Rock Bottom: Geddy Lee Contributes an Important and Entertaining Memoir

With My Effin’ Life, Geddy Lee has accomplished two major achievements. He has written one of the best rock star memoirs I’ve ever read, and I’ve read them all. More importantly, he’s written one of the better Holocaust memoirs of recent vintage, and I’ve read most of those, too. Rock music and genocide are my twin obsessions. Discovering in the long-haired, giant-nosed, soprano-singing bass phenom of Rush the rare ability to portray both with nuance and substance has renewed my faith in mankind, faith that was badly shaken by Chapter Three of this worthy book.

Press play to hear a narrated version of this story, presented by AudioHopper.

Every rock memoir has the exact same formula. The subject feels isolated, music is his or her outlet, they find their bandmates and together they achieve a bunch of hits. And then a challenge knocks them down but not out. They gain some perspective and write the memoir. The only variation is the nature of that challenge. Sometimes it’s depression (Rick Springfield), sometimes it’s a struggle with sexuality (Bob Mould, Rob Halford), and almost always it’s drugs and sex (Kathy Valentine, Sammy Hagar, Steve Lukather, Mark Lanegan, Richard Lloyd, Patty Schemel, Jonathan Cain, and all the others). And there are others with a subject like Lee—just basically a nice guy with no major drug problems and not too horny who happens to be really good at making music (Jim Peterik or Ted Templeman). But this is something new, as Lee tells the incredibly harrowing story of his parents’ lives as prisoners, first in the Jewish ghetto near their Polish town and later in a sickening variety of concentration camps. Somehow, a pampered rock star struggling not to do that fifth line of blow doesn’t seem all that heroic when weighed against the experiences of Mr. and Mrs. Weinrib.

It’s hard not to experience My Effin’ Life—the title derives from its author’s habit of using the PG version of the curse word—as a polite Canadian version of not quite evangelism, but exposition. Geddy goes into wonderfully rich detail about Jewish arcana such as the mourning rituals. As he observes after his father‘s shocking death at age 12, you get the feeling the average Rush fan reading this book doesn’t really need to know that music is prohibited during the 11-month mourning phase. Geddy explaining it in such matter-of-fact detail is a Canadian-nice way of saying, “This shit matters to me. And if I matter to you, you need to understand who I am and how I got there.” It’s actually an incredibly powerful way, coming at a time when the world desperately needs it, of revealing the value of the Jewish people to the human race.

Lee does an able job of describing how his parents’ experiences informed his music, as well. Geddy told Neil Peart the story of his mother’s survival, first in the nazi-established ghetto in Starachowice, Poland, then in Auschwitz, and eventually in Bergen-Belsen, until April 15, 1945 when the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment and the 11th Armoured Division of the British Army freed the 60,000 prisoners who were still barely alive.

Geddy’s mother, Manya Weinrib, z’l, told him she continued to work for 30 minutes even as she saw the Germans with their hands up and other soldiers moving in, because they just didn’t understand that there was anyone left on earth to save them. That story Geddy told Neil eventually became the Rush song “Red Sector A.”

I care about rock music more than almost anything, but I care about preserving the memory of the Holocaust even more, so I will quote Manya—she and husband Moishe became Mary and Morris when they emigrated to Toronto—and her sister Yita.

My mom described the scene to us: “I was working in a woodshed piling wood. We were all starving or sick, and I noticed out one window that the Germans were standing with both hands up. I even joked to the others about it. ‘Look!’ I said. ‘Now they’re saluting Hitler with both hands.’ We worked thirty minutes beyond our liberation because we didn’t realize the British had arrived. When we were told to come out, and that we were free, we could not believe it. We were in shock. We had assumed there was no one left alive to save us, otherwise why had they not come sooner?”

Yita’s experience was quite different from my mother’s: “When the British arrived, they lifted me onto the first tank. As I showed them around the camp, I was so happy, it was the greatest day of my life!” My mother continued, “When we came out of the woodshed the British were so stunned to see us, they couldn’t take it. They were just sitting down and, you know, crying. They couldn’t believe the horror of it. And yet we were used to it.”

All of Geddy’s relatives have the same names as mine — Yitta, Moishe, Ruchel, Herschel. Yet Geddy realizes that a decent number of people who purchased this thing didn’t come for a 90-year-old story about the Holocaust. At the end of Chapter 2, he gives his reader permission to skip Chapter 3, which details his parents’ harrowing experiences. But I believe, and I get the feeling Geddy believes, it’s precisely the person who bought this book to hear about the bass part in “Tom Sawyer” who really should read Chapter 3.

