Donna Halper was twenty-seven and three months into the music director job at WMMS 100.7 when a Canadian promoter mailed her a self-released album by a Toronto bar band his own label had already passed on. She went to the longest cut on side two, a seven-minute grind called Working Man, and put it in rotation.
The switchboard lit. Cleveland was a shift-work town and the song was about a shift. Callers assumed it was an unreleased Led Zeppelin track. Halper walked copies of the record over to Record Revolution in Cleveland Heights, other stations picked it up off Cleveland's lead, and by late summer 1974 Rush had a US deal with Mercury. They dedicated their first two albums to her.
Every arena they have played since ran through this city first. Rush closed the R40 tour in 2015 with Working Man — the last song Neil Peart ever played on stage. On Saturday they are 11 blocks from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame that inducted them in 2013, playing the city that made the call.
“With Special Thanks to Donna Halper of WMMS in Cleveland for getting the ball rolling.” Liner notes, Rush (Mercury US pressing, 1974)
Lee and Lifeson pulled thirty-five songs for this tour and swap roughly half of them night to night. Nine have gone unmissed through the first twenty-nine shows. The rest rotate. This deals a plausible Cleveland set from the real rotation, weighted by how often each song has actually turned up.
★ played at every show so far · rotation data tracked across 29 shows of the tour
Neil Peart joined in the summer of 1974, two weeks before their first American tour, and wrote almost every word Rush ever sang. He played his last show on August 1, 2015 and died on January 7, 2020.
Anika Nilles is not replacing him and the band has been careful to say so. She is playing his parts so that a room full of people can hear them out loud again. On this tour the tribute has usually landed on Bravado and Time Stand Still.
The clock on Clockwork Angels, the last record they made, reads 9:12. On a 24-hour dial that is 21:12. It is also Neil's birthday, which Hugh Syme says he did not plan.
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