Exit Stage Left Video

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The front and back cover were merged to fit your monitor. The cover contains elements from all previous album covers.

"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, November 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, October 16, 1996

"I wanted to do nothing more than just a solid black cover with a pink tail - and probably the back of Snagglepuss' ankle. A complete nod to Snagglepuss: I just wanted to keep it real pop-art - graphic and simple. We got in touch with Hanna-Barbera, who owned the rights. But apparently the ask on that was prohibitive, so that was quickly nixed. I even asked, 'Can I at least put a pink tail on there somewhere?' No one's gonna know.' There were too many legal beagles on that one saying, 'No, better not.' We resolved to make the artwork a nod to several of the preceding albums. I featured those key elements from those albums to make their own cameos in the wings of the stage - we even brought back the actual personnel from those covers." - Hugh Syme, ultimateclassicrock.com, October 29, 2020

"[Syme's longtime friend Bobby King] was the willing bare-assed character for the Starman on 2112. He came back to be the Magritte character on Hemispheres. He showed up again in the wings of Exit...Stage Left, and he was also the prime mover - no pun intended - for the Moving Pictures cover. I made good use of his good will...and his cheap modeling fees." - Hugh Syme, ultimateclassicrock.com, October 27, 2020

"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 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 Onderison, 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 get 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

"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...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..." - Sounds, November 1981

"Exit Stage Left was an enormous production...and got completely insane by contrast. Paula Turnbull (the Permanent Waves girl) was living in Paris and a top model there. We had to bring her to Toronto from Paris for one night to shoot this cover. Her wardrobe, which I had rented from a vintage clothing store for the Permanent Waves cover a couple of years prior, had been returned to the store after the initial Permanent Waves cover shoot. To duplicate this wardrobe, meant either finding a duplicate of the wardrobe or having it made up for the Exit Stage Left cover. I contacted the vintage clothing store where I had rented it before and they still had the original sweater and the skirt in their inventory, which was a miracle really. The man who had played the King on the A Farewell to Kings cover lived in Alberta and had to be found, and brought to Toronto. He got off the plane the night of the shoot and became very ill meaning we had to find a replacement for the King character within a couple of hours as we had booked the Winter Gardens Theatre on Yonge St from 4pm-12 midnight to do this shoot. Hugh went out on Yonge Street looking for anyone that resembled the original King character. He found a young man on Yonge Street, who agreed to be the King. In he came...got dressed up in a King costume and took on the role of the King in the middle of all this mayhem. I often wondered what was going through his mind during the shoot. It had to have been especially bizarre for him to walk into this production at the last moment. We were one of the last shoots in the Winter Gardens theatre as it was slated for demolition shortly thereafter. The power was very unstable in the theatre and because it was an enormous production, the draw on the electricity kept crashing the power source. At 11:30 at night with ½ hour to go we were tying my lights into exit signs praying it would remain stable enough to get the shot." - Deborah Samuel, Durston Photography, November 9, 2012

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