Frontman of the much-missed Rush, child of Holocaust survivors, veteran of 40-plus years in progressive rock, self-confessed germophobe and details obsessive – and arguably the Greatest Living Canadian – there’s a lot for Geddy Lee, 70, to talk about. Fortunately, he’s been able to squeeze it all into his new autobiography, My Effin’ Life, in which he explores the perils of fame, the pleasures of retirement, and an unexpected dalliance with Peruvian marching powder. Asked to name Rush’s best album by Joel McIver, he warns, “Millions of fans are going to disagree with me on this...”

There has never been another band quite like Rush, who formed in 1968 and blew people’s minds worldwide for the next 47 years. An intellectual trio of master musicians who delivered high-fantasy flights of fancy in the 70s, ascended synth-and riffheavy commercial heights in the 80s and settled neatly into classic rock iconhood in the 90s, they represented the ultimate triumph of mind over marketing. With a very Canadian reputation for polite eccentricity, the trio – Geddy Lee (vocals, bass and keyboards), Alex Lifeson (guitar) and Neil Peart (drums) – should, by rights, have never made it big, but in fact they were huge, especially at the triumphant back end of their careers, when they played arena tours worldwide.

If you caught them on one of those dates, you’ll recall the staggering scale of both the production and the songs. Even as a mere trio, Rush made planet-sized music, with Lee steering the show through their big hits Tom Sawyer, YYZ, Limelight and The Spirit Of Radio with a benevolent smile, uttering batlike vocals of extraordinarily high frequency: famously, US alt-rockers Pavement saw fit to discuss his unique pipes in their 1997 song Stereo.

If you never saw Rush live, you’re out of luck, because they ceased touring in 2015 and Peart died at the age of 67 five years later, to the widespread shock and grief of the group’s enormous fanbase. This marked the end of Rush as we knew it: more than just a rock drummer, Peart was a deep thinker and lyricist who had suffered the losses of his first wife and daughter, causing him to step away from Rush from 1998 to 2002.

Lee and Lifeson have essentially been retired for the best part of a decade now, but hopes that they would play together again never went away. This eventually came to pass in September 2022, when the two played at the Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concerts in London and Los Angeles: check YouTube for the massive reaction from the crowd – and fellow musicians – at either event. An earlier, equally enthusiastic response had greeted Lee when he played with his heroes Yes in 2017, on the occasion of their induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame.

Still, Lee evidently doesn’t want or need to be a full-time musician anymore. He has other matters on his mind, writing The Big Beautiful Book Of Bass in 2018 and now publishing a full-blown autobiography, My Effin’ Life. He’s also a photographer and wine expert, and clearly has plenty to occupy himself. Yet still, in the wake of his recent spoken-word tour, rumours havs spread far and wide that he and Lifeson may reconnect for (whisper it) something new from Rush.

Time, RC feels, to ask him some of the big questions…

Are you pleased with the way My Effin’ Life turned out, Geddy?
Yeah, I think I am. When I start doing something, I have a tendency to get a bit carried away – that seems to be in my genetic makeup – and I wrote an awful lot of words: the first version was 1,200 pages. After we cut it down to a somewhat reasonable size, although it’s still 500 pages, I was like, “Holy shit – what was I thinking? What the fuck was I talking about in those other 700 pages?”

And what’s the answer?
I guess you could call it every boring detail [laughs]. I had stories about my travels, I had stories about my hobbies and my indulgences, and a lot more personal adventures and family stuff. In the end it was pared back, and rightly so – I have no problem with that. They did a good job.

You were born Gershon Eliezer Weinrib in Toronto in 1953. Your parents, Moishe and Malka Weinrib, were Polish immigrants who had narrowly survived Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen as teenagers: you recount their experiences in painful detail in the book. How did you research this period of history?
I took a lot of time over it. I had a lot of tapes that I had recorded of my mother, particularly in 1995 when my sister, my brother and I accompanied her back to Germany for the 50th anniversary of her liberation from Belsen. We followed up that trip by going to Poland and visiting her hometown. During that time, my brother and I were recording her while she spoke and getting her, while she was in the heat of the moment, to clarify her stories, because she did have a tendency to tell the same story in a few different ways. There were also a couple of books that I found incredibly valuable, including Remembering Survival by Professor Christopher Browning, who talks about the same phenomenon.

