Rush Plays the Forum, and Geddy Has to Pee

I saw Rush at the Forum the other night. Fifty years, more or less — they’re calling it the Fifty Something tour, which is the kind of honesty that sets the tone for the whole evening. I went in braced for the thing you brace for when a band you loved at nineteen takes the stage at seventy-two. The polite enthusiasm. The willingness to grade on a curve. The quiet accounting of what’s been lost.

I did not need the curve.

They looked great. Not great-for-their-age. Great. Three hours of it, minus the intermission, which I’ll get to. The thing I expected to feel sad about — and did, for a stretch — is that Neil Peart is gone, and you cannot replace Neil Peart, and they did not try to.

What they did instead was hire Anika Nilles, a forty-three-year-old German drummer who came up through Jeff Beck’s band, and she was flatly fantastic, and twenty thousand people who walked in to mourn one drummer spent the night embracing another. The right person for the job turned out to be the right person for the job. That was the whole calculation. It was something to watch a room full of people arrive at the same arithmetic.

Then Geddy went to the bathroom.

They take an intermission now, and he told us why: they had to pee. He said it the way you’d say it to a friend, because at seventy-two the dignified move and the honest move have collapsed into the same move, and they’ve stopped pretending otherwise.

They schedule the tour every other night so the off days do the recovering. They opened with a film of themselves shuffling around a haunted nursing home — the joke you only get to make once you’ve decided the thing everyone’s tiptoeing around is funnier said out loud. They wore clothes that fit men in their seventies. Stylish. Not the spandex. Not a costume of the band they used to be.

None of that is decline. All of it is engineering.

Here is what I think I watched. A few people looked squarely at a real constraint — the body at seventy-two is not the body at thirty — and instead of denying it or surrendering to it, they built a machine around it. Rest days. An intermission. A drummer chosen on merit. The constraint was real. They’d just built around it offstage so that onstage it never showed.

And some of it, sure, is maintenance. Geddy’s hair is not jet black at seventy-two by accident, and he looks terrific. Alex went the other way and is rocking the gray, and he looks terrific too. Both of them are clearly managing the appearance, the health, the energy, intentionally, behind the scenes — and if that brings a little style back into what we picture when we picture getting old, especially for men, then good. Because the default is grim.

We are handed a decade of cargo shorts, sandals with white socks, and the backwards baseball hat, followed by a second decade with the waistband climbing toward the sternum. That’s the surrender uniform, and the thing nobody mentions is that it’s a choice — just an unexamined one. You can decline it. You can keep caring about the face, the body, the clothes, the whole enterprise of being a person who’s still interested.

I didn’t walk out of the Forum the way I walked in.

I’m fifty-nIne, and somewhere in the last few years I’d absorbed a story about my own aging without deciding to believe it: that the next stretch is a managed decline, a slow handing-back of things, and the only real choice left is how gracefully you accept the subtraction. That’s the lie.

Rush isn’t aging gracefully. Rush is kicking Father Time in the teeth and selling him a concert T-shirt on the way out.

They looked their limits dead in the eye, built a machine to handle them — rest days, an intermission, a drummer hired on merit — and then played like men who had somewhere to be.

I drove home rearranging it. The story I’d been handed has the math backwards. Getting older well isn’t the graceful surrender. It’s the refusal — the engineering and the vanity and the stubbornness it takes to keep the part that matters running at full volume.

During one of the solos, a man near me — easily seventy, gray, gone soft in the middle, exactly the demographic — stood up and played air guitar like he was alone in his bedroom in 1981.

Nobody had told him he was too old for it. He’d stopped waiting to be told.