Suddenly there was this opportunity to play as a full-time musician. The turning point for us was in 1971 when the legal drinking age in Ontario, our province, was lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. At that time you played maybe three times a month if you were really lucky, at high school dances and drop-in centres. 1971: Hitting The Clubs And BarsĪlex Lifeson: For a couple of years we just needed to learn our trade. He was a very opinionated guy – about music, about what he thought the band should be, how we should look. And in those early days, John was the leader of the band, to all intents and purposes. John used to announce the songs, and he was totally good at it, really funny, a real acerbic wit. I was just the one with the best voice – or the most appropriate voice! So stepping out in front was not a natural thing for me. The following week we were offered another gig at the same place, but Jeff said he couldn’t do it – he was already in another band at the time. We were offered this gig at a drop-in centre, so I called this guy I’d been jamming with, Jeff Jones, who played bass and sang. John’s brother Bill had said, ‘You need a better name for the band – how about Rush?’ And we liked it. But out of The Projection came the first gig as Rush. And Gary Cooper didn’t stick around for long. It was mostly about getting together and playing the three or four songs that we knew. We just played at a party maybe once every six weeks during the summer. That was a very important friend to have. He was older than us and he was the only one who had a car. The guy that lived next door to me, Gary Cooper, was the bass player. I had a friend named John Rutsey who played drums, and we had a little basement band called The Projection. (Image credit: Chris Walter/Getty) 1968: The First GigĪlex Lifeson: It was cool to be young and be in ‘a band’. That was a bummer!įresh-faced: Geddy Lee. He was threatening to tell my mother that I was high. He was very straight and he was really upset with me. But I was a little too high to be very functional, and this guy was really mad at me. At that time I was playing in another band, and after I got high with Al, I went over to the guy in my band’s house for rehearsal. We went to the local public school grounds to smoke some pot. He was just a terrific pothead, and a terrible influence on me. Geddy Lee: The first time I ever got high was with Alex. We were beginning to look at music more seriously and really trying to figure out what the musicians were playing, how the bands worked. The good old days! We’d either play along with the record, or we would both plug into Ged’s amp and just play, him on bass, me on guitar. We loved to learn all those great Cream songs, play along to the record player, and play them better and better and better. Almost every day we’d go to his parents’ place after school and we’d jam for two hours.Īlex Lifeson: For a long time we were in different bands, but we always jammed together. And we both had a really deep passion for music and wanting to play it. Geddy Lee: We wanted to be rebellious, to break away from our families, like all kids want to do. Alex Lifeson: It was at junior high, in that ‘getting to know you’ stage, that Geddy and I got heavily into music.
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