The story of Rush

Willowdale kids

Rush grew out of Willowdale, a suburb in the north of Toronto. Geddy Lee was born Gary Lee Weinrib on the twenty ninth of July 1953. His parents, Morris and Mary, were Polish Jews who met in the Starachowice ghetto and survived Auschwitz, followed by Dachau for him and Bergen Belsen for her. After the war Morris found Mary in a displaced persons camp, they married there, and they later moved to Canada. Morris died young, in 1965, and Mary ran the family variety store to raise three children. Her thick accent turned Gary into Geddy, the kids at school picked it up, and he eventually made it his legal name. For years he even believed his middle name was Lorne, because his school had registered it wrongly.[1] [2]

Alex Lifeson was born Aleksandar Zivojinovic on the twenty seventh of August 1953 in Fernie, British Columbia, to Serbian immigrants from Yugoslavia, and grew up in Toronto. His stage name is a rough English translation of his surname, which means son of life. He started on viola, switched to guitar at twelve, and his first one was a cheap classical acoustic his father gave him for Christmas. In 1963 he met a neighbour named John Rutsey at school, and the two played street hockey and talked constantly about starting a band. Geddy Lee came into the picture around the eighth grade, when he and Alex started chatting at the back of a classroom. Lifeson later laughed that they wanted to be cool but were far too goofy to manage it.[1] [2] [3]

Lifeson and Rutsey had already tried two short lived groups, the Lost Cause and the Projection. In August 1968 they formed a new trio with a bassist and singer named Jeff Jones. That September the band played its first show at the Coff Inn, a youth drop in centre in the basement of an Anglican church, and earned twenty five Canadian dollars. They had no name when they were booked. Rutsey's older brother Bill suggested Rush, because it was short and punchy, and it stuck. The set was mostly blues rock covers of Cream, Jimi Hendrix and John Mayall. Jones soon drifted away, and on his suggestion, Alex's school friend Geddy Lee took over on bass and vocals in time for the second gig.[1] [2] [3]

Early in 1969 the band grew to a four piece with keyboard player Lindy Young, and picked up a manager, a young Toronto hustler named Ray Danniels, along with an agent, Vic Wilson. Then Geddy was pushed out. One afternoon Young met him on the way to rehearsal and told him the band was breaking up. Weeks later Lee discovered that Lifeson, Rutsey and Young had simply regrouped as Hadrian, named after the Roman emperor, with a new bassist called Joe Perna. Lee felt lied to and started a blues band of his own, which he reckoned was doing better than theirs. He even gave away a ticket to see the Jimi Hendrix Experience so he could watch Hadrian's first show, and found them sloppy.[1] [2] [3]

In the autumn of 1969 Rutsey phoned Lee, more or less apologised, and asked him to come back. Lee agreed, because he missed playing with Alex and thought Rush had more potential than his own group. It was a chaotic time. Lee called one stretch the summer of acid, and once tried to play a gig after taking LSD, a mistake he said he never repeated. A would be manager named Vince tried to turn them into the house band at a Yonge Street strip club, and they walked out. By then Young had left for good over musical differences, and after brief spells with guitarists Bob Vopni and Mitch Bossi, Rush settled by 1972 as a trio of Lifeson, Lee and Rutsey.[1] [2]

Bars, a debut and a Cleveland DJ

What turned Rush from a garage act into a working band was a change in the law. In 1971 Ontario lowered its drinking age from twenty one to eighteen, and suddenly the group could play bars and clubs, sometimes six nights a week, at places like Toronto's Gasworks. Lee dropped out of high school to do it, and his mother broke down in tears. Lifeson had his own row with his parents about quitting school, and it was caught on film for a 1973 Canadian documentary called Come On Children. Led Zeppelin became the new model. Rutsey had seen them at Toronto's Rock Pile in early 1969 and came back raving about John Bonham, and Rush got heavier and louder, with Lee singing higher and higher.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Danniels could not interest a major label, so his company, SRO, launched its own, Moon Records. Rush's first release, in September 1973, was a cover of Buddy Holly's Not Fade Away, a live favourite, with an original called You Can't Fight It on the flip side. It reached number eighty eight on the Canadian chart, and around the same time Rush opened for the New York Dolls in Toronto. The debut album was first cut overnight at Eastern Sound, in cheap dead time after gigs, but the band thought the mixes sounded weak and were heartbroken. Terry Brown, co owner of Toronto Sound Studios, was brought in to remix it and record new songs, including Finding My Way, which Lee came to see as the song that saved the record.[1] [2] [3]

Rutsey had been the band's main lyricist, and he was meant to write the words for the album. At the last moment he lost his nerve, skipped the vocal session, and later said he had torn up everything he had written. Lee had to write the lyrics in a hurry, working from lines he had been improvising on stage. Rutsey later said he had been confused about what he really wanted, and the episode widened a rift that was already growing over musical direction. The album, simply called Rush, came out on Moon on the eighteenth of March 1974, after a delay caused by a vinyl shortage. Only three thousand five hundred copies were pressed, and they sold out quickly.[1] [2] [3]

