After years of fighting illness, the late great Rush drummer Neil Peart passed away in 2020 at the age of 67. The band’s surviving members haven’t discussed his loss much since. The actor Paul Rudd served as the event’s presenter and bassist, keyboardist, and vocalist Geddy Lee spoke, during a Q&A session, when he last saw Neil Peart (translated by Blabbermouth). Lee is presently promoting his new memoir, “My Effin’ Life.”
Geddy Lee talks about the last time that he saw Neil Peart
“(During his final months, Neil) would listen to a different Rush album and he would be analyzing it and listening to something he hadn’t heard sometimes since we’d made it. And by the time that he sadly passed, he had listened to pretty much all the work we had done as a band.”
“And the last time I saw him… he wanted to tell me how proud he was of the music we have done together. Some of this stuff is hard to talk about. And it just blew me away that, in that moment, we were sitting on his balcony at his house. And whenever we left him towards the end, we never knew if we’d see him again or not.”
Geddy Lee said, “And so we were sitting on his balcony and he was having a smoke, because he loved to have a smoke, like clockwork. And we were talking about what a great moment it was that he was here in this place and we had just seen some parakeets flying into the trees and we both were bird nerds so we could talk about that.”
“But he went on to talk about these songs and what they meant to him and he thought it was very important for me to know that, that our life as a rhythm section together was important to him. So I thought that was beautiful.”
Soon after Rush’s self-titled debut album was published in 1974, Neil Peart joined the band. John Rutsey, who was forced to quit the band owing to health concerns, was replaced by him.
In addition to revolutionizing the band’s sound with his incredible drumming abilities, Peart also took on the role of primary songwriter.