Working Man

The track that saved Rush's career. When Cleveland radio DJ Donna Halper played this song on WMMS in early 1974, the station was flooded with phone calls. Factory workers across the industrial American Midwest related deeply to the lyrics about the daily grind of blue-collar life.

The song's seven-minute runtime features an extended instrumental jam section that became a showcase for the band's improvisational abilities in concert, sometimes stretching well past ten minutes. It was Geddy Lee who wrote the lyrics, drawing from observing the working-class neighborhoods of Toronto.

The irony wasn't lost on the band — they wrote a song about hating your day job, and it became the song that made music their actual job. As Geddy Lee later reflected, they were barely out of their teens, had never held real jobs, but somehow captured the feeling perfectly.

"Working Man" remained a concert staple for the band's entire 40+ year career. Most poignantly, it was the final song performed at the R40 tour's last show at the Forum in Los Angeles on August 1, 2015 — closing out Rush's live career with the very song that started it all.