The song Geddy Lee “failed miserably” trying to play
It’s hard to think of any bass performance that Geddy Lee couldn’t pull off effectively.
Every single Rush song sounds like doing the musical version of a marathon every time they made one of their epics, and even when they had radio-friendly tunes like ‘Closer to the Heart’, Lee wasn’t about to let up when it came to making the nastiest bass runs anyone had ever heard. But when he was growing up, the bass legend knew there were bound to be a handful of tunes that completely wiped him out as well.
For anyone who still thinks along the lines of bass being the “lesser” guitar, though, allow me to give you an education. The bassist might have all the power when it comes to how the harmony is supposed to sound in any rock and roll band, and while there have been many icons of the instrument before Lee, he was one of the first prog musicians who seemed to treat the instrument like a lead guitar half the time.
He was always perfectly locked in with Neil Peart, but there was a much different approach than providing a foundation for the tune. There was no reason why the bass needed to be buried, and by putting a lot more treble on, Lee managed to get the kind of growl out of his Rickenbacker in the early days that made it sound absolutely ferocious whenever he hit the strings.
Because from day one, Lee never saw it as acceptable to be delicate with the instrument. The bass is already a bit of a percussion instrument, so by hitting the strings hard, he was always cutting through the mix much better than he would have been using a pick. He was already leagues above most other low-enders by the third Rush record, but the Holy Grail of bass playing always came back to how John Entwistle performed.
Despite being the one member of The Who with the least amount of stage presence, Entwistle usually only needed his music to do the talking. And when he got to take a solo halfway through ‘My Generation’, Lee knew that he needed to make it his mission to learn all of the licks that he was playing.
Rarely do you hear any kind of major bass solo in a pop song, but after getting Roy Orbison’s ‘(Oh) Pretty Woman’ under his fingers, Lee said that trying to play along with ‘The Ox’ for the first time completely destroyed him, saying, “We all tried [early on] to play ‘My Generation’ and failed miserably, but you do your crappy version of it… I would say [Who songs] 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 [line] without too much trouble. But yeah, the Who were much tougher.”
It’s strange enough for anyone to even think about coming up with the lines that Entwistle does, but for those brief moments, he really was the lead guitarist of the group. If you look at the music theory behind every part of his solo, it sounds pretty close to what you would hear from a rock and roll guitarist by sticking mainly to the pentatonic box, but trying to do that with only your fingers would have felt impossible for anyone only familiar with Beatles basslines at the time.
That was the benchmark of what the four-string could do at the time, but Lee was far from the only legend that seemed to go back to Entwistle’s playing. He wasn’t looking to be the greatest to walk the Earth or anything, but in those early Who records, you can hear the beginnings of everyone from Lee to Lemmy to Chris Squire in his attack.
