My Effin' Life

by Geddy Lee

Bored stiff hanging around with Mom, I slipped away after him, but when I got to the lower-level cafeteria, I had to stop short on the stairs. There he was at a table, on his own, with his coffee and cigarette . . . eating bacon and eggs. My eyes nearly popped out of my head. My own dad eating traif. Then, as I watched him from afar, a sly grin spread across my face. Not only did I love the fact that I had busted him, but a heretical idea was planted in my brain that all these religious rules were bullshit. It was like getting a hall pass, a Get Out of Jail Free card, and I knew that one day I was gonna use it!

Not a single adult relative asked me how I was dealing with my loss. Other than the occasional aunt who might swipe the bangs out of my face and say, “You poor boy. Be a good son and cut your hair,” not one so much as asked me, “Are you okay?” I never fully forgave them, and have never, ever forgotten the way that one prick of an uncle crossed the line, while I was standing in front of my own father’s grave. Fact is, to this day I have a long fucking memory for people who treat me badly.

My mother may have been crying tears of joy that day, but there was no real exploring faith with her or anyone else in my family. It was all dogmatic and unintellectual. There was nothing to discuss. They simply did as they’d been taught. How dare I even question it?

Please understand, I love being a Jew and I’m super-proud of all that “my” people have accomplished in so many aspects of life—especially in the face of persistent prejudice, hatred and outright murder—but I consider myself a devout cultural Jew: I love the history, the humour and even some of the food! But a belief in God and organized religion? Not for me. A line from Woody Allen’s Love and Death sums up my feelings well: “If it turns out that there is a God . . . the worst you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.”

It’s a testament to her innate intelligence and maturity that she’d learn to accept and even embrace people for who they are. She’d grow fiercely devoted to her daughters-in-law and adored them unquestioningly till the day she died. I find that hugely admirable for someone of her age and with her past, and wonder if I would have had the strength to change as she did.

I feel both duty-bound and honoured to tell you their story. For their sake. If you find it half as harrowing to read as I did writing it, you may be tempted to skip right along. If you do, I won’t blame you and I’ll see you in chapter four, but I’ve included it in this book because I feel we’re living in an era that seems to have forgotten what can and will happen when fascism rears its head. I think we all need reminding of it in the face of those who either deny the past or never knew about it in the first place.

On November 21, 1946, my mother and father were married in the Officers’ Mess Hall at Bergen-Belsen. What had been a roomful of coldblooded and ruthless persecutors was now a room filled with love, family and the promise of a new future together.

Whoever’s idea it was, the way they all went about it was deceitful and frankly chickenshit, and I was shocked and hurt. Still, I didn’t want to sit around and feel sorry for myself, so I said to myself, Fuck them, and resolved to start a band of my own.

I’d automatically order the open-faced roast beef sandwich—a very ordinary-sounding memory that conjures up the feeling for me of camaraderie and cheating life just a bit. We ought to have been in school being groomed to become proper citizens but were pursuing our dream instead. Maybe that’s why for Rush’s entire career, having a drink alone with Alex and Neil after almost every show would be so important; it was a nightly reminder that we’d gotten away with it.

I had to conjure a proper living now from nothing but a dream and a band (one that had already kicked me out once), if for no other reason than to justify what I was putting my mother through. When I got home, she wouldn’t talk to me. It’s a standard quip to say that Jewish parents want you to become a doctor or a lawyer, but she really thought I was insane. The music and the culture were utterly alien to her. She figured it was a one-way road to drug addiction, at best the equivalent of running away to join the circus.

We started to actually get a wee bit of airplay, here and there, late at night—“Working Man” on WMMS

Donna Halper at WMMS in Cleveland liked the record a lot too. She played several songs from it but found that “Working Man” especially resonated with her listeners. As a matter of fact, the phones lit up, as they say, and Rush became one of the station’s most requested albums despite it being available in American record stores only as an import.

Just about the first thing Alex and I noticed about Neil was “Hey, this guy reads a lot!” He always had a stack of books with him on the road, and it made quite the impression on me to be in the company of someone who, wherever we were, in the middle of whatever maelstrom, could just disappear into the pages.* Al and I were far more restless. We’d be goofing off half the time, but once Neil opened that book he was gone. He was this fascinating creature we’d found in our midst, and we were two dogs circling him, sniffing him out, observing his habits.

