the country, and there's one of those Inukashuk above the town overlooking it, and I was quite taken with it. I bought a postcard almost exactly the image you see on the cover ... I just came back with this postcard and I thought of 'test for echo.' I thought that's exactly what these men mean when you're out in the wilderness ... when you've been hiking for a few days and you come across one of these things, it's such an affirmation that there's life out there. Again the same thing: it's an echo ... and that's the feeling a traveler in the Arctic would get, that it was a sign of life. The same with the satellite dishes. I was kind of referring to the search for extraterrestrial intelligence and the test for echo going out that way." - Neil Peart, "Jam! Showbiz", Oct. 16, 1996

"Hugh Syme constructed an Inuit effigy out of rocks, but his was less than 18 inches high." - Chemistry [webmaster note, the 18" high model is reportedly made out of styrofoam!]

The "Mandelbrot Set" fractal image was manipulated to fit your monitor; the Inuit writing translates as "Echo - we're listening for it." The snowflake wallpaper image is a screen capture from Neil Peart's A Work In Progress DVD, enhanced to match the proportions used on the Test for Echo cd label. The image from 2001: A Space Odyssey was enhanced to remove the fold and staples; this image is not actually found in the film, however, and is likely from a still production photo or an outtake.

"We had actually done a version of it with three astronauts on it to reflect our three guys that keep appearing here and there as the stone-carvers and the mountain-climbers, so we had a version of that with the Inukashauk under the light and the three astronauts in the foreground. They made us change it, so that's how that came about. They were quite amenable to letting us use the original image, which I thought was nice enough, but they wouldn't hear of us (altering it). We figured that image was still relevant to the song." - Neil Peart, "Jam! Showbiz", Oct. 16, 1996

More of Test for Echo. The image of the "lost ship Fantasy" is from the tourbook (which is identical to the image in the cd sleeve, but a larger crop - and no lyrics!)...

"I got a little bit involved because I didn't want [Mercury Records] doing what they had done the last time they did a thing like that [Chronicles]. Last time they did it...the artwork was lame. So I got involved myself and made sure the artwork was decent..." - Neil Peart, Rollingstone.com Telephone Interview, June 5, 1997

"...for several yerars I had lived with one of Dan [Hudson]'s paintings (a life-size quartet of Canada geese walking over a background collage of actual family photographs, with an overlay of jet fighters drawn in blue lines), and a few years before I had commissioned him to do a cover painting for a Rush retrospective CD (appropriately titled, Retrospective)." - Neil Peart, Ghost Rider

"Shooting all those Rush items took me weeks... I mean weeks!!!" - Andrew MacNaugtan, TriNet Chat, Dec. 15th, 2002

"I love the packaging he did on Different Stages, that's one of my favorites. I'm touting tickets outside; Alex in a straight jacket..." - Geddy Lee, Classic Rock, Oct. 2004

"I had to shoot most of the Disc 3 cover...we had the original shot of the Hammersmith Odeon, but everything else had to be photographed. The road, Geddy, Alex, the ambulance...it was a big job, but I think it worked out great. Hugh is an amazing designer! Jolly Teabag was Geddy's idea." - Andrew MacNaugtan, TriNet Chat, Dec. 15th, 2002

"For me, [the cover] represents the burning fire of life. It is a beautiful painting, and off of [the ball of fire] comes sparks and trails and whispers... Those are very symbolic to me, they represent memory, spirit, all sorts of things that are connected to life...." - Geddy Lee, "...And the things that we leave behind." - Alex Lifeson, "Rockline", May 15, 2002

"Initially the idea was to build on the concept of vapour trails and everything from the serious to the seriously silly was explored, not least the idea of a dragon. That was quikly rejected: 'It kind of tipped the scale way too much into the era of rock music that is 'Wakemanesque', that grand and terribly British folklore kind of thing,' says Hugh. Instead, Neil agreed with Hugh that a comet would work, so the cover artist set about putting together a conceptual piece, in oil on canvas. 'It was a real quick and dirty rendering,' says Hugh, but when Neil and the others saw it, they loved the image. 'What was a study became the original for the cover!'" - Chemistry

