Rush (band)

• 1. Introduction

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  Rush, the Canadian rock band, collected CA$25 for its first public concert in September 1968. The stage was a youth centre called the Coff-Inn, tucked into the basement of St. Theodore of Canterbury Anglican Church in Toronto. When the booking was made, the group had no name at all. Bill Rutsey, brother of the drummer, suggested Rush because it was short, and the name stuck. Industry sources now estimate that the band has sold more than 42 million albums worldwide. How does a basement act reach that number? Why did a single radio station matter so much to its fortunes? And what does it mean when a band that called itself finished announces a tour? The answers begin with a basic question that took years to settle: who was actually in the band?

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• 2. Basements and Bass Players

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  Geddy Lee, born Gary Weinrib, joined the band on the recommendation of the bassist he replaced. Jeff Jones left after logistical challenges piled up, and Lee, a schoolmate of guitarist Alex Lifeson, took over bass and lead vocals. He was in place for the second show at the Coff-In. In January 1969 the group grew to four when multi-instrumentalist Lindy Young joined. They began playing other drop-in centres and high schools, and they signed professional management with Ray Danniels, along with an agent named Vic Wilson.

  Lee's place was not safe for long. Friction inside the group led to his dismissal, and the accounts of who drove it differ. Lee recalled that Danniels judged him “not suitable, for whatever reasons he had.” Lifeson remembered that Rutsey, whose personality often steered the group, wanted a different bassist and went along with the decision. Rutsey recruited Joe Perna and renamed the band Hadrian. A poorly received performance with Perna ended that experiment. In September 1969, Rutsey and Lifeson asked Lee to return. As Lee told it: “I got a call from John and he said, 'Can we get together?' Basically, 'Can you come back? We're sorry.'”

  Young left to study at college, and two more guitarists passed through. Bob Vopni stayed briefly in 1969, and Mitch Bossi followed in 1971. By 1972 the band had settled as a trio of Lifeson, Rutsey and Lee. Touring the Ontario high school circuit sharpened their live show. The debut album by Led Zeppelin left a heavy mark on their blues-based hard rock, along with Lee's increasingly high falsetto. Danniels struggled to find steady bookings as the band put original songs ahead of covers.

  The year 1971 brought a change in Ontario law that lowered the legal drinking age from 21 to 18. Bars and clubs suddenly opened to the band. Lee later said it turned them from a “casual garage act” into a professional unit playing six nights a week. Even so, no major label would sign them. Danniels answered by founding an independent label, Moon Records, and arranging for London Records to distribute one single and one full-length album.

  The single paired Buddy Holly's “Not Fade Away”, already a crowd favourite, with an original song, “You Can't Fight It”. Released in September 1973, it reached number 88 on the national RPM Top Singles chart. Around the same time, the band opened for the New York Dolls in Toronto, its first major high-profile engagement.

  The band was unhappy with the sound of its first album sessions, so it started over at Toronto Sound in late 1973 with the more experienced Terry Brown. That began a ten-year partnership. Finishing the record took $9,000, and Danniels sold his interest in his management company to raise it. Rutsey had been assigned the lyrics, but he tore up his drafts right before the vocal sessions. Lee wrote a fresh set based on the earlier versions. Rutsey later regretted the episode and blamed it on feeling “very confused about what I really wanted to do.”

  A provincial vinyl shortage delayed the self-titled album, Rush, until March 1974. The first pressing of 3,500 copies sold out quickly, and the album reached number 86 on the RPM Top Albums chart. Contemporary critics often dismissed it as derivative of Led Zeppelin. Its next audience, though, was across the border, where a disc jockey in Cleveland was about to pick a favourite track.

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• 3. Cleveland and the New Drummer

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  Donna Halper, music director and DJ at WMMS in Cleveland, received a copy of the album and added “Working Man” to the station's rotation. Its blue-collar themes struck a chord with the city's industrial workforce, and demand for the Canadian import surged. To build on that interest, Danniels booked the band to open for ZZ Top at Cleveland's Allen Theatre in June 1974.