What were the primary challenges there?
You’re talking about traumatic experiences that happened to teenagers, and here they are 50 or 60 years later, trying to recall the stories, and yet they’ve told each other those stories so many times that the facts kind of blend. I set about reading a lot of stories by other survivors, and there are some very heartfelt and detailed accounts from the same village that my mother came from. There’s also the marvellous collection of interviews by the Shoah Foundation. I found members of my family among them, amazingly. I was able to cross-reference a lot of what they had gone through, so what I ended up with is pretty close to the truth, I think. Obviously, I wasn’t there, so it’s based on the information I was able to glean from all these different accounts. There were some people at the Polish Museum in Warsaw who offered to help: they sent some incredible documents, including my grandfather’s arrest and deportation warrants. That was just jawdropping. I wanted to get it right, and I wanted it to be my telling of their stories, so I tried to do as much as I could.

This sounds like a gruelling experience.
At times it was. I tried to put myself in the guise of a historian, and to separate myself from it, even though it was my own family members. In Professor Browning’s book, there is a story about the day that the train left the Polish town of Starachowice for Auschwitz, and he’s quoting my cousin. I could not believe it. That was quite a heavy moment for me – to see my own family there. Those moments were very impactful, and writing the book was both therapeutic and cathartic.

Your father died in 1965, when you were 12. Given that, it seems foolish to ask if you had a happy childhood.
I don’t think I was a particularly happy child, although in my very earliest memories I was fairly happy. I was a quiet kid, but I did have a bit of a goofy side. My brother once showed me some old film footage that my dad took, and in the films, I’m always hogging the camera. I never thought of myself as such a ham, but I clearly had a hammy streak. That was revelatory when I wrote the book, because I’d always had a mistaken impression of myself as a child. I thought I was this quiet, nerdy kid, but time and time again, examining my actions as a young child and then after my dad passed away and I got into music, I was obviously acting with great purpose. That doesn’t come from a shy, nerdy kid: it comes from somebody that wants something out of life. That was a surprise, and I learned a lot more about myself than I bargained for.

You’ve experienced frequent epiphanies, or moments of acute perception, since childhood. What are they like?
It’s a sudden, acute sense of everything around you. You’re struck by your own existence. It feels a little bit surreal, so you ask yourself, “Is this actually happening, or am I having an acid flashback?” I’ve always had those in my life. They’ve been described as moments of existential angst, and maybe that’s what they are, or maybe it’s just awareness. Sometimes you go through your day and you’re thinking shit and you’re doing stuff, and then you stop and take everything in. As a kid, these moments could be very overwhelming.

You joined Rush in 1968, and the fun began in earnest.
Yeah, for sure. The most fun I had writing this book was dredging up the touring stories about hanging out with my pals Alex and Neil and remembering everything we went through. In particular, talking about the 70s and 80s was a blast for me. Trying to remember all that stuff was like a detective game, figuring out where you were and putting each year back together in your memory. Some of it just falls out of memory, so I’d call Alex every once in a while and say, “Hey Al, do you remember that gig we did?” or “Do you remember that incident?” Some things he would remember exactly, and I could have completely forgotten them. And then other things, he was a total blank on. It was a very interesting study on the frailty of memory.

Is it correct to say that Rush didn’t make any money until 1978?
That’s not 100 per cent accurate. We weren’t skint, and we had homes and nice cars, but I always say that fame comes long before profit. Truth be told, we weren’t very bright when it came to money. We always wanted to put it back into the show and make the show better; for example if we wanted a new crew guy, or if we wanted to do a new kind of special effect, so we had a hard time balancing the books in the early days, for sure.

In the book, you reveal that you got into cocaine in the 80s. I didn’t expect that.
Yep. Someone else expressed that same reaction recently, and asked, “Why didn’t anyone know that?”, which got me thinking. Because we were a progressive rock band from Canada that didn’t have any big hit singles, there was really no journalistic or pop culture spotlight on us at all. We plodded along in relative obscurity, in a way. We had our fanbase, but there were no journalists that wanted to come and hang out with us for five days, like we were Led Zeppelin. There was no sexy lifestyle that they were attracted to, so we could get fucked up in private without anybody really knowing what we were up to. Me and my buddies, we did like to smoke pot in the early days, and we did try other things along the way, including a lot of acid when we were really young, but we were a part of the 60s drug culture, and we were a product of that. Some of those drugs got the best of me, but fortunately we survived them.

