The two males on the couch, Rush’s Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, have identified one another for 60 years now. “When we first met in junior high school, we sat beside each other, and we laughed,” says Lee, the elder by a month. “He’s the funniest guy I’ve ever known, and I make him laugh, too.” Lifeson, who has been gazing at his buddy fortunately, nods vigorously. “Yeah!” The two of them gently tease one another, and converse of one another with such completely satisfied admiration, that I really feel suffused with heat from the off. “Everybody wants to have a bestie like this guy!” Lee says at one level, beaming.
It’s solely as a result of they like one another a lot that they’re in this posh London lodge suite. Lifeson came to visit to Europe for some well being checks, and Lee determined to return with him. Once they have been right here, they determined they might as effectively discuss to some journalists about Rush’s upcoming R50 reunion tour, and the choice so as to add 24 European and South American reveals to the 58 area dates they’d already introduced for North America (they’ll play the UK in March 2027). The interviews have been meant to be separate, however they determined it might be extra pleasant to talk collectively. Honestly, if you happen to ever wish to see a mannequin for male friendship, spend time with Rush and really feel cleansed.
Their friendship is why Rush exist once more. The pair had declared they have been achieved following the death of their drummer, Neil Peart, in January 2020, bringing an finish to a band that had created a distinctive fusion of prog and exhausting rock within the 70s and continued to evolve for many years, racking up 14 platinum-selling albums within the US with out its principals ever falling out. They reformed not as a result of they missed Rush, however as a result of they missed enjoying collectively as mates. “It goes back before the origins of the band,” Lifeson says. “When we were in junior high, we would get together and play. Music was what drove us as buddies.”
The determination to turn out to be Rush once more was born out of jamming, Lee says. “We got sidetracked and started playing Rush songs. When one jam petered out, one of us said, ‘Why don’t we play this song? Can we remember it?’ So we did. And … we couldn’t.”
“We were so bad,” Lifeson provides.
Playing two tribute concert events to the late Foo Fighters drummer, Taylor Hawkins, in 2022 had given them a shot of adrenaline, and they made provisional plans earlier than Lifeson obtained chilly toes and backed out. When the concept of Rush got here up once more, Lee says, “I told Al: ‘Look, we’re either doing this or we’re not doing it. I can’t talk about it every two years. Because time marches on and I don’t how much time we have. So if we’re going to do it, we do it now. If we don’t, fine, let’s just not talk about it.”
Lifeson: “True story.”
There remained one drawback: the drum stool. Peart wasn’t simply a notable drummer; he was maybe the most distinctive and technically adept rock drummer of his and most different generations. He was many followers’ favorite member of Rush. And he wrote the lyrics. Lee and Lifeson nod once I recommend that changing him is a little like telling a younger ball participant he’s in for Babe Ruth.
“Go out there and take a swing, kid!” Lifeson says, laughing.
The drummer they’ve chosen is 42-year-old Anika Nilles, from Germany. Lee’s bass tech had advisable her, after working on a Jeff Beck tour she performed on. After a video name, she got here to Canada final March for a week of auditions.
Usually, when a band recruits a new member, they discuss enthusiastically in regards to the contemporary really feel the group has, the way it has enabled them to shake up the songs. Did Rush need somebody to try this, or somebody to play photocopies of Peart’s components?
“It has to start there,” Lifeson says. “They have to be true to the arrangements, because that’s the expectation from the fans. But we don’t place any restrictions on her. When she is comfortable and confident in the arrangements, she’s free to enhance them with her own spirit.”
“And she will,” Lee says. “But I don’t think we knew when she arrived what our expectations were, to be honest. “When we started playing with her, something felt wrong. And I was, of course: ‘This is not gonna work.’ Those seemingly impossible fills were not a problem for her at all. What was difficult was understanding a relationship between snare, bass drum and hi-hat that’s different from her training.
“The first four days were up and down, and she was nervous, and she was jetlagged, and we were unsure. We had a little chat before the last day – ‘I don’t know, Al, is this going to work?’ We talked about all the things we liked about her, and what a work ethic she has, nice person and deep knowledge, deep technical ability. So there’s a lot of positives. So let’s not be hasty. And we went into that last day and she just fucking nailed it.”
“She suddenly understood what we were talking about that whole week,” Lifeson says, “not about the technical aspect, but about the stuff in between the big stuff, that Neil was just so amazing at and those internal dynamics that only another drummer can understand, and it clicked in her.”
She might need all of the chops on the planet, however she nonetheless has to attempt to slot in with mates who’ve identified one another since childhood. Right till the top, Lee and Lifeson referred to Peart, who solely joined Rush in 1974, as “the new guy”.
“Yeah, we excluded Neil like that for years – but he wanted in, he wanted to prove to us he could be as goofy as we were, and he was very funny. He sort of barged his way into our friendship, and it worked. And Anika is very quiet, and she’s sliding into our friendship.”
