01 / Prologue - A young power trio goes 45 rpm
02 / The fourth man - “Terry really fixed that record”
03 / Working men - A seven-minute song blows up on WMMS
04 / “He pounded the crap out of them” - Toronto power trio ISO drummer, lyrics a plus
05 / “Led Zeppelin with lobotomies” - Rush avoid the sophomore slump
06 / Let them eat cake - The band get the cold shoulder
07 / There's always the farm equipment business - The heartbreaking tale of the “Down the Tubes Tour”
08 / The rule of the red star - No single, no Top 40, no problem
09 / “The end of the beginning” - Rush record their Double Live Gonzo
IN PRAISE OF JOHN HOWARD RUTSEY (1952-2008) - Pour one out for Rush's O.G. drummer

10 / A few weeks in Wales - A band takes their artistic freedom out for a spin
11 / Sound and fury - Heading for the heart of Cygnus
12 / Have you chaps heard of editing? - Geddy Lee has the worst two weeks of his life
13 / Book II - Lee, Lifeson, and Peart lose their minds
14 / Realignment - Leaving the formula behind
15 / The future is now - Rush step into the 1980s
16 / “A miasma of moronism” - The band deviate from the norm
17 / “Three people playing like ten people” - Rush close out 1981 with a stellar live set

18 / Is that a fire hydrant? - Rush get the seven-year itch
19 / It’s not you, it’s me - Rush break up with their fourth man
20 / In a big country - “Mr. So-and-so” hates odd time signatures
21 / “A lumbering metal anachronism” - Rush make a dark and stormy record
22 / Yes + The Sex Pistols = Power Windows - We really hope you like keyboards
23 / What's that smell? - Rush eat themselves
24 / “The emotional emptiness of bad jazz fusion” - I can’t believe it’s a live album!
25 / Out with the old - Where’s the synthesizer off-ramp?

26 / Scissors, paper, stone - A tight three-piece band and a tight two-piece production team
27 / Why are we here? - Rush rap, chaos ensues
28 / R-E-S-P-E-C-T - Unlikely Rush fans come out of the closet
29 / Feels like the first time - Neil Peart learns all about traditional grip
30 / Is that a bong? - Let’s get mediocre
31 / An evening with Rush - News flash: No one wants to see Rush’s opening acts
32 / Afterimage - A drummer enters limbo
33 / Four studio, one live - The walking wounded try to press on

34 / Out of the cradle - A wounded trio ponders their return
35 / “A very fragile representation of the band” - The hiatus ends
36 / “Holy sh*t, this is Rush!” - A performing entity comes roaring back to life
37 / Recording in Rio - Rush endure a grade-A Charlie Foxtrot
38 / A rough night for agoraphobes - The Rio crowd sings all the lyrics to “YYZ”
39 / For what it’s worth - The band’s first EP and least essential release
40 / Happy birthday to you - What do you get for the band that have everything?
41 / Middle East, Middle West - Another unique entry in the Rush catalog
42 / New world men - Pop acceptance on the thirty-five-year plan

43 / “They loved sound checking” - Another live album, yet again
44 / Planet Olivia - Peart becomes a father again
45 / About of nostalgia - Rush take a glorious look backward
46 / “I do believe it’s our best work” - Rush make their favorite album
47 / Different strings - Why add one member when you can add nine?
48 / Life begins at forty - 10-4, good buddy, over and out
49 / In praise of Neil Ellwood Peart (1952-2020) - “I miss him even to this day”
50 / Epilogue - “It’s what we do”

Discography
Bibliography
Photo Credits
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index

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INTRODUCTION

Rush released their self-titled debut album in 1974. Since then, the band have been the subject of countless books, podcasts, documentaries, fan websites, journalistic articles, scholarly articles, and dissertations. What could there possibly still be to say about them fifty years later?

As it turns out, plenty. It’s not just that Rush don’t sound like anyone else, and it’s not just that they’ve never made the same record twice. This music refuses to go away, it remains as relevant as ever, and it has continued to connect with listeners, regardless of external fads.

Rush stopped touring and recording in 2015, but if YouTube is anything to go by, kids eighteen and younger are fully on board. They react to “Tom Sawyer” the same way their parents did when they first heard it on eight-track tape. The music inspires the same wonder and affection, and nothing has really changed but the playback format.

Initially, I didn’t really hear them much until high school in the 1980s, when MTV played the videos for “Distant Early Warning” and “The Big Money” fairly often. I liked what I heard, but not enough to part with eight of my weekly allowance dollars and invest in a cassette.

Then, one great and glorious day, I heard “Freewill,” and when Alex Lifeson played that magnificent guitar solo, I was on board. That was decades ago, and I've had a chronic, inoperable case of Rush Fever ever since. No matter how much I listen to them, I never suffer from Rush Fatigue.