Then came Cleveland. Donna Halper, music director at the rock station WMMS, got a copy of the album from a contact in Canada and put its closing track, Working Man, on the air. In a factory town, the blue collar song hit hard, and listeners phoned in asking where to buy it. Import copies sold out in local shops. Danniels booked Rush into Cleveland's Allen Theatre in June 1974, opening for ZZ Top, one of their very first American shows. The buzz reached Cliff Burnstein at Mercury Records, who signed them within a day to a two album deal worth two hundred thousand dollars. Every later pressing of the debut thanks Halper for getting the ball rolling.[1] [2] [3] [4]

But the man who had pushed the band hardest for six years was on his way out. Rutsey was a Type 1 diabetic who needed frequent hospital care, and in late 1973 illness had already forced him to miss shows. He also preferred straightforward rock, while Lee and Lifeson were falling for Yes and Pink Floyd. He played his last show with Rush on the twenty fifth of July 1974, at Centennial Hall in London, Ontario. Lee said later they felt guilty at first, but that nobody was happy and it had to happen. Rutsey himself said in a rare interview that he left because he no longer liked the band's music. Rush now had a record deal, an American tour weeks away, and no drummer.[1] [2] [3]

The Professor arrives

Neil Peart was born on the twelfth of September 1952 in Hamilton, Ontario, and grew up in Port Dalhousie, near St. Catharines. He was bright enough to skip two grades, and he got his first real drum kit on his fourteenth birthday, after proving he would stick with a practice pad for a year. Keith Moon was his hero. At about ten he nearly drowned in Lake Ontario when older boys kept him off a raft, and he later linked that terror to his lifelong fear of being trapped in crowds. At eighteen he went to London to make it as a drummer, but ended up selling jewellery on Carnaby Street. After eighteen frustrating months he came home and sold tractor parts at his father's dealership.[1] [2] [3]

In the summer of 1974 a mutual acquaintance talked Peart into auditioning for Rush. He was the fourth of five drummers they tried. He turned up in a battered Ford Pinto with his drums stowed in garbage bags, and Lifeson's first thought was that he was not nearly cool enough. Then he started playing, and Lifeson said he sounded like Keith Moon and John Bonham at the same time. Lee was hooked by his triplets, and the two bonded over books. Peart officially joined on the twenty ninth of July 1974, Geddy's twenty first birthday. On the fourteenth of August he played his first show with them, at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh, opening for Uriah Heep and Manfred Mann's Earth Band before more than eleven thousand people.[1] [2] [3]

Peart brought something the others did not want, a love of words. He read constantly, and Lee and Lifeson happily handed him the job of lyricist. His first album with the band, Fly by Night, was recorded in about five days at the end of December 1974 and released on the fourteenth of February 1975. It swung between plain hard rock and the eight part fantasy By Tor and the Snow Dog, a story that began as a joke about two dogs owned by Ray Danniels. The title song came out of Peart's lonely move to London. That year Rush opened for Kiss and Aerosmith and won the Juno Award for most promising group. Their label, though, had really wanted another version of the first album.[1] [2] [3] [4]

The band went straight back to Toronto Sound in July 1975 and made Caress of Steel, their most ambitious record yet, built around two long multi part pieces, The Necromancer and the side long Fountain of Lamneth. They were proud of it. Almost nobody else was. Sales were poor, crowds shrank, and they nicknamed the tour the Down the Tubes Tour, while struggling to pay themselves a hundred and twenty five dollars a week. Mercury considered dropping them, and Peart saw label forecasts for the coming year that left Rush out. Danniels flew to Chicago and talked the label into one more album. Lifeson later said it was the only time he came close to giving up.[1] [2] [3]

That last chance became Twenty One Twelve, released in March 1976. The label wanted something commercial. Instead, the whole first side was a twenty minute science fiction suite about a future where music is outlawed, and a man who finds a guitar and is crushed by the priests who rule. Peart credited the novelist Ayn Rand in the sleeve notes, partly to head off legal trouble over similarities with her work. It became their breakthrough, reached number five in Canada, and remains their second biggest seller. Its sleeve introduced the Starman, a naked man facing a red star, soon the band's emblem. That June, three sold out nights at Toronto's Massey Hall were taped for the double live album All the World's a Stage, which the band called the end of chapter one.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Wales, epics and Moving Pictures

Success brought a backlash. In the British paper NME, the writer Barry Miles linked the Rand credit to fascism, and the charge hurt Lee in particular, as the son of Holocaust survivors. He defended Twenty One Twelve as a story against totalitarianism. Peart later said the English press called them junior fascists, and that it came as a total shock. The band pushed on. In May 1977 Danniels and Vic Wilson set up a new independent Toronto label, so that Rush would have more control over their records at home, and it released A Farewell to Kings that August. The album was made in about three weeks at Rockfield Studios in rural Wales, chosen for its isolation and because the band loved British music.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

