A conversation with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson of Rush from 2010

The YYZ legends talk about their rock doc, their reluctant relationship with music videos, and getting hammered at group dinners

Jan 09, 2025

Welcome to stübermania, where I dig into my box of dust-covered interview cassettes from the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to present bygone conversations with your favourite alterna/indie semi-stars (and the occasional classic-rock icon). This is a newsletter in three parts: The Openers (links to recent writings, playlist updates, and/or other musical musings), The Headliner (your featured interview of the week), and Encores (random yet related links).

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THE OPENERS

Happy new year, everybody, and thank you for indulging my year-end listicling. We’re back to the regular stübermania routine this week. By fortuitous coincidence, the most recent interview subject featured in this newsletter—the ever-elusive Gregg Alexander of New Radicals—turned up on the red carpet at the Golden Globes this past Sunday! Crazy timing!

What I did on my winter break: I spoke to Alex Kapraonos of Franz Ferdinand about playing electric piano with Glaswegian greats Urusei Yatsura, that weird live Grammys mash-up performance with Black Eyed Peas, making a record with Sparks, his Greek roots, indie sleaze, his short-lived mustache phase, and much more in this edition of Stereogum’s We’ve Got a File on You.

THE HEADLINER:
A conversation with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson

The date: May 14, 2010

Location: The Alliance-Atlantis offices in Toronto

Publication: Eye Weekly

Documentary being promoted: Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, directed by Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen

The context: This week marked the fifth anniversary of Neil Peart’s death, an occasion I observed by revisiting A Farewell to Kings and then digging out this interview I did for Eye Weekly with his surviving bandmates back when they were doing the press rounds for their documentary. Appropriately/uncannily enough, even at the time of this interview, 10 years before his passing, Neil already felt like some mystical figure occupying a cosmic plane beyond the reach of us mere mortals—i.e., someone whose presence was measured by his absence. Needless to say, the notoriously media-shy drummer didn’t participate in promotional duties for the documentary, and tellingly, within the film itself, he’s interviewed separately, while Alex and Geddy often appear onscreen together. And while the film was ostensibly a celebration of Rush, it necessitated a reopening of their darkest chapter—the deaths of Peart’s daughter and wife in short succession in 1997 and 1998—so I can totally understand why he wouldn’t want to be put in a position where he’d have to repeatedly reflect on those tragedies on the film-junket circuit.

This interview was one of those quick 10-minute sit-downs where journalists were trotted in and out of the conference room like cattle. But while my time with Geddy and Alex was brief, it’s always nice to get first-hand confirmation that your classic-rock heroes are genuinely nice, chill, funny dudes.

Note: The tape started rolling as Alex was checking his phone between interviews, which led to a mini-rant about the annoyance of iPhone email alerts.

They say when you stop to check one email, it takes you three minutes to get back to what you were doing before.

Geddy: It’s really disruptive.

Alex: I used to be so punctual for everything and now in the morning, I’m always late because I stop by my computer and I just check. And now it’s on your phone.

So going into this film, were you a fan of rock documentaries in general? Did you ever envision something like this being part of Rush’s legacy?

Geddy: Well, I certainly wasn’t a big fan of music documentaries. There are some, obviously, that are more interesting than others, and I did enjoy the Headbanger’s Journey film that Scott and Sam did—I participated in that, and that’s how I got to know them. So I thought they did a really good job, and I watched their Global Metal one too, and I thought they were really interesting. They really had a good attitude.

Rush is a very self-contained unit, and as we see in the film, you’ve worked with the same management and roadies for almost the entirety of your career. But Sam and Scot have said that when this movie idea came up, you trusted them to run with it and you didn’t want any hands-on involvement…

Alex: Because it was their movie. We happen to be the subject, but it’s their movie, so we didn’t want them to feel restricted in any way by any feelings we might have.

So there was never any worry about what they might focus on?

Alex: I never thought about it.

Geddy: I was just worried that they would ruin their career. I was more worried for them than for me!

