Geddy Lee and the radical decency of Rush fans: Gathered in Chicago for one night only

Geddy Lee — or rather, as his touching new memoir, “My Effin’ Life,” makes plain, the man born with so many family names, nicknames and colloquial derivations of names, his own mother was uncertain of the name on his birth certificate — is a complicated guy. You would expect as much from the bassist of Rush. They were a famously complicated band, playing complicated prog-rock epics. Their fans, who packed Auditorium Theatre last Sunday night to hear Lee talk about his life, are complicated themselves. Famously so. I am a fan myself, but like some Rush fans, I concealed my fandom for periods.

It could be a social liability.

When I thought of Rush fans, I thought of the opening lines of “War of the Worlds,” of “intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic,” regarding “this earth with envious eyes.” I thought of disaffection and resentment, and the 1970s and 1980s, and of being a latchkey kid. I thought of suburban sprawls and conformity and friends who worshipped drummer Neil Peart, loading basements with more drums than they knew how to handle. Peart had Tama drums so when I began to play (poorly), I played Tama. Peart had two bass drums. I talked my mother into buying two bass drums, though I could barely play one.

I thought of lyrics so convoluted that at times Geddy Lee seemed to be singing out of the instruction manual for hooking up his stereo. I thought of lyrics so wordy and on the nose, Lee would screech out lines like: “All this machinery making modern music / Can still be openhearted / Not so coldly charted / It’s really just a question of your honesty.”

That’s still a goofy lyric, but, being older now, I also hear the unabashed warmth that I was probably too ashamed to recognize in my 20s, when I thought I knew better. On the sidewalk outside the Auditorium Theatre, Pete Sylvester, a longtime fan from the suburbs, told me: “There was a time, for many in high school, years ago, this fan base was basically made up of outcasts. But that’s not true now — they’ve been around too long and a lot of those fans of course are no longer in high school. Still, Rush knew those kinds of feelings.”

“‘Conform or be cast out,’” he added, ending his point with a Rush lyric.

Luckily, I speak fluent Rush.

“‘Subdivisions,’” I nodded, noting the song’s title.

He smiled.

“There’s an old joke,” he said. “It goes, ‘I don’t need therapy. I listen to Rush.’ "

That’s not a bad way of thinking about Lee’s book tour — or at least, a decent way of explaining the Auditorium Theatre appearance, a bustling, sold-out family affair that could have doubled at times as casual rock church or inspirational outreach, minus the piety. “I didn’t even bring my bass with me, and they’re still here,” Lee said, scanning the crowd, in mock surprise that anyone showed up. He played no music. Rather, he spoke to generations in the Rush dialect, a heady language. A romance language of sorts. This hard world, the language suggests, does not go easy on people like us, the detail-oriented, guarded, sincere. The fast success of “My Effin’ Life,” which debuted recently at No. 3 on the New York Times Best-Sellers list, is like a reminder that Rush was a guilty pleasure for many people who, as they matured, shed that guilt. Lee writes that when Rush was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, he heard well wishes from a wacky range of unlikely fans — Chuck D of Public Enemy, Jackson Browne, Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine, Tom Petty.

If a group like that shares anything, it’s an innate humanism, not unlike Rush itself.

Each stop on Lee’s tour has brought out a surprise interviewer, a famous fan. Jack Black in Los Angeles, Paul Rudd in New York City, Matt Stone of “South Park” in Colorado, Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in Detroit. But for Chicago, it was Kim Thayil, guitarist and co-founder of Soundgarden, a Park Forest native who shares something sad with Lee, never mentioned during their two-plus hour talk, yet poignantly there beneath their words: Both lost bandmates prematurely, Thayil in 2017 when singer Chris Cornell committed suicide, and Lee in 2020 when Peart died of brain cancer at 67.

This was not the light conversation between rock stars some might expect, no matter how many screamed “WE LOVE YOU GEDDY!” from the balcony. They talked about being sons of immigrants: Thayil’s parents came as students from India; Lee’s parents, Jews from Poland who survived Nazi concentration camps, arrived in Toronto after World War II. When a fan asked Lee if he had tattoos, he said he would never get a tattoo, having grown up in a family whose aging members still carried prisoner numbers on their arms. Lee spoke of feeling uncomfortable as a Jewish child in Canada, being bussed to a junior high school brimming with antisemitism, and how, at that age, “being ostracized in any way, you grow up resentful.” He spoke about meeting a friend, a star hockey player at school, who became his concert buddy, then pulled him into the world.