  Later that month, Rush signed with the US booking agency American Talent International. Executive Ira Blacker mailed the album to Cliff Burnstein, an enthusiastic A&R man at Mercury Records. Burnstein signed the band within 24 hours. The deal covered two albums and $200,000, including a $50,000 advance and $25,000 toward future recording costs. Blacker then left the agency to become the band's American co-manager, and he booked them as an opening act across the country through the end of the year. The American release of the album carried a dedication to Halper.

  The 25th of July 1974 was John Rutsey's last gig with the band. He preferred straightforward rock, while Lifeson and Lee wanted to explore the complex arrangements of progressive groups such as Yes and Pink Floyd. His health was a factor as well. Rutsey was a Type 1 diabetic who needed frequent hospitalisation for monitoring and insulin regulation. Those complications had already disrupted the schedule in October 1973, when drummer Gerry Fielding stood in.

  After auditioning five drummers, Lifeson and Lee chose Neil Peart, who joined on the 29th of July 1974. The first US tour began two weeks later. On the 14th of August, at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh, the new trio opened for Uriah Heep and Manfred Mann's Earth Band in front of more than 11,000 people. Peart also took over the lyrics. Lifeson and Lee had little appetite for writing words, and they recognised that Peart's wide vocabulary came from regular reading. When the tour ended in December 1974, the debut album had peaked at number 105 on the Billboard 200.

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• 4. Defying the Label

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  The song “By-Tor & the Snow Dog” announced a new Rush on Fly by Night in 1975. It was a story song with a multi-section format and intricate arrangements. Peart's love of fantasy and science-fiction literature had transformed the lyrics. Not everything changed, since some tracks still echoed the plain blues of the debut. The title track reached number 45 in Canada as a single. The album itself reached number 9 there and was certified platinum for 100,000 copies sold. In the US, it earned platinum status for a million.

  Two songs dominated Caress of Steel, a five-track album from 1975. “The Necromancer” and “The Fountain of Lamneth” were both extended, multi-chapter pieces, and they sat back to back. Some critics called the record unfocused and audacious, with a heavier reliance on atmospherics and storytelling than Fly by Night. The band had intended it as a breakthrough. It sold below expectations. The tour played smaller venues to declining box office receipts and picked up the nickname the Down the Tubes Tour.

  The record label pushed the band to make its next album more accessible and commercially friendly. The members ignored the requests. The result, 2112 in 1976, centred on a 20-minute title track divided into seven sections. It reached number 5 in Canada and became their first double platinum album, a first taste of significant commercial success. The novelist Ayn Rand shaped the lyrics of this period, most visibly in the 1975 song “Anthem” and in a derivation from her work that the band openly acknowledged on 2112.

  Touring for 2112 ran from February 1976 to June 1977 across Canada, the US and, for the first time, Europe, with dates in the UK, Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands. Three sold-out shows at Massey Hall in Toronto in June 1976 were recorded for All the World's a Stage. The double album came out that September, reached number 6 in Canada and became the band's first to crack the US top 40. Its liner notes declared: “This album to us, signifies the end of the beginning, a milestone to mark the close of chapter one, in the annals of Rush.”

  Rockfield Studios in Monmouthshire, Wales hosted the next two albums, A Farewell to Kings in 1977 and Hemispheres in 1978. Lee described the shift in taste this way: “As our tastes got more obscure, we discovered more progressive rock-based bands like Yes, Van der Graaf Generator, and King Crimson, and we were very inspired by those bands.” Lifeson experimented with classical and twelve-string guitars. Lee added bass-pedal synthesizers and a Minimoog. Peart's kit grew to include triangles, glockenspiel, wood blocks, cowbells, timpani, gong and chimes.

  The single “Closer to the Heart” became the band's first success in the UK, peaking at number 36, with number 76 in the US and number 45 in Canada. A Farewell to Kings did not match the sales of 2112, but it still went platinum in both Canada and the United States. By then, the record deal brought a CA$250,000 advance on each album and a 16% royalty rate. Exhaustion from making Hemispheres, however, was already nudging the band toward shorter, softer songs.

