The Rush Vapor Trails comeback on 28 June 2002 was the kind of night that defies easy summary: a packed arena in Hartford, Connecticut, thousands of people in tears before a note had been played, and three musicians who had spent years unsure they would ever share a stage again. The show at the Meadows Music Centre opened a tour behind Rush’s 17th studio album, Vapor Trails, and marked the band’s first live performance in over five years.
Tragedy that silenced the band
The absence had nothing to do with creative exhaustion or contractual disputes. On 10 August 1997, drummer Neil Peart received a police visit at his home in rural Quebec. Officers had come to tell him and his wife Jackie that their 19-year-old daughter, Selena, had been killed in a single-car accident while driving back to college in Toronto. Less than a year later, in June 1998, Jackie died of cancer following a diagnosis made during an extended stay in London.
‘I had no reason to carry on,’ Peart later wrote in his memoir Ghost Rider: Travels On The Healing Road. ‘I had no interest in life, work or the world beyond.’ He told Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson he was done, with Rush and with music entirely.
Alex Lifeson later recalled the moment Selena’s death landed: ‘Neil’s daughter was 19 when she was killed and it just broke everybody’s heart to such an extent that nothing seemed beautiful anymore.’ Lifeson said he did not pick up a guitar for a year. Neither he nor Lee had any expectation Rush would ever reconvene. ‘The longer it went, the more I believed that we would not get back together,’ Lee told the Mercury News in 2002. ‘I just thought it was a place that he was not going to be able to go back to emotionally.’
Peart, meanwhile, had taken his wife’s parting suggestion literally. Grieving and lost, he climbed onto his BMW motorbike and spent 14 months riding the length and breadth of North and Central America, from Alaska to Mexico, ‘lost in my own sorrows,’ stopping at diners and gas stations, largely unrecognised. Music was the last thing on his mind.
The road back: Rush Vapor Trails and a second chance
It was Rush’s longtime photographer Andrew MacNaughton who nudged things back into motion. Determined to find Peart companionship, MacNaughton sent him Polaroids of a photo assistant named Carrie Nuttall. Peart was reluctant but intrigued. MacNaughton arranged a meeting in Los Angeles. By the end of 1999 the pair were in a relationship; within a year they were married.
Lee and Lifeson were elated. ‘He fell in love and saw that there was beauty in the world,’ Lifeson told The Costa Times. It was Nuttall, too, who made the crucial intervention on music. As Lifeson recounted to Rush: An Oral History author Vinay Menon, she told Peart: ‘It’s my understanding that you are a really good drummer and you had this long career and you’re about to throw that away at a time when you need that more than anything.’ Something shifted. Peart contacted his bandmates and said, in Lifeson’s words: ‘I’d like to try it. I don’t know if I can do it, but I’d like to try.’
Work began in January 2001. The first weeks were tentative: talking, relearning each other’s company before a note was written. Songs emerged from Lee and Lifeson jams, passed to Peart to work out drum parts. The entire writing and recording process took 14 months, longer than any previous Rush album. They dispensed with keyboards completely, a decision Lifeson had long wanted. Vapor Trails was released on 14 May 2002.
The album had its flaws, partly let down by a flat mix, but tracks like One Little Victory, Earthshine and Ghost Rider ranked comfortably among the best of late-period Rush. At 13 tracks and 67 minutes, it was their longest album to date, as if years of pent-up emotion had broken through at once.
That Hartford opener set the emotional register for the entire tour. The 29-song setlist mixed classics including Tom Sawyer and The Spirit Of Radio with new material. Their 1993 track Between Sun & Moon was dedicated to John Entwistle, who had died the previous day. When Working Man closed the show, the crowd was in pieces. ‘I remember looking out at the audience and there were people crying,’ Lifeson told Vinay Menon. ‘It was so emotional. I guess it was their chance to purge some of their emotions.’
The tour ran five months and took Rush to South America for the first time, closing with three arena shows on the continent. Onstage behind the band sat a trio of industrial-sized Maytag washing machines, periodically fed with Canadian dollars by a roadie: surreal, funny, and a clear signal that the grief had not swallowed Rush’s instinct for the absurd.
By 2004, with the Feedback covers EP (a short, joyful tribute to The Who, Cream, The Yardbirds and others) the band had closed the door on the darkest years of their career. The Rush that emerged from that Hartford night was, by every measure, still intact. In an interview with Classic Rock, Lee described Feedback as coming together quickly: ‘It was short and sweet and it came up quickly.’ A friend’s suggestion that the band pay tribute to their roots had given them permission, finally, to exhale. The hardest chapter was behind them, and the South Park-era diversion, the solo albums, the silence, all of it now read as prelude rather than ending.