They’ve said when they first approached you, you told them, “we’re a pretty boring band, I don’t know why you’d want to make this.” But they did a pretty good job of making you seem exciting!

Geddy: Go figure! Anything is possible!

Did you learn anything about yourselves watching your lives play out on the big screen?

Geddy: It’s a strange experience, seeing 40 years of your life put together—it’s like looking at a huge scrapbook. There are parts of the film that shocked me in terms of the distance, the passing of time—looking back to those early moments where they had footage of us playing when we were 20 years old. The disconnect between that person I was then and the person I am now was a bit jarring. I couldn’t remember doing that gig. So that was something that gives you pause to reflect on why that happens: the aging process and how full your life gets—it’s so full of stuff that you can’t keep it all in there. And obviously, listening to other musicians talk about our music and what it meant to them was quite surprising. It’s one thing to hear other musicians like your music, but wow, some of these guys were really inside what we were all about.

And they’re coming from unlikely sources. It’s interesting that a lot of the artists interviewed in the film came more from the ‘90s alternative-rock world—like Trent Reznor, Taylor Hawkins, and Tim from Rage Against the Machine—because at that time, there was a real emphasis on disowning classic rock and creating a new sound for a new generation. So it was cool to hear that they were very much into what you were doing.

Geddy: It is interesting. And what I was glad about was that they weren’t afraid to have dissenting opinions. Some of those guys didn’t like it when we changed, and other guys just got turned onto it when we started to change. It covers the span of time in an interesting way.

Alex, one of the most intriguing sequences in the film is pulled from Alan King’s 1973 documentary Come on Children, which features you as a teenager arguing with your parents about your decision to pursue music. Was this the first time you had revisited that footage since it was first released?

Alex: I came across that about 10 years ago—IFC picked it up around that time and it was on a couple of times in that big soup of documentaries that they get. I first saw it when Alan had finished the final cut, and that was the one and only time I saw it. And I wasn’t aware that [Scot and Sam] were aware of it, so it was a little bit of a shock to see it up there. But I can see how it works in the film.

Do you recognize yourself in that scene? Do you still remember the circumstances around it?

Alex: Oh, I do. I can still feel how the room felt, and how the lighting was and all the people in the room. And there was obviously a much broader conversation we were having; that was one little sliver from that. Lots of the other kids were involved in it as well. But it was still really weird to see. I’ve gotten a lot of comments on it, so I guess it was the right thing for them.

One of the more poignant sequences in the documentary centres around the “Subdivisions” video, where you have some of your fans talking about how they saw themselves in that video and how much it meant to them. Correct me if I’m wrong, was this the first narrative music video you had made?

Geddy: That’s true. It was kind of a homemade project, really, we did it with our friend Norm Stangl, who went on to make so many different productions for the tour. His forte was really special effects, so he just got some of the people he worked with together and jammed a little script, as it were. I mean, the song is a script, it kind of says it all, and they just basically brought the song to life.

Alex: We actually filmed our part in a rehearsal hall at Universal up on Steeles…

Geddy: in the suburbs!

Alex: …and we just filmed it during one of our rehearsal dates, rather than go to a studio.

Did you immediately embrace videos as a promotional vehicle?

Geddy: We reluctantly embraced them.

Alex: We started doing them very early. I mean, the first or maybe the second video we did was just a live performance of three songs, rather than miming to one of our songs.

Geddy: Yeah, I guess really the first attempt was the stuff we did for A Farewell to Kings.

Alex: Well, we did “Xanadu” at Seneca. But then we did the three...

Geddy: That was for Hemispheres. And they were pretty much just performances. Even the ones we did for Moving Pictures were done at Le Studio. For the ones we did in the late ‘80s and early ’90s, people would come to us with these mini-film concepts. And some of them were interesting. We shot some in England that were quite interesting. We tried to turn it into an interesting project—there was one album where we hired three really interesting filmmakers to do three different videos for us and kind of gave them carte blanche to do what they wanted, just to see what happened. But I’d say we had an uncomfortable relationship to the whole thing.

So you knew going into this film that any story about this band would have to touch on Neil’s tragedies. Was that a particularly difficult thing to revisit?

Geddy: It is.

Alex: It always is.

Geddy: It’s very sobering; it takes you right back to that period. It was hard for me to watch. But I thought they did a great job—they were very delicate.

Alex: They did it very respectfully.

Is it a coincidence that, throughout the film, you two were filmed together, while Neil was filmed separately? Until the final scene at the dinner table, we don’t really see all three of you interacting together.

Geddy: I don’t know why. It was kind of their decision, I guess.

Alex: Geddy and I are here, we live five minutes from each other. It’s easier for us to do something together.

Geddy: I don’t remember a single request for the three of us together.

Alex: Just the dinner at the end. Because they wanted to get something with the three of us, and that’s just during the closing credits.

Part of me wished the whole movie could’ve been that—like a My Dinner With Andre thing.

Geddy: You wouldn’t want to have much more of that! We got pretty hammered.

Alex: And that was early in the evening.

Geddy: We warned them: We have a lot of fun when we have dinner. We hadn’t seen each other, the three of us in the same room, in quite some time. We have a good time when we get together so we said, “Look, film us if you like, but I can’t guarantee you’ll get anything out of it that’s usable!”

Well, speaking of restaurants, I can’t leave you today without pitching you my friend’s concept for a restaurant—or, a Rushtaurant as it were, called Spaghetti Lee’s, where you can get a YYZiti, a Red Bruschetta, and La Vino Strangiato for a prix-fixe price of $21.12.

Geddy: That’s a great idea! Nice dish. Kudos to the chef!

Alex: I’d go and have it!

I’ll have my people contact your people. Oh, and one more thing: Were you dismayed to learn that your film was the second documentary shot at Pancer’s, after the Anvil doc beat you to it?

Geddy: Yeah, I know, and it’s the wrong Pancer’s. We wanted to go to the one we actually used to hang out in, but it’s a Thai restaurant now.

ENCORES

The Rushtaurant idea mentioned toward the end of the interview was the brainchild of the late, great Darius Minwalla, who, like his idol Neil Peart, was another amazing drummer who left this world far too soon. (Over his career, he played for an array of alt-rock icons including The Posies, Scott Kannberg a.k.a. Spiral Stairs, and Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers.) Anyone who had the pleasure of meeting Darius would’ve heard his Spaghetti Lee’s pitch within the first five minutes. A year after his untimely passing in 2015, his friends and family turned a Vancouver bar into a pop-up Spaghetti Lee’s restaurant for a memorial gathering. (Kannberg also paid tribute to Darius and his Spaghetti Lee’s concept on the 2017 Spiral Stairs track, “Exiled Tonight.”)
This newsletter normally spotlights artists who came up through the indie-rock ranks, from which Rush are completely disconnected on a musical, spiritual, and technical-skill level. Sure, Rush may have inspired one of Pavement’s most famous lyrics, but historically, few indie-rock bands have cited them as a direct influence, and few have attempted to cover their songs (because, generally speaking, nobody knows how to play Rush songs other than Rush). However, there have been a few brave indie-reared souls who’ve dared to stand within the pleasure dome decreed by Kubla Khan. Shout out to ‘90s British power-popsters Silver Sun for essentially turning “Xanadu” into a Buzzcocks tune…
…and kudos to Kingston, Ontario power duo P.S. I Love You for pulling off a synth-less “Subdivisions.”
But perhaps the greatest Rush/indie-rock crossover moment occurs in the video for Yo La Tengo’s “Sugarcube,” where A Farewell to Kings comprises the core reading curriculum at the Pres. McKinley Academy of Rock…
…while in 2005, Geddy Lee came this close to becoming the 47th member of Broken Social Scene when he made a cameo in the video for “Fire Eye’d Boy” (though his performance is largely overshadowed by that of Brian Taylor, a.k.a. former frontman for Toronto ‘80s hardcore legends Youth Youth Youth and long-time manager of local indie record store Rotate This).