The Rush drummer left Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson holding the last chord of “Working Man” at Little Caesars Arena while she reached for a bag of chips.
Anika Nilles has spent her first months in Rush proving she can play the songs. In Detroit she showed she is settled enough to interrupt one.
At Little Caesars Arena on Aug. 26, the drummer left Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson ringing out the closing chord of “Working Man” while she reached for a bag of chips. She ate a few, then held the bag out to her bandmates. Both waved it off. She put the snacks away and tried to catch the pair out by hitting her final notes without warning, but the two men who have been playing that song since 1974 were watching for it.
The chip routine is only the latest entry. YouTuber “Rush101” has assembled a compilation of at least ten show-closing pranks from the current run, and the escalation is visible across them.
In the earliest, Nilles simply pulls a baffled face while Lee and Lifeson trade looks, shrug and mouth “okay” before finishing the song. At another show she takes out her phone and shoots a selfie of the three of them. At another she unfolds a newspaper and reads while the guitars ring out. At another she appears in a replica of The Bag.
That last one reaches deep into band folklore. The Bag was Alex Lifeson‘s creation from Rush‘s touring days alongside Kiss in the 1970s, a paper bag pulled over his head and his hands pushed through the fly of his trousers, a character he used to entertain his bandmates and Ace Frehley on the road. Lee and Lifeson recounted its origins in the 2016 documentary “Time Stand Still“. The joke predates Nilles‘ arrival in the band by roughly five decades.
The looseness follows a long stretch of hard work. Lee and Lifeson began rehearsing with Nilles in March 2025 and built the whole preparation around a fixed cut-off point.
The “Fifty Something” tour is Rush‘s first road work in more than a decade and the first since Neil Peart left the drum stool. Peart played his final show with the band on Aug. 1, 2015 at the Forum in Los Angeles, and died in January 2020 at the age of 67 after three years with glioblastoma. Lee and Lifeson launched the current run at that same venue on June 7, opening with a four-night stand.
The lineup also includes keyboardist Loren Gold, a veteran of touring bands for The Who and Chicago, which makes this the first time Rush have worked as a quartet rather than a trio in their entire history. Demand pushed the 2026 itinerary from an initial 22 dates to 58 shows across 24 cities, with more than half a million tickets sold. A run through Europe and South America follows in early 2027, the band’s first European shows since 2013.
Rush played a second Detroit date at Little Caesars Arena on Aug. 28 and continue across North America through December.