Once I was a fan, it took almost no time to see that Rush have devoted haters, people who think nothing of telling you to your face how much they hate the band. They hate Geddy Lee’s voice. They hate Neil Peart’s lyrics. They hate the ten-minute songs about black holes. Journalists and civilians alike have flung raw bile at the band since their formation, and it’s persisted to this day.

Interestingly, the haters are as intensely committed as the fans and for the same reason: The music is impossible to ignore while it's playing. It will either draw you in immediately and make you a lifer, or you will hate it instantly and shut it off mid- song, even if you're not in your own home and it's not your stereo. There is no “in-between” response to this trio—only irrational love or irrational hatred.

I had to take some things into consideration when I wrote this book. Rush are one of the most documented bands on earth, so serious fans already know their history. Books like Visions, by Bill Banasiewicz, and Contents Under Pressure, by Martin Popoff, are comprehensive and lay out the sequence of events definitively, so I left out stuff like how the band formed, the early lineup changes, and other things that have been covered thoroughly by others before me.

I also could not possibly compete with the books the band members themselves have written. No one is going to have more insight into Neil Peart’s life than Neil Peart, and he wrote several books that should be considered the last word on his personal life.

That being the case, I decided to focus on how I feel personally about the band, my opinion of their music, and the parts of the Rush story that I found emotionally affecting or otherwise interesting. I also tried to get a sense of what the band members were like as individuals by interviewing people who had worked alongside them for years.

I also wrote this book to process the 2020 passing of drummer Neil Peart, which hit me like a ton of bricks. It upset me as if it had happened to someone I knew, especially after his daughter Selena and common-law wife Jackie passed away in the 1990s. That news affected me deeply, so I was relieved to learn he had remarried and become a father again. I thought he was “all better.” So, when the news came through that he had passed, it just seemed so unbelievably cruel.

I’ve been sitting with that feeling ever since, and I think a lot of fans are still reeling from the news. I hope reading my take on all that is somehow helpful to them. Writing it was helpful to me.

I feel like I can never say enough about Rush, and I’ve learned that expressing intense love with words while still sounding coherent is really difficult. Most of the time, what I really wanted to say was, “Oh, my God! Did you hear that drum fill? This is awesome!” I mean, those are my true feelings, but they wouldn't make much of a manuscript any more than typing “SCREW FLANDERS’ over and over again will make a good restaurant review. So, hopefully, despite my shameless, undignified, and worshipful fanboying, I wrote something coherent.

Rush’s music continues to matter to me, and it’s been there for me in difficult times. It centers me. It’s been a real friend to me and continues to be. As I said, I never knew Neil Peart, but when I heard the lyrics to “Subdivisions,” “Circumstances,” and “Secret Touch,” they succinctly expressed thoughts and emotions I didn’t even realize I was feeling.

This is why I say that, even though I never knew Neil Peart, his lyrics made it feel like he knew me.

In the 1976 song, “Something for Nothing,” he gave timeless advice to anyone who was listening: “Let your heart be the anchor and the beat of your song.” That's guided me throughout my life, and all the misfit kids in the immediate and distant future will also feel spoken to directly when they hear it. He'll live on through them. He’ll live on through the kids who hear him play one time and immediately get hooked for life. In that sense, we can say about Neil Peart what he wrote in the obituary for his drum instructor Freddie Gruber: “He will be missed, but he is not gone.”

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ONE: THREE TRAVELERS FORD THE RIVER

01 / PROLOGUE
A young power trio goes 45 rpm

Rush's self-titled debut album was released in 1974, featuring bassist and vocalist Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson, and drummer John Rutsey.

Initially, they were a Toronto bar band emulating acid rock groups like Cream and The Jimi Hendrix Experience. Those bands made the loudest and heaviest music of the 1960s, and the members of Rush had been paying attention. Now, it was their turn, and they wanted in.

The three band members had all gone to school together, and those years had made them close. However, Lee and Lifeson had always been closer. The pair hailed from immigrant families, making them perennial outsiders at school to everyone but each other.

“We were sons of Eastern European immigrants who had left Europe after the Second World War to start a new life in Canada,” Lee told Classic Rock in 2016. “We understood where each other came from, culturally.”

Lee’s parents were Polish Jews who had survived the Holocaust. Born Gershon Eliezer Weinrib, the name “Geddy” derived from his mother saying “Gary” in a Polish accent. The moniker had stuck since his school days, and when he turned sixteen, he took it as his legal name. Lifeson, meanwhile, was born Aleksandar Živojinović to Serbian parents.

“I grew up in a very Serbian home,” Lifeson told the podcast Make Weird Music in 2021. “I didn’t speak English until I started kindergarten.”

The band formed in 1968, and the lineup shifted multiple times, finally stabilizing in 1972. In 1973, after five years of playing the local circuit, they recorded their first single.

