“Alex gave me my first joint, and I got so f**king stoned”: Rush’s Geddy Lee recalls the first time he smoked marijuana at 13 – and he got so high it sabotaged his band rehearsal
When Rush’s Geddy Lee was 13, he was a pretty innocent young lad – until he met Alex Lifeson. Despite Lee now being in his 70s, he can clearly recall the day Lifeson first introduced him to the world of marijuana… and ultimately sabotaged his gig in a local band.
In a new interview with Prog magazine, Lee laughs when he remembers his first time getting stoned. “[Lifeson] was the one who introduced me to it,” Lee says. “I was playing in this other band whose drummer was a Who freak – he dreamed of being in The Who. Me and Al were hanging out… and he gave me my first joint. I got so fucking stoned.”
READ MORE: “Twice a night we’ll pick a song to play for him”: Geddy Lee reveals how Rush will pay tribute to Neil Peart on reunion tour
Unfortunately, it was only after getting thoroughly high that the penny dropped – Lee had somewhere to be. “Suddenly I went, ‘Shit, I have to go to rehearsal!’” he says.
Aware that he had been the one to corrupt Lee, tempting him to get stoned in the middle of the day, Lifeson offered to walk with Lee to his rehearsal. “Al came with me, and we were walking in slow motion across the park,” Lee remembers. “I got to the guy’s house, and he looked at me and went: ‘Look at your eyes, man. Are you stoned?’ He was freaking out like you’d expect your parents to freak out.”
“I was like, ‘This is a bummer, man! Al, this guy’s a drag!’” Lee laughs. “I said, ‘I gotta go home. How do I come down from this stuff?’ And [Lifeson] went, ‘You gotta drink Coca Cola. It brings you down.’ So, yeah, we kind of bonded over marijuana.”
While Lee adds that he’s “never touched the stuff since”, it’s a comment clearly made in jest. In the band’s 2010 documentary, Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, Lee admitted that Rush “were pretty high” while recording their 1975 record, Caress of Steel, adding that it clearly “sounds like it” too. He has even gone on record acknowledging that Rush fans are also prone to enjoy getting stoned. During the band’s appearance on Classic Albums series, he proudly labelled Rush crowds “the most aromatic audience” he knows of.
Lifeson has also been very vocal about his appreciation of marijuana. In fact, he even spoke to High Times in 2012 and revealed that a few Rush tracks were inspired by the ol’ hazy jane – namely the 1976 track Passage to Bangkok, which documents the best places to go to bag high-grade cannabis.
“It’s about a fun little journey to all the good places you could go to have a puff,” Lifeson explained. “We thought it would be kind of fun to write a song about that, and Neil [Peart] did it in a very eloquent way, I think. That song was probably written in a farmhouse, on an acoustic guitar, in front of a little cassette player of some sort. We would record like that and then go down in the basement and rehearse it.”
Elsewhere in the interview, Lifeson reflected on his relationship with the drug. “Do things go better with pot? Sometimes they do, sometimes they don’t,” he said. “I find that you can be very imaginative when stoned, you can be very creative – but implementation is sometimes difficult. In the past, there have been times when I’ve been really inspired in writing and came up with things that I would never otherwise think up. But the actual playing can be obstructed a little bit.”
He also recalled how him the band’s legendary drummer, the late Neil Peart, sometimes used to smoke before going out onstage. “In the very, very early days, occasionally – well, more than ‘occasionally’ – Neil and I would smoke a joint before going on,” he admitted. “I mean, this is in the mid-‘70s; I would never, ever do something like that now! I won’’ even have a sip of beer before a show, because I need to be extremely clear-headed.”
Now, the Rush pair are a bit more responsible. And they wont be high onstage during their Fifty Something Tour, which kicks off in Los Angeles on June 7. The group will perform in North America, South America, the UK, and Europe, finishing the tour on April 10, 2027, in Helsinki.
Head to Rush.com for full dates and ticket information.
The post “Alex gave me my first joint, and I got so f**king stoned”: Rush’s Geddy Lee recalls the first time he smoked marijuana at 13 – and he got so high it sabotaged his band rehearsal appeared first on Guitar.com | All Things Guitar.
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