He said something close to, “Compromise is what the world functions on. Compromise. How dare you hurt your partners’ promising careers by refusing to compromise?” Nasty shit! Neil retorted simply but firmly that in art or music there can be no room for compromise; it was not a word in his vocabulary.

We saw recording as a creative process that should never be interfered with—sullied—by some boge’s “practical considerations,” and we stuck to the rule for life. In the long run, our refusal to compromise made them a fair bit of money, wouldn’t you say?

To be honest, we didn’t really consider ourselves to have a sound of our own until 2112, though there were moments like with “By-Tor” when we said to one another, “Ooh, nobody’s stupid enough to have done this before.”

The Police, for instance, fought tooth and nail over who would get the B side—because, of course, if you sold a million singles, even the guy who wrote the B side reaped a royalty reward. Well, we had zero hit singles to worry about, so it was easy for us to take the high road, but regardless, hearing that reinforced a decision we were about to take: from A Farewell to Kings onward, every song would be divided equally amongst the three of us, all for one and one for all, a working democracy. For the rest of our career we would never have to talk about that crap again. And to a great degree it was one of the secrets of our longevity.

Nancy was raised a United Church Protestant but harboured no religious feelings of her own; like me, if she was anything, she was an atheist. But having learned from me what Mom’s family had endured in the Holocaust, she wanted her to know that she respected her faith and would do what she could to help her swallow the pill of another Weinrib marriage outside the Orthodox tradition.

Nancy was a total doll and my mother put aside her reflexive cynicism for the evening. Let me tell ya, my mom could really dish if she felt like it, so that was a testament not just to her intestinal fortitude but her natural intelligence too. To accept me dropping out and becoming, of all things, a musician, and now to accept that I was about to be married outside of the faith—Nancy’s conversion notwithstanding—was unheard of in the world she’d grown up in, but she understood that the world was changing and, difficult though it must have been for her, throughout her life she’d continue to let old dogmas lie and adapt to new ways.

I’ve seen people play fast and loose with the interpretation of the last lines of the chorus: I will choose a path that’s clear I will choose free will To my dismay, those words have been cited without regard for the song’s overall message and used as a catch-all, a licence for some to do whatever they want. It makes me want to scream. Taken out of context, it becomes an oversimplified idea of free will, narrow and naïve, not taking into consideration that even the strongest individual must, to some extent, bow to the needs of a responsible society. Too often it’s seized upon as a reckless substitute for common sense.

During intermission in later years, here’s what thrilling things would happen: first we’d fight for the bathroom. Then Neil would have a cigarette, I’d check the baseball scores to see how my fantasy team was doing and Alex would dive into his iPad. That’s how exciting it was backstage with us. The last thing we needed was to see people.

I was surprised to learn that every day over the past few months, as he was driven to his cave by his friend Juan Lopez, he’d passed the time by listening to each and every one of our albums in order, taking in different songs on every trip. He told me how surprised and happy he’d been to hear how well the interplay of bass and drums stood up after all these years. He’d re-analysed the songs’ structure and listened closely to our individual parts and remarked on how our ambitious and quirky style of play had “filled each other’s gaps,” making us both sound better in the bargain. As he impressed upon me just how proud he was of all we’d accomplished, I was blown away by how closely he’d been listening. As I write this now, I find myself overwhelmed with emotion to think how he was reviewing his life, knowing he was at the end of it, and talking about how much our working relationship meant to him, wanting me to hear it from his lips.

Pete Seeger’s “To everything there is a season,” and Tolkien’s “The road goes ever on . . .” With or without our permission, in life and in death, those two things are immutable. The band has run its course, but the music remains.

I showed it to Finnian so he could see one name etched there: that of my namesake and his great-great-grandfather Gershon Eliezer. He was puzzled by the Hebrew version, so I told him it translates to Gary Lee, my birth name before I changed it to Geddy. His eyes widened, then he smiled and said cheekily, “Hi, Gary.” He saw straight through all my alter egos, alternate names and nicknames, right to my essence.