The A-side was a cover of Buddy Holly's “Not Fade Away,” and the mix hopelessly neutered it. The song had been a fixture of their live set, but this sounded less like the turbocharged Rolling Stones tribute they intended and more like Bow Wow Wow's cover of “I Want Candy.”

Side B featured the Lee-Rutsey original, “You Can't Fight It,” which fared slightly better than side A. The mix was still lifeless and flat, but the individual performances stood out a little better. You can hear Rutsey’s drumming clearly, and Lifeson’s status as a world-class guitarist is already on display, even at this early stage. But as far as the A-side was concerned, it was a crushing disappointment.

“I was embarrassed by how it came out,” Lee said. “It was so... dinky.”

Record labels wanted nothing to do with the fledgling trio and refused to sign them. The band members and their comanagers, Ray Danniels and Vic Wilson, responded by taking matters into their own hands, dubbing themselves Moon Records, and pressing five hundred copies of “Not Fade Away” / “You Can't Fight It.”

The single got a decent review from Peter Taylor of RPM Weekly, who wrote that it “manages to capture the excitement that they can whip up in a live performance.”

The single was intended to bring them to a broader audience and maybe even get them a U.S. record deal. It did nothing for them, and when you listen to it, you can hear why. It wouldn't be until their sound was captured correctly that they would get the wider notice they were looking for.

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02 / THE FOURTH MAN
“Terry really fixed that record”

After their single failed to make an impact, the members of Rush began thinking about their next step. They decided to go big and make a full album, but the resources to do so were scarce.

“Our manager Ray Danniels put up the money,” Lee told Classic Rock in 2016. “We had to do it cheap, recording late at night, after hours.”

Even though they hadn't liked how their single sounded, they re-enlisted the same recording engineer to helm their debut LP. Recorded at Toronto's Eastern Sound, Lee said the sound wasn’t any better than it was on their first single, and they couldn't live with it.

Terry Brown, a British engineer who had worked on Axis: Bold as Love by The Jimi Hendrix Experience, took the helm as the trio worked to salvage the recording. He told Sonic Perspectives in 2022 that he took to their music instantly upon hearing it.

“I'd never heard anything like it,” he said.

He understood the sound they wanted and knew how to get it. They rerecorded three tracks from the Eastern Sound sessions— “Finding My Way,” “Need Some Love,” and “Here Again’—and added overdubs to the tracks they were keeping. The whole process took about a week, and Brown faithfully got the band’s raw hard-rock sound to tape.

“Terry really fixed that record,” Lee said. “It sounded great.”

One problem remained, and it was a big one. The lyrics were written primarily by Rutsey, who withdrew them just as Lee was about to step into the vocal booth and record them. Lifeson told Rolling Stone in 2016 that this left him and Lee to write entirely new lyrics from scratch at the last minute.

“Here Again” and “Working Man” fared the best, but the lyrics on the other six songs aren't up to snuff. The band needed a dedicated lyricist, and they didn’t have one.

Luckily, the music on Rush more than makes up for it. “Finding My Way” is as energetic an opener as anyone could hope for, while “Here Again,” the band’s lone foray into slow blues, evokes the melancholy vibe of “Ready for Love.” Rutsey’s drumming recalls that of Bad Company’s Simon Kirke, one of his biggest influences.

After the almost Sabbath-heavy side 2 opener, “What You're Doing,” comes “In the Mood,” a throwaway filler tune reminiscent of Diet KISS. The LP closes out with “Working Man,” and anyone who had to drag themselves out of bed every morning to get to a tedious, soul-destroying day job could easily get behind the lyrics.

The lineup on Rush didn’t last beyond the debut album (more on that later), but one has to imagine what might have been in an alternate universe where Lee, Lifeson, and Rutsey stayed together. They could have had a respectable career as a straight-ahead hard rock band in the vein of Nazareth or Humble Pie, and there’s certainly no shame in that. But ultimately, Lee and Lifeson wanted more than that.

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03 / WORKING MEN
A seven-minute song blows up on WMMS

Rush may be a fundamental entry in the band’s catalog, but when it was released, no record label would go near it. Luckily, one of the 3,500 copies Moon Records pressed was sent to Donna Halper, then music director for WMMS radio in Cleveland.

It was sent to her by A&M Canada promoter Bob Roper. Had the album come out on a major U.S. label, there might have been an aggressive publicity push to get it airplay, but Rush had nothing of the sort. When Roper sent the LP, Halper characterized it as “an act of kindness.”

She put on “Working Man,” the last song on the record, and it immediately struck her as an ideal song for Cleveland’s radio listeners. The city was a manufacturing hub full of blue-collar workers, and she believed many of them would relate to the lyrics. Her instincts were right, and upon playing the song on the air, listeners flooded the phone lines to say they loved it.

