My oldest friend, Alec, called me a Rush superfan once, then corrected himself—“No, I’m the superfan. You just got dragged along for forty years.” He’s not wrong. We’ve been chasing this band across the country since we were kids, and last night he handed me a ticket to the fourth and final show of their sold-out stand at the Kia Forum in Inglewood and said the only thing that needed saying: “We have to be there for this one.” He was right. I’ve been to roughly fifteen Rush shows in my life. This might have been the best.
You could feel it before you got through the gates. The lot was a tailgate, a reunion, and a tent revival all at once—men my age in twenty-year-old tour shirts, kids who weren’t born when Moving Pictures came out, and one diehard who told me he’d flown in from Australia for all four nights and had clocked well over a hundred Rush shows in his lifetime. By the time the house lights dropped, the whole arena was humming. No opener, no warm-up act to politely endure. Just the band, two sets, a brief intermission, and three hours and fifteen minutes of the catalog we grew up on—twenty-eight songs, all of them Rush.
When “Xanadu” filled the room and rolled straight into “Limelight,” every single person in that building was on their feet—and I mean every single one. From our seats in the third row, dead center, I had a clean look at Geddy Lee’s face, and the man was beaming. His voice, somehow, sounded the way it did thirty years ago. He hit the high notes as if the calendar had never happened. And that bass tone—the singular, growling, melodic thing only he does—was locked in all night. Legend status, confirmed and re-confirmed.
