Anthem: Rush in the '70s

Martin Popoff

• Publisher: ECW Press
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781773055039
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Rock Music

The definitive biography of the rock 'n' roll kings of the North

With extensive, first-hand reflections from Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart, as well as from family, friends, and fellow musicians, Anthem: Rush in the '70s is a detailed portrait of Canada's greatest rock ambassadors. The first of three volumes, Anthem puts the band's catalog, from their self-titled debut to 1978's Hemispheres (the next volume resumes with the release of Permanent Waves ) into both Canadian and general pop culture context, and presents the trio of quintessentially dependable, courteous Canucks as generators of incendiary, groundbreaking rock 'n' roll.

Fighting complacency, provoking thought, and often enraging critics, Rush has been at war with the music industry since 1974, when they were first dismissed as the Led Zeppelin of the north. Anthem, like each volume in this series, celebrates the perseverance of Geddy, Alex, and Neil: three men who maintained their values while operating from a Canadian base, throughout lean years, personal tragedies, and the band's eventual worldwide success.

Chapter 1
Early Years

“We didn’t have a mic stand so we used a lamp.”

No question that the Beatles were and still remain the patron saints of rock ’n’ roll. And February 9, 1964, the first of the band’s three consecutive appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, would provide the nexus of that sainthood: that night, the Beatles inspired myriad adolescents to take up the rock ’n’ roll cause, including the heroes of our story.

But if you wanted to drill down, get more hardcore and find out who might be patron saints of playing, it wouldn’t be out of line to bestow that title upon those heroes — Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson and Neil Peart and their Canuck collective called Rush.

Of course, Neil, “the Professor,” chuckling through his Canadian modesty, would deem that premise absurd, citing the likes of his personal saints of playing, perhaps folks like The Who and Cream, maybe Jimi and his band, Led Zeppelin or maybe “underground” origami rockers like Yes, Genesis and King Crimson. But pushing back at Neil, one might point out to the drum titan that time moves on. Over generations, waves of bands and rock ’n’ roll movements ebb and flow. Film stars from the ’30s and ’40s are forgotten, big band orchestras are forgotten, doo-wop bands are forgotten, ’60s and even ’70s radio playlists are ruthlessly pared down to what can fit on the back of an envelope — no one cares what you think anymore.

And so, as time passes and the ’60s greats are forgotten, the members of Rush seem poised to become the new “patron saints of playing.” And maybe they’ll stay there. In the mid- to late 2000s, the world turned to pop and hip hop with more and more music made by machines. If indeed rock died further through the parallel precipitous contraction of the music industry, marked by recorded music being made essentially free, then we might be able to pick those patron saints once and for all.

As drummers are wont to point out, no parents ever had to force their kid to practice their drums, and by side glance, this is why the patron saints of playing are not some sensible choice like Mahavishnu Orchestra, Gentle Giant, Kansas or Brand X. It takes some fire in the belly, some excitement, some fuzz pedal, to light up a teen and their dreams. And that is why Rush is the band that wrote the manual for more of our rock heroes from the ’80s and ’90s than anybody else. They inspired those who have made all the rock music before the genre’s miniaturization a few years into the 2000s. Debatable as it might be — and these abstracts, of course, are — if the widest, most productive and beloved flowing Steven Tyler scarf of rock history until the end of guitar, bass and drums runs from, say, 1977 until 2007, then Rush songs are the ones woodshedded most by the players who populate that time span, the songs that advanced the capabilities of hundreds of your favorite rock stars, making them good enough to be heard.

But before all that, the Beatles shot like a bottle rocket emitting white heat around the world, and that included Canada, where Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson (we’ll hear about “the new guy” later) were politely taking notes in Willowdale, Ontario, a vague suburb northwest of Toronto. The class chums were barely teenagers when rock changed conceptually from individuals to bands. And already there was set in place a maturity and focus built of the duo’s Canadian experience, with which to deal with the cultural sea-change rifling through school lockers worldwide.

Gary “Geddy” Lee Weinrib was born July 29, 1953, in Willowdale, so he was the perfect age to understand the get out of jail free card slipped to him, one imagines, by Ringo. He also had a brother and a sister in a family headed by two Holocaust survivors, Morris Weinrib and Manya Rubenstein, now Morris and Mary Weinrib of North Toronto.

“They both worked originally in what they called the ‘schmatta’ business,” explains Geddy, concerning his parents, “which was on an assembly line, sewing clothes and things like that. But they worked their way up to a lower middle-class kind of income and raised me in the suburbs. So I was a product of suburban life. Listen to the song ‘Subdivisions’; that’s where I grew up. It was a bland, treeless neighborhood. A new subdivision.”