The only hitch was that Lee’s high-pitched vocal led many callers to ask which new, unheard Led Zeppelin album WMMS was premiering. Brad Madix, the band’s front-of-house engineer from 2002 through 2015, thought the same thing when he first heard the song.

“I literally thought it was Led Zeppelin the first time I heard it,” he said.

That small error aside, Rush connected with audiences directly through the music, bypassing the recording industry entirely. Halper said it was a testament to the quality of the song, and she’s not surprised people today still listen to it.

“Working Man’ sounds as good now as it sounded in 1974,” she said.

Meanwhile, the critics hated both the album and the band that made it. The trio became the subject of scathing reviews, which started a long tradition of journalists excoriating the group every chance they got. One could say without resorting to hyperbole that critics hated Rush and Rush to a degree that was utterly deranged.

“Rush is like so many hundreds we have heard before, rock without melody, unintelligible lyrics, songs we have heard though the name and the band remain anonymous,” wrote Gary Tannyan in the June 6, 1974, edition of the Saskatoon Star-Phoenix. “Music without a face, music without any distinction, and most of all music that does not fill any void in the music scene.”

Journalists may have reviled them, but the positive response Rush got from radio listeners throughout the United States was too strong to ignore. It forced American record labels to pay attention, and Rush ultimately received a worldwide release from Mercury Records later in 1974.

The Mercury reissue featured two changes to the album jacket. The band’s red logo on the front cover was rendered in a hideous shade of magenta, and a small acknowledgment was added to the album credits: “A special thank you to Donna Halper for getting the ball rolling.”

Shortly after the album’s release, Rush parted ways with Rutsey, and U.S. tour dates were booked and imminent. Lee and Lifeson would need to find someone new to take over, and the clock was ticking.

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04 / "HE POUNDED THE CRAP OUT OF THEM"
Toronto Power Trio ISO Drummer, lyrics a plus

When Neil Peart was a kid, he was obsessed with rhythm. He would bang out percussive patterns with his hands, with chopsticks, on any nearby surface. He couldn't help it.

His teachers and classmates didn't see him as a great artist discovering his destiny. They saw him as an annoying weirdo who wouldn't stop banging on his desk.

“A girl named Donna once threw a book at me,” he wrote in the St. Catharines Standard in 1994. He also said his science teacher called him “some kind of retard.”

His parents were more understanding and signed him up for drum lessons. Many aspiring percussionists get sick of practicing paradiddles and give up after a week, but Peart could practice all day and never get sick of it.

In short order, he became a very in-demand drummer, playing with several local groups. He had too much ambition to stay local, so in 1971, he proposed to his bandmates in J.R. Flood that they leave Ontario behind and move to an urban hub— one with a major music scene and larger audiences.

There were no takers, so Peart went off to London by himself to do it on his own. It was one of many solo trips he would take during his life to parts unknown.

As the reality of becoming a professional musician abroad set in, his optimism faded along with his mercenary instincts. He quickly learned from doing session work that he didn’t want to be a hired gun. It simply wasn't in him to put his creativity aside for commerce. He wanted to make music that mattered to him, even if there wasn't much money in it—or any money, for that matter.

After eighteen frustrating months overseas, he returned home in 1973 with a plan. He would earn a living selling tractor parts alongside his father and play music he liked in a band called Hush (with an “H”). Creativity and commerce would be kept separate, a sensible and hard-won strategy. He told Drum! magazine it only lasted a year.

“One day that July, as I stood behind the parts counter, a man drove up in a white Corvette,” he said. It was Rush comanager Vic Wilson, who had come to tell him the band he represented had just lost its drummer and needed a replacement. It had to be a quick learner who could jump right on board because U.S. tour dates were rapidly approaching.

In 1989, Alex Lifeson told the radio show In the Studio with Redbeard that when Peart came down to audition and started playing his drums, “he pounded the crap out of them.” For a lot of bands, that would be enough to win the gig, but he brought a lot more to the table than just volume. Brent Carpenter, Rush’s monitor engineer from 2002 through 2015, said the drummer had a unique and instantly recognizable sound that distinguished him from other players.

“I don’t know how he did it, but you knew it was him,” Carpenter said.

Robert Scovill, the band’s live sound engineer from 1989 through 1997, said Peart had a perfect “kit mix.” In engineering parlance, that means all the drummer had to do was sit down and play, and it sounded phenomenal.

“You could have put up one microphone on that guy and probably gotten away with it,” Scovill said.

Peart became a member of Rush on July 29, 1974, and just sixteen days later, they were in front of eleven thousand people at the Pittsburgh Civic Arena, opening for Uriah Heep and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band.