Do you still indulge?
No, I don’t do drugs. Wine is my drug now.

Moving Pictures (1981) album was a commercial high-point for Rush, but you didn’t enjoy fame, and you hated it when fans became too obsessed. Did it ever occur to you that you’re too sensible to be a rock star?
Not in the way that you put it, but there are things about the lifestyle – now that I’ve been sitting here for eight years, since our last tour – that I don’t miss. I don’t miss the crowd roar... okay, maybe I miss that a little bit. What I do miss is the job, and that beautiful moment when you’re playing well, and you look across the stage and your partners are playing well, and you’re lost in that moment. That is the best thing ever. That’s what I miss.

There’s a clip on YouTube of Rush playing the 1981 song YYZ in Brazil, and the caption is, “Only this band could make 60,000 fans sing along to an instrumental”.
[laughs] They were amazing! The Brazilians wrote their own parts. It was incredible. I do miss that part. The first time that ever happened was at the Apollo in Glasgow, and I had chills from that and so did my partners, I can tell you. So, I’m not going to say that it’s not a great feeling to be onstage and have people throwing a lot of love at you. I would be lying if I said that. But it’s not something I miss.

You often refer in the book to the band impacting on your marriage. I imagine it’s impossible to be both a touring musician and a present partner or father.
It’s near-impossible, for sure, and there’s damage, which is usually suffered by someone other than yourself. I know so many musicians whose marriages have failed, or come close to failing, or whose children have been neglected, and I have guilt about that with my own kids. Work, and my obsessive nature, means that I get sucked into it, and I didn’t pay enough attention to them. That’s something that I’ve tried to correct over the last 20 years of my life, and I know that the other guys were also very aware of that.

There seemed to be a transition point in the early 2000s when Rush relaxed and started having fun, playing giant arenas and having crazy props onstage and so on.
There definitely was. It began with Neil coming back to the band and touring the Vapor Trails album in 2002. It felt like a second lease of life. I never thought Neil would get through [the losses of his wife and daughter] and want to play again, but here we were onstage, after that incredibly difficult record to make, and the atmosphere felt so easy. There was an easiness between us and a clear love between us, and a willingness to not worry about anything else but playing our asses off and trying to make each other laugh. From that point until the end of our career, that’s all we tried to do. Write well, play well and make each other laugh.

As you see it, when was Rush on peak creative form?
I think with the Clockwork Angels album (2012). Now, millions of fans would disagree with that [laughs], but I think there’s a maturity in the writing of that album that was not possible at any other time in our history. Some would point immediately to Moving Pictures and say, “That was your peak” and there’s an argument to be made for that, but if you’re asking me, it’s Clockwork Angels.

Performing with Yes at their Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame induction in 2017 must have felt good.
That was huge thrill for me to do that, I have to say. It was an odd experience, showing up to rehearsal and meeting the guys, because we’d never met before. There were two Yeses at the time, so it was a bit of an odd scene, but nonetheless I was welcomed very warmly and that made me feel great because their music meant so much to me. Playing [the 1971 Yes hit] Roundabout was just about the ultimate thrill. I woodshedded for that moment, I can tell you – I didn’t want to fuck it up.

Do promoters and other industry people ever suggest that Rush should recruit a new drummer and tour?
Constantly, and I appreciate it. I don’t belittle it; I don’t dismiss it. When Alex and I played the Taylor Hawkins Tribute concerts last year, it was very good for us to do that. It was nice to play those songs with other people, and it was no disrespect to Neil at all. Those songs are us, you know? They were him, but they were also us, so to retake ownership of those songs and to not be afraid of that moment was huge, and very tempting to do again. Previous to that, I’m not sure I could make that claim. It was really thanks to the incredible will and generosity of Dave Grohl, the most superhuman being on the planet. He gave us that opportunity: he wanted us there, and he was so encouraging. He did everything he could to make it as easy for us to come back in that context, and he was very cognisant. I remember having conversations with him where he’d say, “Well, you can’t play with just one drummer, because then they’ll all say that it’s Rush 2.0.” I was like, “Oh yeah – you’re right, Dave. How about you be one of the drummers?”

