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Neil Peart, Geddy Lee & Alex Lifeson

Fri, Mar 29, 2024

Geddy Lee on his relationship with Neil Peart in new Rolling Stone interview

Fri, Jan 29, 2021@10:07AM | comments

GeddyLeeEarlier this month, Rolling Stone magazine's Brian Hiatt interviewed Neil Peart's widow Carrie Nuttall, along with his bandmates and Rush manager Ray Danniels for a very revealing feature article discussing Peart's 3-year battle with cancer and his final years. As part of the feature, Geddy Lee was interviewed to talk about his special relationship with Peart, and Rolling Stone has posted the interview online. When asked about the high bar Neil set for himself, and the struggles he endured on the final tour, Geddy had this to say:

... He set the bar really high for himself, and as his body started to let him down he worried that he would betray that. He was really big on that. He used to say all the time that he never wanted to let down the kid in him. He would visualize him as a kid watching his own drum performance and never wanted to let that kid version down. But it was really a very difficult gig and as time went on and his body started to, as I said, let him down, it became much more difficult for him to get through it. Yet somehow he did. Any talk of a compromised version of one of our songs, it's just not in the cards. If he couldn't do it the way he'd done it in the past, he didn't want to do it, and that was pretty much it. ... But he struggled through [the R40 tour]. He had lot of weird issues, physical issues, a tendency to get infections. He was so fucking stoic. He would never let, you know ... You'd see him limping or something and you'd go, "Man, what's going on?" "Oh, fuck ... I need to tell you." But you had to guess if he even had a cold, because he didn't grumble about that kind of stuff. He was the exact opposite of me. When I have something wrong, everyone in the fucking organization knows I have something wrong. [Laughs] I really tried to teach him how to whine but he just couldn't learn. ...

You can read the entire interview online here.

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