Geddy says that being one of the few Jewish kids around made him stand out. “They bused us to a school when we first moved to that kind of neighborhood, and, as a young kid, it was pretty terrifying. It was a tough neighborhood. That part of Toronto was just on the border of being transformed from farmland to subdivisions, so it was in transition. You had the leftover mix of different kinds of social backgrounds, so there were a lot of pretty tough kids — what we called greasers back then — with not much to do except beat up the new kids. So, it was an exciting time. I hated living in the suburbs, and my first opportunity, I got out. And I think a lot of kids that I hung out with felt the same way. Everything was going on downtown. We wanted to go downtown — we spent our time going downtown.”

“My husband had a sister in Canada, and we didn’t have anywhere to go,” begins Geddy’s mother, Mary. “And she made papers for us and we came here in 1948. My husband and I stayed with her for a while; we didn’t have any trade or a profession, so it was very hard in the beginning. My husband had a friend from years before, when they were just children in school, and he volunteered to teach us — and he was going to be a pressman, and I was going to be a finisher, for clothes. So in about two weeks, he gave us some lessons, and we learned every day. And then another cousin got us into a factory. Garments. My husband was making a dollar an hour, and I was making fifty cents an hour. And after a while, I was so fast that they gave me samples to work on, on piecework, so I was making more money.

“So we finally moved and had our own place, and two and a half years later, my daughter was born. I remember when we would look for places to live, the first thing we would say was ‘We have a child.’ If you had a child, it was the hardest — couldn’t rent anything. And after we moved, Geddy was coming, and when we had two children, the landlord, this blond lady, would not accept us. We didn’t have money for a down payment, but my husband went to this society that helps people and they lent us the money, and we bought a house, and we waited for Geddy to arrive. I remember every room in that house; I had rented every room just to make up for the five thousand dollars we owed. And Geddy was born, and my husband was so excited because he was a boy, and we already had a girl.

“And it was a nice neighborhood,” continues Mary, “on Charles Street. It was a really nice neighborhood, easy. It was a mixture of young and old people. Afterwards, we moved to Willowdale. Actually, first it was Downsview, and then to Willowdale. Allan was born in Downsview. My husband sold the house overnight: we went to a wedding, and his cousin was there, and he said, ‘You know, Morris, I have a customer for your house.’ It was a bungalow. So my husband gave him an enormous price and said, ‘If she’ll pay it, I’ll give her the bungalow.’ We came home from that wedding, two o’clock in the morning, and his cousin is sitting in the driveway and said, ‘Sign here.’ So the next day we had to go look for a home, and then we went to Willowdale.

“Everybody knew everybody, and it was nice — nice neighbors, great place to be because all the kids were the same age, with a lot of friends all over. It was a nice neighborhood: shopping was easy, everything was easy. I remember when we bought a store in Newmarket and we used to drive to Newmarket, and it was treacherous. There were no roads, there was nothing, everything was muddy, and if it was raining, you could hardly get through. So my husband used to say, ‘You’ll see, in a few years all of this will be built up.’ And sure enough, a few years later everything was built up.” Typical of her sunny disposition, Mary Weinrib remembers Willowdale more positively than Geddy.

“Pretty boring,” says Geddy. “Not much to do. So that’s why music became so important to us because we would go to each other’s basements and listen to music, and everybody had different favorite bands. That was the social life. There was nothing much else. The occasional concert, drop-in center, that kind of thing. When I was twelve, my father passed away. And we were kind of a religious family, a Jewish religious family, and in that kind of household, when a father dies, the son, the firstborn son, is supposed to . . . has a lot of responsibilities in terms of the grieving process.”

Morris had never fully recovered from injuries he sustained in a Nazi concentration camp. As part of Geddy’s grieving duties, he says that he attended synagogue twice a day, morning and evening, for eleven months and a day, and he had to abstain from rock ’n’ roll, even removing himself from music in school.

“There are still songs that were popular that year that people talk about and everyone should know it and I go, ‘What?’” continues Lee. “There’s just a gap in my learning. Anyway, when that year was over, I kind of dove headfirst to try to catch up to being a normal kid, to play with other guys in the neighborhood. And I often wonder if that’s what really made me hungry to be a musician, the fact that it was kind of kept from me for a year.”

