Video 22 May 1981 - The Spectrum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania [Audience / 8mm]

[Rush Archives]

Downloads:​

Video:​

• 1981-05-22 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Sound 8mm)

Audio:​

• 1981-05-22 - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Source Merge) *recommended*
• Philadelphia, PA '81

Track Listing:​

01 - The Camera Eye (cut) **/*​

02 - YYZ / Drum Solo (cut) *​

03 - Broon's Bane​

04 - The Trees​

05 - Xanadu (cut)​

06 - The Spirit Of Radio​

07 - Red Barchetta​

08 - Closer To The Heart​

09 - Tom Sawyer​

10 - Natural Science (cut) **​

11 - By-Tor And The Snow Dog (cut) **​

12 - In The End (cut) **​

13 - In The Mood (cut) **​

Notes:​

• The audio recording is very short, missing most of the songs from the performed setlist. Most of the middle section of Xanadu is also missing.
• The first video source is film shot by John Witmer. Song segments captured are noted above. (*)
• The second video source is film shot by James Ferrani. Song segments captured are noted above. (**)
• Both Witmer and Ferrani were friends who attended the concert together, and sat right next to each other while filming.
• While poorer copies of Witmer's film has circulated online for many years, in early 2026, a new 4K scan of the master reel and restoration has been released by Classic Rock Media Archive, in collaboration with Rush Archives and John Witmer.
• As with any 8mm audience footage from this era, full songs and concerts were not able to be captured due to the short length of the film reels.
• However unlike the most commonly used 8mm film of the era, this rarer Sound 8mm film stock and camera were able to concurrently record audio, so no syncing separate audio was required here. Both John and James used Sound Super 8 cameras and film stock.
• The recommended audio download combines audio from Witmer's film with the audio cassette recording. Coincidentally, the audio tape starts during the setlist at the same point the film ends. Note, the source merge audio version has not yet been updated to include the pieces from Ferrani's film, who only recently shared his in August 2025.

Preview:​

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[By-Tor X-1]

A nice upgrade of the Super 8 film shot John Witmer was released today!
John also filmed FM, another Canadian band, who were Rush's supporting act for a large portion of this tour, mostly following the disbandment of long-time touring companions Max Webster.



Important reminder for optimal viewing quality via YouTube, click the gear icon at the bottom of the video to be sure it is set to 4K.

This new release was a project that has been in the works since August 2024, much longer than expected.

If anyone is interested in the backstory of these films, when John Witmer was first approached by Classic Rock Media Archive to rescan his film collection, he initially was only comfortable enough to outright sell his reels. So acquaintances with CRMA asked me if I wanted to buy the Rush reel, which I happily did so along with his Yes film. CRMA also bought his Genesis and David Gilmour films, and figured these would be the only four. Though later after seeing the end results of these films, John was more than happy to loan out the rest of his collection.

John says he projected his films at monthly parties for many years, and due to this many of them ended up in rough shape from significant dirt scratching. His Yes film was a very bad victim of this, but after a lot of manual effort and stress, CRMA managed to digitally repair it to near perfection and released it in June 2025. His Rush film suffered fairly extensively too, with thick black lines dancing diagonally across the image. In part due to lack of motivation to deal with more of this tedious repair work, many months have gone by before any final result was ready to be released.

All things considered, while not perfect, I think the end result came out very nicely. While the old version was very blue and compressed, we can now see so much more color and detail. Also being sound film, the new transfer of the audio is a giant improvement in clarity.

So with that, and I'm sure many people have already seen the old copies in the past years, I hope everyone enjoys this new version. Special thanks to John Witmer for recording this rare piece of Rush history!

I also want to note, that with all Rush films worked on by CRMA, the downloads available on this website are all pre-YouTube files that I've been provided with, not YouTube rips with additional compression and subsequent generational loss.