From there, the more standard rock memoir takes hold, but always with wit and the same kind of hyperactive energy Geddy brought to his busy bass lines.

He grew up in Canada, and the cookie-cutter nature of suburban Toronto is a frequent theme of Rush and its chief lyricist, the incomparable drummer Neil Peart. Songs like “Working Man,” and “Subdivisions,” which the filmmaker Michael Moore has credited with actually saving the lives of some disaffected teens, came out of that rather leafy experience.

Geddy mentions that antisemitism in those days was still a thing. When I was growing up in the heavily Jewish suburbs of Chicago’s North Shore, my friend Todd blew our minds with stories of antisemitism his dad Gil had experienced growing up in Canada. Gil said there was a separate hospital for Jews, because the real hospital wouldn’t accept patients from the Jewish neighborhoods. Geddy talks about being bullied for his schnoz, a dead giveaway just as surely as the yellow stars his parents had been forced to wear.

Geddy’s love of music takes hold and he gravitates toward the bass guitar with the usual “four strings seemed easier than six” joke. His realization of the melodic and rhythmic roles bass could play was informed by Jack Casady and Phil Lesh and Chris Squire and will resonate with anyone who appreciates the instrument and its critical role in rock music.

Given the band’s massive success—14 platinum albums over a remarkably stable 40-year career—I hadn’t realized just how seldom Rush managed to sneak onto the charts. Obviously, Rush is not a singles band. Their songs are uncomfortable, often featuring unusual time signatures, ridiculous length, and impossible to imitate musicianship. (That’s what makes their late-career cameo as the all-guys favorite in “I Love You Man” so funny.) But I hadn’t realized that the novelty song “Take Off” by Bob and Doug McKenzie was the closest Geddy ever got to a hit. It reached number 16 compared to New World Man, which hit 21 on the US charts.

I frequently read books twice when I’m reviewing them, and when I do, I try to read it in print and on audiobook. This one is a must for audiobook, but not just for the obvious reasons, like in Chapter 16 when Geddy breaks into a really beautiful a capella version of “Territories.” Hearing Geddy Lee lapse into Yiddish phrases and an Eastern European accent—his very name is just the way his Yiddishe momme would pronounce “Gary”– is one of the sublime treats of my entire audio reading history. And there are Easter eggs, as well. Alex Lifeson reads from his own self-deprecating review of an early bar show. It’s a little jarring to hear these voices appear with no explanation, but it’s also kind of seamless, reflecting a 50+ year musical partnership that dates back to their high school days. Elsewhere, Cliff Burnstein, who discovered the band for Mercury, reads a wonderful summary of pulling that first Canadian LP out of the pile.

The book painstakingly fulfills the rock memoir mandate, detailing hotel room hijinks, “lending” Ozzy some hash oil, being out-drunk by Nazareth and opening a tour for Kiss in their prime. There are detailed production notes on each record as the band evolves as composers and musicians while keeping its promise not to record anything they can’t faithfully reproduce on stage as a trio. There is some of the eye-glazing discussion of why a Trident mixing board—especially the Trident A in Soho—is so important to humanity. But mostly, the book derives its power from the warmth and humanity of its author.

And yet, experiencing this book just a few weeks after the greatest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust makes it hard to grapple with some of the lighthearted and loving memories. Almost 90 years after many of Geddy Lee’s relatives were killed for the crime of being Jewish we can fire up Twitter and see the exact same fucking thing.

This is a problem too grand even for the mighty power of rock ‘n’ roll.

I don’t have an answer and ultimately neither does Geddy Lee. But with this memoir, Geddy Lee doesn’t simply tell great stories of a great band’s great run. He takes his rightful place among Canada’s most important Jews, alongside Mordecai Richler, Mort Zuckerman, Leonard Cohen, the Bronfman Family and a surprisingly long list of other Jews, who have done nothing but uplift the culture, economy and public life of every place they’ve ever lived.

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Ken Kurson

Ken Kurson is the founder of the Globe suite of sites. He is also the founder of Green Magazine and greenmagazine.com and covered finance for Esquire magazine for almost 20 years. Ken is the author of several books, including the New York Times No. 1 bestseller Leadership.

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