It’s hard to think that any member of Rush ever grew tired of playing their material. Most of their classics would take an Olympian level of talent to survive, so there’s no way to go through the motions when performing tracks like ‘Tom Sawyer’ or all nine minutes of ‘La Villa Strangiato’. There are still songs that Geddy Lee would return to just for fun, though, and ‘Vital Signs’ still never got old for him after decades with the power trio.
During the making of the album Moving Pictures, Rush were already in a state of change. They were still making the most forward-thinking progressive rock of their time, but they were also stumbling into pop music almost by accident. Sure, the punk and new wave scenes were still influencing them, but the thought of the same people who created ‘2112’ having a hit in the same era as The Police seemed more than a little bit strange.
After ‘The Spirit of Radio’ caught on on mainstream radio, though, Moving Pictures became their magnum opus. Since they had roadtested a lot of the tracks during soundchecks, classics like ‘Limelight’ and ‘YYZ’ took no time at all to complete, but ‘Vital Signs’ was a bit of a different beast.
Considering how much time they spent doing ambitious projects before, this is as close to a straight-ahead pop song that they got on the record. Whereas the last album flirted with pieces of reggae here and there, this is the first time that they dove head first into it, with Alex Lifeson channelling his inner Andy Summers with his chord stabs.
Despite never being a mainstream hit, Lee thought that the song still had the same power it had when they first recorded it, saying, “That was a hoot to write. We wrote it in about five minutes in the studio. We just put it together quickly and had a lot of fun doing it. It’s still fun to play. It’s the quirkier side of Rush’s sound, and I think there’s always a need for that, to give your sound diversity.”
Then again, Lee’s definition of fun is still a nightmare for half of the bass players in the audience. Since Lifeson is doing a lot less in the mix, the low end is a nonstop workout from back to front, complete with string skipping and techniques that make four-stringers roll their fretting hand to the next string to make sure nothing bleeds through.
There’s also much more to dissect in what Neil Peart is getting at in the lyrics. He never sought to write traditional love songs, so hearing him wax poetic about people not fitting into society and trying to deviate from the norm was probably a breath of fresh air from the usual schlock populating the charts.
Above all else, ‘Vital Signs’ is a good example of a pop-flavoured song that is still complex. It may be ready for prime time in terms of its raw sound, but any self-respecting bass player should know that they are never out of the woods when it comes to performing any of Rush’s tunes.
