Rush singer Geddy Lee revealed that he was forced to quit his original instrument, the guitar and play the signature instrument that we know him for today, the bass after the original bassist for his first band left due to his mother deeming Lee and company a “bad influence”. He made the remarks in an NPR interview, as transcribed by Alternative Nation. This Rush singer recently revealed a disturbing Metallica secret
Interviewer: Geddy Lee is our guest on World Café, the new book is called: “Geddy Lee’s Big Beautiful Book of Bass”. You know, we talk about how you are a bassist, but some people might not know-how in your first band you were a guitarist. A Rush icon just called out this awful Jimmy Page ripoff not too long ago.
Geddy Lee: Well I wasn’t really, it wasn’t really a band, it was a bunch of guys just sitting around a bedroom dreaming about being a band. I had a guitar, a beautiful, acoustic guitar that had palm trees painted on it. So, we tried making noise, we tried imitating other bands, and so we had a guy that was supposed to be our bass player at the time but his mom wasn’t too keen on him hanging around with us. We were a bad influence. He got pulled and had a vote of the other two people in the room and voted me to be the bass player. You know, being a Canadian, I like to compare it to being a goalie. Nobody really wants to be the goalie but somebody has to be the goalie. So you get voted to be the goalie, I got voted to be the bass player. Which suited me just fine; there were two fewer strings on the bass than on the guitar. Rush’s singer just revealed what he really thinks about U2.