This is NOT Rush

“You’ve got to know when to hold ’em, know when to fold ’em.”

“A Man has got to know his limitations.”

“Huh?”

All these quotes (ok, the last one word is not a quote) I find I’m consistently saying to myself when I hear about a remake of a classic film, some athlete staying in the game well beyond his or her prime, when a classic rock band keeps chugging along, under their same name, without any original members onboard anymore (or worse, when we all see those nightmarish videos of an artist on stage delivering such lackluster renditions of their songs you can’t but cringe). The band thing happens so often it has now become a joke between my friends and I, as in, “Did you see the video of so and so trying to sing; it was scary!” or when we bemoan how a classic band is pretty much relegated to the status of cover band seeing as no OG members reside in that band any longer. When I just learned that beloved Canadian hard rock trio Rush, or what is left of Rush—bassist/keyboardist/singer Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson—are going to tour, without seminal member/drummer extraordinaire Neil Peart (ok, not at OG member I will give you that) I once again had a WTF moment.

Queen tours without Freddy Mercury or John Deacon and calls themselves Queen!? No shade (as the kids say) to Adam Lambert, who I like very much and stepped into the lead singer spot for the band (post Queen going on tour with Paul Rodgers), but without one of the world’s most iconic front man (not to mention one of the world’s most underrated bass players) in that four piece, this band ain’t Queen to me. Rush without Neil Peart? I don’t care how fantastic a drummer Anika Nilles is, but Rush without Peart is…not…Rush. Call it something else, tour, make records, go with God, I say. In fact, I do indeed want to hear Lifeson and Lee play and write together again.

But…

I get it. We want to hold on to our youth (no one more than me), live the illusion that things are as they were. We want to go to a show and rock out to those songs we love so much with bands we adore to make us feel…well…something in a world that gives us so little now that we have aged out of it. But these lumbering and limping versions of the bands we love are NOT the bands we love anymore. I can’t count how many times this has happened across the past decade or so; classic bands trying to stay on the road, make albums, retain their glory when they are so NOT the band they used to be. And it’s often less because of their talents atrophying (granted, this is certainly the reason in plenty of instances) but simply because no one is left in the band anymore that was in the band originally, or for enough time they were relevant to the band’s sound and zeitgeist.

Rush’s “Fifty Something” tour will proceed, after a spate of Kia Forum shows, to Mexico City, Fort Worth, Chicago, New York, and Toronto, and Cleveland.