A Farewell to Kings stretched the trio in every direction. Peart added orchestra bells, tubular bells and chimes to his kit. Lee took up a double neck bass and a Minimoog, Lifeson added bass pedal synthesizers, and they refused to hire a fourth member, which Peart called the easy way out. The eleven minute Xanadu, inspired by Coleridge's poem Kubla Khan, was recorded in one complete take, which stunned the studio engineer, and the birdsong on the album was captured outside the building. The short song Closer to the Heart, with its first verse by the band's friend Peter Talbot, became their first British hit early in 1978. The tour ran to about a hundred and forty dates, and the band called it the Drive Till You Die Tour.[1] [2] [3]

They returned to Rockfield in 1978 for Hemispheres, and it nearly broke them. They arrived with almost nothing written, worked it out in a rented farmhouse, and recorded through June and July, the longest they had yet spent on a record. Because the songs had been written without testing the vocals, Lee discovered at the London vocal sessions that everything sat in brutally high keys, and he had to take walks to calm down. The instrumental La Villa Strangiato, inspired by Lifeson's nightmares, took so many attempts that Lee said it took longer to record than the whole Fly by Night album, and it was finally stitched together from several takes. The band took six weeks off afterwards just to recover.[1] [2]

Hemispheres left them drained, and they decided to stop writing side long epics. In 1979 they gathered at a farm near Flesherton, Ontario, where Lifeson cooked breakfast, Lee and Lifeson wrote music, and Peart wrote lyrics in a nearby cottage. The songs got shorter and sharper, with hints of reggae and new wave. Permanent Waves, recorded at Le Studio in Morin Heights, Quebec, came out on the fourteenth of January 1980. The Spirit of Radio, inspired by the free form Toronto area station CFNY and its slogan, became their biggest British hit at number thirteen, and the album reached number four in America. Its tour was the first that ever made them a profit. They sent the album's Canadian gold record to Terry Fox, shortly after he had to abandon his Marathon of Hope.[1] [2] [3]

Instead of the planned live album, the band went straight back to work, a change Lifeson ranked as their most important decision after Twenty One Twelve. They wrote at Ronnie Hawkins' estate on Stoney Lake, Ontario, where Lifeson was going through a model aeroplane phase and crashed one into the roof of a truck. Tom Sawyer grew from a poem by Pye Dubois, lyricist of the Toronto band Max Webster, which Peart reshaped. Moving Pictures, released on the twelfth of February 1981, became their biggest record, number one in Canada, number three in America and Britain, and eventually five times platinum in the United States. Tom Sawyer and Limelight became their signature songs, and the instrumental YYZ earned a Grammy nomination.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Synthesizers and new producers

Fame did not sit well with Peart. Limelight was his account of how uneasy he felt with fans and autograph hunters, and he even wrote to Roger Waters to thank him for capturing that alienation on Pink Floyd's The Wall. A second double live album, Exit Stage Left, followed in October 1981, named after a catchphrase of the cartoon lion Snagglepuss. While mixing it at Le Studio, the band wrote Subdivisions, and the next album, Signals, released in September 1982, pushed Lee's synthesizers to the front. Its single New World Man, written and recorded in two days to fill space on the record, became their only American top forty hit, at number twenty one, and went to number one in Canada.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Signals also cost them their producer. Lifeson felt his guitar had been buried, and at one point he pushed his fader up during mixing, only for Terry Brown to pull it back down. In March 1983, at a meeting in Miami, the band told Brown, their producer since 1974, that they wanted to try someone new. Lee later called him a mentor and a father figure. Finding a replacement was hard. Steve Lillywhite, known for his work with U2, agreed and then pulled out two weeks before rehearsals to produce Simple Minds, which left Lee furious. They finally made Grace Under Pressure with Peter Henderson, over four gruelling months at Le Studio, sometimes fourteen hours a day, and released it in April 1984.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Grace Under Pressure was a dark record. Its title came from Ernest Hemingway's definition of courage. Afterimage mourned Robbie Whelan, a young assistant at Le Studio who had been killed in a car accident, and the album was dedicated to him. Red Sector A imagined life inside a prison camp, and was inspired in part by the memories of Lee's mother, a survivor of Bergen Belsen. On stage, Peart now added Simmons electronic drums and a riser that rotated to swap his acoustic and electronic kits. The back cover portrait was taken by the celebrated photographer Yousuf Karsh, and the video for The Enemy Within was the first ever played on Canada's new music channel, MuchMusic, in August 1984.[1] [2] [3]

For the next two albums Rush worked with Peter Collins, an English pop producer they nicknamed Mister Big. Power Windows, released in October 1985, was recorded in five studios, from The Manor in Oxfordshire to AIR on the Caribbean island of Montserrat, with a thirty piece string section at Abbey Road and a choir. Hold Your Fire followed in September 1987, with Aimee Mann of Til Tuesday singing on Time Stand Still. It became their first studio album since Caress of Steel to miss platinum in America, and Lee later called its track Tai Shan an error. After a third live album, A Show of Hands, the band left Mercury in 1989, feeling the relationship had gone stale, and signed with Atlantic.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Back to guitars

