The one show Rush considered a huge victory: “Finishing on such a high note”
The idea of any rock star making it big should feel like a giant piece of validation. The entire concept of someone making it feels like a pipe dream when slogging it out on small stages, so once they enter the arena, it’s as if all of those years of hard work have finally come full circle, and they can appreciate everything that got them to those massive shows. Although Rush had to go through every major setback you’d expect from a 1970s prog-rock outfit, it’s hard to appreciate those decades at the top until it almost comes to a grinding halt.
Granted, nothing was going to officially stop the band’s touring lifestyle. They were always mainstays of the arena circuit by the time they hit the 1980s, and even though their keyboard era is an acquired taste for most people, they could still sell a ton of records with that ride-or-die fanbase. They had the same kind of following normally reserved for the Grateful Dead, but it got a lot more complicated after the Test for Echo tour.
While Neil Peart was the stoic member of the band who could plough through anything in his way, no one was going to be able to recover from losing a child as he did. After his daughter tragically died in a car accident and his wife passed away of cancer a few months later, Rush seemed like a distant memory, and the drummer ended up taking a massive sabbatical from music.
Nothing mattered to him at that moment, so the only way to soothe his soul was to keep himself busy driving around North America. While he would keep in touch with his bandmates every now and again, it was a long road before he even set foot behind the drumkit, let alone had the drive to write any new music for the group.
“People were going totally mental…”
Alex Lifeson
When he did find the time to pick himself up, though, Vapor Trails became one of the band’s greatest triumphs. Despite Rush’s records never getting the same major numbers as the biggest names in music, the fans were with them all the way through, showing up in droves almost as a thank-you to the band for sticking together through those dark times.
They had come out on the other side of everything, but Alex Lifeson remembered that they didn’t truly feel the sense of accomplishment until they hit their massive shows in Rio, saying, “Having been on this tour, in this place where people were going totally mental playing ‘One Little Victory’, it was a huge victory that we survived the previous five years. Finishing on such a high note was quite a trip.”
And for someone who had hardly thought about music in years, the fact that Peart got his signature touch back on the drums made him sound like he never quit. The band were still at full capacity, and despite never being considered cool, hearing the audience sing along to every single note of ‘YYZ’ was quite a feat for any band to accomplish since the song didn’t have any words.
But Rush probably didn’t need to prove themselves on this high a level if they didn’t want to. They had already established themselves as prog-rock giants before they even reached the 2000s, but whenever a band goes through a near-death experience like that, they weren’t going to move on afterwards. This was far from an average show. This was a celebration of that bond that carried them through every dark day.
