Full Show Friday | Rush At The Capitol Theatre 1976

In 1976 Canadian prog-rockers Rush were finally feeling good about the course of their career. After a few albums that didn’t do well either commercially or critically, the power trio released 2112 on April Fool’s Day of 1976, which went on to become their first major commercial success.

On December 10, 1976 Rush made their debut at the Capitol Theatre in Passaic, NJ as part of a bill that also included Foghat and Montrose. The band’s set featured material from their first four studio albums, including the title track of 2112. Rush’s performance was filmed by the venue in black-and-white and the entire set has recently been shared on the Music Vault YouTube channel.

Read what bassist Geddy Lee had to say about this show as per Rolling Stone:

“Oh, wow. I remember that gig. Capitol Theater. Obviously, this was a really good time for us. We have staved off our demise. In late 1975/ early 1976, we definitely thought we were going down the drain. We honestly thought this was going to be our last album. When it came out, it was mostly word-of-mouth. It wasn’t getting much airplay, obviously. But you could tell there was a buzz amongst fans when we played it. We were feeling very optimistic.

“I do remember this show. I used to love the theater gigs. I remember they had a very good caterer at that particular venue. You remember gigs sometimes by what you ate before you went on. This is just two years after the first video, but it was a big two years. A lot of growing up. We were on tour all the time. We were doing over 200 shows a year, probably in excess of that. We didn’t take much time off. We did back-to-back-to-back-to-back shows. At one point, I remember someone counted that we did 17 one-nighters in a row, 17 different cities.

“We were headlining at this point, but very small venues. This was just as we were becoming a headliner. We couldn’t headline big venues, but we could play places like this theater, and they were often multi-act shows to get people to come out. We weren’t selling a ton of tickets, so we needed help to get people out. There was change in the air. You could feel there were things happening to us. . .Where do they get videos like this?”

Here’s the band’s short but sweet set:

0:00:00 -Bastille Day
0:04:41 -Stage Banter
0:05:04 -Anthem
0:09:41 -Stage Banter
0:10:04 -Lakeside Park
0:14:12 -2112
0:30:20 -Stage Banter
0:30:58 -Fly By Night / In The Mood