Rush entered the nineties by turning the synthesizers down. After a six month break, their first real free time in fifteen years, they made Presto with the English producer Rupert Hine, who laughed while hearing their demos, which puzzled them until they realised it was pleasure. Released in November 1989, it was their first album for Atlantic. Roll the Bones followed in September 1991 and was a real comeback, reaching number three in America, their best showing since Moving Pictures. Its title track even featured Lee in a rap section, his voice lowered with effects. The instrumental Where's My Thing was nominated for a Grammy, but lost to Cliffs of Dover by Eric Johnson, who had opened for Rush on that very tour.[1] [2]

The guitar came fully back on Counterparts in 1993, and the process was tense. Lifeson had asked Lee again and again to leave the keyboards out, and when Lee brought them to the writing sessions anyway, Lee said the atmosphere became volatile. Lifeson said they went through bigger emotional ups and downs than on any album before. It still debuted at number two in America, kept from the top only by Pearl Jam's Vs. Peart's lyrics included Nobody's Hero, inspired by a gay friend from his London years who later died of AIDS, a man Peart credited with keeping him from ever becoming homophobic. After a short North American tour the band took a long break, and Lee stayed home for the first year of his daughter's life.[1] [2]

During that break Peart did something remarkable for a man already hailed as one of rock's greatest drummers. While producing a Buddy Rich tribute album, Burning for Buddy, in 1994, he noticed how much Steve Smith of Journey had improved, and learned that Smith studied with the jazz teacher Freddie Gruber. So at forty two, Peart became Gruber's pupil and rebuilt his technique, switching for a time to the traditional jazz grip. Lifeson made his first solo album, Victor, released in 1996. The band regrouped for Test for Echo that September, and in October began their first tour with no opening act, billed as An Evening with Rush, with shows close to three hours long. The final date came in July 1997.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Tragedy and the healing road

On the tenth of August 1997, just weeks after the tour ended, Peart and his common law wife, Jackie Taylor, helped their nineteen year old daughter Selena pack her car to drive to Toronto for her second year of university. She never arrived. She was killed in a single car crash on Highway 401 near Brighton, Ontario, and a police officer brought the news to their door. Selena was their only child. At her funeral, by the most common account, Peart told Lee and Lifeson to consider him retired, and they assumed Rush was finished. Jackie was shattered, and within months she was diagnosed with cancer. She died on the twentieth of June 1998, and was buried next to her daughter.[1] [2] [3]

Peart said Jackie died of a broken heart. With almost nothing left, he got on his BMW motorcycle and rode. Over more than a year he covered about eighty eight thousand kilometres, from his home in Quebec up toward Alaska, then down through the United States and Mexico to Belize. At times, he later admitted, he sought refuge in drugs and alcohol. In Los Angeles, the band's photographer Andrew MacNaughtan introduced him to Matt Stone, one of the creators of South Park, who remembered being told not to mention girls or children, and found a man who was simply very sad. Peart wrote the journey up in the book Ghost Rider, Travels on the Healing Road, published in 2002, and it became one of his publisher's best sellers.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Back in Toronto, Lee and Lifeson did not know whether they still had a band. They put together a triple live album, Different Stages, dedicated to Selena and Jackie. Lifeson did not pick up a guitar for at least a year. Lee buried himself in a solo album, My Favourite Headache, recorded partly in Seattle with Matt Cameron of Soundgarden on drums, and was moved when local musicians dropped by to pay their respects. Then Peart's life turned again. Through Andrew MacNaughtan he met the photographer Carrie Nuttall, and they married on the ninth of September 2000. Early in 2001 he told his bandmates he was ready to come back to work.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The three met at Reaction Studios in Toronto on the ninth of January 2001 and, for the first three weeks, barely played a note. They talked instead, making sure everyone was really ready. The album that followed, Vapor Trails, took about fourteen months, the longest they had ever spent on a record, and for the first time since Caress of Steel there were no keyboards at all, just layers of guitar, bass and drums. Released in May 2002, it reached number six in America, although its crushed and overly loud mastering drew complaints from fans and from the band, and it was fully remixed in 2013. The tour that followed was their first in six years, and in Sao Paulo, Brazil, sixty thousand people came, the biggest headlining crowd of their career.[1] [2]

Rush, the second life

The Vapor Trails tour ended on the twenty third of November 2002 at the Maracana stadium in Rio de Janeiro, filmed for the live release Rush in Rio. A year later came trouble. On New Year's Eve 2003, at the Ritz Carlton hotel in Naples, Florida, sheriff's deputies were removing Lifeson's son Justin from a black tie party. Lifeson went to his aid, and in the struggle that followed both father and son were hit repeatedly with Tasers, and Lifeson's nose was broken. He was accused of pushing a deputy down a stairwell and charged with felony battery on an officer. In 2005 he and his son pleaded no contest to a lesser misdemeanour of resisting arrest without violence, and each received a year of probation.[1] [2] [3]

