The curtain came down on Rush’s R40 tour at the LA Forum on August 1, 2015. It was a glorious farewell, if a bittersweet one for at least two of the men up there onstage.
“We still felt like we had lots of gas in the tank and we could continue going,” says Alex Lifeson of himself and Geddy Lee. “But there was no extending it or looking beyond it. We just had to accept it, as difficult as that was.”
Except even R40 might not have happened if Neil Peart had had his way. “Neil was done before that,” says Lifeson. “He’d had enough of touring.”
Ironically, it was the guitarist who’d really struggled with being on the road in recent years – he’d been suffering from arthritis and digestive issues for a while. He’d have been well within his rights to call for retirement, but Peart got there first. When talk of what would become the R40 tour first arose, the drummer arranged a band meeting.
“This was just after Al had had surgery, and he wasn’t really recovered from that,” says Lee. “He kind of limped into the restaurant where we were meeting. Neil came in with all this, ‘I don’t want to tour!’ Al said, ‘Well, I don’t know if I have many more tours in me, so I’d like to tour now.’
“That’s the one thing Neil couldn’t say no to, which pissed him off,” Laughing at the memory. “He said he went back to his room that night at the hotel and went, ‘Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck… I can’t say no to that guy!’”
“He always reminded me of it,” says Lifeson sweetly.
When Lee walked offstage at the end of the very last show on the R40 tour, he wasn’t sure Rush were completely finished. “I had hope,” he said. He raises his hand and makes a small gap between his thumb and his finger. “I had that much hope.”
Lifeson has a different memory of the immediate aftermath. “I remember going back to the hotel and there was a bit of a party,” he says. “My family were there, my grandkids were there. After they’d all gone to bed, I went out onto my balcony and sat there by myself and had a smoke, feeling very lonely and so melancholy. I was kind of crestfallen by the end. The future seemed so dark.”
“I can tell you, the flight home was not a happy place,” says Lee. “We were all very, very quiet. I have a photograph that one of our guys took, and you can feel it in that picture.”
Over subsequent months, Lee’s sliver of hope faded. It was clear that Peart wasn’t going to change his mind. “They’d filmed the tour and wanted to put it out, so we still had to talk about details,” says the vocalist-bassist. “But I don’t think our hearts were in it.
“I think, initially, I was a little pissed – a little angry. And then I had an email conversation with Neil. I’d listened to the drum solo he’d picked and wrote to him out of the blue: ‘Dude, it was so fucking good! I’m glad you picked the right one.
“And it brought up this whole conversation about his new life and how happy he was, and it broke that feeling I had completely. ‘What kind of friend are you, thinking about yourself when this guy is so happy now?This is what he wanted and what he needed!’”
He continues: “And then we got the terrible news in September [2016] that Neil was ill. That scrambled everybody. There was no thought of work.”
Lee and Lifeson met up from time to time to have dinner, and visited Peart to offer support. His death on January 7, 2020, understandably hit them hard. The fact that the Covid pandemic was brewing at the same time only compounded things.
“To have gone through the emotional shock, and then to be locked up, it was a pretty weird time,” says Lee. “That’s when I started writing my memoir, and that really got me through the next couple of years. I think Al was well into his Envy Of None project at the time, too.”
With Peart gone and his ex bandmates immersed in their own projects, Lee’s flicker of hope was finally extinguished – until it wasn’t.