The reason why Geddy Lee never considered himself a “keyboard player”
Throughout his 50 years playing music professionally, Geddy Lee has acquired quite a reputation among musicians and fans. Best known as the bassist and lead singer for Canadian progressive rock titans Rush, Lee managed to handle the transition from 1970s guitar rock to 1980s synth pop relatively smoothly when compared to his peers. That’s because Lee had been embracing synths for years, all the way back to 1977’s A Farewell to Kings.
Lee’s roles in Rush went beyond his bass playing and singing. Along with guitarist Alex Lifeson, Lee composes all of the music and melodies that appear in Rush’s catalogue. That responsibility to create melodies proved to be more difficult on bass, so Lee began experimenting with keyboards, eventually bringing them into Rush’s sound in order to explore new sonic horizons.
By the time Keyboard Magazine interviewed him in 1984, Lee was playing keyboards just as much (if not more frequently) on stage as he was playing bass. It led to an interesting question: did Lee consider himself to be a bass player or a keyboard player? When asked directly, Lee provided an answer that helped shed some light on his view of himself as a musician.
“I still think of myself as a bassist, but I put more effort and more time into playing keyboards,” Lee revealed. “Of all the instruments that I play at home, I end up playing keyboards more than anything because it’s such a challenge. It’s also more satisfying than playing bass on my own. Although I love playing bass, I’d rather play it with somebody – a bass is a lonely instrument on its own. But with keyboards, especially synthesisers, you can put up a sound and bathe yourself in it. Who needs anyone else?”
“My actual ability on keyboards is somewhat limited, and I don’t consider myself a keyboard player, although I do like playing the synthesisers,” Lee added. “I look at myself as more of a melodic composer with the synthesiser. As a keyboard player, I can’t play a lot of complex chord changes or move through a very complex structure, but I can find lots and lots of melodies. I can write lots of songs on a synthesiser. I can zone in on the sound that I want and make it speak for the mood I want to create; that’s my role as a synthesist.”
Lee didn’t have the formal keyboard training that a lot of his fellow musicians did. A few piano lessons as a kid were the only exposure that Lee had to keyboards in his youth. Along with learning the basics of instrumental music in school, the piano lessons failed to kickstart anything radical in Lee. Instead, it was the rock music of the time that got him to embrace music as his calling. As such, Lee never considered himself good enough to call himself a “keyboard player”.
“I find that more and more people who aren’t accomplished musicians as keyboard players are synthesiser players or synthesists,” Lee said. “However, a guy who doesn’t have any musicality is not going to make anything worthwhile. If you haven’t got a musical sense or a musical feel, you can have all the toys in the world, but you’re still going to come up with nothing.”
“What I believe in most as a musician is musical sense, or musicality, not how many notes you can play, or how many schools you’ve gone to,” Lee concluded. “What can you do with the knowledge that you have? Some people with very limited technical knowledge can do amazing things – they can speak musically. Actually, you can make music with very few notes. After all, there aren’t that many notes to begin with.”
By the mid-1980s, Lee was using those few notes to radically redefine Rush’s sound. The embrace of synths alienated some of Rush’s longtime fans, many of whom gravitated to them as pioneers of progressive metal. However, the band’s synth-heavy phase proved to be just another era for a band that evolved and reconfigured itself multiple times throughout its career. With the benefit of hindsight, the synth era of Rush proves to be just as revealing and important as any of the band’s other (or more beloved) eras.
Check out Lee playing the keyboards on a live version of ‘Red Sector A’ down below.