The family then sued the hotel and the deputies. A federal judge cleared the deputies in 2007, finding they had not used excessive force, but an appeals court later ruled that hotel staff had exaggerated the situation to police, and the remaining claims against the Ritz Carlton were settled confidentially in 2008. By then Rush were enjoying a second life. In July 2003 they played a huge benefit in Toronto, nicknamed SARS Stock, to lift the city after the SARS outbreak, in front of more than half a million people. For their thirtieth anniversary in 2004 they recorded Feedback, an EP of songs by their sixties heroes, from Cream to the Who and the Yardbirds, and toured the world again.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Lee called this period Rush two point oh. After nearly losing everything, the band became looser and started saying yes to things they would once have refused, which Lee compared to George Costanza doing the opposite of his instincts. Snakes and Arrows, co produced by the young American fan Nick Raskulinecz and released in May 2007, debuted at number three in America, with Peart's lyrics wrestling with faith and religion. The tour that followed grossed nearly sixty five million dollars, their most successful yet. On stage, Lee replaced his amplifiers with rotisserie chicken ovens, complete with an attendant in a chef's hat. In July 2008 they played Tom Sawyer on The Colbert Report, their first American television appearance in more than thirty years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

In May 2008 the band's past caught up with them. John Rutsey died in his sleep on the eleventh of May, aged fifty five, of an apparent heart attack linked to his lifelong diabetes. After leaving Rush he had tried screenwriting, then took up bodybuilding, sometimes working out with Lifeson at a Toronto gym. Lee and Lifeson remembered his great sense of humour and his impeccable timing. In 2009 Rush appeared as themselves in the comedy I Love You, Man, in which characters played by Paul Rudd and Jason Segel bond over the band. The next year the documentary Beyond the Lighted Stage won the audience award at the Tribeca Film Festival, with taped comments from Rutsey, and Rush received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the Time Machine Tour of 2010 and 2011 they played Moving Pictures in full for the first time. Then came Clockwork Angels, released in June 2012, their only true concept album from start to finish, a steampunk tale that Peart also turned into a novel with the science fiction writer Kevin J. Anderson. It debuted at number one in Canada and number two in America. On the eighteenth of April 2013, after years of fan campaigns, Rush were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame by Dave Grohl and Taylor Hawkins of the Foo Fighters. Peart joked that they had spent years saying it was no big deal, and it turned out it kind of was. Lifeson then gave a speech made entirely of the words blah blah blah.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6]

The last bow and the loss

By 2015 their bodies were complaining. Lifeson had psoriatic arthritis and Peart had chronic tendinitis. Peart, father of a young daughter, Olivia, born in 2009, did not want to tour at all, and agreed mainly because Lifeson feared it might be his last chance. The R Forty tour marked forty years since Peart joined, and ran through their catalogue in reverse order. Peart still rode his motorcycle hundreds of miles between shows, developed a painful foot infection, and sometimes needed a golf cart to reach the stage, yet he played three hour sets at full intensity. On the first of August 2015, at the Forum in Los Angeles, he stepped out from behind his kit to hug his bandmates at the front of the stage, something he had never done in forty years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Nobody said it aloud, but it was the end. In December 2015 Peart told Drumhead magazine that his daughter introduced him at school as a retired drummer, and that, like an athlete, he was taking himself out of the game. Lee insisted he was only talking about touring. But in January 2018 Lifeson told The Globe and Mail they had no plans to tour or record again, and that after forty one years it was enough. What almost nobody knew was why Peart had gone quiet. In June 2016 he found he could not finish the Sunday crossword, and soon he was stumbling over words. That August he was diagnosed with glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer, and went into surgery.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Peart kept the illness secret, and Lee and Lifeson spent years deflecting questions. He dreaded fans gathering outside his house. He lived far longer than the usual prognosis, going to his garage office every weekday, throwing himself one last birthday party in 2019, and listening back to Rush records with a pride that surprised his friends. Lee and Lifeson flew to see him often, and every goodbye was a giant hug, because they never knew if it was the last. Neil Peart died in Santa Monica, California, on the seventh of January 2020, aged sixty seven, after a three and a half year fight. The band announced it three days later, calling him their friend and soul brother, and asked fans to give to cancer research in his name.[1] [2] [3] [4]

For a long time Lee and Lifeson could hardly face their instruments. In 2021 Lee told Rolling Stone that Rush was over, out of respect for what the three of them had built. Slowly the music crept back. In August 2022 they played Closer to the Heart at South Park's twenty fifth anniversary concert at Red Rocks, with Matt Stone on drums. That September, at the tribute concerts for the late Foo Fighters drummer Taylor Hawkins in London and Los Angeles, they played Rush songs with Dave Grohl, Chad Smith and Danny Carey behind the kit. Lifeson formed a new band, Envy of None, and in November 2023 Lee published his memoir, My Effin' Life.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Fifty Something

For a while Lifeson's health seemed to settle the question. In 2023 he had surgery for digestive problems that left him with gastroparesis, and in 2024 he said he was proud that Rush was over when it was over. But he and Lee kept jamming Rush songs in Lee's home studio, just for fun, and found themselves laughing so hard that, as Lee put it, playing the songs seemed to chase away the dark clouds. After a trip together to a health spa in Austria, Lifeson came home fired up. In March 2025 the band released Rush Fifty, an anthology running from their 1973 debut single to the last song the classic trio ever played together.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

