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Rush: Subdivisions video

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I have never understood the full appeal of hometown heroes Rush. The Ayn Rand-inspired lyrics creeped me out sometimes, the music a little too technically precise for Rock and Roll (though admirable from a musicianship point-of-view), and their fans a little too passionate (always guys, if I recall, with a near-homoerotic lust for Neil Peart and his ace drumming skills). That’s just personal taste though, and they seem like genuinely nice guys who care about things (Geddy Lee is often seen walking around Yonge Street in its Rosedale stretch) so it was neat to stumble on the video for their 1982 song Subdivisions. They’re a little too hard on the suburbs probably (they were Willowdale boys after all), but this video was shot all around Toronto, with some great vintage shots of the Yonge strip and a Moriyama designed high school. From the Wikipedia entry:

The promotional videos scenes were filmed in the Toronto area. The downtown scenes in downtown Toronto, the suburbs scenes in Scarborough, Ontario, near Warden and Finch. The high school scenes were filmed at L’Amoreaux Collegiate Institute, in the same area. The student that walks downtown in the video is Dave Glover, a student at the L’Amoreaux Collegiate Institute at the time. Near the end of the video, Glover is seen playing the video game Tempest at an arcade, which was reportedly his favorite video game at the time.

At about 20 seconds into the video, there is a shot of what appears to be the DVP, but I don’t recognize the train passing over. It’s not the TTC, GO or VIA. Any of our transit buffs know — or did VIA have a different livery back then? Is it even Toronto (though those two road tunnels suggest as much, but I can’t recall where a train passes over the roadway)? And Dave Glover, where are you now?

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17 comments

  1. The train is a GO Train. Those are the cars they had before the bilevel cars they run now. The road is the DVP, near Wynford Drive.
    (You can also see vintage trolleybuses in the very beginning of the video!)

  2. Those are the old single-level GO coaches passing over the DVP on the overpass south of Lawrence.

  3. But it IS a GO train. Just not one of the bilevel coaches we’re used to today.

    You can see the GO logo right in front of the first window on each car. Apparently our resident transit geeks can tell you plenty more about those older trains:

    http://transit.toronto.on.ca/gotransit/2508.shtml

  4. “with a near-homoerotic lust for Neil Peart and his ace drumming skills).” LOL Shawn.

  5. You can still ride those cars on the ONR from Toronto to Cochrane and Moosonee.

  6. Now I see the GO logo — it looked like another window to me. It was all before my Toronto time — when the “GO Train” was simply “that thing they have in Toronto.”

  7. The Video Invasion arcade was on Bathurst Street if I remember correctly?

  8. Video Invasion is now a location of What A Bagel: 3500 Bathurst.

    Brian May of Queen most famously dropped by the arcade, they had pics on the wall.

  10. Maybe the most surreal aspect of it all is how a mere 25 years ago, a school like L’Amoreaux would still be defined to a significant measure by guys with names like “Dave Glover”…

  11. Hear this and many more great songs tomorrow and Saturday nights at the ACC…hahaha. I’ll be the guy air masturba… errrr air drumming in section 108.

  12. Peart can come across as being a bit dorky at times, but Subdivisons is actually a quite interesting song, one of the few to directly address the problem of psychogeographic angst.

    I talked about this in an old essay I did for Year 01 #12 here.

  13. My husband Dave Glover is the guy from the video. Interesting tidbit: they got really crappy seats to the show and never even met the band in person! Still fun for him though. Now Dave can be found as the proprietor of a coffee house and on tv and stage in his local community of Cobourg Ont.

  14. Great video, great song, great band! Dave Glover is quite the “video hero” to millions of Rush fans worldwide. The video would not have had the same impact without his participation.

    Thanks to Sue Glover for the info. Good to know he is doing well.

  16. Just to let you know that Rush has a huge legion of fans in Brazil and that this video is extremelly popular among the local fans. This is a great song and knowing about the actor is extremelly (and I mean it) funny.

    Regards from the thropics

  17. Okay so if you want to see him now go to the facebook page for our business The Human Bean, Cobourg’s Coffee House