"The tarot card 'The Tower' seemed a chilling reflection of the events of September 11, 2001." - Neil Peart, "Behind The Fire", Vapor Trails Tourbook

"We did not have a lot of input in this. This was mostly a record company project. Our opinions were made known and they were very cooperative about doing good packaging for us." - Geddy Lee, USAToday.com chat, Feb 5, 2003

"...the dragon was picked on by Hugh to become the representative of the show in Rio, and of course he's got him dressed up like Carmen Miranda." - Geddy Lee, Contents Under Pressure

"I shot the photo that is on the front cover of the DVD - the live picture. That series of photos I shot with the idea in mind of, 'I better get shots of this. I think this could potentially be a great cover.' So I shot it vertically with the idea in mind of the shape of a DVD. I sent the roll to Hugh Syme and we talked about some ideas and I said, 'I shot these photos specifically for your consideration for the front cover.' I guess from there he sort of rolled with that and came up the dragon idea and just took it to the next level. I think it's very funny and very brilliant - it's a wonderful cover. I think he got the initial [dragon] elements from Norm [Stangl, of Spin Productions, creator of the dragon visuals for the Vapor Trails tour], but Hugh is the one that added all of the fruits and that stuff. He created all of that himself." - Andrew MacNaughtan, Fye.com, Sep. 26, 2003

The image of the dragon statue (replacing "Christ The Redeemer") atop Corcovado mountain in Rio de Janeiro, the image of the individual band members, and the black and white photo taken by Neil's wife, Carrie Nuttall, were all enhanced to remove folds, staples, etc. This image of the dryers is from the Rush In Rio promotional CD sampler.

"To my surprise, 'snakes and arrows' called up several links to something called 'Leela, The Game of Self Knowledge,' or, incredibly, 'The Game of Snakes and Arrows.'..created by Buddhist saints and sages as a game of karma—like many games, a metaphor for life...When I told Alex and Geddy about the Leela connection, and showed them the gameboard painted by Harish Johari, they were as excited by all that serendipity as I was, and we agreed to use his painting for the cover." - Neil Peart, "The Game of Snakes & Arrows"

Images from the Snakes & Arrows linernotes, illustrations by Hugh Syme. The roadside arrows in the highway image are nearly identical to those at the famous "Twin Arrows Trading Post", found on "Route 66" 20 miles east of Flagstaff, Arizona. The image from "Workin' Them Angels" is an illustration created by Hugh Syme with the assistance of George Eastman House, who supplied the original Lewis Hine photograph on which the illustration is based.

"Bravest Face" is an illustration by Hugh Syme and Andrew MacNaughtan, who also took the band photo. The Steve Martin-esque "Snake & Arrow" image is found in the jewelcase and MVI releases.

These six remaining Snakes & Arrows images were altered and enhanced to remove lyrics, etc. The tray and snakeskin images as they appeared in the artwork were merged together to form the image found here. The final desert road image with the whirlwinds is from the MVI booklet, and was expanded to fit your screen using the border from the "Far Cry" single.

"For our first British tour, our record company over there printed up a...vivid little pamphlet, I guess you might call it. We didn’t have anything to do with that one, best described as a 'curiosity'." - Neil Peart, The Complete Tourbooks 1977-2004

"As much as I loved the Candy Apple Red finish of my Tamas, I just couldn't have the same color again! Neal [Graham at the Percussion Center in Fort Wayne] and I discussed a few possibilities, and he did me up a sample with a mix consisting of an opalescent white base, with just a hint of pink in it, and a few metallic flecks to highlight the opalescence. (More goodies from the "hot rod" finishes book!) I stayed with the brass plating on the hardware - because I couldn't think of anything nicer!" - Neil Peart, Modern Drummer, May 1987

"When Geddy saw the color I had chosen for them, he asked: 'Whatever possessed you?' Well I'm not sure about that, but it's another 'hot rod' finish like the red ones, this time a combination of white opalescent, with a few 'flip-flop' sparkles, and a little hint of pink. Just different, that's all." - Neil Peart, Hold Your Fire Tourbook