On the sixth of October 2025, at an invitation only evening at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, introduced by Donna Halper herself, Lee dropped the news almost casually. He said he thought they should tour next year. At first the crowd took it as a joke. Rush would return in 2026 on the Fifty Something tour with a new drummer, Anika Nilles, a German virtuoso who had played with Jeff Beck. Lee's bass technician had raved about her, and the band secretly brought her to Toronto for what Lee called an experiment. Peart's widow Carrie and daughter Olivia gave the tour their blessing, and demand was so strong that dates kept being added.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

The tour opened on the seventh of June 2026 at the Kia Forum in Los Angeles, the same building where Rush had played their final show with Peart. Keyboard player Loren Gold, a longtime member of the Who's touring band, made them a four piece on stage. Peart was woven through every night, in old footage, recordings of his voice and, of course, his songs, and Aimee Mann joined Lee for Time Stand Still, which she had never sung live with them before. On the second night they played the complete Twenty One Twelve suite for the first time in twenty nine years. Critics noted that Lee's voice, retrained with coaching, sounded stronger than it had in years.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

As of 2026, the tour is set to run across North America through December before heading to South America and Europe in 2027, the band's first shows there in many years. Whatever comes next, Rush's place is secure. They have sold more than forty million albums worldwide, and only the Beatles and the Rolling Stones rank ahead of them for consecutive gold or platinum studio albums by a rock band in America. Their early crowds were almost all young men, and in later years the band noticed more and more women out front. Musicians from Metallica and Tool to the Foo Fighters name them as an influence, and in 1996 they became the first rock band honoured as a group with the Order of Canada.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7]

The people around Rush

Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson met as schoolboys in suburban Toronto and are the only two musicians on every Rush album. Lifeson went along with pushing Lee out in 1969, something he only admitted to Lee half a century later. They clashed hard over keyboards in the early nineties, but the friendship outlasted the band. Lee calls Lifeson by his old nickname, Lerxst, and his best friend, and their private jam sessions after Peart's death led to the 2025 reunion.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Geddy Lee and Neil Peart. Lee knew from Peart's first audition that he had found the drummer of his dreams, and for four decades he was the voice for Peart's words. He described singing them as both a pleasure and a hard job, since he did not always agree with them. Over time Lee became Peart's trusted editor and sounding board, and Peart would rewrite lines on the spot beside him in the control room. Lee said Peart was the most strong willed of the three at first.[1] [2]

Neil Peart and Jackie Taylor. Peart knew Jackie Taylor's family before he joined Rush, having worked at a local record store with her brothers. They were together for twenty three years as common law partners, and their only child, Selena, was nineteen when she was killed in a car crash in August 1997. Jackie died of cancer the following June. Peart's grief over both losses is the heart of his memoir Ghost Rider.[1] [2] [3]

Neil Peart and Carrie Nuttall. Photographer Carrie Nuttall met Peart in Los Angeles through Rush's longtime photographer Andrew MacNaughtan, while he was still grieving. They married on the ninth of September 2000, and their daughter Olivia was born in 2009. Nuttall cared for him through his illness, later allowed Kevin J. Anderson to finish their last novel together, and with Olivia gave her blessing to the band's 2026 reunion tour.[1] [2] [3]

Rush and Ray Danniels. Ray Danniels, a young Toronto hustler, became Rush's manager in 1969 and stayed for decades. He launched Moon Records to release their first single and album, and later set up an independent Toronto label with Vic Wilson. In 1976 he flew to Chicago and persuaded Mercury to allow one more album, which became Twenty One Twelve. He told Rolling Stone that managing Peart was always a matter of coaxing, until Peart refused any more touring in 2015.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rush and Terry Brown. English engineer Terry Brown, co owner of Toronto Sound Studios, rescued Rush's debut in 1973 and co produced every album from Fly by Night to Signals. The band called him Broon and named a short guitar piece on Exit Stage Left after him. As synthesizers took over, the partnership frayed, and in March 1983 they told him in Miami they wanted someone new. Lee later described him as a mentor and a father figure.[1] [2] [3] [4] [5]

Rush and Donna Halper. Cleveland DJ and music director Donna Halper played Working Man on WMMS in 1974 and sparked the American demand that won Rush their Mercury deal. The band thanked her on every later pressing of the debut. She became a media historian and professor, spoke when Rush received their Hollywood star in 2010, and in 2025 introduced Lee and Lifeson on the night they announced the reunion.[1] [2] [3]

Rush and John Rutsey. John Rutsey was Lifeson's childhood friend and the band's first drummer, the one who insisted on regular practice and at first steered them toward glam rock outfits. He also pushed Lee out in 1969, then begged him back. After leaving in 1974 he kept in occasional touch, working out with Lifeson at a gym, and Lee revealed that Rutsey came to his 1976 wedding, the only time he ever met Neil Peart.[1] [2]

Rush and Hugh Syme. Hugh Syme designed every Rush cover from Caress of Steel onward, including the Starman on Twenty One Twelve and the triple pun of Moving Pictures. He also played on their records, adding synthesizer and Mellotron to Twenty One Twelve, piano to Different Strings and the main riff of Witch Hunt, and he is the man waving in the background of the Permanent Waves cover.[1] [2] [3] [4]