Asked if Rush ever argued, Lee said, being Canadian, they never did.

“We disagreed.”

Rush was, as Thayil put it well, a “civil” band, putting a premium on decency. They leaned left, though Peart was an avowed libertarian (and later, a librarian in his daughter’s grade-school library). Alex Lifeson, the guitarist, was a class clown, and the group, as Byzantine and complex as its music could get, used humor pragmatically, to soften those angular, sci-fi edges. “SCTV” and “South Park” made short videos for Rush’s concerts; the band itself would play against a backdrop of working washers and dryers and chicken rotisseries that the road crew would nonchalantly use throughout its shows.

Lee, now 70, with long flat hair cascading past his shoulders, looks like a wealthy wizard who moonlights as an English professor. But as a screen behind him circled through archival images, you could see that distrustful young disaffected teenager again. Indeed, on the sidewalk before the talk, meeting younger fans, I found myself staring into a Rush time machine. Generations removed from the days of “Tom Sawyer” and “2112,” yet here was that same unease with strangers, the same long unstyled hair.

I met Dagny Kowal, a 17-year-old from Indianapolis, there with her family; she held a stunned, standoffish stare, cradled a plush pig and wore a Rush T-shirt. Her sister, Rosalynn, 23, bright-eyed, ironic, said she was bummed that Spotify just informed her that Rush was no longer her most played band. She said she likes “complex music” and Rush “sings everything I am feeling right now.” She is majoring in engineering at Purdue University. She said: “To be honest, it is so weird being young, female and into Rush.”

Just don’t tell Lilly Bick of St. Louis. Long, lanky, straight flat hair. A classic Rush fan, if this was 1981. Except, also more wide-eyed, with a big smile. She’s 15. “Rush is not mainstream, even now,” she said, “so I dove in headfirst.” She’s in the robotics club at school and recently attended an Air Force-led STEM science camp in Colorado Springs.

If I had more time, I would have convened a cross-generational convention between old and young fans, there on the sidewalk. They would have recognized so much in one another. Dave Goldwater of Schaumburg, 53, was not a popular kid at his military school, he said. He was at the talk with his sister, Wendy, and her son Will Farber, 25, who thinks of Rush fandom as “a clique that never ended, yet more philosophical than most.” Caryn Moczynski, 56, of Milwaukee: “I was not a Dungeons & Dragons Rush fan, I was a ‘Star Wars’ Rush fan.” Barbara and Jane Greer, 58 and 60 respectively, had thin wispy beards springing off their chins because they never cared about shaving, they said. They are a self-possessed breed of Rush. They call themselves the Bong Sisters, and as Barbara said: “We were burnout Rush fans in high school, and we’re still burnouts.”

A few feet away, direct from Appleton, Wisconsin, was a reunion of former members of By-Tor and the Snow Puppies, a high school band you never heard of. “Actually, call us Second Nature, which was the better name we had,” said Daryll Hurst, 48. When they formed, they used Rush as a model, which is like studying Wayne Gretzky to learn to skate. “We would get a good response from a Van Halen song,” said Bryan Hartjes, 47, “but we were more proud of making it through anything by Rush without screwing it up.”

It’s not unusual, of course, to see the members of a rock band reflected in its fans, but I thought of By-Tor and the Snow Puppies when Lee, during his talk, spoke of feeling physically unable to keep up with anything by Yes, another 1970s prog-rock institution.

Many fans told me they were baseball crazy. Not coincidentally, Lee spoke of falling hard for baseball when, during the band’s early days, he listened to WGN while touring the Midwest in a van. too. Thayil, during their conversation, recited from memory an entire lineup of the Cubs. When Lee opened the floor up to questions, someone asked him how he would change the game if he became the commissioner of baseball. (He wouldn’t.) Someone asked him to choose between George Brett and Mike Schmidt. (He went with Brett.) Someone asked if he would consider becoming a baseball announcer.

He’s no Jack Brickhouse, he said.

Again, not typical rock star bombast.

Lee choked up while discussing Peart, and later admitted he’s a frequent crier. He recalled crying in front of a Gerhard Richter painting at the Art Institute. He also said that he’s an architecture buff, so someone asked him to name his favorite building. He smiled toward the rafters with his liquid eyes: “I am going with this one.”

cborrelli@chicagotribune.com