Rush’s Geddy Lee had a conversation with The Telegraph in support of his autobiography ”My Effin’ Life” where he opened up about the group’s late drummer Neil Peart.
In 2016, on the eve of a walking tour along Hadrian’s Wall (the largest Roman archaeological feature in Britain), Geddy Lee received the news that Neil Peart was ill.
“I was crushed and confused and really at a loss,” he recalls. “And I have to say the walking was good because I had to put one foot in front of the other and focus on not falling off of [a] hill. And it gave me some time to regret those feelings of resentment that I had. To regret not celebrating Neil’s retirement with him. I felt that I had been incredibly selfish and now here he was at the beginning of a fight for his life. So there was a lot of emotions post-Rush in that first year. A lot of conflicting emotions.”
Geddy Lee recalled the last time he met Neil Peart:
“It was a very poignant evening. And it’s a memory I do cherish. The last conversation we had was remarkable in that one of the things he wanted to express was his pride (because) he’d been listening to everything we’ve done.
”Every day he would go to what he called his ‘Bubba Cave’, where he would spend his days with his cars and his office and his books and whatnot. And on the way there, every day he would listen to the work we had done over the years, one record at a time.
”He wanted to just share how proud he was of the work we had done together, which was a beautiful thing.”