Neil Peart and Kevin J. Anderson. Science fiction writer Kevin J. Anderson, a longtime friend, turned the story of Clockwork Angels into a novel in 2012, and it reached the New York Times best seller list. The two wrote a sequel, Clockwork Lives, and were working on a third book when Peart died. With Carrie Nuttall's blessing, Anderson finished Clockwork Destiny, published in 2022, and he spoke at Peart's memorial.[1] [2] [3]

Rush and Paul Rudd and Jason Segel. Director John Hamburg built his 2009 comedy I Love You, Man around two men, played by Paul Rudd and Jason Segel, who bond over Rush. The band's instinct was to say no, but they agreed to appear. Rudd and Segel later returned in character in video segments on the Time Machine, R Forty and Fifty Something tours, and Rudd conducted the string section during YYZ at the final Clockwork Angels show.[1] [2]

Rare facts about Rush

• Rush earned twenty five Canadian dollars for their very first gig, in a church basement youth centre in 1968. The trio played the Coff Inn, a drop in centre under St. Theodore of Canterbury Anglican Church in Willowdale, that September. They had no name when the show was booked.[1]
• Geddy Lee spent his childhood believing his middle name was Lorne. His school registered his name incorrectly, so he grew up thinking so. Only as a teenager, seeing his birth certificate, did he learn his middle name was Lee, which became his stage surname.[1]
• Geddy Lee's highest charting American single is not a Rush song but a comedy record with Bob and Doug McKenzie. Take Off, from the 1981 Great White North album, reached number sixteen on the Hot 100. Rick Moranis, who played Bob, had been Lee's classmate for years, and Lee recorded it in about fifteen minutes wearing a toque.[1] [2]
• Alex Lifeson's stage name is a translation of his Serbian surname, Zivojinovic, meaning son of life. Born Aleksandar Zivojinovic in Fernie, British Columbia, to Serbian immigrants, he adopted Lifeson as a literal English rendering of his family name.[1]
• A teenage row between Alex Lifeson and his parents about quitting school was filmed for a 1973 documentary. The Canadian film Come On Children followed ten struggling adolescents and caught Lifeson arguing for a music career. The footage later reappeared in the Rush documentaries Beyond the Lighted Stage and Time Stand Still.[1]
• Before Rush, Neil Peart sold jewellery on London's Carnaby Street. At eighteen he moved to London to become a drummer, but supported himself at a shop called The Great Frog. After eighteen months he gave up, went home, and sold tractor parts.[1]
• Neil Peart was the fourth of five drummers Rush auditioned in 1974. Lee and Lifeson were so impressed that they felt embarrassed for the fifth candidate, who had carefully written out charts of their songs. Peart joined on Geddy Lee's twenty first birthday.[1]
• Geddy Lee barely remembers Peart's first show with Rush, thanks to free Southern Comfort. Opening for Uriah Heep in Pittsburgh in August 1974, before more than eleven thousand people, Lee admitted he was drunk, and said that by the time he came to his senses the set was over.[1]
• By Tor and the Snow Dog was named after two dogs belonging to manager Ray Danniels. The band's lighting man, Howard Ungerleider, nicknamed the dogs Biter and Snow Dog. Lee called the song a joke that got out of control, and Peart turned it into an eight part fantasy.[1] [2]
• On the original vinyl of Fly by Night, the chimes at the end of By Tor and the Snow Dog can play forever. The chimes run into a locked groove, so on a manual turntable the sound repeats until someone lifts the needle.[1]
• The cover of Caress of Steel was meant to be silver, but a printing error made it gold. The mistake was never corrected. It was also the first Rush sleeve by Hugh Syme, who designed every cover after it.[1]
• The Caress of Steel song I Think I'm Going Bald was written about Kim Mitchell of Max Webster. Mitchell was guitarist and singer of the Toronto band Max Webster, which shared management and tours with Rush.[1]
• The Twenty One Twelve overture borrows a short passage from Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture. The opening soundscape was created by cover artist Hugh Syme on an ARP Odyssey synthesizer, before the band crashes in with a nod to Tchaikovsky.[1]
• The Twenty One Twelve track The Twilight Zone was written and recorded in a single day. The band needed one more song for side two and were big fans of the television series, so they based it on stories by its host, Rod Serling.[1]
• The brain on the Hemispheres cover was real, loaned by the University of Toronto. Hugh Syme borrowed it from the medical faculty's Department of Anatomy to photograph. The naked figure on the right was a dancer from the Toronto Ballet School.[1]
• Parts of La Villa Strangiato borrow from a 1937 jazz piece by Raymond Scott. The sections called Monsters and its reprise are taken from Scott's instrumental Powerhouse. The piece has twelve sections and was Rush's first recorded instrumental.[1]
• Xanadu, eleven minutes long, was recorded in one uninterrupted take. At Rockfield in Wales the band ran it once to set microphone levels, then played it straight through. That second take is the album version, and the engineer, Pat Moran, was stunned.[1]
• Rush sent their Permanent Waves gold record to Terry Fox. In September 1980 the band gave the Canadian gold disc to Fox, shortly after he had been forced to abandon his Marathon of Hope run across Canada.[1]
