The Rush song Geddy Lee called “the most difficult” for him
For any aspiring rock musician, tackling a Rush song feels like an impossible challenge. Although the Canadian power trio has been known for writing more straightforward tracks towards the start of the 1980s, playing any of them well tends to feel like writing a research paper while running a marathon. So if one instrument is already difficult, just imagine what Geddy Lee had to go through on the band’s final tours.
Despite being one of the greatest bass players of the modern age, Lee was known for singing and playing the keyboards at different points in the set, usually keeping his four-string strapped across his back as he moved over to the keyboards. To add even more madness to his setup, Lee played various bass pedals with his feet, making him the true freak of nature out of his bandmates.
When talking about different pieces of Rush’s discography, though, there is at least one song that Lee admitted to finding challenging by his standards. Although he had been playing side-long epics throughout most of the band’s ‘70s period, the title track of the album Roll the Bones gave him the most trouble.
Penned by Neil Peart about the nature of humanity and why certain events happen, Lee brings a warmness to the studio version, especially when offset by Alex Lifeson’s acoustic-electric guitar. When performing in a concert setting, though, Lee admits that getting the timing right for the vocals is fairly difficult.
When talking to Bass Player magazine, Lee went into depth about how the song trips him up, explaining, “‘Roll the Bones’ has accents that go against the vocal part, although the bass line isn’t complicated. That’s one of the most difficult songs for me because it’s hard to get into those bass-and-drum punches and keep the vocal line from getting her-jerky”.
Although the final version is a fairly typical Rush song, one of the most identifiable sections of the track comes with the only rap section to be featured on a Rush project. Experimenting with the hip-hop format, Lee was pitched down in post-production to spit the lyrics that Peart wrote for him.
Even for a band as adventurous as Rush, not every band member was sold on the section, with one idea being to bring in John Cleese to perform the section as a piss-take. Though the song may be dated the moment that breakdown comes in, it remained a staple of their live show on their final tour, with Lee handing the rap section over to a television screen of different celebrities lip-synching the track.
While Lee had struggled with his vocal performance, it was a far cry from the adventures that the band got up to in the ‘70s. Across albums like Hemispheres, the band wrote songs that were so difficult that they had to be recorded in three separate parts to make sure no one made any mistakes. Rush’s musical capabilities may seem too perfect for their own good, but they have never been ones to sacrifice their muse over what they could play live.