Lee told Canadian Musician in 1990 that he and Lifeson didn’t even consider that their new drummer might also be a lyricist. When he auditioned, it was for the drum position only, but it didn’t take long for them to notice that he had an extensive vocabulary. Maybe he could take a crack at writing a few lyrics.

“We did notice his incredible appetite for books and for reading,” Lee said. “He also spoke English better than anyone we knew.”

Donna Halper, former music director for WMMS radio in Cleveland, eventually got to know him as he integrated himself into the band. She said it didn't take long for her to come to the same conclusion.

“Neil was a reader, and he read just about everything you could imagine,” she said. “He read philosophy, he read poetry, he read literature. I mean, you name it, he read it.”

While Peart had the qualifications, neither he nor anyone else in the band remembered a conscious decision to appoint him to the official lyricist position. He told Canadian Musician that he was never asked to take the role. He just took it.

“I don’t think anybody ever asked me,” he recalled. “I saw a vacuum and worked on a couple of things that I submitted and were accepted.”

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05 / “LED ZEPPELIN WITH LOBOTOMIES”
Rush avoid the sophomore slump

When Rush embarked on their 1974 U.S. tour, it was their first opportunity to be heard by American music journalists. The critics of this great nation were unanimous in their assessment of the band.

Dennis Hunt of the Los Angeles Times, reviewing their concert at the legendary Whisky a Go Go, described the trio as “one of those fledgling groups with an alarming disregard for originality.”

Another gig was at Cleveland’s Agora Theater and Ballroom, a concert that made the rounds on the bootleg circuit for years. Mark Kmetzko wrote in the local publication Scene that the Led Zeppelin comparison Rush frequently received was “ludicrous” because of the trio’s “too-simple compositions and lack of dynamics.” However, he conceded that “the crowd ate it up.”

Rush came off the road in December 1974. According to Circus Raves, the band had all of five days off, then entered the studio to record their sophomore LP. Terry Brown, who had salvaged the band’s debut, returned as coproducer.

Little material carried over from the John Rutsey era. “Best I Can” and “In the End" were written before Peart joined, but the other six songs on their second album were largely worked out on tour, sometimes from the back seat of the car driving them to their next gig.

Despite the pressure cooker situation, Fly by Night came out very well and featured a transformed version of the group's sound. “Anthem” starts the record off in aggressive 7/8 time, and the lyrics are many steps up from the placeholder stuff on the debut.

On “Beneath, Between, and Behind,” Peart delivers a pummeling straight out of the Ginger Baker playbook, and there's even some pre-disco four-on-the-floor for a hot minute. The title track is based around a contemplative guitar riff, and you can almost imagine the lyrics acting as Peart's kiss-off to London after his frustrating experience there. If that’s the case, it’s the loveliest middle-finger salute ever recorded.

The album also features “Rivendell,” a heartfelt rumination on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. It’s easy to imagine the song winning lifelong fans among the “Dungeons and Dragons” set, just as it’s easy to imagine it inspiring others to go out and buy Stooges records. Rush may never have set out to be divisive, but you either loved that they sang unironically about Gollum’s misty mountains, or ran away as fast as your legs could carry you.

Upon hearing Fly by Night, Donna Halper, former music director for WMMS radio in Cleveland, said her first impression was that it was an ambitious expansion of what had come before.

“There were still flashes of what made them a really good rock and roll band in the first record, except now the lyrics were going to be a little bit more involved, a little bit deeper,” she said.

Reviewing the album, John Mendelssohn wrote in Phonograph Record that Rush sounded “like Led Zeppelin with lobotomies.” Pam Simon wrote in the March 29, 1975, edition of North Carolina's Statesville Record & Landmark that side 1's “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” was an outrageous affront to the human ear, calling the guitar sounds “grotesquely ugly.”

“I can only hope that Fly by Night will do exactly that,” she wrote.

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06 / LET THEM EAT CAKE
The band get the cold shoulder

After the Fly by Night tour, Rush came home as conquering heroes. According to a Mercury Records press kit, the title track had made Canada’s Top to, and the album stayed in the Top 30 for six months.

Thus emboldened, the trio walked into Toronto Sound to chart a daringly progressive course on their next album, Caress of Steel. In 2023, Lee revealed that so much hash oil was consumed during the sessions that he heard reverb that wasn't there, affecting the final mix. He described that outcome as “cautionary.”

“You can't be a serious musician if you're f*cking around with these drugs when it comes to work,” he said.

Auditory hallucinations aside, Caress of Steel has a lot going for it. The opener, “Bastille Day,” has a punk-rock-meets-Queen vibe that starts things off grandly, and Peart’s autobiographical “Lakeside Park” is a gem.

