Alex and John decided to bring on board a manager, a guy named Ray Danniels I’d seen around at various shows on the Yorkville strip and hanging around the coffeehouses. He was clean-shaven with blond shoulder-length hair that he was always playing with at the back of his head — and that he used to iron to keep straight. He’d left his home in Waterdown, Ontario, and, something of a hustler, earned his money however he could. He tried singing in a band, but that didn’t work out, so he set his sights on managing instead. When I first met him, he had his phone and his papers on the floor, which was basically his desk. His first agency was called Universal Sound, after which he formed the Music Shoppe, which in 1973 became SRO. He was ambitious, clever and a born salesman. Clearly, he saw something he liked in the band. But it wasn’t me.

So, one afternoon as I’m walking to rehearsals, I see Lindy coming towards me across the field on the way to his house, and I ask him where he’s going.

“Oh, hey, Ged,” he says, looking at the ground. “Uh, listen . . . Rehearsal is cancelled and, uh, well, the band is breaking up.”

Back home I got hold of the other guys, but they were weird and aloof on the phone. It seemed that Rush had disbanded, though I suspected I wasn’t being told the whole story. I tried not to dwell on it and started calling around to other musicians I knew, trying to get something else going, but then in May, I heard that Alex, John and Lindy had reformed as Hadrian (after the Roman emperor) with a new bass player named Joe. It was all a ruse. I’d been out-and-out lied to!

Ray had offered to manage them but made it clear he didn’t think I was right for the band. It’s important to say, however, that it turns out it wasn’t his idea in the first place. I’ve been informed some fifty years later that it was Rutsey’s. Just recently I asked Alex about that time—something I’d always wondered about but never really brought up. (Maybe I was afraid of the answer, I dunno.) He sheepishly responded that back then he was the kind of guy who just went along with things, and that the decision to replace me was driven by John, who was keen to reinvent the image of the band and wanted someone hipper . . . whatever that meant. “I didn’t want to get on John’s bad side,” he told me. “You know how he had a very strong personality. He made all the decisions. As for Ray, he was just being opportunistic.”