Rush’s Geddy Lee: ‘I regret how I behaved with Neil Peart’

Mary Weinrib was reassured by the sound of a key turning in a lock. Even after emigrating to Toronto, she and her husband Morris bucked the trend of their New World neighbours by keeping their front door secured even when they were at home. As she explained to her son Geddy, around whom she was never shy about decanting details of the unspeakable ordeals faced by Polish Jews in the Second World War, she felt safer that way. The Nazis couldn’t force their way in. 

This memorable nugget is just one of many eye-popping details to emerge in the first act of My Effin’ Life, Rush frontman Geddy Lee’s compelling new autobiography. After surviving both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, the author’s parents were married in the guards’ quarters of the latter camp following its liberation by British forces on May 5 1945. Despite his mother’s doubts about the suitability of a life as a jobbing musician, 41 years later Gary “Geddy” Lee, along with bandmates Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart, became the first rock band to be honoured as Officers of the Order of Canada.

“I think I became obsessed with music as an escape from what was happening in my home,” Lee tells me. “I had grown up in a very happy home when I was quite young, yet amid that happiness there was always a seriousness because my family, the remnants of my family, clung to each other as survivors [of the Holocaust] … so there was this undercurrent of seriousness, especially when they talked about those that were missing. Those that were killed. Those that were left behind. Those moments of absolute horror that they experienced and survived.”

On a cold day in both London and Toronto, the sight of Geddy Lee speaking on Zoom from a room in his home festooned with books reminds me of a quote from Kiss bassist Gene Simmons. “In rock’n’roll, even an ugly bastard like me can get laid, but none of the Rush guys ever did it,” he said. Instead, en route to selling some 42-million albums over a 38-year recording career, they wrote songs influenced by literature, philosophy, politics and personal emancipation. The Right-wing slant of a song such as The Trees – inspired by Peart’s fondness for Ayn Rand – saw the group labelled “Nazis” by a hysterical NME.

Given a division of labour that saw bassist and vocalist Lee compose music with guitarist Lifeson, with lyrics provided by drummer Peart, it’s perhaps surprising that My Effin’ Life was dispatched to the printers without the help of a ghost-writer. Instead, under the cloud of a strict Canadian lockdown, each day Geddy Lee would sit on the couch in his living room collating thoughts and stories in a careful and thorough manner. Seeing her husband in his bathrobe, pecking away at a keyboard at four o’ clock in the afternoon, his wife Nancy would exclaim, “What the f–k? Go get dressed!”

“I discovered how much pleasure I got out of cobbling together my thoughts, and how playing with words very much appeared like playing with notes to me,” he says. “I didn’t want to work in an office, I didn’t want to work in a confined space. And I didn’t want to work in my studio, because for the longest time I just couldn’t go into my studio. It was too chock full of memories that I wasn’t prepared to face.”

These memories are linked to the death of Neil Peart, from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, in January 2020 (the group had formally disbanded in 2018). While on the road in North America during the summer of 2015, Geddy Lee had hoped his bandmates could be persuaded to extend their final campaign into Europe, or even to embark on future tours. Fans viewing footage of the trio companionably watching an episode of Antiques Roadshow immediately prior to their last ever concert, at the Forum in Los Angeles on August 1 2015, might also have persuaded themselves that the pause was impermanent. After all, Rush had disappeared from view before, for four years in fact, following the death of Peart’s wife and 19-year-old daughter – from cancer and a car crash respectively – within a 10-month period.

But this time it was for keeps. At the end of that concert, in front of 17,500 people – including super-fans Taylor Hawkins, Chad Smith and Danny Carey, the respective drummers with Foo Fighters, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Tool – Neil Peart did something he’d never done before in his 41 years with the band. Rather than exit without fanfare from within his 360-degree kit, instead this most revered of rock players joined Lee and Lifeson at the lip of the stage to take the applause of an audience who well understood the significance of one of modern music’s most progressive, not to mention weirdest, bands at last calling it a night.

“I do believe it’s a prerequisite for all rock drummers to go through a Neil Peart phase.,” Chad Smith told the writer Philip Wilding. Along with bandmate Dave Grohl, in 2013 Taylor Hawkins inducted the trio into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins once said that Rush “remain one of the top bands in the world [and] whether some guy at Rolling Stone believes that or not is completely irrelevant. Because at the end of the day rock is a people’s game. And the people have… consistently voted for them.” Consistently is putting it mildly. Once Rush began headlining arenas, in the late seventies, they never looked back.

In 2016, on the eve of a walking tour along Hadrian’s Wall, Geddy Lee received the news that Neil Peart was ill. “I was crushed and confused and really at a loss,” he recalls. “And I have to say the walking was good because I had to put one foot in front of the other and focus on not falling off of [a] hill. And it gave me some time to regret those feelings of resentment that I had. To regret not celebrating Neil’s retirement with him. I felt that I had been incredibly selfish and now here he was at the beginning of a fight for his life. So there was a lot of emotions post-Rush in that first year. A lot of conflicting emotions.”