Rush, within the type the world got here to know them, arrived when Peart changed John Rutsey as drummer and took over the lyrics. On their debut, with Rutsey, that they had been a sub-Led Zeppelin heavy blues rock band. But Lee and Lifeson had turn out to be obsessive about emulating their prog heroes Yes and Genesis, and wanted a drummer who may match their aspirations: that was Peart.
“We wanted to play like people like that,” Lee says. “We wanted to be that precise, to be as grandiose as they were, or as conceptual as they were. We were carried away by those records, and we wanted in.” And thus got here the grand collection of data – Caress of Steel, the career-defining 2112, A Farewell to Kings and Hemispheres – crammed with multi-part suites and lyrics straight out of the fantasy cabinets of the bookshop (“By-Tor and the Snow Dog was a joke!” Lee insists, on the suggestion their humour didn’t come by of their music). They have been the band that impressed legions of 14-year-old boys to purchase Ayn Rand books, and for whom no solo could possibly be too intricate: their instrumental La Villa Strangiato was too complicated for them to play straight by within the studio. (Its subtitle: An Exercise in Self-Indulgence.)
As the 70s fell into the 80s, synths and smoother textures got here into their music – at Lee’s behest – and Peart’s lyrics moved away from the legendary to the private and human, in songs such because the hit single Subdivisions, in regards to the loneliness of the suburban teen. Did it turn out to be simpler for Lee to narrate to the lyrics as they turned extra human?
“Yes and no. There were times when it was too personal and uncomfortable for me – I was the guy pushing for universality in his lyrics. After we came back with Vapor Trails [Rush’s first album following the deaths of Peart’s daughter and then his wife in 1997 and 1998], there were moments that were very confessional. It was almost too intimate for me, and I had to be the audience there and say: ‘Look, I don’t want to change what you’re trying to say. But let me in a little bit so it’s not just about your experience.’ That was a tough conversation.”
Friendship allowed Rush to climate vicissitudes different bands wouldn’t have tolerated. By the top of the 80s, Lifeson was completely fed up with the declining position of his guitar-playing within the band. The reply was easy: accommodate him. Go again to being a guitar band, irrespective of that it meant the top of Lee’s favorite period of the band and the entry into his least favorite.
In the mid-2000s, Peart determined to completely reinvent his fashion, taking classes from the jazz drummer Freddie Gruber: that was what he wished, so that they tailored. “It was uncomfortable at first, because we wanted him to flip the sticks around and just start pounding,” Lee says. “And he was resolute he was not going to shift. So we had to adjust the feel a bit. For me, it was interesting as a bass player, because he had a rounder swing in his playing. And I think it’s part of what our band always was: open. So for us not to be open to this change would have been antithetical.”
That in flip created contemporary issues, as a result of after they subsequent toured, Peart had one set of songs to play within the new vogue, and one other set that required a completely totally different method. “I think that’s what made him such an amazing monster drummer by the end,” Lee says. “He was more ferocious and at the same time he could swing on a dime.”
When they speak about Peart, it’s not by misty eyes. At occasions Lee, particularly, refers to him within the current tense (“How Neil plays …”). But the loss is profound. “I just miss him,” Lee says. “I don’t know if there’s one thing I miss about him.”
“His laugh,” Lifeson says.
“When he says, ‘Oh, come on!’ and calls your bluff,” Lee says. “He was a mentor to me in many ways. He was a very stimulating person to be around.” Then he giggles and appears to be like at Lifeson. “And I love the way Neil used to punch him so hard in the shoulder. Or he’d just look at me and say: ‘Hit him!’”
In the top, all of it comes down to like. Not simply the principals’ love for one another, however their viewers’s love for them. They observe that following the 2010 documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, there was an upsurge in affection for them. Lifeson thinks individuals respect their work ethic; Lee that they admire Rush’s unapologetic nerdery.
I recommend it’s extra easy: individuals discovered their friendship to be very shifting. Lifeson nods alongside. Lee says, “I know that when I do some post on Instagram and I talk about him, or he talks about me, the response is crazy. They just love it.”
The greatest level of distinction between them is the way in which they specific emotions.
“He’s really emotional,” Lee says.
“I am,” Lifeson nods. “Too emotional.”
“He can go from zero to 100 at a seemingly innocent remark. ‘Al, calm down. That’s not what we’re talking about.’”
“That helps.”
“He can really explode. A real Serbian. [Lifeson’s parents, Nenad and Melanija Živojinović, came to Canada from the former Yugoslavia.] The only thing that calms him down is to go eat a pig somewhere. And I’m probably too controlling for him.”
“Yeah.”
“And too rational.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
And nonetheless, 60 years on, in the event that they and their wives of fifty years are invited out to dinner, it’s finest if the hosts don’t sit Lee and Lifeson collectively, as a result of nobody else will curiosity them. They will sit with their heads collectively, immersed in their very own personal social gathering. Lee turns to Lifeson. “We did that at Tim’s one night. They had planned this wonderful dinner party, and we just alienated them.”
Lifeson nods like a large, completely satisfied labrador. “That happens a lot!”
