Rush’s Geddy Lee on the last time he saw Neil Peart

nme.com:

Rush‘s Geddy Lee has opened up about the last time he saw his former bandmate Neil Peart.The drummer died in January 2020 after living with an aggressive form of brain cancer called glioblastoma for three-and-a-half years.

He was 67 years old. A tribute concert was held in Los Angeles, California the following September.During Lee’s current book tour – where he is reading passages from his memoir My Effin’ Life, which came out on Tuesday (November 14) – the singer-songwriter talked about his final meeting with Peart.Per Consequence, the comments came as part of a Q&A segment of the tour’s opening night at the Beacon Theatre in New York City on Monday (November 13).He told the crowd that Peart “would listen to a different Rush album” in the last months of his life, and “would be analysing it and listening to something he hadn’t heard, sometimes since we’d made it”.Lee continued: “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…”The bassist/vocalist then began getting emotional, telling those in attendance: “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.”Lee added: “And so we were sitting on his balcony and he was having a smoke, because he loved to have a smoke, like clockwork.