It’s no wonder. Even by the standards of a rolling rock group, the members of Rush had spent serious time in each other’s company. In the 1970s, a period when radio stations were more likely to play an expletive-strewn comedy album than the Ontarian’s Zeppelin-infused progressive bombast, the three young men lived on the road harvesting an audience one gig at a time. They refused to stand still in other ways, too. Even when 1981’s Moving Pictures album sold more than five-million copies in the United States alone, their sound continued to evolve. New wave, electronica, reggae and even hip hop were folded into the mix. Despite the occasional bristle, their audience remained uncommonly loyal to the last.

In the autumn of 2019, Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson paid what would prove to be their final visit to Neil Peart. An acutely private person, the man they nicknamed “Peke” had even gone so far as to hire a publicist to ensure that the circle of people who knew of his illness was vanishingly small. In these final years, the pair understood that part of their job description was to make their friend laugh by talking about “the insane things we liked to joke about”. With good-natured familiarity, often it was Lifeson who was the butt of these jokes.When the time came to leave, rising from their chairs on the balcony of the drummer’s home, the visitors each took turns clinching their host in a bear hug.   

“It was a very poignant evening,” Lee tells me. “And it’s a memory I do cherish. The last conversation we had was remarkable in that one of the things he wanted to express was his pride [because] he’d been listening to everything we’ve done. Every day he would go to what he called his ‘Bubba Cave’, where he would spend his days with his cars and his office and his books and whatnot. And on the way there, every day he would listen to the work we had done over the years, one record at a time. He wanted to just share how proud he was of the work we had done together, which was a beautiful thing.”

Geddy Lee was in New Zealand attempting to collate his thoughts on Neil Peart’s death when he discovered that bad news wasn’t done with him. Heading home amid a growing pandemic that would for once unite the world, at home in Canada his own spin on an international calamity came in the form of his mother’s ailing health. Mary Weinrib had survived her husband (who never learned of his son’s success as a songwriter and musician) by more than 50 years. But in 2021, the woman with a number tattooed on her arm, died at the age of 96.

“If you recall, the early days of Covid were incredibly paranoid,” he says. “So they wouldn’t let anyone into the elevator [in her building] and they wouldn’t let my mom go outside, either. And so it was a frustrating thing, especially because she had been suffering from dementia, which was getting increasingly worse. And so… finally I said to her care-givers, I said ‘please bring my mom outside. I’m going to be out on the street. I want to see her.’ She didn’t even know who I was at first. It was heart-breaking.”

I find it remarkable that in a volume that will be bought by fans of a rock band, Geddy Lee somehow finds the wingspan to write about the life and death of his mother and father, not to mention other family members murdered by the Nazis. And while the shelves of bookshops wince under the weight of music memoirs, only My Effing Life contains a photograph of a mass open-grave at Bergen-Belsen. Rest assured, though, none of this is a drag; even at the darkest points, humour tugs at the reader’s sleeve. Which is to be expected from a man who used to play in front of a backline comprising three rotisserie ovens, complete with rotating chickens basted by a roadie dressed as a chef. 

Tragically, I think, Rush never did play in Poland. About this there was nothing conspiratorial, Geddy Lee explains, other than a desire by Peart and Lifeson to spend more time with their families rather than add to an already burdensome schedule by expanding their operation into eastern Europe. But he was able to accompany his mother on a trip to her hometown, in 1995, and to hear her exclaim “yes, I think this is the room I was married in!” in what was once a mess hall on the site of the death camp at Bergen-Belsen. 

Last September, he even got the chance to perform a few Rush songs. Appearing at the Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concerts – the 50-year old Hawkins had died from a suspected drug overdose in the spring of that year – Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson were joined onstage at Wembley Stadium and the Forum in LA by Dave Grohl, in his capacity as a drummer, for sets featuring the devilishly complicated early-day standards 2112 Part One: Overture and YYZ. Following the latter date, at the after-show party, the two Torontonians were congratulated by Paul McCartney, who urged them to return to the road.

Inevitably, then, my final question is whether or not Lee and Lifeson plan to make music together once more. “Let me tell you this,” comes the answer, “Alex and I talk at least once a week. We try and see each other every couple of weeks. He’s still my best effing friend… He’s very willing, I’m very willing, and it’s just a matter of finding some time now that I’ve got these other projects that usurped my life and dominated my life.

“But,” he says, “I can’t wait to get to the point where I stop f—ing talking and get back to making music.”

My Effin’ Life by Geddy Lee is out now (Harper Collins). Geddy Lee tours the UK in December