["TOM SAWYER" PLAYS] That's Rush, one of rock music's most influential bands. Jim Axelrod talks with a founding member, Geddy Lee, For the Record..
At Henderson's brewery in Toronto two best friends, business partners for decades, have a new venture...
Alex: "It's quite a full-bodied beer. And yet it's light at the same time."
["THE SPIRIT OF RADIO" PLAYS]
Geddy: "This is Rush Canadian Golden Ale."
And as Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson know, anything connected to their band, Rush, will most likely be a hit. 55 years after they formed Rush in the suburbs of Toronto, Lee is out with a memoir.
Geddy: "We all think we know ourselves. But we keep secrets from ourselves. It takes sometimes a deep dive like that to turn over all the stones and see, wow, that was me."
Geddy Lee may now live a rock star's life, with some of his 350 bass guitars lining his home studio--
"I'm not looking for any more."
So he says.. but it's nothing he could have ever imagined. This son of Jewish immigrants. Your given name is Gary.
"Mm-hmm. And my mom had a very thick accent. And so she said, (JEWISH ACCENT) "Geddy," come in the house. (USUAL ACCENT) And that's how my name was born. (JEWISH ACCENT) Geddy, come in the house."
Holocaust survivors, who had courted at Auschwitz.
"It's a miracle I'm sitting here and able to enjoy the fruits of my life, all because they held out and survived."
That life his parents' determination provided was changed forever in eighth grade, when Lee started chatting with a kid sitting nearby in the back of the room.
"We were really goofy".
It's so odd when he uses the word goofy. The future rock stars are always the coolest guys in the room.
Alex: "We wanted to be cool, but we were too goofy to figure out how to do that".
Alex was on guitar and Geddy played bass a few years later when they held auditions for a drummer.
Geddy: "And to our everlasting good fortune, a lanky, shirtless, goofy guy pulled up in a Ford Pinto and started playing triplets like machine gun rattle."
["FLY BY NIGHT" PLAYS]
Neil Peart completed the lineup that would stay together for the next four-plus decades.
["TOM SAWYER" PLAYS]
Their blend of musicianship stagecraft, and, yes, a little goofiness, inspired intense loyalty from a crowd that was largely male teenagers, in the early days.
Maybe some of the people watching you were like, I'm so tired of going to high school every day and worried about how I look, and what I'm wearing, and being cool.
Geddy: "Alienation, I can relate to that. I mean, who wasn't alienated as a teen?"
["LIMELIGHT" PLAYS]
Though the album Moving Pictures had fan favorites, like "Limelight" and "Tom Sawyer," hit singles were never their jam.
Geddy: "We used to sometimes say, wow, that's a catchy tune we just wrote. If somebody else played it, it might be a single. But if we play it, for sure we'll fuck it up."
But they knew what they were doing, combining that big progressive rock sound with Geddy's distinctive voice. Early critics, "if your voice was any higher, your audience would consist entirely of dogs and extraterrestrials".
Geddy: "That's a good one. [LAUGHS] I'll buy that."
It was a formula that would sell more than 40 million albums. What's the lesson?
"The lesson is be yourself and stick to your guns."
And that might have been the whole story behind this legendary rock band. But in 1997, the music stopped. Neil Peart's daughter died in a car crash.
"It's the worst pain, the worst possible pain to lose a child."
10 months later, Peart's wife died of cancer. It would take five years for Peart to want to play again.
"And we walked out on stage as three just people that were really thankful that we had a second chance to do this. Rush 2.0 was a different band."
How?
"More appreciative, looser. We just started saying yes to things we normally said no to.
Which is how they ended up in TV shows like South Park, and movies like I Love You, Man.
Alex: "We'd see more women at our shows, like, a lot more."
Geddy: "Like, five or six."
Alex: [CHUCKLING] "But it was really interesting to see the growth of the band go from that kind of cliquey thing, culty thing, to something more broader."
While they'd be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013, tragedy wouldn't leave triumph alone. In 2016, Neil Peart was diagnosed with cancer. He died in 2020... And here you two are figuring out what the next chapter looks like, and someone's missing.
Alex: "Yeah. It's difficult to figure out what that chapter is without him."
Have you and Alex ever talked about, let's go get one of the great drummers and tour again.
Geddy: "Have we talked about it? Yeah."
Will it happen?
Geddy: "It's not impossible. But at this point, I can't guarantee it."
While Alex strikes a more hopeful note.
Alex: "It's just not in our DNA to stop."
Rush fans should know, however they continue to collaborate... they'll do it the way they always have.
Geddy: "Do what you believe. Because if you do what someone else believes and you fail, you got nothing. If you do what you believe and you fail, you still have hope.
["CLOSER TO THE HEART" PLAYS]