“Much tougher”: Geddy Lee picks the hardest bassline to cover
It was 1969, and Geddy Lee was a bumbling 16-year-old teenager. His father had sadly passed away when he was young, leaving a hectic household and an eminent sense that life is short and has to be seized in his wake. However, much to his mother’s chagrin, Geddy Lee set about seizing it a little too readily for her liking after he dropped out of school to try and make it as a musician.
Rather than deter him, her disappointment would prove to be a driving force. “I felt like I had to make sure that it was worth it,” he recalled. “I wanted to show her that I was a professional, that I was working hard, and wasn’t just a fuckin’ lunatic”. It turned the amateur enterprise he had set up in the basement, a space he shared with his grandma’s kitchen, into a junior rock gymnasium. “One time, it was literally so loud that it rattled glasses off the shelves, which shattered into her chicken soup,” he told Rolling Stone.
He was honing his chops to the sound of Led Zeppelin, The Beatles and anything else groovy that came his way. However, it was trying and failing to nail one bassline early on in his development that got him to this position—a bassline so tricky that even struggling to do it an ounce of justice made Lee realise that he might be onto something.
“He was one of the first gods to me. Gods of rock. Ever since I first heard ‘My Generation’, it’s like, ‘Who is that?’ That was a name you needed to know,” he recalled in an interview with Q104.3—the name in question, of course, being John Entwistle. “And I still rank him as the greatest rock bassist of all time, in one sense. First of all, he was ferocious. He had a sound that dared to encroach upon the domain of the guitar player. So he had a very loud, very aggressive tone.”
So, an ambitious teenage Lee set about getting as close to that sound as he possibly could. He would jam day and night with his friends in his family’s basement. He was getting better by the day. But try as he might, ‘My Generation’ still proved impossible to mimic while other songs were now easily wandering into his arsenal after a couple of listens.
The issue was, as Pete Townshend has explained himself, Entwistle wasn’t a bassist, he was The Who’s lead guitarist, it’s just that his guitar happened to have four strings. Aside from that, the rest of the band took up the rhythm while he raced forward with all the flair of Jimi Hendrix, all the melody of Paul McCartney, and all the attitude and atmosphere of Jimmy Page. The atmosphere on ‘My Generation’ was punk a decade before the event with the virtuosity of prog.
To this day, Lee considers it perhaps the hardest bassline to get right. “We all tried to play ‘My Generation’ and failed miserably. But you do your crappy version of it,” he said. Adding that The Who “were harder to do than, say, a cover of ‘Road Runner,’ by Junior Walker and the Allstars, where you can transform that into sort of a rock bass without too much trouble. But yeah, The Who were much tougher.”
So, from Lee’s perspective, Entwistle became the premiere bassist of his youth. He broke down the crux of his talent as thus: “First of all, his tone, secondly, his audacity and thirdly, his dexterity. I mean, he had incredible dexterity. Just moved across the strings in such a fluid manner with such ease, and yet, sounded so tremendously ferocious at the same time.”
Try mastering that when you’re 16, and the only thing you’re likely to succeed in is enraging your mother, but that failure might just push you on to become ‘God of Rock’ yourself—at least, that’s what happened with Geddy Lee.
