Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy And The Conspirators bassist Todd Kerns recently opened up about how Geddy Lee’s skills in an interview with Appetite For Distortion. He admitted that watching Lee perform can be intimidating, especially considering how much the Rush frontman manages to do on stage.
“I was really comforted by reading Geddy Lee’s book because it was always kind of like, ‘Look at this f*cking guy!’ You know, he’s up there playing keyboards and bass and foot pedals and singing, and it just makes you feel like an idiot,” Kerns shared.
The bassist found some comfort in learning about Lee’s dedication behind the scenes, though. He explained, “It was comforting to hear him say how much he really has to rehearse that until it’s muscle memory. I go, ‘Oh, okay! Well, that’s comforting to know.’ Otherwise, he’s basically superhuman, anyway. But I think the fact that it actually takes a little bit for him to be superhuman is comforting.”
Lee’s high-pitched, expressive voice became a defining feature of Rush’s music along with his vocals. When the band moved towards more synthesizer-driven music, he started playing both bass and keyboards during live shows.
All that effort paid off with his induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Rush in 2013 as well as multiple Juno Awards. But the bassist admitted that these achievements followed a lot of failures in a past chat with Premier Guitar.
He said, “I was always f*cking around with my sound in one way or another… Every time I thought I was plateauing, I would change something about it. Every time I thought I was plateauing, I would change something about it … which can be good and bad. That’s one of the dangers of being a progressive musician: You move past something you maybe should stick around in a bit longer because you’re busy searching for that next thing, that improvement. … So, always, as a band, the three of us were looking to improve from the last piece of recorded work.”
Rush is currently getting ready to release an anthology box set of tracks from their recorded and live catalog all the way through their final show in 2015. The set will see release on March 21, 2025.
