For a band built around musical precision, timing wasn’t always Rush’s strong point. In 2015 they played their farewell R40 Live Tour, despite it actually being 41 years since their debut album. Now comes this 50th-anniversary celebration, similarly a year overdue.
Better late than never: R50 is a luxurious celebration of the venerated Canadian trio’s career. It’s available in a range of box set formats, from the basic four-CD-plus-104-page hardback book version (around £80) to the superfan-serving Backstage Exclusive Super Deluxe Edition (just over £300). There’s inevitably been consternation at the elevated prices – but no one is being forced to buy it.
What about the music? R50 does a great job of charting the band’s journey from nerdy The Who and Led Zeppelin freaks to elder statesmen grudgingly accepted by the cultural gatekeepers who once derided them, cherrypicking at least one song from each studio and live album. Fans can fulminate over the merits of the tracklisting – “Where the hell is The Fountain Of Lamenth?!” – but it hits all the right beats.
The big draw musically is the scattering of rare and unreleased songs. Their debut single, an enthusiastic but far from-classic cover of Buddy Holly’s Not Fade Away, and its B-side, You Can’t Fight It, resurface here for the first time since they were originally released in 1973.
More intriguing are the rough-arsed cover of Larry Williams’s Bad Boy and the Rush original Garden Road, both recorded live in Cleveland in 1974 and never officially released before on any format. Neither are jaw-dropping, but they’re fascinating as historical documents – though it’s a shame they didn’t exhume the similarly lost-to-time Fancy Dancer too.
The real wallop comes at the other end of the journey. R50 closes with the moment that brought the curtain down on their career: a medley of What You’re Doing, Working Man and Garden Road recorded at the Los Angeles Forum on August 1, 2015. Geddy Lee’s voice is all over the place, but it doesn’t matter – the emotion of it all is inescapable.
Of course, there’s an unavoidable poignancy to this delayed milestone. Rush never made their 50th anniversary, never mind their 51st. The farewell tour was just that – Neil Peart’s death in 2020 put the matter beyond doubt.
Rush still exists in name, but Lee and Alex Lifeson have been clear about not wanting to bring it back as a working proposition, and nor should they. Punctuality aside, R50 is a fitting testament to the brilliant band they were.
R50 is on sale now via Mercury/UMe.
