Fans of the Canadian rock band Rush have reason to rejoice. On Oct. 6, original members Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson announced that the band will head back out on the road next year for the “Fifty Something” tour.
This will be the first time in 11 years that Lee and Lifeson have toured together. “Alex and I have done some serious soul-searching and come to the conclusion that we f–ing miss it,” Lee said in the announcement.
The reunion shows, described as celebrations of the band’s legacy of over 50 years of music, will pay homage to late drummer and lyricist Neil Peart, who died from brain cancer five years ago.
Playing percussion in Peart’s absence for the 2026 tour will be Anika Nilles, a German drummer and composer.
The Willowdale-born band originally scheduled two Toronto shows at the Scotiabank Arena on Aug. 7 and 9, but only a few days later, Rush said it would play two extra nights in the band’s birthplace, on Aug. 11 and 13. All four of these dates are now sold out.
With the majority of the first batch of cities completely sold out, the Rock and Roll Hall of Famers have added 17 more cities to the tour, including Montreal, Vancouver and Edmonton, Alta. Their musical voyage begins in Los Angeles on June 7 and will now close in Vancouver on Dec. 15. The Artist presale for the new city stops will begin on Oct. 27.
While fans gear up for Rush’s next act, here’s a walk down memory lane to reminisce about what many called the band’s “worst” album.
The 1975 album that made Rush think it was the end
In December of 2023, nearly five decades, 23 tours and 17 studio albums after the fact, Geddy Lee sat comfortably in an armchair on stage at Massey Hall across from his lifelong friend and Rush bandmate, Alex Lifeson, reminiscing on the body of work they’d created together with the late drummer Neil Peart.
Leaning back and crossing his right leg over his left, Lee posed a question.
“Do you remember making ‘Caress of Steel?’” he asked.
“When you say remember…,” Lifeson responded, to scattered laughter from the crowd and Lee himself.
“Do you remember how much hash oil we smoked making ‘Caress of Steel?’” Lee specified.
“Yeah, that was the thing then…,” Lifeson admitted.
Lee’s question worked on two levels.
He was asking, jokingly, whether the drug-fueled haze allowed Lifeson to recall any specifics, but also whether the guitarist had any particular memories of writing, recording and producing an effort that, to even their most ardent fans, is but a forgettable footnote in a career of progressive, daring excellence.
The album, which turns 50 in September, is one of the most perplexing in the band’s vast and deep catalogue, largely due to its esoteric narratives and expansive, lengthy arrangements. It was critically panned at the time of its release and ushered in an era of profound misery for the band.
It arrived just seven months after the momentum-generating “Fly by Night,” which briefly charted in the U.S. Their 1974 self-titled debut, which garnered modest support in Middle America, allowed the band to tour the U.S.
In his memoir, “My Effin’ Life,” Lee admitted that he worried whether the band would be able to continue following the “Caress the Steel” concerts, subsequently dubbed the “Down the Tubes Tour” — doubt that wasn’t apparent during the recording or touring of their first two albums.
“They actually thought that was the end, after this album came out,” recalled Howard Ungerleider, the band’s longtime tour manager and lighting director who, early on, was their de facto one-man crew.
“Caress of Steel” is not a bad album
The album showcases the ambitious musical scope and epic lyricism for which Rush became well-known, but it’s a clumsy, somewhat juvenile transition.
It features Lee’s fluttering, searing vocals (“Bastille Day”), stirring riffs (the “Bacchus Plateau” section of “The Fountain of Lamneth”), and some of the most technically tasteful drumming this side of Billy Cobham (“The Necromancer”).
Narratively, it tells of revolution and Tolkienesque adventures, mimicking the breadth of prog legends Genesis and Yes while embodying the musical spirit of much harder, rockier bands.
It came up short because they couldn’t find a way to elegantly move the straight-ahead hard rock of their debut (“Working Man,” “In the Mood”) into the stratospheric heights of their later opuses (“Cygnus X-1,” “Xanadu”).
“It plays a lot of different directions that you wonder if they fit together,” said Chris McDonald, dean of Cape Breton University’s School of Arts & Social Sciences and the author of “Rush, Rock Music, and the Middle Class.” “Not so much throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, but it seems they were trying to be reborn as a new band. And they hadn’t quite left behind some of the old (to go) 100 per cent into the new.”
Yet to critics, the album was an all-too-perfect microcosm of everything to hate about Rush.
It was derided as unfocused, meandering and self-gratifying, and its sour reception came as such a shock that Peart, also the band’s lyricist, told Star music critic Peter Goddard in 1977 that the record represented “a crisis” for a band just starting to come into its own.
One particular caustic review in the Kingston Whig-Standard called it “an earful of torture” that was hampered by Lee’s “downright disgusting” voice. (The reviewer didn’t even bother to get the song names correct, mistitling the 12-plus-minute “The Necromancer” as “The Romancer.”)
