Rush vocalist/bassist Geddy Lee spoke last year about Paul McCartney encouraging him and guitarist Alex Lifeson to get their band back on the road, and on his recent book tour to promote his autobiography My Effin' Life, Lee revealed that McCartney wasn't the first of his heroes to reach out to him and Lifeson while they were grieving.
On the Los Angeles date of his book tour, at the Orpheum Theatre, Lee revealed to the evening's host, long-time Rush fan Jack Black, that he and Robert Plant had first connected while both men were holidaying in Morocco in the mid '90s. The story was Lee and his wife Nancy were on a cycling holiday and had rented a bungalow at La Roseraie in the Atlas Mountains, and were astonished to discover that Plant was in residence in a bungalow facing their own. The two musicians subsequently met at dinner in the hotel, and shared stories about their travel experiences, and "hit it off really well" according to Lee, who described the former Led Zeppelin frontman as "friendly and charming."
Lee told Black that Plant subsequently reached out to him a couple of years later, in the summer of 1998, in the immediate aftermath of the death of drummer Neil Peart's partner, Jacqueline Taylor. As he recalls, he received a note from Rush's management's office saying that "some joker pretending to be Robert Plant" had phoned asking to speak with him, and had left a number for Lee to call. When Lee did so, Plant invited him to attend the upcoming Page and Plant show at Toronto's Molson Amphitheatre on July 4.
"I said, Look, I don't know if I can come down, because of this bad thing that just happened," Lee told Black. "And he said, 'Look, I've had my own share of loss, and you have to get on with your life, and sooner is better than later. I want you to come down, call Alex [Lifeson] up, just come down.' And so I called Al, and we went down to the concert, and they couldn't have been nicer to us: Robert was just so charming, and Jimmy was great, and it really lifted us, at a moment when we could have used the lifting."
Black then told Lee that the story touched him because, on a personal level, he was never sure whether it was appropriate to reach out to friends at a time of loss.
"That story made me feel like, yeah, it's okay," he told Lee, "and in fact, when people are hurting like that, a lot of times, they need you the most."
On the flipside, Lee also recently revealed on The Strombo Show podcast that certain musicians had been "inappropriate" in their approaches to him after Neil Peart's death.
"I heard from all kinds," said Lee. "That was a very weird moment. My little black book got filled up really quickly. It was like, Whoa, that’s just so inappropriate right now. Dude, wait two months. At least two months, if ever."
Watch that interview below:
