Rush was one of the bands which hailed from the swinging sixties. The band was formed in 1968 with Geddy Lee on lead vocals, bass, and keyboards, Alex Lifeson on guitar, and Neil Peart on drums. They are one of the most successful bands and still have a dedicated fan base.
Everyone has problems when it comes to certain things and Geddy Lee the vocalist of the band struggles with singing and performing one particular Rush song. Imagine struggling to perform your own song, well seems like it happens. Back in 1992 when he was interviewed he was asked about the song which was difficult to perform at live shows. And the vocalist was not shy about it.
The interview was a usual one, with questions like “Did you ever dream that the band would make it this far?” and he was answering them in a usual way too. One question which intrigued everyone’s attention is when he was asked if he’d ever written a song and thought it would be a challenge to sing.
He answered, “Many times. Even ‘Roll the Bones’ has accents that totally go against the vocal part, although the bass line isn’t complicated. That’s one of the most difficult songs for me to do because it’s hard to get into those bass-and-drum punches and keep the vocal line from getting her-jerky.”
He even remembered that his bandmates encouraged him to take things easy as it was a hassle. The bass riffs of the song were particularly hard for him and his bandmates wanted him to take it slow. He added, “The tendency is to want the vocal to push with the bass, so I try to shim the vocal a little on either side so that it works. Again, the guys have given me a lot of encouragement rather than letting me settle for a bass line that maybe isn’t so interesting. They’ve always encouraged me to go further, even though they know I’m going to have a headache at rehearsal.”
The bass line was a hard one for him. On top of that, he also had to sing along with it. It was deemed very difficult for him as he had to do both things simultaneously. However, his friends made it easy for him as they provided him with encouragement every time they had to perform it.
There is also another moment when he shared a complex song he struggled to play and kept fu**** up. While talking with Rolling Stone on January 7, 2020, he talked about their song ‘La Villa Strangiato’. Back then he remembered the drumming parts which were very hard. Lee said,
“That was really hard to play, that song – when we first wrote it. We couldn’t get through it. We kept f****** it up because there’s so many details, so many rhythmic shifts. Again, we wrote that kind of in sync with each other so I don’t know how to describe that process really. As you’re working on one section you’re intimate with what he’s playing, and then I’m intimate with what I’m playing and we try to make sure we can hear each other and I’ll go to some new place and he’ll go, ‘Oh, I like that. OK, I’ll go there with you.’ And vice versa. And that’s how you sort of build it and then you try to remember that sucker and that’s not so easy.”