Behind the cover
The album’s artwork presents as a dusty, mythical and dense affair. The main wizard-like character is accompanied by a slinky serpent on a rocky platform. The lettering is shiny and gold.
But that wasn’t how it began, at least visually.
The cover was originally a much more elegant piece drawn entirely in a stark, rich pencil. Artist Hugh Syme was inspired by both the illusory sketches of M.C. Escher and the epic narratives in Peart’s lyrics, he told the Star.
The decision to change the artwork from smooth to sooty came directly from the record company, not the band, whom Syme said were always respectful and encouraging of his vision.
“More often than not with Rush, especially Neil, I was spoiled rotten,” said Syme, who designed every Rush album cover thereafter, from his studio in New Castle, Ind. “His titles were always very evocative. Even though they were simple, they were pretty potent. I was spoiled rotten by having him tell me, ‘That’s the new title,’ and I go, ‘That’s f—king great, I love it!
“There was no micromanaging from those guys,” Syme added. “They grew to respect and trust what I would come up with.”
The album’s cold reception was especially crushing because of just how much the trio were fond of the five-song, 45-minute record they’d just produced at a nondescript East York studio.
“I was really thrilled with it at the time, and I thought we’d come up with a great record,” producer and engineer Terry Brown told the Star. “Personally, I think it’s aged pretty damn well.”
Brown, whom Lifeson once described as the fourth member of the band, worked with them from “Fly by Night” through their 1982 album “Signals.”
The “Caress of Steel” sessions were fun and lighthearted, he recalled.
Bucking the rock ‘n’ roll stereotype of internal feuding, Rush’s career has long been marked by a distinct lack of personal conflict. By all accounts, the three musicians were always collaborative, brotherly and respectful both on the road and in the studio.
“I mean, you can hear it coming off the record,” Brown noted. “It doesn’t sound like there was a lot of difficulty putting that together, to my ear anyway. And I remember when we were doing it, we had a blast.”
The ensuing tour, on the other hand, was far less sanguine.
With little support from the press or their label, they played smaller gigs to fewer fans, sharing the bill with acts far less glamorous than Aerosmith and Kiss, for whom they opened during the “Fly by Night” tour.
Among the band’s inner circle, it was known as the “Down the Tubes Tour” or, more to the point, the “Corrosive Steel Tour.”
The Rush fan website Power Windows, which has catalogued more than 1,900 of the band’s concerts, even brackets the tour with its pejorative nickname.
“It was a very somber turning point in their career,” Ungerleider said. “Looking forward, they were sure this was it.”
Still, they persisted, and instead of kowtowing to industry pressure and churning out a poppy, single-laden fourth album, they ran headlong in the opposite direction with 1976’s “2112,” which the Star would describe, favourably, as “the kind of rock that assaults every sense.”
Brown said that “Caress of Steel” represented a natural but crucial stepping stone for a band just trying their hand at sprawling, epic narratives drawn from fantasy and sci-fi literature.
“It definitely set the stages for ‘2112,’” Brown said. “There was no way I was going to make a pop record with those guys and talk them into doing a whole bunch of singles. It made absolutely no sense.”
The last laugh
Rush had been — and still is — a punching bag for a certain segment of the critical class, who are quick to dismiss them as self-indulgent, hyperactive poindexters who spend too much time inventing three new time signatures before a 12-minute song’s first chorus, and not enough time cranking out Zeppelin-adjacent radio hits.
Despite Rush’s commercial success — they’ve reportedly sold more than 40 million albums and were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2013 — and their prodigious impact on generations of musicians, the band’s appeal has been considered limited compared to some of their contemporaries.
Their crowds were studious, docile even. As Goddard wrote of Rush’s three-show swing through Maple Leaf Gardens in 1981, “only at a concert by Rush would a crowd follow orders.”
“It’s actually an audience, not a crowd,” he observed. “It’s quieter, more intense.”
For Brown, the band, which stopped touring in 2015, had a near-magical air about them that was bound to enchant others just as it had him: Lee’s voice was gleaming and precise, Lifeson’s nimble guitar stylings blew him away and Peart’s drumming set the standard for the scores of players that came after.
It was just a matter of time before the rest of the world caught on.
“I just had this thing back in the day,” Brown said. “If I love these guys so much, there’s gotta be a few thousand people out there who are going to agree with me.”
Brown eventually found more than a few thousand people who agreed with him, even if not everyone jumped on board for “Caress of Steel.”
Fifty years later, it’s never been clearer, and the band themselves couldn’t be more grateful.
“I’m so happy we have this volume of shared memories,” Lee reflected in front of the rapt Massey Hall audience. “We’re so fortunate.”
With files from Savannah Ridley