He’d lost both Kurt Cobain and Taylor Hawkins, of course, so perhaps he understands the sensitivities better than most people.
He understands a lot. He’s a caring, sensitive, incredibly giving person. His encouragement brought us back to the stage, and it was in honour of Taylor, of course, and in honour of our own bandmate and pal Neil, but it was more than that, and I think he knew that.

The Californian band Primus toured America last year, playing your 1977 album A Farewell To Kings in its entirety. Did you see the show?
Alex and I went when they came to Toronto and sat at the side of the stage. It was weird for us to watch, but suddenly I felt Alex’s hand on my shoulder: he was proud to see that someone cared so much about what we’d done that they were willing to go out and pay tribute to it. It was very sweet, and we love those guys so much. They’re such great people and great players – and it was great hearing Les [Claypool, bandleader] try to sing my parts. He just did it as himself, which was absolutely right. He made it his own.

You name a lot of people in your book who have either been good to you or have wronged you. Your exact words are, “I am a motherfucker who bears a grudge”. That’s an unusual degree of honesty.
[laughs] Well, that’s good, I guess. When I set out to write this book, my co-writer Daniel Richler said to me, “Are there any rules?” I said, “Only one rule, which is that the only person I should embarrass is myself.” I didn’t quite stick to that, because there were a few times that I could not resist embarrassing someone else, but for the most part I tried to keep it to people that impressed me or moved me, or to people I miss, and the people I’ve lost. I’ve lost a lot of people, and sometimes I wonder, “Is that normal?” Sometimes it feels as though I’ve lost an inordinate amount of people on a regular basis. Part of the motivation to write is to try and make sense of all of that to myself.

Have you achieved that goal?
Well, in bits. I think it was good for me. Reviewing and paying homage to some of these lost friends was good for me and good for my heart.

You also mention being obsessed with details. Does that make you difficult to work with?
I don’t think I’m a difficult guy, but that’s me talking. You’d have to ask the people who are sitting beside me in the control room. There’s probably more than one recording engineer who would beg to differ, but I’ve managed to remain friends with all the people I’ve worked with, so I think that must say something about my ability to be insistent, at times, but not belittling or unfair. I’ve always put the project first, not my own self or my own wishes. Again, Alex might argue with that from time to time [laughs]. But he still loves me, so we’re all good.

Do you feel optimistic about the future?
I do, and I don’t think I could have said that before this book, to be honest. That tells me a lot about what the process has put me through. I feel happier today than when I started to write this book, and you have to remember, I began it not very long after Neil passed, so it was a very tough time. But here we are, at the beginning of 2024, and I do feel optimistic about the future, and excited to see what’s around the corner.

Well, that’s the question that everyone will ask you – what’s next?
[laughs] Right! I don’t know. One thing I do know is that I don’t want to plan my life too far ahead. Another thing is that my life with my wife comes first, so any other idea – whether it’s musical or not – is subservient to those decisions. Would I do a musical project? Yes, I would. Will I? We’ll see. I’m up for it, but there’s the task of promoting this book, and once that’s out of the way, I think there’ll be a clear view of some musical endeavour that will draw me back in.

Are you good at doing nothing?
Pretty effin’ good at it [laughs]. I say that, but my wife would vehemently argue that I’m never doing nothing, because I’ve always got a project on the go. I’ve just finished another little book that I’ll save for another conversation, and I have so many other ideas for other types of book. I’m obsessive about my bird photography: I have two years of bird photographs that I haven’t sorted through yet. And then there’s all those bass guitars that are staring at me very guiltily, saying, “What the fuck, man? What are we doing here if you’re not gonna play us?” All those things are begging for an answer, and I have to attend to them.

It’s the burden of choice.
Yeah. But it’s kind of wonderful to have things you want to do, and not all of them are important in the big scheme of things. You make them important by deciding that you’re gonna spend time on them.

In the book, you seem to conclude that music and family are all we really have. Did I interpret that correctly?
You did. At the end of the day, that’s what you can hold close to you. You know those are real. Everything else seems so ephemeral.