The surviving members of Rush regret their final tour being so short.
The progressive rock band played their last gigs almost a decade ago and now Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson have admitted they feel they “let down” fans in the UK and Europe after not pushing harder to take the ‘R40 Live’ gigs outside of North America because late drummer Neil Peart only wanted a limited run.
Geddy told Classic Rock magazine: “I’d pushed really hard to get more gigs so that we could do those extra shows and I was unsuccessful.
“I really felt like I let our British and European fans down. It felt to me incorrect that we didn’t do it, but Neil [Peart] was adamant that he would only do 30 shows and that was it.
“That to him was a huge compromise because he didn’t want to do any shows. He didn’t want to do one show.”
Despite Neil’s restrictions on the tour and his health issues, Alex admitted a “dozen or so” extra dates may have made the band “a bit more accepting”.
He added: “There was a point where I think Neil was open to maybe extending the run and adding in a few more shows, but then he got this painful infection in one of his feet.
“I mean, he could barely walk to the stage at one point. They got him a golf cart to drive him to the stage. And he played a three-hour show, at the intensity he played every single show.
“That was amazing, but I think that was the point where he decided that the tour was only going to go on until that final show in LA.”
The tour kicked off in Tulka, Oklahoma, in May 2015 and ran for 35 dates across the US and Canada until August that year.
The group only confirmed they had gone their separate ways following Neil’s death in 2020, but Geddy – who reflected on their final tour in his 2023 book ‘My Effin’ Life’ – admitted it was a “complicated” time for the band.
He said: “I just kind of felt I owed an explanation to them, the audience,” Lee explained. “It’s part of why I went into the detail I did about Neil’s passing in the book, was to let fans in on what went down. That it wasn’t a straight line.
“This is how complicated the whole world of Rush became since August 1 of 2015 until January 7th of 2020 when Neil passed. Those were very unusual, complicated, emotional times. Fans invested their whole being into our band and I thought they deserved a somewhat straight answer about what happened and how their favourite band came to end.”