"They wanted the portraits to reflect their personality to some degree...Each guy was responsible for coming up with his own concept. It was to be tongue-in-cheek and playful. The entire dressing room and the noses was all Geddy's idea. So they played up on that. Andrew recruited a special effects makeup artist to come over and make a mold of Geddy's nose in turn reproducing the noses several times out of plaster and placed them on stands." - "An Introduction to Andrew MacNaughtan", Trinet

"It's the two of Neil's personality: the intellectual reading Aristotle, but yet him dancing in the background which is really the other side of Neil. He's a very fun, very funny, great guy who likes to have a good time. I really like that shot and that was his idea. All of those shots were the guys' ideas and I just executed them as best I could." - Andrew MacNaughtan, Fye.com, Sep. 26, 2003

"This photo was taken in October '92, during a Bicycle Africa tour of Mali, Senegal, and The Gambia. Djenne is a medieval town in the inland delta of the Niger River, not far from Timbuktu. The 'Great Mosque,' like the rest of Djenne, is built of mud, and every year after the rains they have to climb up and resurface that mud, using the exposed beams as scaffolding. The minarets are topped with ostrich eggs, and altogether it's about as amazing a thing as this reporter has ever seen. My friend Mendelson Joe says this photo looks like 'a retired hockey player visiting another planet.' And that's about how I felt -- except for the 'retired hockey player' part." - Neil Peart, Counterparts Tourbook

"About two months before each tour, Hugh and I would discuss creative directions for the new tour book, deciding which graphic elements from the album art we might like to use (like with Test for Echo, when we used an alternate, moodier version of the album cover for the tour book)..." - Neil Peart, The Complete Tourbooks 1977-2004

"In the original Vapor Trails design, Hugh Syme had one version of the cover, where on the back, very small in the corner, was this very tiny dinosaur, who was the cause of this great vapor trail. And when we were doing the preproduction for the tour, I was looking for animation ideas to use live. I wondered what it would be like to expolit that little dragon a bit more, turn him into a character, which people at Spin Productions developed into a full-blown character that we used during 'One Little Victory' live. It was a cool, humorous way to use this dragon...the dragon was picked on by Hugh to become the representative of the show in Rio, and of course he's got him dressed up like Carmen Miranda." - Geddy Lee, Contents Under Pressure

"I love Alex's portrait and I love Neil's portrait in the desert - I'm really proud of that...the Neil in the desert shot that was my idea. I really wanted to try something that felt really special instead of just shooting the drum kit against a backdrop which is something we've done for the last five tours. I really wanted to do something a little more artful and challenging. The shot of Alex, I think I said to him 'I want to do something weird and sort of stupid. What about a shot of you on a beach with chicks and bikinis.' And then he said, 'Oh no, how about this: how about you shoot a huge muscle guy, like Charles Atlas was the term he used, and then take a picture of my head and stick it on his body.' Perfect and that's what we did and that's how quickly it came about. And just so you know we didn't really squish Alex's head that much, this guy was absolutely huge. When I showed Alex the picture of the guy, he was laughing so hard he was actually crying. He could not believe how hilarious that photo turned out." - Andrew MacNaughtan, Fye.com, Sep. 26, 2003

"...we aimed to create the drumset equivalent of the 'dream cars' displayed at auto shows, a showpiece that was also the ultimate expression of crafsmanship." - Neil Peart, R30 Tourbook

"I said, 'I really want to build something special for the 30th anniversary.’...I said I wanted something really special [for the exterior], and...I realized, I’d never had black drums in all my life. I’d had black chrome Slingerlands, but not the actual classic ‘piano black.’ Black and red is my favorite color combination, so I said, 'We have to have that. It’s the 30th anniversary, why not have the band logos?' And also, Keith Moon’s 'Pictures Of Lily' kit, the famous one that was painted in the panels around it on a piano black background, it was a tribute to that because these are my dream drums. I always try to keep in touch with my inner 16-year-old. That’s the first concert I ever went to, he was playing those. So [the DW kit] became partly a homage to Keith Moon, to myself at 16. All of that became part of the thinking that evolved into the finish." - Neil Peart, Drum! Magazine, July 17, 2004

