The genre Geddy Lee never wanted to play while jamming: “Just shoot me”
For some musicians, jamming is one of the only ways to reach greatness.
For some musicians, jamming opens up doors you wouldn’t have encountered before, spontaneous streams of creative expression you wouldn’t have likely anticipated in any other setting. For Geddy Lee, it’s a blessing and a curse.
Mostly, this was because he felt like there was a right way to do it. Most of us, when we think of jamming, we think of musicians coming together to play spontaneous riffs and licks before stumbling upon accidental greatness. But what Lee never liked was when people fell into old tricks, even if their whole thing was playing on old tricks. To keep it fresh, you had to have the knack for doing it well.
Which is probably why he became so endeared to Cream. To Lee, Cream were the epitome of a group who just got it, the first group of, as he put it, “pure virtuosity”. In his view, they were the “perfect model” that they tried to emulate in Rush, the kind that knew when to extend instrumentals and jams and when to cap it off.
In the beginning, though, for trios like Rush and Cream, a lot of this balance came from blending blues and rock in a way that didn’t entirely reinvent the wheel. For people like Eric Clapton, blues was a springboard that helped usher rock forward, an enabler to innovation when done right, when done without relying so heavily on the past that it becomes restrictive.
And that, above all, is Lee’s pet peeve. Whenever he gets into a jam session and they revert to the same old tricks, as a bassist, it’s one of the worst things that can happen. And even worse than that is that it’s straight-up boring. As he explained to Paul Semel in 1996, “Jamming, to me, is so boring. When you get musicians from all over, who have never played together before, they always settle on a blues progression. And as the bass player, it’s like, ‘Oh please, just shoot me if I have to play another blues progression.'”
To his credit, his frustration makes complete sense. Blues was everything to several major players, but the more you overdid it, the more it defeated the point. It had to have that familiarity that wasn’t so much that it got rid of that lingering mystique. The kind Clapton once said was “nothing like I’d never seen before”. Ray Davies even once referred to some of its biggest players, like Broonzy, as from some kind of “mythical world”.
So for Lee, it was a delicate balance. But maybe it’s also because he seemed a little slower on the uptake with the spirit of blues, and didn’t know how to play a basic blues scale at first, according to Gene Simmons. But even when he eventually got there, something about it made him feel stuck more often than not. Like, to him, it always felt like more of the same, and not the kind of innovative or productive environment everybody always talked about when hyping up jam sessions.
