Rush’s Geddy Lee on the band that were “too hard” to imitate
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 Lee’s mother’s chagrin, he 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.
Thus, he knew that part of his education, and, indeed, his grapple with getting the most out of life, would involve venturing beyond the homestead walls of his humble hometown. So, when he saw a tour poster for The Rock Pile concert in Toronto, it shone like a beacon of hope for the would-be rockstar. So, along with Alex Lifeson and the original Rush drummer, John Rutsey, Lee queued for hours to get into the concert.
The big draw was Led Zeppelin, at the time, a little-known act buoyed by the esteemed presence of Jimmy Page in their ranks. After hours of waiting in the August sun among the general admission masses, Lee and his cronies in Rush managed to get second-row seats. “They literally brought the house down because, by the end of the night, there was plaster falling from the ceiling,” he recalled.
Instantly, Lee was a fanboy. As Alex Turner of Arctic Monkeys says, “There is always that one band that comes along when you are 14 or 15 years old that manages to hit you in just the right way and changes your whole perception on things”. For Lee, it turned out to be Led Zeppelin—he had already wanted to be a serious musician, and now he wanted to the a serious serious musician.
So, when their first album came out, he told Classic Rock that they waited for the record store to open one grim morning on the day of release. They snaffled a copy like Augustus Gloop in Wonka’s lair and “ran to [Lee’s] house“, all huddled on his bed, gave the sacred disc a spin in hushed expectation, and soon started “freaking out over ‘Communication Breakdown’.”
Their inspiration blossomed from there, and that didn’t make things easy for the young hopefuls. Lee says that they were “a huge, huge influence” on Rush. The problem was that as mere teenagers, they “wanted to be them instantly”. They soon found that was an impossibility. They slaved away in their basement practice room trying to cover the band but immediately found their way “too hard” to play. Even when they started gigging, they still weren’t ready to master their hero’s work.
“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,” Lee recalls. However, while they might have been beyond their musical capacity at that time, the act of trying to imitate them was a huge learning curve and helped to establish Rush’s style of assimilating a kitchen sink of influences in a single song. As Lee concludes: “They used influences and they took chances that other heavy metal bands just would not conceive of, maybe sparked by Robert Plant’s lyrics. He had that Tolkienesque majesty about his lyrics, and people don’t like that about his writing, but I do.”