"A photo shoot by Demborah Samuels for Tama drums involved setting up Neil's kit in the middle of the lake [outside Le Studio]. 'The boys took the drums out of the rowboats and set them up on this little swim platform,' says Terry Brown. 'The stool was litterally right at the back, and I know it freaked him out - it scared the crap out of him!'" - Chemistry

"After Deborah's great shot on the lake, I'd always wanted to shoot Neil with his drumkit in an exotic location. Sabian shipped the kit down from Toronto, and said why don't we shoot it in a forest or something. I just love that shot where I'm way back and it's just a moment of him playing the drums amongst all the forest. It was so surreal because when he started to play, you could almost see all the squirrels halting and birds flying away, with him playing away! I know Neil got off on it as well, he'll put in the extra effort if its done well, and artistic and tasteful." - Andrew MacNaughtan, Chemistry

More R30 tourbook images from the last 30 years, most are alternative/similar photos to those which appeared in earlier tourbooks. The Test For Echo live photo originally appeared on the "Clusterworks" information insert from Different Stages.

"...this time the hardware is plated in black nickel...the finish is Aztec Red, inset with a pair of logos Hugh Syme and I created for the CD package. The Greek symbol ouroboros, or snake eating its tail, surrounds a calligraphic rendering of my favorite road sign: the universal symbol for 'winding road' (On a motorcycle or in a fast car, that's the best kind of 'snake and arrow' you can see.)" - Neil Peart, Snakes & Arrows Tourbook

The photo of Rush on stage was taken at Red Rocks Amphitheater on June 29, 2004; an altered version of this same image was used on the cover of Neil's book, Roadshow.

"Andrew photographed Alex in a number of different ways - wearing make up, with water on his face, darkening his eyes, 'aging' his face, etc. He then painstakingly hand cut each photo and finally put Alex' face back together like a puzzle... At one point, a coffee cup was inadvertently placed on one of the photos leaving behind its mark. By then Andrew said 'the hell with it!', took a cigarette and burned a mark on another of the photos." - "An Introduction to Andrew MacNaughtan", TriNet

"As far as the album cover goes, it's a very abstract representation of the title. It kind of represents the yin and yang of that phrase. Half in heaven, half in hell. The character on the cover finds himself torn between these two worlds. It's a little abstract but a lot of fun...the slinky is part of what we call a Gordian knot which is a knot that is almost impossible to untie. It's kind of representative of that phrase." - Geddy Lee, "Rockline", Nov. 29, 2000

"This packaging is technically referred to as a 'Digipack' and record companies generally do not like to use them claiming that they cost more to produce. Which may well be the case based on the fact that their production is geared up to use the plastic 'Jewel Box' and as a result any other type of request is considered a special order. So, if an artist insists on using the 'digipack' type of cover they will make that artist pick up the extra cost. They also claim that 'MARKET RESEARCH TELLS US THAT FANS REALLY PREFER JEWEL BOXES AND VIEW THEM AS BETTER VALUE FOR MONEY'. As for myself I much prefer the 'digipack' type of packaging for the following reasons, more environmentally friendly, they feel better in your hands (like an album cover!..I'm old fashioned I guess!), they look much better in terms of graphic display, and they don't shatter the instant you open them like the dreaded Jewel Box!! Although they may have a tendency to fray a bit over time. For those artists that believe that artwork is important in ways beyond the practical, unique packaging usually becomes a bit of a battle with most of the larger record companies. Even for very successful artists." - Geddy Lee, The Geddy Lee Interactive Website, Jan. 11, 2001

"I started a series of 'Ghost Rider' photographs, where I would stop in the middle of an empty road, park my bike on the centerstand so it looked as if it was riding along, then run back down the road to take a photo from behind, of bike, diminishing highway, and surrounding landscape." - Neil Peart, [Letter to Hugh Syme, Feb. 11, 1999], Ghost Rider