It took a series of losses for the high-voiced rock star to confront his personal history. It all came out in his new memoir.

November 10, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EST

Musician and author Geddy Lee. (Richard Sibbald)

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TORONTO — Gershon Eliezer Weinrib’s dark hair still falls past his shoulders. In most rooms of his home, a bass sits within reach. And as he watches his beloved Blue Jays from his seat behind home plate, there’s always some guy lingering nearby, waiting for the moment to thrust out a hand and blurt: “I just wanted to say hi. I’m a huge fan.”

Weinrib, better known as Geddy Lee, played his final show as the octave-bending frontman of Rush eight years ago. At the time, though, he still held out hope for an encore, which didn’t seem unreasonable. The prog-rock trio was a giant of 1970s FM radio, filling arenas with a sound that melded the proto-metal of Hendrix or Led Zeppelin with the nerdy, noodling precision of Yes or early Genesis, while their graduate-level lyrics evoked Ayn Rand, Samuel R. Delany or John Dos Passos, to the delight of fans who kept coming back for decades even after they cut their hair and sold their Trans Ams.

Lee can talk eloquently about birdwatching, baseball and what he looks for in a great burgundy. But his response is blunt when he’s asked if he misses his band.

A band, it’s often said, is like a marriage. Except most married couples get to spend a few hours apart each day. A band eats together, bunks together and rambles together from gig to gig in that rusty Econoline or, when fortune strikes, a posh tour bus. And if that band is lucky enough to score a bona fide hit, the bitter battles over money, credit and fame can rupture the union as brutally as a divorce.

But Rush was an unbreakable unit from the moment Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer Neil Peart began playing together in July 1974. No 2-to-1 votes; everything had to be unanimous. Debates were fine, but voices were never raised; drumsticks never flew through the air.

“I mean, I’m sure there were differences of opinion at times, but they always managed to work it out,” says Terry Brown, who produced Rush over its first decade.

During the era of the golden god, when jean-stuffing rockers roamed the Earth searching for drugs, groupies and TV sets to toss, the members of Rush seemed content keeping to themselves. “Every night after a show, the girls would line up, and my God, you can even be an ugly bastard like me and get laid,” Gene Simmons of Kiss recounted in a 2010 documentary on the band. “And none of the Rush guys ever did. I just never understood it. What the f— did you do when you went back to your hotel room?”

The trio’s personal lives mirrored their collective commitment to the band — a relationship that Lee contemplated as he tried to cope with a series of losses over the past decade.

He lost Rush in 2015 after that final tour. He lost Peart in 2020. And he lost his mother, Mary, and their Saturday lunches and Yiddish one-liners, in 2021, when she died at 95. Those losses and the isolation of the pandemic left Lee, 70, struggling with an overwhelming sadness.

He had looked to his mother as a model of resilience. A Polish Jew, she had survived the concentration camps and found strength and purpose in preserving and sharing the stories that others preferred to forget.

So Lee decided to take stock of his own memories. And he began work on a project he had never intended to take on.

There never was a band like Rush. Despite the occasional forays into platform shoes and satin, none of them looked or acted much like rock stars. They mastered the kind of technical precision — experimenting with synthesizers and changing time signatures mid-tune — that gets you labeled as “classically trained,” which they weren’t. And in the era of headbanging and “Cat Scratch Fever,” they were singing 11-minute songs inspired by the epic poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

“Conform or be cast out,” Lee sang in “Subdivisions,” a 1982 song about the pressure to be like everybody else, which Rush would never succumb to.

“They lived that,” said Les Claypool, the frontman of the 1990s funk-metal band Primus. “When we toured with them in Europe, we got a lot of s— from the press because it’s, like, why are you cutting-edge guys playing with these old dinosaurs? … From our perspective, these were our heroes.”

And what about the voice of Geddy Lee? In truth, it ranged no higher than that of Robert Plant, the keening powerhouse of Led Zeppelin, but early on, the strained, reedy quality of Lee’s vocal stylings was arresting — instantly recognizable and easily mocked. “A guinea pig with an amphetamine habit,” wrote the Montreal Gazette. “A munchkin giving a sermon,” sniffed the New York Times.

It didn’t matter. Lee had heard worse.

Growing up in Toronto in the 1960s, the greasers teased him about the size of his nose and joked that he rode to school on the “Jew bus.” It was only when he became friends with Steve Shutt — a future Hall of Fame hockey star — that the bullying let up.

Mary had tried to prepare her three children for this. She told them all about her journey — how she and her future husband, Morris, were just teenagers when they were rounded up by the Nazis and sent to Auschwitz. About the miracle of their survival and their reunion after the war, and about the antisemitism she feared they would face, as well.

Not long after Lee’s 12th birthday, Morris came home from work with what he thought was the flu. Lee remembers waking up later in the night to the screams: His father had had a heart attack and was dead at 45.

For the next 11 months, Lee found himself even more socially isolated, spending every day at shul to honor his father, in abidance of Jewish law. The experience set him apart and formed him as the nerd frontman he would become, forever shy yet anxious if he didn’t properly acknowledge his fans, never convinced he was truly a part of the rock star club.

Canada probably had something to do with it, as well.

“Growing up in Toronto, you were just sort of made to feel like a dollar’s worth 74 cents,” said comedian and actor Rick Moranis, a grammar school classmate of Lee’s. “You felt more like an appendage of the States or something like that. I mean, we drove to Buffalo to buy Beatle boots or blue jeans. … It felt very much like a foreign place that things hadn’t reached. Except on the radio.”

While his mother worked long hours at the family discount store, Lee and his siblings were left either with their deeply religious grandmother Bubbe Rose or largely to their own devices. Lee took to going to rock concerts with Shutt, and one day they both bought bass guitars.

A couple of weeks later, Shutt was at Lee’s house when Lee put a record on and started playing along.

“He’s just playing it. Boom, boom, boom, boom,” Shutt recalled. “And that’s when I knew Ged was going to be a bassist, and I was going to be a hockey player.”

Mary, boggled by the cultural upheaval of the decade, was unimpressed with her son’s musical acumen — and infuriated by his ever-growing hair. Rather than have a bar mitzvah photo taken of her son, Mary commissioned an artist to create a portrait. In the painting, she could keep his hair cropped.

“She would go into his room with a scissors when he was sleeping,” remembers Susie, his sister. “And I remember coming after her and grabbing her and going, no, no, no, you can’t do this.”

Geddy spent more time in his bedroom, listening to music and practicing. Eventually he dropped out of high school, to his mother’s dismay. Yet the two were very much built from the same stuff, said his younger brother, Allan.

“There’s a Holocaust instinct that comes out, like no matter what happens, we keep moving forward,” he added. “In 1965, women don’t go and take over a business and run a store…”