‘The Other Side of This Life’: the lick that shaped Rush’s Geddy Lee
Everyone who has been working for as long as Geddy Lee has their lists of riffs that seem to come naturally. Even though Rush had been known as the hallowed titans of all things prog in the 1970s, nothing that they did came out of jamming, and a lot of their best moments came from everything being carefully choreographed in exactly the right way. Then again, that can only come from someone who had been playing their fair share of tricky licks since they were a teenager.
Because listening to what Lee is playing half the time, many of his lines could easily pass for lead guitar lines transposed onto the bass. Outside of him having massive chops, the key to his sound is his playing with the harshest attack of any other bass player on the planet, usually digging into the strings as hard as he can to make his idols like John Entwistle and Jack Bruce proud.
But that’s not how things were supposed to work out. Before Lee had even heard of bands like King Crimson and Genesis, he was busy learning the best in blues rock. While Bruce was still a hero for him to look up to, some of the best riffs that he learned from around that time had less to do with the song and more with the swagger behind it.
After all, this is a band that started life as a tribute to Led Zeppelin, so it wasn’t out of the question for Lee to try and make his very own version of a John Paul Jones walking line or create something Jimmy Page might have played had he decided to ditch the pick. Then again, there was still room for some psychedelia as well.
While Lee got his start listening to the biggest bands out of the British invasion, the psychedelic movement wasn’t that far behind. And despite admitting to, shall we say, dabbling in a few nefarious activities with substances back in the day, Lee always came back to how Jack Casady shaped his bass tone when playing the tune ‘The Other Side of This Life’.
The tune itself is one of the most surreal things the 1960s ever spit out, but while it wasn’t prog, that didn’t stop Lee from falling head over heels in love with the tone, saying, “There’s a live version of it that we used to cover way, way back in Rush when we were starting out. During the intro, he plays this angry circular pattern and if you listen to that, you’ll hear how there’s a nod to [him] in my sound.”
Then again, hearing the aggression in the original is miles different from what Lee eventually did live. There are still the building blocks of genres like heavy metal, but whereas the recorded version is fine for what it is, Rush’s take on it sounds as if the song has been given steroids and is strapped to a freight train, given how hard they are performing.
What’s even crazier, though, is the fact that Casady sounds like he’s playing with a pick, whereas Lee plays with fingers and manages to sound even more aggressive by only using two of his fingers. Most people may see the pick as a way to get a different tone, but the fact that Lee could make his fingers sound more aggressive than Jefferson Airplane should have been our first clue that he was superhuman.
