Full disclosure, same as last time: Rush is my favorite band of all time, and Moving Pictures was the first album I ever owned — a birthday present, recommended to my mother by Steve, my friend next door. So when the house lights went down Monday night and the second set turned out to be that record in its entirety, I was not exactly in a position to be objective. Grade accordingly.
Photos and Review by Jeff Palmucci
Rush finished their two-night stand at TD Garden on Monday, September 14, and the thing I keep coming back to isn’t a song. It’s that six years ago this show was impossible. Neil Peart died of brain cancer on January 7, 2020, and for years afterward Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson said flatly that there was no Rush without him. A lot of us made our peace with the R40 tour in 2015 being the end of it. The band did too.
We were all wrong, and Monday ran three hours and five minutes — 7:45 to 10:50, two sets and an encore, 22 songs (setlist.fm).
The elephant, handled well
Anika Nilles has the least enviable job in rock: sitting behind the kit that belonged to a drummer a lot of people consider the best who ever did it. She did not play it safe, and she didn’t play it as an impression either.
What struck me was how often the Garden cheered mid-song. Not at the end of a number — right after a passage. “La Villa Strangiato,” “YYZ,” the back half of “Headlong Flight.” Those are the spots where Peart used to do things that made drummers put down their beer, and a crowd that knows every one of those spots by heart was clearly listening for them. She hit them, and 20,000 or so people reacted like a hockey crowd.
The press materials for this tour have been stacking rave pull-quotes since June, which is what press materials do. Ignore the adjectives. The actual evidence is a room full of Rush obsessives — the most unforgiving audience a fill-in drummer could face — deciding she was great. Loren Gold on keys, meanwhile, does the quiet load-bearing work that lets Geddy play bass and sing at the same time.
The tributes
There are two of them built into the show, both on tape, and they are not throwaways. The first lands before “Bravado,” with career-spanning footage of Peart rolling while the band plays underneath it. The second sets up “Time Stand Still,” which is about as on-the-nose as the band gets and earns it anyway.
Geddy did the talking in between. Introducing “Headlong Flight,” he described Peart’s evolution into someone who “became a philosopher,” wise to the ways of the world — a nod to the fact that the guy behind the drums also wrote most of the words the band sang.
That’s the part that got me, honestly. I’ve had these lyrics in my head since I was a kid and somewhere along the way I stopped hearing them as writing. Standing in the Garden watching “Subdivisions” — a song about being a teenager in the suburbs and not fitting anywhere — I lost it a little, tearing up like a freakin’ goofball. “Closer to the Heart” finished the job. There aren’t many arena rock bands whose back catalog can do that.
And then there’s the comedy, because this is still Rush. The opening film is a run of gags including a second-hand sausage vendor and cobwebbed versions of Lee and Lifeson, with cameos from Jason Segel and Paul Rudd. The two of them turn up again on tape at the very end, reprising their I Love You, Man characters for a closing Peart tribute that is somehow both a joke and completely sincere.
The playing
Geddy Lee is 73. He sang “The Spirit of Radio” on Monday and I do not know how.
Both of them are still absurdly fast. Watching Lifeson take “La Villa Strangiato” and Lee run the bass line on “YYZ” is the kind of thing that’s more impressive live than on record, because on record you can’t see how much work it is. “Red Sector A” came with a simulated gunshot dropped in after the “smoking guns” line, which got a visible flinch out of my section.
The second set is the headline: Moving Pictures, complete and in order. “Tom Sawyer,” “Red Barchetta,” “YYZ,” “Limelight,” then the side-two material nobody plays — “The Camera Eye” with an extended piano intro, “Witch Hunt,” “Vital Signs.” Forty-five years on, that album still sequences like it was built to be heard this way. From there into the “2112” overture, “Temples of Syrinx” and the grand finale, then out through “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” and “Working Man.”
If you’re deciding about the rest of the tour
They are genuinely mixing it up. Saturday’s Boston show shared an opener with Monday’s and then diverged hard: Saturday got “Freewill,” “The Trees,” “The Analog Kid,” “The Garden,” “Anthem” and all of side one of 2112, and closed the encore with “Finding My Way” (setlist.fm). Monday got Moving Pictures, “Dreamline,” “A Farewell to Kings,” “New World Man” and “Red Sector A.” Roughly two-thirds of the two nights didn’t overlap.
The tour continues through December in North America and into Europe and South America in 2027. If your city has two dates and you can swing it, the evidence from Boston is that they’re two different shows.
I spent eleven years assuming I’d never see this band again. Monday night they played my first record, start to finish, and a drummer who was a toddler when I bought it made it sound like it should. I’ll take it.