“We wanted to be them”: The one band Rush could never replicate live
Every musician has their one—the single artist or band without whom they simply wouldn’t have developed in the way they did or fully committed to music. Rush frontman Geddy Lee has always been open about his ultimate influence. While Paul McCartney, James Jamerson, and Yes all played defining roles in shaping his path to becoming a legend, the fundamental group for him was Led Zeppelin.
Lee was a fan of Led Zeppelin from the very beginning—something few can truly claim. The first time he saw them perform was in August 1969, when they played two shows in Toronto. At that time, he wasn’t yet in Rush, but he attended the concert with the band’s founding members, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer John Rutsey.
At the time, the British band were fast rising as the most exciting group on earth. This was thanks to the release of their self-titled debut album, which arrived that January. It put an inventive and expansive twist on rock, signalling the new decade’s dawn. In addition to that, their explosive live shows were also becoming the stuff of legend, primarily due to the music press lauding ex-Yardbird Jimmy Page’s new outfit. Thus, the general admission show prompted much excitement among Toronto’s droves of longhairs. It was a feral race to get tickets.
Lee and his friends were already huge Led Zeppelin fans, captivated by the energy of their debut album, and they queued for hours to get into the show. When they finally made it inside, they sat in the second row, just metres away from a band on the brink of global superstardom. Just two months later, in October 1969, Led Zeppelin released Led Zeppelin II, an album that cemented their status as the biggest band on the planet—both critically and commercially—dethroning The Beatles from their lofty perch.
Lee has spoken extensively about the show since that moment, as it was a pivotal moment. Led Zeppelin espoused an otherworldly essence when they walked out on stage and, unsurprisingly, matched this image with a resounding performance where they brought the house down. According to the frontman, they quite literally did this, with plaster falling from the ceiling due to their elemental reverberations and sonic force.
When speaking to Classic Rock in 2021, Lee revealed how he and his friends were instantly obsessed with Led Zeppelin as soon as they played their debut and how, no matter how hard they tried, they simply could not replicate them. “We wanted to be them,” Lee conceded of Rush’s early attempts to imitate their heroes.
He recalled: “I remember when the first album dropped and we waited at our local Sam The Record Man store in Willowdale, grabbed the record, ran to my house, put it on and sat on my bed freaking out over Communication Breakdown. They were a huge, huge influence on us. We wanted to be them instantly. But their stuff was hard to play. We tried a number of Zeppelin songs when we played in the bars, but we felt we couldn’t pull them off. We did have Livin’ Lovin’ Maid in our set for a while though.”
Although they could never replicate Led Zeppelin, over the coming years, as Rush began to hone their sound and each member developed their technique, it became clear to them how critical the ‘Communication Breakdown’ group was for them. Led Zeppelin’s prog-rock experiments of the early 1970s laid the foundations for their own spacey voyaging.