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• 5. Reinventions

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  “The Spirit of Radio” and “Freewill” arrived on Permanent Waves in 1980, and both were short enough for the airwaves. Earlier extended songs had received limited airplay, so the band added reggae and new wave elements and more synthesizers while keeping a hard rock core. “The Spirit of Radio” peaked at number 22 in Canada, number 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 13 in the UK. The album became their highest-charting to date. Peart's lyrics turned expository, dwelling on humanistic, social and emotional subjects instead of fantasy. The six-month tour covered 96 shows for more than 650,000 people and was the first to turn a profit.

  Pye Dubois, lyricist for the Toronto band Max Webster, offered Rush a set of lyrics he had written. The offer came after Rush joined Max Webster to record “Battle Scar” for the 1980 album Universal Juveniles. The band accepted, and after Peart reworked them, the lyrics became “Tom Sawyer”.

  Moving Pictures, released in February 1981, carried “Tom Sawyer” as its lead track, probably the band's best-known song. It reached number 24 in Canada, number 44 on the Billboard Hot 100 and number 8 on the new US Album Rock Tracks chart. The follow-up, “Limelight”, hit number 18 in Canada, number 54 on the Hot 100 and number 4 on Album Rock Tracks. The 11-minute “The Camera Eye” was the band's last extended song. The album was their first number 1 in Canada and reached number 3 in both the US and the UK. Both the RIAA and Music Canada certified it quintuple platinum. A second live album, Exit... Stage Left, followed later in 1981.

  On Signals in 1982, keyboards moved from the background to the melodic front line in “Subdivisions” and “Countdown”. The song “Losing It” featured collaborator Ben Mink on electric violin. Tracks such as “Digital Man”, “The Weapon” and “Chemistry” stretched into ska, reggae and funk. Signals became their second number 1 album in Canada and peaked at number 10 in the US. Behind the scenes, producer Terry Brown grew uncomfortable with the growing role of synthesizers, and the band felt dissatisfied with his studio treatment. They parted ways in 1983.

  Peart took the title Grace Under Pressure from Ernest Hemingway's line “Courage is grace under pressure”, which he applied to the band's decision to leave Brown. Producer Steve Lillywhite backed out at the last moment after receiving an offer from Simple Minds. Lee said Lillywhite “is really not a man of his word.” Peter Henderson was hired to co-produce and engineer instead. Peart adopted Simmons electronic drums, and Lifeson's role grew compared with the minimal one he played on Signals. The 1984 album reached the top 5 in Canada and the UK and the top 10 in the US.

  Peter Collins produced Power Windows in 1985 and Hold Your Fire in 1987. Lee layered his synthesizers more thickly and switched to an English-made Wal MK1 bass, while Lifeson used processors that reduced his guitar to echoey chord bursts and thin leads. Hold Your Fire went only gold in the US, whereas the previous five albums had gone platinum. The live album A Show of Hands followed in 1989. Rolling Stone critic Michael Azerrad gave it 1.5 stars and dismissed it as “musical muscle”. The band then changed labels from Mercury to Atlantic, and Mercury released the double platinum compilation Chronicles in 1990.

  With producer Rupert Hine, Presto in 1989 and Roll the Bones in 1991 stepped back from keyboards. “Show Don't Tell” topped the US Mainstream Rock Tracks chart, as did “Dreamline”. The title track of Roll the Bones borrowed from funk and hip hop, and the instrumental “Where's My Thing?” borrowed from jazz. Counterparts in 1993 and Test for Echo in 1996, both with Collins, were among the most guitar-driven albums of their career. Counterparts peaked at number 2 in the US. Peart added jazz and swing touches that he had learned from drum coach Freddie Gruber. In October 1996, the band began “An Evening with Rush”, its first North American tour without an opening act.

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• 6. Loss, Return, and Farewell

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  Peart's daughter Selena died in a car crash in August 1997, and his wife Jacqueline died of cancer in June 1998. After the Test for Echo tour ended in 1997, Rush entered a five-year hiatus. Peart travelled North America on his BMW motorcycle, covering 88,000 km. In his book Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, he recalls telling his bandmates at Selena's funeral, “consider me retired.” Lee and Lifeson prepared an archival album in the meantime. Different Stages was a three-disc live set dedicated to the memory of Selena and Jacqueline.

