Rush Share Regrets Over ‘Incorrect’ Decision to Shorten Their Final Tour
Rush have spoken about their final tour, sharing their regrets that the shows didn’t reach the UK and Europe.
Rush’s R40 Live tour kicked off in Tulsa, OK, in May 2015, and featured 35 shows across the US and Canada, ending in August of that year. These would become the band’s final shows and drummer Neil Peart died of brain cancer in January 2020.
Almost 10 years on, bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson have reflected on the tour in a new interview with Classic Rock magazine, explaining that Peart’s health issues meant that they couldn’t say goodbye to all of their fans.
“I’d pushed really hard to get more gigs so that we could do those extra shows and I was unsuccessful,” Lee said. “I really felt like I let our British and European fans down. It felt to me incorrect that we didn’t do it, but Neil [Peart] was adamant that he would only do 30 shows and that was it.
“That to him was a huge compromise because he didn’t want to do any shows. He didn’t want to do one show.”
“I just kind of felt I owed an explanation to them, the audience,” Lee went on. “It’s part of why I went into the detail I did about Neil’s passing in the book [his 2023 memoir, My ‘Efiin Life], was to let fans in on what went down. That it wasn’t a straight line.
“This is how complicated the whole world of Rush became since August 1 of 2015 until January 7th of 2020 when Neil passed. Those were very unusual, complicated, emotional times. Fans invested their whole being into our band and I thought they deserved a somewhat straight answer about what happened and how their favourite band came to end.”
“There was a point where I think Neil was open to maybe extending the run and adding in a few more shows, but then he got this painful infection in one of his feet,” Lifeson added. “I mean, he could barely walk to the stage at one point. They got him a golf cart to drive him to the stage. And he played a three-hour show, at the intensity he played every single show.
“That was amazing, but I think that was the point where he decided that the tour was only going to go on until that final show in LA.”
It was recently announced that Rhino will be reissuing Rush’s classic albums Presto, Roll The Bones, Counterparts and Test For Echo on vinyl as part of the new Start Your Ear Off campaign.