GEDDY LEE
Ahead of the publication of his revealing autobiography, Geddy Lee talks about some of the events and people who have helped to shape his life as a person and as a musician.
When Geddy Lee was writing his autobiography, he thought of giving it the title My Life In Comedy. His publisher, however, felt that was a little too self-deprecating for the memoir of a man famed for his virtuoso skills as multitasking bassist, singer and keyboard player with legendary rock group Rush. So Lee proposed an alternative title, again with tongue in cheek, and this one stuck: My Effin’ Life. “I do have a tendency to drop ‘F’ bombs during any conversation,” he explains, “so effin’ is a word I use a lot.”
Lee is talking to Classic Rock on a beautiful end-of-summer day in London, where he is on holiday with his wife Nancy. Dressed all in black, his long hair pulled back, and peering from behind tinted glasses, he’s looking good for a man who recently celebrated his seventieth birthday. He’s also in relaxed mood as he begins with some small talk about baseball and his grandchildren. But within the first few minutes of an hour-long conversation, his mood suddenly shifts as he reveals the reason for putting his extraordinary life story on record. “Originally I had no interest in writing a memoir,” he says. “I just felt like my life is unfinished. But a couple of things happened that profoundly changed my point of view.”
In January 2020, Neil Peart, Rush’s drummer and lyricist, died at the age of 67. The following year, Lee’s mother Mary, a Holocaust survivor, passed away aged 95.
“I had the sadness of watching my mother slowly being affected by the ravages of dementia,” Lee says. “It was heartbreaking to see that she could no longer remember stories she had told me in the past. And she didn’t know who I was at times, which freaked me out. So it got me thinking about memory and how fragile our memory banks actually are. The other thing was that Neil had finally succumbed after a three-and-a-half-year battle with brain cancer, glioblastoma, and during that time I witnessed kind of the same things I’d seen happen to my mother. Neil had a remarkable memory right up until the end, don’t get me wrong. Sometimes his powers of recall were staggeringly accurate even when he was suffering the most. But, you know, I started thinking: ‘What if I forget? Holy crap, what if all the experiences of my life suddenly disappear into the dust?’”
There are plenty of good memories in My Effin’ Life, mostly relating to all the great music Lee made with Rush, and all the high times shared over 40 years with Neil Peart and guitarist Alex Lifeson. But in the course of this interview, when Lee rec