  Peart met the photographer Carrie Nuttall in Los Angeles while visiting longtime Rush photographer Andrew MacNaughton. They married on the 9th of September 2000, and in 2001 Peart decided to come back. The three met in January 2001, with Peart saying, “We laid out no parameters, no goals, no limitations, only that we would take a relaxed, civilized approach to the project.” With producer Paul Northfield, they produced seventy-four minutes of music for Vapor Trails. It took about 14 months, the longest they had ever spent on a studio album, and it was the first since Caress of Steel without keyboards or synthesizers.

  Vapor Trails came out on the 14th of May 2002. It peaked at number 3 in Canada and number 6 in the US, but only number 38 in the UK. The tour, the band's first in six years, brought first-ever concerts in Brazil and Mexico City. In São Paulo the band played to a capacity crowd of 60,000, the largest of its career. The final show, on the 23rd of November 2002 at Maracanã Stadium in Rio de Janeiro, became the live album Rush in Rio.

  For its 30th anniversary, the band released Feedback in June 2004, an extended play recorded in suburban Toronto with eight covers of artists such as Cream, The Who and The Yardbirds. Snakes & Arrows followed on the 1st of May 2007, recorded in part at Allaire Studios in Shokan, New York with producer Nick Raskulinecz. It debuted at number 3 on the Billboard 200 with approximately 93,000 units sold in its first week. On the 16th of July 2008, the band appeared on The Colbert Report, its first American television appearance in over 30 years, and played “Tom Sawyer”. They also appeared as themselves in the 2009 comedy film I Love You, Man.

  In April 2010, the band recorded “Caravan” and “BU2B” at Blackbird Studios in Nashville, songs destined for Clockwork Angels. The Time Machine Tour that followed performed Moving Pictures in its entirety. Clockwork Angels came out on the 12th of June 2012, reaching number 1 in Canada and number 2 in the US. Peart and author Kevin J. Anderson also collaborated on a novelization of the story in September 2012.

  The Rush R40 Tour opened on the 8th of May 2015 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and closed on the 1st of August in Los Angeles. Lifeson said afterward that it might be the final large-scale tour, citing his psoriatic arthritis and Peart's chronic tendinitis. In December 2015, Peart said in an interview that he was retiring, though Lee said he was simply taking a break. On the 16th of January 2018, Lifeson told The Globe and Mail: “We have no plans to tour or record anymore. We're basically done. After 41 years, we felt it was enough.”

  Peart died on the 7th of January 2020 at the age of 67, after a battle with glioblastoma, a type of brain cancer, that lasted about three and a half years. In 2021, Lee told Rolling Stone: “That's finished, right? That's over.” He added that he was still proud of what the three of them had done together, and that he would never hesitate to play one of the songs in the right context.

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• 7. Craft and Stagecraft

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  A review in The New York Times once said that Geddy Lee's voice “suggests a munchkin giving a sermon.” In the early years his voice was high-pitched, with a strong likeness to Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, and it was often described as a “wail”. His bass playing, however, was rarely criticised. He named Jeff Berlin, Jack Casady, John Entwistle, Jack Bruce and Chris Squire as his biggest influences. In turn, he inspired players including Steve Harris, John Myung, Les Claypool and Cliff Burton. On “Tom Sawyer”, he plays bass and keyboards, sings and triggers foot pedals, all at once.

  Alex Lifeson is best known for his signature riffing, electronic effects, unorthodox chord structures and a copious arsenal of equipment. As a teenager he was influenced by Jimi Hendrix, Pete Townshend, Jeff Beck, Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page. In the 1970s he added touches of Spanish and classical music, inspired by progressive guitarists such as Steve Hackett and Steve Howe. When synthesizers took over in the 1980s, he looked to Allan Holdsworth, Andy Summers of The Police and The Edge of U2 for new ways to think about the guitar's role.

  Neil Peart has been voted the greatest rock drummer by fans, critics and fellow musicians, according to Drummerworld. Keith Moon first inspired him, and he absorbed the styles of Ginger Baker, Carmine Appice and John Bonham. His kit mixed standard drums with unusual additions for a rock drummer of the time, including a glockenspiel and tubular bells. His lyrics divided opinion. In 2007, Blender magazine placed him second on its list of the “40 Worst Lyricists In Rock”. AllMusic, by contrast, called him “one of rock's most accomplished lyricists”.

