The “most important” bassist Geddy Lee ever heard
When Geddy Lee first started playing the bass, the idea of a virtuoso behind the four-string was still a relatively new concept.
No one was expecting some of the best lines in any rock and roll song to come from the bass player, and even when there were true technicians behind the four-string, there were always people like Eric Clapton and Jimmy Page who were outshining everything that was happening on the low end. But all it took was the right musician to come along for Lee to start rethinking what he was doing whenever he jumped onstage.
Because way before Rush was even an idea, Lee was already playing guitar and trying to wrap his fingers around the greatest riffs he could find. He could certainly appreciate the simple basslines that Paul McCartney was laying down on Beatles records, but some of the finest work that he ever heard was usually coming from riffs rather than arrangements, like the beginning of Roy Orbison’s ‘Oh Pretty Woman’.
As long as there was something to latch onto, he was in heaven, but there was something different about Cream when they first formed. Every member of the group had been through the wringer playing the heaviest blues music that they could think of, but even with someone like Clapton in the fold, the world wasn’t ready for what they heard coming out of Jack Bruce whenever he performed.
Compared to John Entwistle’s percussive approach and John Paul Jones’s way of dancing around Jimmy Page, Bruce practically played his bass like a lead instrument half the time. It didn’t matter that he had one of the greatest guitarists of all time at the other side of the stage as long as he had the right groove, and even when he and Ginger Baker were butting heads, he was already a step above anything that the rest of the bass community was doing in rock at the time.
He had the chops of a seasoned jazz veteran, and his way of dressing up every one of his bass parts was irreplaceable in Lee’s mind, saying, “Jack Bruce, the first guy to put me over the edge as a bass player, a genius bass player as far as I’m concerned, he was the most important bass player of a band, a rock band.” Then again, there are so many chops throughout every one of Cream’s songs that you really forget the kind of vocal chops that Bruce had on every one of their songs as well.
He wanted to make some of the gnarliest bass grooves that anyone had ever heard, but when listening through their catalogue, his stratospheric range was what gave them their power. With all due respect to Clapton, the band would have never worked had ‘Slowhand’ been the lead singer the whole time, and their trade-offs on ‘Sunshine of Your Love’ helped usher in a heavier kind of blues to the mix.
And when listening to Lee’s way around the bass, he was a diligent student of Bruce’s work in many respects. A lot of credit must go to people like Chris Squire and John Entwistle for giving Lee his tone, but even when he was playing some of the best bluesy licks he could think of or channelling Bruce on Rush’s version of ‘Crossroads’, the tone that he has was all in his fingers from the moment he started annihilating the strings on his bass guitar.
So while Bruce was a good place to start, Lee learned one of the most important lessons that any rock and roll musician should. It’s one thing to start making a name for yourself by wearing your influences on your sleeve, but what people are really looking for is something that they’ve never heard, every time they hear a new record, and it was Lee’s job to put his instrument through its paces.
