I’d gone to the show, but to do that I had to give up a pair of tickets for another, at Maple Leaf Gardens the same night. First my brain took me to the hike my wife and I took a few years ago from Bowness-on-Solway to Wallsend-along Hadrian’s Wall-when, trudging beside her, this memory suddenly presented itself: Hadrian was playing its debut gig at a local church, Willowdale United, and I’d been curious to hear the band. Even typing out the name Hadrian just now set a sort of fugue in motion. Like everyone, I suppose, I realize that over time I’ve forgotten or blocked out a lot of things.

Clearly, music meant everything to me, and despite my supposed lack of confidence I instinctively knew that I had to take control of my own destiny, if only hoping that success would be a kind of revenge.

I’ve always pictured myself as a mousy kid, blowing with the wind and following the crowd, but the mysteries revealed when going back in time to write this book are, well, revelatory! I couldn’t have been entirely a will-o’-the-wisp or I would not have had the chutzpah to keep on keeping on. Still, I didn’t want to sit around and feel sorry for myself, so I said to myself, Fuck them, and resolved to start a band of my own. Whoever’s idea it was, the way they all went about it was deceitful and frankly chickenshit, and I was shocked and hurt. As for Ray, he was just being opportunistic.” “You know how he had a very strong personality. “I didn’t want to get on John’s bad side,” he told me. (Maybe I was afraid of the answer, I dunno.) He sheepishly responded that back then he was the kind of guy who just went along with things, and that the decision to replace me was driven by John, who was keen to reinvent the image of the band and wanted someone hipper.

Just recently I asked Alex about that time-something I’d always wondered about but never really brought up. I’ve been informed some fifty years later that it was Rutsey’s. It’s important to say, however, that it turns out it wasn’t his idea in the first place. Ray had offered to manage them but made it clear he didn’t think I was right for the band. I tried not to dwell on it and started calling around to other musicians I knew, trying to get something else going, but then in May, I heard that Alex, John and Lindy had reformed as Hadrian (after the Roman emperor) with a new bass player named Joe. It seemed that Rush had disbanded, though I suspected I wasn’t being told the whole story. Rehearsal is cancelled and, uh, well, the band is breaking up.”īack home I got hold of the other guys, but they were weird and aloof on the phone. “Oh, hey, Ged,” he says, looking at the ground. So, one afternoon as I’m walking to rehearsals, I see Lindy coming towards me across the field on the way to his house, and I ask him where he’s going. Clearly, he saw something he liked in the band. He was ambitious, clever and a born salesman.

His first agency was called Universal Sound, after which he formed the Music Shoppe, which in 1973 became SRO. When I first met him, he had his phone and his papers on the floor, which was basically his desk. He tried singing in a band, but that didn’t work out, so he set his sights on managing instead. He’d left his home in Waterdown, Ontario, and, something of a hustler, earned his money however he could. He was clean-shaven with blond shoulder-length hair that he was always playing with at the back of his head - and that he used to iron to keep straight. In this exclusive excerpt, Lee takes us back to 1969, when an early, as-yet-unsigned lineup of Rush consisted of “ Alex Lifeson, keyboardist Lindy Young, drummer John Rutsey, and me … until I am dumped.”Īlex and John decided to bring on board a manager, a guy named Ray Danniels I’d seen around at various shows on the Yorkville strip and hanging around the coffeehouses. My Effin’ Life, the new memoir from Rush‘s frontman and bassist, Geddy Lee, tells a tale that’s almost as epic in scale as his band’s largest-scale songs, from his upbringing as the child of two Holocaust survivors, to the rise of Rush, to the loss of drummer Neil Peart in 2020, and everything in between.

Big time rush songs any kind of guy