Geddy Lee Interview

One of the first rock shows I ever attended (courtesy of my older brother and his friends) was Canadian superstars Rush at Wembley Arena. Along with the band’s trademark virtuoso playing on epic rock tracks like Tom Sawyer and Closer To The Heart, there were huge inflatable bunny rabbits, animated and funny films that played between songs and a space-age light show that was almost blinding. Let's just say that, not surprisingly, a unique experience like that left its mark on me. Late last year I was lucky enough to briefly speak to the voice, and bassist extraordinaire, of Rush: Mr Geddy Lee. That's right, GEDDY LEE, and yes, Pavement, he speaks like an ordinary, but rather nice, guy. It was concerning the band's latest impressive DVD release Snakes & Arrows Live, a three-disc concert of their most recent tour. It's a pretty cool document of the tour but as always with Rush, they've put together something a little more special with the band showing off their comic side, as seen in the concert's opening segment that sees Geddy dressed as a mad Scotsman and guitarist Alex Lifeson hamming it up as a crazy green-faced Indian guru.

The opening sequence and little films are such fun. Are you guys wannabe actors?

[Laughs] I guess reluctantly, well, not so reluctantly actually, we’ve embraced the goofier side of ourselves. I’m afraid me and my team of idiots are to blame for that.

There's a great South Park animation in the middle of show, with Cartman pretending to be you. How did that come about? 

Well, they’re fans and they’ve become friends with Neil [Peart, drummer], since he’s moved out to the West Coast, he kind of hangs a bit with Matt Stone. So I really wanted to see if they could do something for the beginning of the show and they happened to be away at the time and so they got the message late. But they called back and said "We would have loved to have done something, is there something else we can do?" So I suggested, if you can think of a fun intro for Tom Sawyer go ahead. So they got the whole gang into the studio and they turned the whole thing around in, like, three days it was all done.

I remember the first time I saw you guys how impressive it was with the lights, the films and the props. How important is the visual aspect for you? 

I think it is very important because a lot of our songs are quite long and involved and require us to be at times quite static which is not entertaining and I think you’re asking a lot of your audience to be there for three hours. I think the least you can do is try and entertain them visually and make them laugh once in a while, so for me it’s just part of how I view a kind of a total entertainment experience for three hours. You know you’ve got to tickle them once in a while just to see a smile on their face. [laughs]

You put all of that into the DVD too, don't you? Your DVDs always seem like you've put a lot of thought and effort into them.

Well, I think the DVD experience is kind of perfect for a band for us, because our fans love to have that souvenir document of each tour and this is the perfect way to do that. And as we keep changing our tours each tour is kind of a one-off in a way, so it’s nice to have some kind of record of what we did over that two-year period. So as a historical document for our own purposes it’s valuable and from our fans point of view it’s a way of keeping that tour alive for them. DVD is great for live concerts and live music; I think it’s really the ultimate experience.

There's quite a lot of material from the new record, Snakes & Arrows, which seems like it more of a back to basics album... 

I would say… it’s hard for me to use that term because it’s not really back to basics, but at the same time it certainly evokes the spirit of some of our earlier records, I would say and I think it was a successful way of blending the past and the present.

It's been a big success for you though hasn't it? Were you surprised? 

Yes, I was actually. I was very proud of the record when we finished it and I knew we had done some good work there but you never really know how the public will take to it and this record was very well received and very quickly digested, which was kind of a surprise for us.

The record seems to have brought a whole new generation of fans to the band... 

The whole last tour there’s so many younger fans coming to the shows and you know, you can really tell they’re new ones because a lot of them are just listening to the old material and waiting for the new ones and then they go crazy. And that’s unusual and gratifying. A lot of them are young players or they got turned onto the band through Rock Band or Guitar Hero or something like that. So they’re coming at it from a musical point of view which I think is even cooler.

I like the fact that you mix up the set list from tour to tour, this DVD for instance seems to have a lot of 80s material on there...

Yeah, we just to mix up the shows up from tour to tour and somehow or another we just fall into a particular groove on which songs to play. This time we wanted to pull some songs out to play that were maybe a little more obscure and hadn’t played for long time, I know the fans really like to hear, you know, deep cuts, as they call it, songs you wouldn’t expect to hear, and you know it keeps it fresh for us and gives us a chance to reinvent that song live.

It seems like some of the older stuff is probably pretty hard to recreate live... 

Well, we’ve kind of painted ourselves into a corner by, you know, adding all these textures and flourishes to our records and then insisting on replicating them live so we’ve kind of created a nightmare for ourselves but it keeps you on your toes and it keeps the crowd kind of wowed by the fact that there’s only three of us up there yet we’re still able to wrestle the technology to recreate all those things. It’s a challenge every night and it keeps us very in the moment, we can’t really go for a holiday in your mind without fucking the song up. But it keeps us off the street. [laughs]

So, the tour and the DVD is finished. Is there any chance Rush might be going back into the studio soon? Ah, no, right now I’m working on not working. I think once we have about six or seven months off people start getting bored and antsy, then we know it’s time to call each other up and say, "why don’t we write a few songs and see how it goes". But it hasn’t happened yet and I don’t expect it to happen for a little while yet. [laughs]