Weinrib, better known as Geddy Lee, played his final show as the octave-bending frontman of Rush eight years ago. At the time, though, he still held out hope for an encore, which didn’t seem unreasonable. The prog-rock trio was a giant of 1970s FM radio, filling arenas with a sound that melded the proto-metal of Hendrix or Led Zeppelin with the nerdy, noodling precision of Yes or early Genesis, while their graduate-level lyrics evoked Ayn Rand, Samuel R. Delany or John Dos Passos, to the delight of fans who kept coming back for decades even after they cut their hair and sold their Trans Ams.
Lee can talk eloquently about birdwatching, baseball and what he looks for in a great burgundy. But his response is blunt when he’s asked if he misses his band.
“F—, yeah.”
A band, it’s often said, is like a marriage. Except most married couples get to spend a few hours apart each day. A band eats together, bunks together and rambles together from gig to gig in that rusty Econoline or, when fortune strikes, a posh tour bus. And if that band is lucky enough to score a bona fide hit, the bitter battles over money, credit and fame can rupture the union as brutally as a divorce.
But Rush was an unbreakable unit from the moment Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer Neil Peart began playing together in July 1974. No 2-to-1 votes; everything had to be unanimous. Debates were fine, but voices were never raised; drumsticks never flew through the air.
“I mean, I’m sure there were differences of opinion at times, but they always managed to work it out,” says Terry Brown, who produced Rush over its first decade.