• The storm behind the model on Permanent Waves is a real photo of Hurricane Carla hitting Galveston, Texas, in 1961. The background shot by Flip Schulke shows the Galveston Seawall. Model Paula Turnbull posed in front of a fan, and the man waving in the distance is designer Hugh Syme.[1]
• The angry mob at the start of Witch Hunt is the band and studio staff shouting in a freezing driveway. Recorded outside Le Studio in sub zero weather, helped along by a bottle of Scotch, the voices were overdubbed again and again. Lifeson says a rude remark of his about football can still be heard.[1] [2]
• Neil Peart recorded Moving Pictures with a microphone taped to his chest. The band experimented with a pressure zone microphone strapped to him while he played, to capture the room's ambience. He can be seen wearing it in the Vital Signs video.[1]
• Early CD pressings of Moving Pictures were missing the very first beat of Tom Sawyer. The error on the 1984 compact disc was fixed on later pressings.[1]
• In Brazil, Tom Sawyer was used as the theme for the dubbed TV series MacGyver. Lifeson said the band could not understand why they were so popular in Brazil until they learned the local version of MacGyver had swapped in Tom Sawyer as its music.[1]
• The Signals song Countdown was inspired by watching the first Space Shuttle launch from a VIP area. Rush were invited to the launch of Columbia in April 1981, and the song includes samples of real radio communications from before and during the flight.[1]
• The back cover of Signals shows a fictional school named after baseball player Warren Cromartie. The mock blueprint of a subdivision includes Warren Cromartie Secondary School, and the Montreal Expos outfielder and his team are thanked in the liner notes.[1]
• Getting the Signals dalmatian to sniff the fire hydrant took dog biscuits hidden underneath. Photographer Deborah Samuel shot it on her studio roof, on a patch of artificial turf, with a hydrant rented from Toronto and repainted red.[1]
• Presto's Anagram for Mongo is named after a character in Blazing Saddles, and every line plays with anagrams. Each line contains words formed from the letters of other words in the same line. Lifeson admitted it did not really mean anything, it was just fun.[1]
• Where's My Thing is subtitled Part Four of the Gangster of Boats Trilogy. Lee and Lifeson had threatened to name an album Gangster of Boats if Peart ever ran out of title ideas, and it was also a joke about a trilogy having a fourth part.[1]
• The Snakes and Arrows instrumental Malignant Narcissism was named after a line in the film Team America. The movie's creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, were Rush fans and were delighted. The track was recorded in a single day on a stripped down drum kit.[1]
• The clock on the Clockwork Angels cover reads nine twelve, which is twenty one twelve in twenty four hour time. It is a nod to the album Twenty One Twelve, and coincidentally, Neil Peart's birthday was the twelfth of September, nine twelve.[1]
• Geddy Lee's favourite bass, a 1972 Fender Jazz, came from a pawn shop in Kalamazoo, Michigan. He bought it in 1978, and in 1998 Fender released a signature model recreating it.[1]
• There are asteroids named after Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson. Asteroid 12272 Geddylee was named in 1990, and main belt asteroid 19155 Lifeson was named in 2007.[1] [2]
• An extinct genus of frogfish, Neilpeartia, is named after Neil Peart. It was described in 2020. In 2017 the band members also had three new microbe species named in their honour.[1] [2]
• Before a 1979 Dutch festival, Lifeson hurt a finger so badly that Rush cancelled shows in Germany. Lee says nobody really knows how it happened. At the same Pinkpop festival, keyboard tech Jack Secret hopped a stage wall, fell down concrete stairs and broke both feet, then helped run the show from the side of the stage.[1]
• Geddy Lee sang O Canada at the 1993 Major League Baseball All Star Game in Baltimore. A devoted baseball fan, Lee also threw the first pitch at the Toronto Blue Jays' 2013 opener.[1]
• In 2020, a cardboard cutout of Geddy Lee sat behind home plate at the Blue Jays' games in Buffalo. When the pandemic forced the team out of Toronto, the cutout replaced Lee, a familiar face with his scorecard in the seats behind home plate.[1]
• Rush wanted Snagglepuss's tail on the cover of Exit Stage Left, but the legal costs killed the idea. The album's title came from the cartoon lion's catchphrase, and the band had hoped to show just his tail vanishing, until the rights holders demanded too much.[1]
• A would be manager once asked the teenage band to make stoned eyes for a photo shoot. The same man tried to make them the house band at a Yonge Street strip club, and they walked out. Lee says the phrase kept cracking him and Lifeson up at photo shoots for decades.[1]
• Neil Peart entered the Modern Drummer Hall of Fame at thirty, the youngest person ever so honoured. He was inducted in 1983 through the magazine's readers poll.[1]
• Original Rush bassist Jeff Jones later had a hit with Put Your Hand in the Hand. After leaving Rush he joined the band Ocean at seventeen and toured the world, and later played in Red Rider.[1]

Disputed stories

These stories are told often but the accounts don't agree. Here are the versions and who says what.