The three-part suite, “The Necromancer,” is the highlight of the album. The first section, “Into Darkness,” is almost Pink Floydian in its moodiness, and Lifeson wrings palpable agony out of his Les Paul. In the middle section, “Under the Shadow,” the band locks into a heavy mid-tempo groove and rides it for a couple of minutes before switching to a faster, more frantic section. Lifeson solos furiously over all of it while Lee and Peart show they're already a completely locked-in rhythm section. It’s a tornado of controlled chaos.

There are also some blunders. “The Fountain of Lamneth” takes up all of side 2 and drags in many places, and “I Think I’m Going Bald” adds nothing to the album and shouldn’t even have been recorded.

The critics were again consistent in their assessment of the band’s music.

“Lakeside Park’ could be a tremendous tune if someone else performed it,” Stan Tepner said in the November 21, 1975, Kingston (Ontario) Whig-Standard.

There were also issues with the cover art. It was designed by Hugh Syme, an illustrator who played keyboards with the Ian Thomas Band. That group had the same record label and management as Rush and opened for them frequently across Canada. When he designed a cover for his own band that caught Peart’s eye, he was asked to create one for his labelmates.

The album cover he created was silver, per the “steel” in the title, but the label changed it to an ugly, muted gold. The illustrator said at the time, neither he nor the band were aware that a record label could step in and unilaterally change an artist’s work.

“Mercury didn’t think it had enough ‘shelf appeal,’” he said. “They saturated my illustration with this really heavy-handed sepia brown, then added this chromium lettering, which looks like something from the Fillmore East. It just had nothing to do with what we intended.”

Syme said after that experience, it was written into Rush's contract that he must be invited to the printing press to approve the artwork for all releases from that point on. While he was happy to regain control over his work, he wasn’t bitter about what Mercury did to the Caress of Steel cover.

“Nobody meant any harm,” he said. “It just began the process of making sure that nothing was ever presumed in the future.”

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07 / THERE'S ALWAYS THE FARM EQUIPMENT BUSINESS
The heartbreaking tale of the "Down the Tubes Tour"

If Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart weren't aware that Caress of Steel wasn't selling, they found out repeatedly on tour, night after night. They played sixty-seven concerts between August 24, 1975, and January 10, 1976, and during that time, they became demoralized by all the half-empty halls.

“We named it the ‘Down the Tubes Tour,” Lee told Mojo in 2016. “We joked about Neil going back into the farm equipment business.”

Much of the excursion was spent opening for KISS, and the two bands formed an unlikely friendship. KISS bassist Gene Simmons told Classic Rock in 2012 that, despite the Caress of Steel tour’s reputation as a humiliating bust, he thought that Rush had been well received by KISS fans.

“They didn’t really have their own fans turning up to see them in any numbers at that stage, but they weren’t all that different to us, so they appealed,” Simmons said. “It was all riff-based blues rock with a lot of bombast.”

He added that if Rush had a real ace in the hole, it was their commitment to touring, which he described as a “grueling” exercise that could give even the most gung-ho aspiring musician second thoughts. But Simmons said the trio’s ironclad commitment was plain to see. They meant business, and it would take a hell of a lot more than sluggish record sales and empty seats to stop them.

“They were ‘all for one and one for all,’” he said.

The Caress of Steel tour put Rush in a precarious financial position. Peart told Classic Rock in 2004 that it had gone so poorly that they couldn't afford to pay their crew—or even themselves.

The record company wasn't happy either, but rather than drop the band, Mercury would allow them to make one more record, preferably one brimming with radio-friendly hits. This was something they couldn't consciously do.

Lee told Louder in 2023 that he, Lifeson, and Peart felt “the very idea of compromise was offensive.” Rather than play it safe and court the Top 40, they decided to make their potential final album one for the ages. It stood an excellent chance of achieving “pearls before swine” status and going over every listener's head, but hey, Vincent van Gogh wasn’t appreciated in his lifetime either.

“We thought this would probably be the last record we make,” Lee told Mojo. “So we were like, ‘F*ck you, Mercury. If we’re going to go out, we'll go out doing our crazy sh*t, not failing at what you want us to be.”

The trio made good on their pledge. They got to work on their next twenty-minute opus, a science fiction space opera based in a futuristic totalitarian state. It was seventeen minutes too long for pop radio and featured the phrase “I love you” nowhere in its lyrics. Still, despite the possibility that it was an act of commercial suicide, coproducer Terry Brown told Mojo in 2016 that he was convinced the album they had recorded was a work of genius.

“I felt that this was a huge leap forward for the band,” he said. “I thought they’d nailed it, totally.”

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08 / THE RULE OF THE RED STAR
No single, no Top 40, no problem

The album 2112 is Rush's first outright masterpiece. It may have a couple of lulls here and there on side 2, but it’s an otherwise fascinating listen from start to finish.

It’s also notable for featuring cover artist Hugh Syme’s first musical contribution to a Rush album. It came about spontaneously.