His mother called Geddy a “great kid, quiet; he really had a good sense of humor, and he was a happy child. And he was actually very respectful since he was a child, good in school, had lots of friends; he was very good. Until his father died. It was hard. We moved, and two years later, my husband died. And Geddy was, I think, about twelve. He was really a big help to me because after my husband died, I was in shock. And then we had a store, and two weeks after, I was thinking I can’t go to that store. I can’t go. They used to give me all kinds of pills and this and that. Once when I was really, really crying and Geddy heard me, he came in and sat on my bed and he said, ‘Mommy, I know why you’re crying. You don’t know what to do at the store, right? Daddy would really want you to open the store and try, and if you can’t make it, you know you tried.’ And the rest is history. He left, took all those pills, called the girl who helps at the store, because she had a key in Newmarket, and he said, ‘I’m coming out.’ I just want to give you what kind of help this child was. Even later the same year. It was December, Christmastime, I needed somebody to come and help in the store. I had a couple of girls, and Geddy volunteered. And all day long, he was at the cash. He didn’t even want a lunch.”

Driving home on Christmas Eve, Mary decided that Geddy deserved a present for working so hard. Geddy said that Terry next door had a guitar for sale for fifty dollars. Once his mother was over the shock, and as they arrived home from the store, she had given him the money.

“We’re telling him he’s now the man of the house,” continues Mary. “You’re now the man that is the head of the house. So this kid, after about two or three months that I was at work, he said, ‘I’m so glad, I’m so happy, Mommy, that you are working and I can go to school because I thought I had to go to work instead of school.’ You see, his father was actually a musician when he was young. In those years, there was no thing where you could become a big star. If somebody needed a drummer, he was a drummer at a wedding. If someone needed a guitarist, he was a guitarist. When we were in Germany, we lived with an old German lady and we had one room. And she had a mandolin, and he always used to talk about music and this lady says, ‘Here, have the mandolin. Play!’ So he used to, every morning, go under my window and make up all kinds of songs with a mandolin. And when we were coming to Canada, I said, ‘You’re not taking that big thing with you?’ And now I wish I had it. So he takes after his father, really.”

On Geddy’s religious duties after his father’s death, Mary explains, “All year, he used to go to say prayers to his father, twice a day, morning and evening. I had a friend who used to take him, take him to school, take him at night, bring him home. Yeah, he was really young. Actually, he taught himself his Torah, and taught himself to say the prayer. A week before his bar mitzvah, I called the rabbi and said, ‘Here, we’re having that bar mitzvah, I don’t know if this kid knows anything, because we didn’t have a teacher to teach him.’ But of course, the rabbi was sitting beside me. I was crying for a big reason, here my heart went, and the rabbi put his hand on my shoulder, and he said, ‘Mrs. Weinrib, I wish I had your son’s gift. Your son has a gift from God.’ Who would believe that? You know what I mean? I just thought [he said this] because I’m crying.

“Even before, when my husband was alive, the first thing he brought to the house was a piano. We didn’t have a stitch, nothing, no tables, no nothing, and we were teaching Susan piano lessons. One day, on a Sunday, the teacher came and she taught them something new. And I invited her for tea, and all of a sudden, we hear playing, and the teacher says, ‘You know, I have to go and congratulate Suzie. She really did a good job.’ And we walked in, and it was Geddy. And the teacher said to me, ‘You can’t let this go. This child has a very good ear for music. You have to give him lessons.’ And he was like ten years old. But at the time, we could just afford it for Suzie.

“All teachers told me this, actually, so I knew. His father had the same ear for music. This man, in the morning, woke up with radio, went to sleep with radio, and in the store, the music was blasting. And you know what? He used to make fun of the Beatles. My husband used to say, ‘“Yeah, yeah, yeah” — with this he’s going to sell records?’ Always when I hear the Beatles, I remember what he used to say to me.”

Soon Geddy would be listening to the Beatles again, but in the meantime, it was hard for him to miss out.

“Yeah, it was; it was very hard. He couldn’t have any. Maybe, in my presence, he never listened to music on the radio. He was really doing his thing because he had to go and say prayers. And after the year, he really came out. He was himself. After a year, you can start. Especially when he already had his guitar. Because his father died in October, and I got him the guitar in December, the twenty-fourth actually. And then I remember, he had to do a year in enrichment class to catch up, which was in a different district. And then the next year, he went to Fisherville Junior High School, and sometimes he knew more than the teacher did. Because he had this background already. And that’s where he met Alex. He used to bring him home. I used to love Alex. He’s such a nice, cute guy, very polite, very nice and a very good relationship.”

