The Top Ten Reasons to Feel Proud to Be a Fan of Rush

Reason #6

Of the 19 studio albums, 9 live albums, 11 compilations, and 1 EP that your band has released, 24 of them have gone gold, selling more than 500,000 copies, and 14 of them have gone platinum, selling more than a million copies,…some of them going multi-platinum.

14 platinum records.  That puts your band in the same league as The Dave Matthews Band, James Taylor, and The Doors.

We’re talking mainstream sales figures here.  And even though Rush got tagged as “prog rock” because they share with “proggers” what Geddy described as “the desire to make our music weird,” he also said that he saw Rush “carrying on a tradition begun by Cream or The Who more than anything.”

What did I say?  Mainstream.

Still, the band did wind up with an audience that was overwhelmingly male.

“There’s no getting around that,” Geddy once admitted to The Guardian in 2018.

“We would joke about it backstage:

‘See any girls in the front row?’

‘No.  Some attractive boys, a lot of ugly boys.’

“When things started changing – and they did – we noticed!

‘There’s girls in the front row!’

“Or there’d be a sign in the back:

‘Myth Busters:  Girls Who Love Rush.’”

But then Geddy laughed and pointed out, “We were too old to take advantage of it by that point.”