“I visited them in the studio and Terry Brown said, ‘Hugh plays keyboards. We should have him play something on the album,” Syme said. “I opened up the ‘Overture’ on ‘2112, and then got a beautiful song on the flip side called ‘Tears.’ I went down the hall for a few hours and worked up all the Mellotron parts.”

The title track takes up all of side 1. If you didn’t fully grasp the story, a concise synopsis appeared in the program for Rush's three- night engagement at Toronto's Massey Hall in June 1976.

“In the year 2062, a galaxy-wide war results in the union of all planets under the rule of the Red Star of the Solar Federation,” it read. “The world is controlled by computers, called Temples, which determine all reading matter, songs, pictures... everything connected with life during the year 2112.”

The twenty-minute suite was borderline autobiographical. Just as Rush had presented Caress of Steel to Mercury Records, the main character in “2112” presents the priests of the Temples of Syrinx with a guitar. In both cases, the protagonists were proud of what they had delivered, and in both cases, the response from the powers that be was, “Don’t annoy us further.”

The suite ends with what sounds like the end of the world. It was fitting for a band that would have the plug pulled on them if 2112 didn't shift enough units.

Side 2 isn’t the home run that “2112” is, but there’s plenty of solid material anyway, such as “The Twilight Zone” and “A Passage to Bangkok,” a weed travelogue describing all the places where the sticky icky is grown. But the album closer, “Something for Nothing,” is one of the best songs the band ever recorded. Its lyrics characterize being true to yourself as the ultimate act of defiance: “What you love is your own power/What you live is your own story.”

The artistic risk Rush took with 2112 paid off. Boyd Tattrie of RPM Weekly wrote in the April 24, 1976, issue that “American sales have been outstanding,” something that had to put a lot of minds at ease among the band and the people around them.

He also said that 2112's status as a concept album made it easy to promote, as the jacket’s “grabbing graphics” were perfect for trade paper advertisements. The popularity of 2112 had even boosted sales of the much-maligned Caress of Steel, since kids who went to record stores to buy the new album would often pick up the last one, too.

Decades later, it’s worth asking what it was about this record that brought Rush to a broad audience. In 2013, Rolling Stone critic Rob Sheffield said that its sound and fury had kept it permanently relevant decades after its release.

“The abrasively distinctive sonics, from Peart’s busy tempo shifts to Lee’s squawk of doom, keep it from ever fading into the background,” he wrote. “Nobody will ever turn it into a Broadway show.”

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09 / "THE END OF THE BEGINNING"
Rush record their Double Live Gonzo

After the success of 2112, the naysayers had to concede that Rush might have been onto something. No one but Lee, Lifeson, and Peart could know what that might have been, but Boyd Tattrie of RPM Weekly gave it his best guess.

“Rush seem to have a sense for anticipating and understanding their audience,” he wrote. “The majority of their audience are teens in the 15-17 year old bracket, who are naturally attracted to antiestablishment concepts and philosophies that they can call their own.”

The trio barely had time for a Molson before returning to Massey Hall for a string of dates in June 1976. These concerts were recorded and used for the band’s first live album, All the World’s a Stage. It had the good fortune to be released during the mid-1970s when every self-respecting band was expected to have a live double album in its arsenal. It also gave the trio a little breather before they had to start work on their next record.

All the World’s a Stage features furious readings of “Bastille Day” and “Anthem,” as well as a slightly trimmed version of “2112.” It’s wild to hear them play the whole thing—well, maybe 85 percent of it—and if it’s missing anything, it’s the discipline of the studio version. However, that’s been exchanged for an almost- explosive rage that’s surprising to hear from these guys. It’s the sound of three young people who had nearly been denied their vision and were now going to be as 100 percent Rush as possible.

The sound quality is not at the audiophile level many fans expect from this band, but the performances have a savagery that appears nowhere else in their catalog. Both Lifeson and Peart have solo turns in which they showcase their undeniable chops, but even without a solo of his own, Lee’s playing is all over the neck — his entire performance is basically an eighty-minute bass solo.

The record has none of the flubbed notes or other imperfections that make live albums feel like genuine concert artifacts, but the energy comes through loud and clear. It doesn’t feel like a perfectly replicated collection of studio songs with applause piped in. Instead, it’s a well-executed performance that’s still really raw — the best of both worlds.

Not everyone was sold on the Rush live experience. A few months after the release of All the World’s a Stage, Stephen Ford of Detroit News attended a concert at Cobo Arena and registered his disgust at parting with $6.50 to attend the “monstrosity.”

“Lead singer Geddy Lee continues to sound as though he played one football game too many without ample equipment, guitarist Alex Lifeson studies the stage charisma of the great

guitarists without ever noticing their craft, and drummer Neil Peart should take a long, hard look at learning computer programming,” he wrote.

