Rush’s Geddy Lee reveals his last meeting with Neil Peart
Rush vocalist Geddy Lee has looked back on his friendship with the band’s late drummer Neil Peart, including the last time they met. Peart passed away in 2020.
Lee is currently on a book tour across the United States promoting his memoir My Effin’ Life. During the New York leg of the tour, the musician was joined on-stage at The Beacon Theatre by actor and Rush fan Paul Rudd.
In the Q&A section of the event, Lee reminisced on the last few months of Peart’s life while he was suffering from glioblastoma and said the drummer “would listen to a different Rush album, and he would be analysing it and listening to something he hadn’t heard sometimes since we’d made it.”
The bassist continued: “And by the time that he sadly passed, he had listened to pretty much all the work we had done as a band. And the last time I saw him… [choking up] he wanted to tell me how proud he was of the music we have done together… Some of this stuff is hard to talk about.”
“It just blew me away that, in that moment, we were sitting on his balcony at his house. And whenever we left him towards the end, we never knew if we’d see him again or not. And so we were sitting on his balcony and he was having a smoke, because he loved to have a smoke, like clockwork. And we were talking about what a great moment it was that he was here in this place and we had just seen some parakeets flying into the trees and we both were bird nerds so we could talk about that,” Lee added.
Reflecting further on their final conversation, the Rush member continued: “But he went on to talk about these songs and what they meant to him and he thought it was very important for me to know that, that our life as a rhythm section together was important to him.” He concluded by describing the heartful moment as “beautiful”.
In addition to his book tour, Lee’s new documentary series, Geddy Lee Asks: Are Bass Players Human Too?, will air on Paramount+ next month. The new four-part programme is set to premiere on December 5th and will explore the lives of former Nirvana member Krist Novoselic, Robert Trujillo of Metallica, Les Claypool of Primus, and Melissa Auf der Maur, formerly of Smashing Pumpkins and Hole.
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