Alex Lifeson used a pause during the introduction to “Limelight” at the Bell Centre in Montreal on September 4 to sack the rest of Rush.
The moment began when Geddy Lee handed him the microphone. Lifeson said a few words about the city, acknowledged that it sounded like the sort of thing bands say everywhere, and then asked whether he could get on with it.
“I think I’d like to… can I start the song now?”
“You’re the boss!” Lee replied.
Lifeson looked surprised, and then took the idea and ran with it.
He said: “I’m the boss? This is new! I’m the boss! Ah, you’re fired, everybody! I’m just going to do a show by myself. I’m going to make hundreds of dollars!”
“I’m going to go to the middle of the stage and take a rock star pose and start this, because this is my band now,” he added.
He then walked to the front of the stage, struck the pose and played the opening riff.
“Limelight” comes from 1981’s Moving Pictures, and its lyric, written by Neil Peart, is about the discomfort of public attention and the difficulty of living under it.
The show was the second of two nights at the Bell Centre, following September 2, and the band’s first appearances in Montreal in more than a decade.
Onstage jokes have become a feature of this tour. Drummer Anika Nilles has built up a running series of gags at the end of shows, including interrupting the closing chord of “Working Man” to eat crisps.
Lee has since explained that the humour was always there, but that the band kept it to themselves for years.
“When we first started we always had a good sense of humor,” he said earlier, “but for some reason – I guess it was youth and just lack of confidence – we kept that humor to ourselves.”
The change came after the band’s longest absence. Rush stopped in 1997 after Peart lost his daughter and, the following year, his wife. They returned in 2002 with Vapor Trails, and something in the group’s approach had shifted.
“As time went on,” Lee said, “and we went through many different phases, and some of these phases were not happy times, by 2002 we had decided that it was okay to be ourselves.”
What followed was a run of appearances no one would have predicted from the band’s first two decades: turning up in South Park, filming their own comedy sketches to run during shows, and a cameo in the 2009 film I Love You, Man.
“Before 2002 we said ‘no’ to anything that was outside our comfort zone,” Lee said. “After 2002 we just started saying ‘yes’ to things – and I Love You, Man was exactly that.”
Rush returned to the road this year for the “Fifty Something” tour, their first since Peart retired from performing in 2015. He died in January 2020.
Lee and Lifeson are joined by Nilles on drums and Loren Gold on keyboards, working through Canada, the United States and Mexico with two sets a night and a rotating selection drawn from a pool of around 40 songs.
