“Most remarkable”: Geddy Lee on his experience of working with Dave Grohl
Not everyone is in the music business to make friends. Many people can go through life thinking that the entire thing is one big party, but there are other times when the party either has to end, or they think that selling millions of records gives them the right to start acting like a king. While Geddy Lee was always able to keep his head straight, he knew that some of the best people that he could ask to work with were usually those who could remain genuine through it all.
Aside from being in one of the biggest bands in the world, Lee was never interested in being some lavish rockstar type. He may have enjoyed the occasional world tour, playing to millions of people wherever he went, but when he was able to settle down, he had a lot of pleasure in going to a baseball game and behaving like a regular guy away from the spotlight and every prog fan at his shows.
That wasn’t limited to Lee, either. The whole concept of fame was always hard for Neil Peart to grapple with, and even when he managed to document his feelings about everything in ‘Limelight,’ he still had people showering him with praise that made him more and more uncomfortable no matter how many times he tried to move out of the fisheye lens he talked about.
But the beauty behind the best rockstars was their ability to stay grounded. While people can easily fall into the trap that Gene Simmons did, where they start to stop functioning like empathetic human beings, that wasn’t going to happen with the alternative generation. They were never looking to be major rock stars in the beginning, and even when Nirvana hit it big, Dave Grohl never took a second of his time onstage for granted.
Even when working in Foo Fighters, Grohl wrote the rulebook on how to keep himself grounded while still standing at the lip of the stage. After all, his only job while in Nirvana was to act like a madman behind the drumkit, and even if he was meant to play up his rock and roll chops, he always approached it like another member of the party getting up onstage to play, despite the party getting a lot bigger over the years.
While Lee had always been an avid fan of Grohl’s, it wasn’t until he played at the tribute concert to Taylor Hawkins that he realised the kind of person he was dealing with, saying, “You could feel the spirit of Taylor and the love coming from the Foo Fighters family. That was really touching. And Dave Grohl is one of the most remarkable human beings I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet and work with. So here we were, Alex and I, having not played together in years, feeling pretty nervous about who’s going to play the drum parts. But it all came together, and in some ways, it was maybe the greatest gig of my life.”
And considering Lee’s penchant for playing with Peart, the rest of the band did not disappoint. Grohl had already gained a reputation for being his generation’s John Bonham, and listening to him tear through some Rush classics made him sound like the perfect substitute for Peart following his passing.
Any chance of Rush getting together to tour without Peart is still unthinkable, but Grohl was never looking to replace ‘The Professor’. He knew that he was doing justice to a drumming god, and the most that he could do was draw attention to the prog legends that helped him dream bigger than what he had sitting at home drumming on his pillows in Virginia.
