Rush 17: Chronicles

Smart labels anthologize the ones who got away, particularly when the ones have continued to thrive elsewhere. While Rush had jumped to Atlantic, Mercury knew that their catalog would continue to sell, particularly in the CD era. Hence, Chronicles neatly summarized the band’s history from start to now, on two discs, democratically sampling each one of their albums; the exception was three songs from Moving Pictures, not two.

In addition to providing an excellent overview that documented the taming of Geddy Lee’s vocal cords, the big draw for fans was the inclusion of the songs that had been left off the original CDs of All The World’s A Stage and Exit… Stage Left. “What You’re Doing” and “A Passage To Bangkok” each appear in sequence to ensure that every album was represented. Moreover, “Mystic Rhythms” was included from A Show Of Hands, and “Show Don’t Tell” provides true closure.

The modes of the times dictated that a double CD was packaged in a clamshell case about an inch thick, but Chronicles was worthy of taking up space on a shelf, and seemingly would always. It stayed in print even after the catalog was remastered in 1997, whereupon Mercury took to anthologizing them again, and not for the last time. Retrospective I: 1974-1980 and Retrospective II: 1981-1987 each repeated ten tracks from either disc of Chronicles and made some very bold additions (“By-Tor”? “The Body Electric”?) while jumbling the chronology and adding zero rarities. (Both volumes were combined into a single slimline package for 2006’s Gold, which reinstated “Working Man” to the dais at the expense of “Something For Nothing”.)

Then in 2003, likely to cash in on the band’s return from hiatus, The Spirit Of Radio was a single disc purporting to present the band’s “greatest hits”, despite the fact that only one of their singles had ever cracked the Billboard Top 40. That said, it again stuck to the timeline and hit all the highlights, with the possible exception of “Force Ten”. (True completists would also want to make room for the two Rush entries in Universal’s head-scratching ICON series. The first was a glorified mix tape that mixed familiar tracks with deep cuts; this was repeated a year later in a second version, along with a disc that sampled all their Mercury live albums.)

Rush Chronicles (1990)—4
Rush Retrospective I: 1974-1980 (1997)—3½
Rush Retrospective II: 1981-1987 (1997)—3½
Rush The Spirit Of Radio: Greatest Hits 1974-1987 (2003)—4