Just as the tragic news of Neil Peart’s passing came to light, I had the chance to salvage a lasting, priceless memento of my Rush fandom. Except that I took too long to act on it. Now what?

I have been to five Rush concerts, two of them with my youngest brother. Our first concert together was the Toronto II in July 2010. We were lucky enough to get front row tickets, and the photographer (John Arrowsmith) snapped our pic. One day in 2011, whilst browsing the Rush site, we found our picture for sale! My brother got a copy, and my wife gave me one for my birthday.

The next time we went to a Rush concert, also front row, was in Sheffield (UK) on May 2013. It was my first wedding anniversary and my wife gave me a pass because it was Rush.

This time my brother and I had a plan. We will have a message for the band (something ‘funny’). During the concert, I saw the photographer walking in front of us, and I shouted “JOHN ARROWSMITH”! He turned, we introduced ourselves, told him that we got the picture he took of us three years before, and asked if he could do it again. He saw the note, chuckled, and took our picture. A few months later the picture was available for purchase.

My brother got a copy, but for some asinine reason, I postponed buying it. This last December (2019) I finally decided to order the picture from the Rush Backstage site. To my horror, pictures were no longer available. The site photos.rush.com is a big emptiness. I looked everywhere, including directly at smugmug.com (the service used by Rush to sell the pictures) and I went as far as using archive.org to look for the image so I could use it for an image search. I even messaged the photographer on LinkedIn (not surprisingly, I got no reply). I was desperate.

Rush Backstage Photos site, and all its void as of December 2019. It’s been empty for about a year.

My brother and I were discussing options, like having his picture scanned by a professional printing shop (need a A2 or A1 size scanner for it!) when he said he found the original email of his order, which has a “reorder” link. It was nerve-wrecking, since the entire re-order process would show a ‘missing image’ icon instead of the photo. “Shall we do it?” “Would they just send an empty frame?” I decided to sleep on it for a while. Being an IT, guy I eventually reasoned that they cannot print something that does not exist. We would either get refunded for their inability to print something that is no longer there (most likely, I thought), or they would print and send the real picture. So, we “re-ordered” the picture… On January 2nd.

Email confirming the “reorder” — fingers crossed! Note the generic thumbnail instead of the real picture. SmugMug always shows the thumbnail of the picture being ordered.

Last Friday my wife and I were having dinner, when my brother sent me a WhatsApp message with the tragic notice that Neil has passed. Like many of you Rush fans, I cried — a lot. Messages started to pop on my WhatsApp about it. I was annoyed at first (“as if I wouldn’t know!”), and it felt like rubbing salt on the wound. It took my wife to make me see that my friends know how much Neil meant to me, and this is their way of saying that they are thinking of me. Indeed, a long-time friend sent me a sad face with the message “reminded me of you. I hope you are ok!”. Even my dad was tiptoeing around me over the phone the next morning, as he also read it on the news.

I have been pretty much consumed with work, and family, and so sad with the news of Neil’s passing that I completely forgot about the picture saga…

As I came back from work yesterday, the first thing I see when getting into my house was this huge package next to the stairs with a “SmugMug” label. “This is it! Or is it?!” I was extremely nervous opening it, having to take my time to avoid damaging it for being over-excited.

And there it was… The picture I thought I had lost forever. My last Rush concert in all its 16x24 inch glory. I cried. I needed this “one little victory” — a final memento after the sad news from last Friday.

The last memory of my last Rush concert.

“16x24… Wife will not be pleased!”, I thought while grinning through tears.