“It was just weird. It wasn’t working, whatever we tried. I think it created a negative association”: Tom Sawyer started out as Rush’s least favourite track on Moving Pictures. It later made them big in Brazil

Rush in 1981 — (Image credit: Rush archive / Fin Costello)

In 2023 Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson looked back on Rush’s struggle to complete Tom Sawyer for eighth album Moving Pictures, and their doubt that what would become their signature track really held together at all.

Tom Sawyer has become a legend to Rush fans, and it was never out of the band’s set list after its first appearance. Naturally, this being Rush, it almost never made 1981 album Moving Pictures.

“Actually, for the longest time, it was the worst song on the record,” Geddy Lee reveals. “We had more trouble with that song than almost any other. I had real doubt about whether it was working at all.”

Turning to Alex Lifeson, he continues: “I remember when we came to do the solo, and we were having a lot of trouble getting a sound you were happy with.

“All of a sudden, [engineer] Paul Northfield jumped into action and came up with this idea of miking the stereo speakers and doing your solo in a stereo spread. It gave it that kind of tubular sound, and then it finally came to life.”

Rush - Tom Sawyer - YouTube

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Even mixing the track presented issues. “We’d had problems with the computer that was running the mix,” Lee recalled, “so we all had our hands on different parts of the console, operating it manually because we didn’t trust the fucking thing. We’d do a take and everybody was holding onto their section of the console.

“But even then, I remember having doubts about that song. Then when we heard it back in full it was like, ‘Holy fuck!’ when those bass pedals came in. It was like, ‘Okay, this works.’ But up until that point, there was a lot of doubt.”

Tom Sawyer also marked the first time Lee lad down his Rickenbacker bass and picked up a Fender Jazz – which was pretty much heresy to a lot of Rush fans. “Yeah, I just couldn’t get the bass sound to work on that song,” he explains.

“It was just weird, because I use the Rick on pretty much every other song on the record, but it wasn’t working on Tom Sawyer whatever we tried.

“There was a lot of fiddling. I think it created a negative association towards Tom Sawyer – but not when it was finished. It genuinely felt like a whole other song.”

Rush - Tom Sawyer (Live From The Montreal Forum / 1981) - YouTube

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Lifeson reflects: “It went from being this immovable thing to the obvious candidate to open the record; that opening and then Neil’s drums. But I do remember it being a real relief to tick off the chalkboard.”

The track had another gift to give its creators as a reward for their perseverance. “It was used as the theme song for the Portuguese version of [TV spy show] MacGyver in Brazil,” Lifeson says.

“We went to Brazil and we couldn’t figure out how the fuck we got so popular there. And it turns out they’d overdubbed the original music for the show and changed it to Tom Sawyer. And so everybody wanted to hear that song, because everybody knew it from fucking MacGyver!”

Philip Wilding is a novelist, journalist, scriptwriter, biographer and radio producer. As a young journalist he criss-crossed most of the United States with bands like Motley Crue, Kiss and Poison (think the Almost Famous movie but with more hairspray). More latterly, he’s sat down to chat with bands like the slightly more erudite Manic Street Preachers, Afghan Whigs, Rush and Marillion.

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