Geddy Lee is out making the rounds in support of his new memoir, My Effin’ Life, touring the country for speaking events. Earlier this month, the Rush bassist caught up with one of his most devoted followers, Les Claypool of Primus, for a virtual event where they discussed the memoir, Lee’s family history, bad reviews, and much more.
Starting the interview with a virtual clink of wine glasses, Claypool accurately described Lee’s 797-page memoir as “A big bastard of a book,” with Lee retorting, “I’m not one to do things at half measures.” Though for the longest time, Lee didn’t want to write a memoir at all, opting to look ahead to new adventures rather than reliving old ones. It was the death of bandmate and drumming legend Neil Peart in 2020 that changed his mind, along with the global pandemic shortly thereafter, and watching his own mother’s struggles with dementia.
“I was really quite perturbed by Neil’s passing, and I was having a hard time moving past that and I thought perhaps looking at my life backwards—even talking about the things that my family went through during World War II which were stories of the Holocaust that I grew up around and the eventual passing of my father when I was 12 years old—maybe those were things I hadn’t examined closely enough,” Lee surmised. “Maybe there was some, as they say in the therapy business, ‘unattended sorrow’ that I hadn’t dealt with. Because in many ways when you lose somebody in your life you kind of lose everybody all over again that you’ve lost. It’s kind of a river of grief that flows alongside your subconscious.”
One of the most compelling parts of Lee’s memoir, per Claypool, is the section devoted to his family’s experiences in World War II Europe during the Holocaust. His mother and father met in a concentration camp, and Lee tells the story of how his parents were able to persevere and escape to Canada to eventually start their family.
“I thought, well, what is the purpose of a memoir? Is it just to write a few rock and roll stories and to sell some books or do you owe it to the reader to share who you are? For the reader to have some understanding of your personality, your real personality, to get rid of the artifice. And so for me, it was very important for the reader to understand the household I was raised in because I think it explains my outlook on life and explains in a sense my value system. And so I also felt an obligation to my mom to tell her story or to get it down on paper in an accurate, or as accurate a way as is humanly possible 60 years after the fact, to clarify all these stories I heard as a child.”
Moving onto his own experiences with Rush, Lee pointed to “Fly by Night” in the book as something he’s a little disappointed in, that the playing is a little too “vanilla.” Overall, however, he told Claypool, “I don’t have regrets about anything we did musically. I would do it all again; I wouldn’t change a f–ing thing.”
Despite his certainty, some in the rock n’ roll press didn’t see eye-to-eye with Rush’s vision, labeling the band as “pretentious” early on. It was a label that Lee and Peart never understood, with Geddy contending that their music was always honest, if adventurous perhaps even beyond their abilities. Even in the face of negative reviews, Lee still finds value in confronting his critics.
“I think it’s helpful to examine bad criticism,” Geddy said. “Because I was as skeptical of bad reviews as I was of overly good reviews. You know what it’s like, some person waxing on about how great you are,” to which Claypool coyly responded, “I don’t get good reviews. I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Watch Les Claypool interview Geddy Lee about his new memoir My Effin’ Life, available now.
Geddy Lee of Rush & Les Claypool of Primus talk about Neil Peart, Mordecai Richler & #MyEffinLife
[Video: Kevin Krasnow]
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