Nobody knew if Rush would ever play again, but by 2002 he was finally able to return to music. The unbearable tragedies caused Peart to put his drums aside and go on a lengthy, cross-continent motorcycle journey that he eventually chronicled in his book Ghost Rider. The following summer, his wife Jacqueline died of cancer. Less than two months after it wrapped, drummer Neil Peart’s 19-year-old daughter Selena, his only child, died in a car accident. Nobody knew it at the time, but the end of Test for Echo tour marked the beginning of a very difficult time for Rush. It was one of the final stops of the long tour. Here’s pro-shot video of them doing it at Toronto’s Molson Ampitheater on June 30th, 1997. The first set of every show that tour wrapped up with the complete “2112” suite, all 21 minutes of the thing. The only exception came on the 1996/97 Test for Echo tour. They’ve condensed it a bunch of different ways over the years, but even on the original 2112 tour in 1976 they’d leave out segments like “Part V: Oracle: The Dream” to save time. When their Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction set was limited to three songs, they made sure one of them was the opening of “2112.”īut the song is divided into seven segments that take up the entire first side of the vinyl record. Even on the 2012/2013 Clockworks Angels tour where there wasn’t a single 1970s song in the main set, they still made sure to wrap up most nights with the opening segments of “2112.” Doing otherwise would probably caused an audience revolt. There’s nothing in the Rush catalog that’s been played live more than the first two parts of their 1976 masterpiece “2112.” They’ve been the highlight of nearly every Rush show since the album came out, surfacing more than 1,300 times onstage.

Rush 2112 1976