Happy retirement Rush

Bass player and national treasure Geddy Lee turned 65 on Sunday, making him the second member of Rush to reach pension age. Guitarist Alex Lifeson will complete the set on Aug. 27. For fans of the trio, this is more than just a meaningless milestone. 2018 is the year we have all had to accept that Rush is probably finished as a creative enterprise. These are gentlemen who have reached retirement age, and they are defying the traditions of their profession by actually acting like it.

After the group’s last tour ended in August 2015, drummer-lyricist Neil Peart began insisting he was retired. Everybody who has ever bought a record knows enough to smirk at such a declaration by a musician, and Peart had already told Lifeson and Lee he was quitting the business for good in 1997, when his teenaged daughter and his wife died in quick succession.

After a long motorcycle odyssey, he decided he was willing to return after all.

But in 2018 Peart’s fast, ultraprecise playing style leaves him in physical torment; he is raising a young child, and he has always despised publicity. Lifeson told the Globe in January he thinks the band is “basically done”, because there can be no Rush — in the studio or on stage — without Peart.

All of this — even Neil Peart’s remorseless flintiness — reflects the distinctive, endearing characteristics of Rush: the band has now ceased to exist for some of the same reasons it attracted adoring generations of listeners. As a commercial proposition, Rush remains a potential superpower. Other groups of similar magnitude have always been able to find ways to push on when important members, or even every member that anyone might recognize, came to the end of the road. (In a rock group there is usually at least one person who could really use the cash from a tour.)

Could Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson find some young drummer with healthy wrists and ankles, take “Rush” to the casino circuit, and sell mountains of $75 tickets? They probably could, and they would probably put on a wonderful show. But it is unthinkable (he wrote, knocking on the wood of his desk) for them to do such a thing under the Rush name.

They could probably even devise a low-stress acousticheavy setlist, with sloweddown versions of the hits, that they could take to small venues with Peart in tow. Tempting as such schemes must be — Lee was publicly in denial about Peart’s second retirement for ages, and Lifeson says he would go on if it were entirely up to him — they do not suit the nature of Rush.

The group is a three-piece in which every piece counts more or less equally. And part of what their fans pay to see is physical effort of the highest intricacy. I hope it will not offend my fellow Rush fans if I compare it to juggling or acrobatics, or at least suggest that it has such an aspect. Rush songs are full of unpredictable, shifting time signatures and difficult cues. The band’s numerical paucity leaves nowhere to hide dropped chords or melodic clangers. Unlike most three- and fourpiece groups, Rush has almost always refused to ever bring a hired sideman onto the live stage, even though this requires Lee to operate sequencers with foot pedals while playing what are often ludicrously difficult bass lines — singing like, well, like Geddy Lee.

This, I say as someone who loves Geddy like a family member, is truculence bordering on absurdity. If Rush could approach fans individually and talk it out with them, they could probably persuade them that it made sense to bring a keyboardist, or even a rhythm guitarist, along on the road. (Some groups even sneak in a second percussionist!)

It may even be a bit sad that we were denied a more collegial Rush, one that participated in the life of its musical generation, strayed occasionally from its triune purity, and did fun crossovers with other groups (such as 1980’s Battle Scar, recorded with fellow Torontonians Max Webster for the Universal Juveniles LP).

But as a practical matter, a sideman would not be tolerated by fans at a Rush concert, and there is a risk that any such person might be booed or abused, even assuming he was skilled enough to keep up. The nerdy complexity of the music Rush performed in its heyday practically guaranteed that the band would develop a cult, and longtime critical distaste for anything with “progressive” pretensions reinforced the fans’ militancy, as a sense of persecution always does.

Rush has now found something like general acceptance, and been praised by many younger artists, but it is in the position of not being able to add a fourth to the Holy Trinity, much less swap out a component.

Thus does Rush halt, despite having an intact classic lineup that is, as far as we know, healthy in most respects. We are no longer accustomed to instinctively thinking of 65 years as “retirement age,” yet that is how it has turned out.

Neil Peart proved to be, in the strictest sense, a hard manual labourer who can no longer do the job.

There is nothing for it but to wish all three happiness and peace.