Indeed, comic relief for Geddy came from this new partner Alexandar “Lifeson” Živojinović, born August 27, 1953 in Fernie, British Columbia. “First time I ever became aware of Alex was at R.J. Lang Junior High School; he was easily noticeable back then because he was a bit of a teacher’s pet,” chides Lee. “I also had a friend, Steve Shutt, who became a well-known hockey player, and we went to school together, and he was one of the few guys that I met in high school that actually was much hipper than he looked. Steve was funny because he used to grow his hair every summer when he wasn’t playing hockey, and as soon as he had to go back to hockey, he used to cut his hair, so he was like this hidden freak. We got along pretty well back then, and he was the first guy who made me notice Alex.

“Because I was playing and looking for other people to play with, he said, ‘Well that guy there is a good guitar player. You should hook up with him.’ Steve would talk to me because he knew I liked music, and I was playing an instrument, and he would talk to me about this guy, Alex Zavonovich — that’s what he called him; he mispronounced his name — and he said, ‘You should call this guy up; you guys could jam together.’ So that was the first time I became aware of him. But I didn’t actually make contact with him until we were in the same class next year in Fisherville Junior High. He was a funny kind of kid, a yuck-it-up guy, and he got me laughing. So we hit it off in school. Plus we liked the same kind of bands, and there was the fact that he was a guitar player. I was playing bass, so it was kind of a natural fit for the two of us. We would all sit at the back of the class. I think he was the first friend I had in that area where we kind of got irreverent together.

“Anyway, so it was actually Steve’s suggestion that I hook up with Alex. And then, I’ll never forget, the next year we were in the same class, and he always wore this paisley shirt and had his hair combed and always sucked up to the teacher, I remember very clearly. But that’s how we met, and then we found out that we were both musicians and eventually it led to us playing together. He was very likable. He was very funny. He’s still to this day the funniest human being I’ve ever known. He’s got a charm about him, you know. When you meet him, you just like him. So I liked him, and we became good friends.”

Alex’s parents, Nenad and Melanija “Milla” Živojinović, also arrived in Canada after World War II; they first met in Yugoslavia. “My father was kind of sent out to B.C. to work in the mines, as a lot of Eastern Europeans were at that time,” begins Lifeson. “My mother’s side of the family . . . my uncles wanted to look for better work, so they ended up out in Fernie as well, and we left when we were very young. I think I was eighteen months old or two years old when we left — I really have no memory of our time there. And then we moved to downtown Toronto and I grew up there and in the north part of the city.

“I became really interested in music at around twelve and got my first guitar. My parents bought me a cheap Kent Japanese acoustic guitar. I think it was ten or twelve dollars. You know, it had the guitar strings two inches above the neck, and they were the thickness of telephone cords. But it was really exciting. I was just so overwhelmed by music and the sound of the guitar. I listened to the Beach Boys, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles and all of that stuff in that era. And the following year, I got an electric guitar, again a cheap Japanese electric guitar, from my parents at Christmas.”

Alex had negotiated to get this guitar — his first electric — in return for turning in a good report card. His parents, pleased with his grades, kept their end of the bargain, although they had to borrow the money to buy the instrument. Says Milla, “He wanted to have a group with this next-door neighbor we had, but nothing happened there. So we got the electric guitar. He played constantly, in the morning, in the evening, after school, all the time.”

Like Geddy’s, Alex’s upbringing was quite ethnic, not out of step in a city and country built by immigrants.

“We ate very ethnic foods, all my parents’ friends were other Yugoslavians, Serbs, Croats, a real mix. Typical for a working-class Eastern European family in Toronto, we couldn’t afford a cottage or have that whole cottage lifestyle, which a lot of my friends grew up with. It was very normal in Toronto to have a place up north or east or west. The thing that we used to do was go to Lake Simcoe, to Sibbald Point, and all the guys would play soccer and all the moms would cook and unpack food, put out the blankets. There was a museum up at Sibbald Point, and we’d go to the museum and swim. And every weekend in the summer was spent up there because it was free and you could drive up there and there was plenty of room. I remember always stopping for Dairy Queen on the way home. Very Ontario, absolutely.

“It was typically working middle-class,” continues Alex. “The summers were spent playing with friends and running around. There was school and hockey and winter sports, just like anybody else. I’d say it was a very normal upbringing. My parents were very hard workers: don’t complain about it, go do something. I really respe...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Early Years
• Chapter 2: Rush
• Chapter 3: Fly by Night
• Chapter 4: Caress of Steel
• Chapter 5: 2112
• Chapter 6: All the World’s a Stage
• Chapter 7: A Farewell to Kings
• Chapter 8: Hemispheres
• Photos
• Discography
• Credits
• Additional Sources
• About the Author
• Martin Popoff — A Complete Bibliography
• Copyright
• Discover the Series!