All the World’s a Stage became the first Rush album to break into the U.S. Top 40 album charts. The band must have sensed that they were already at a mile marker, as the liner notes contain a statement revealing their commitment to leaving the past behind. It was very clearly written by Neil Peart: “This album to us. signifies the end of the beginning, a milestone to mark the close of chapter one, in the annals of Rush.”

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IN PRAISE OF JOHN HOWARD RUTSEY (1952-2008)
Pour one out for Rush's O.G. drummer

For most of the trio’s existence, the name “Rush” has meant “Lee-Lifeson-Peart.” Period, full stop. However, their original drummer was John Rutsey, who had to leave the band after recording the debut album.

He left for two reasons. One was purely a matter of taste—Lee and Lifeson wanted to take the music in a more progressive direction, and he didn't.

The other factor was diabetes, which he suffered from and which made it next to impossible for him to tour.

His truncated tenure has led some to believe his contributions to the band were minimal. This is incorrect. According to those who knew him, he was as vital to the band as anybody and was instrumental in getting it off the ground.

“In those early days, John was the leader of the band,” Lee told Classic Rock in 2016. :

When “Working Man” got an overwhelmingly positive response from WMMS listeners, they won their first gig in the United States at Cleveland’s Allen Theater. Former WMMS radio music director Donna Halper met them in person when they came to town for the show and described their emotional state as a mixture of youthful enthusiasm and raw terror.

“They were kids, nineteen, twenty years old,” she said. “They had never been prepared for this.”

She said that it quickly became clear to Lee and Lifeson that if they were going to tour—and they had to if they wanted to graduate from Toronto’s

bar circuit—they needed a different drummer. The subject had come up privately before, but now it was in sharp relief and needed to be addressed.

“They were going to go and perform in other cities, and John Rutsey couldn't do that,” Halper said. “His health problems were going to make that impossible.”

In the twenty-first century, medical technology has enabled diabetic musicians to manage the illness on the road—see Poison’s Bret Michaels, for example. Halper said that in 1974, that wasn't possible.

“Today, you take out your little pen, do your little finger prick, and go on with your life,” she said. “That isn’t how things were for people with severe diabetes in the 1970s. You needed to find a hospital, and you needed to have things administered to you. It could take half a day.”

She added that Rutsey’s youth didn’t help either. Like many people just a few years removed from adolescence, he didn’t prioritize his health.

He didn’t always consider the consequences if he wanted to eat sugar-infused buttercream cake and wash it down with a beer.

“He didn’t want all those restrictions,” she said. “It was going to lead to them replacing him, but the fact that suddenly they were about to perform in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and a couple of other cities made it much more urgent.”

Lee and Lifeson knew change was inevitable, but it was heartbreaking when the time came to part ways for good. They had grown up with Rutsey and played music together for years. They had paid their dues with him as their drummer, and just as their hard work began to bear fruit, they had to show him the door.

“They still cared deeply about each other,” Halper said. “On a professional level, they knew that it needed to happen, but on a personal level, they felt terrible about it.”

After leaving the band, Rutsey pursued bodybuilding. Original roadie Ian Grandy told I Guitar International in 2009 that he hadn’t seen the drummer for about a year after he departed from the group. When he did, the former drummer was in peak physical condition.

“I was happy that he was into something healthy,” Grandy said.

Rutsey’s enthusiasm for pumping iron also came in handy in the late 1980s when his former bandmate Alex Lifeson wanted to shed some pounds. According to Music Express, the guitarist would regularly come to the gym where Rutsey exercised, and the former drummer would motivate his old bandmate with some good-natured competitiveness.

John Rutsey died on May 11, 2008, at fifty- five. The Toronto Star attributed the death to “complications from his lifelong affliction with diabetes,” causing a fatal heart attack as he slept. Shortly afterward, Lee and Lifeson released a statement warmly recalling their days with him as a hardworking bar band that dreamed of bigger things.

“Our memories of the early years of Rush when John was in the band are very fond to us,” the statement read. “Those years spent in our teens dreaming of one day doing what we continue to

do decades later are special. Although our paths diverged many years ago, we smile today, thinking back on those exciting times and remembering John’s wonderful sense of humor and impeccable timing. He will be deeply missed by all he touched.”

Despite acknowledging that the change was necessary for Lee and Lifeson, Halper remains adamant that Rutsey’s tenure was crucial to the group and he was a lot more than just the drummer Neil Peart replaced. She said there would have been no Rush without him.

“We would not even be having this conversation if it weren’t for that first album,” she said. “If people didn’t fall in love with ‘Working Man,’ with ‘Finding My Way,’ it wouldn’t have generated the interest that led to them getting a management deal in the States and a contract with a U.S. record company. None of it would have happened.”

end excerpt...

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