  The late 1980s brought a capacious rack of digital samplers into the band's concert gear. Each member carried MIDI controllers loaded with different sounds for every song and triggered them with whatever limbs were free while playing a main instrument. That let the trio recreate studio arrangements with complexity and fidelity, without backing tracks or an extra band member during its initial run. The coordinated use of pedal keyboards and electronic triggers is subtly visible on the R30: 30th Anniversary World Tour DVD.

  Peart's drum solos were a staple of every show. Each had a basic framework of routines connected by sections of improvisation, so no performance was identical. Since the mid-1980s he used MIDI trigger pads to play sampled sounds of a marimba, harp, temple blocks, triangles, glockenspiel, orchestra bells, tubular bells and vibraslap, instruments that would otherwise eat up far too much stage space.

  The stage itself carried props that the band at one point called “diversions”. These included washing machines, vintage popcorn poppers, animations and inflatable rabbits emerging from giant hats behind the band. From the mid-1990s the props usually sat on Lee's side of the stage, stage left, to balance the amp stacks on Lifeson's side when Lee chose to use a venue's house system instead of amps.

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• 8. Acclaim and Return

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  The Rolling Stone Record Guide called Rush “the power boogie band for the 16 magazine graduating class” in 1979. A July 2008 Rolling Stone article said, “Rush fans are the Trekkies/trekkers of rock.” The members themselves noted that people “either love Rush or hate Rush.” The band collected seven Grammy nominations and ten Juno Awards. It entered the Canadian Music Hall of Fame in 1994, and its members were made Officers of the Order of Canada in 1996. A star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame followed on the 25th of June 2010.

  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame took longer. Rush had been eligible since 1998 and was finally nominated in 2012. Induction was announced on the 11th of December 2012. Before then, Lifeson said, “I couldn't care less. Look who's up for induction; it's a joke.” At the ceremony on the 18th of April 2013, he spontaneously recited his prepared speech as “blah blah blah”, annoying his bandmates and confusing the audience. In 2013 Canada also issued a permanent first-class stamp featuring the “Starman” logo, and in 2017 three newly named microbe species honoured the members. Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, a documentary premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival on the 24th of April 2010, won the festival's Audience Award.

  Nothing about the band's retirement seemed temporary until August 2022. Lee and Lifeson played “Closer to the Heart” at the South Park 25th anniversary concert at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, with the show's co-creator Matt Stone on drums and members of Primus alongside. It was their first performance since Peart's death. That September, at the Taylor Hawkins tribute concerts in London and Los Angeles, they played “2112: Overture”, “Working Man” and “YYZ”, the last of which was Hawkins' favourite Rush song. Dave Grohl, Omar Hakim, Chad Smith and Danny Carey took turns on drums. Smith said afterward, “Those guys miss playing.”

  In December 2023, Lee told CBS News Sunday Morning that continuing as Rush with a new drummer was “not impossible, but at this point, I can't guarantee it.” In January 2024 Lifeson said he no longer wanted to tour because of arthritis. By May he was proud that Rush “was over when it was over”. Yet the two appeared together at a Gordon Lightfoot tribute at Massey Hall that month. The 50th-anniversary anthology box set Rush 50 arrived on the 21st of March 2025.

  On the 6th of October 2025, Lee and Lifeson announced a reunion tour called Fifty Something, scheduled for June to December 2026, with Anika Nilles on drums. A health spa in Austria had first nudged them toward the idea. Two years earlier, Lifeson had undergone surgery that left him with gastroparesis. What began as 12 dates grew into 58 shows. On the 23rd of February 2026, the band announced a 2027 leg: first live dates in South America in seventeen years, then its first European tour in fourteen years.

  Former Chicago keyboardist Loren Gold joined as a touring musician in late February 2026. It was the first time Rush had performed as a quartet since Mitch Bossi left in 1972. On the 29th of March 2026, the new line-up played “Finding My Way” in a surprise appearance at the Juno Awards. Lee said in January 2026 that new music might eventually come out, and that he would like to see what Nilles could do in a creative situation.

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