How Geddy Lee’s 1960s Turned A Holocaust Survivor’s Son Into Rush’s Engine

Before 2112, before stadium light shows and twenty minute epics, Geddy Lee was just Gary Weinrib, a skinny kid in suburban Toronto trying to drown out ghosts from Europe with the volume knob on his amp. The 1960s were the decade when that shy teenager turned into the unlikely engine of Rush.

To understand how Rush really started, you have to zoom in on those years: Holocaust stories at the dinner table, a cheap department store bass, furious neighbors and a church-basement coffeehouse that paid twenty five bucks a night. Out of that mix came one of rock’s most obsessive bass players and one of the strangest origin stories in classic rock.

Growing up in Willowdale with the war still in the room

Geddy Lee was born Gary Lee Weinrib in Willowdale, a suburb of Toronto, in 1953, the son of Polish Jewish Holocaust survivors Mary (Manya) Rubinstein and Morris Weinrib. As teenagers his parents were pushed through a chain of camps from a labor camp in Starachowice to Auschwitz and finally to Dachau and Bergen Belsen before emigrating to Canada and starting over.

Unlike many survivors, they talked. Lee has described hearing detailed stories of the camps from around age eight and suffering nightmares from the images his mother shared. His father died in the mid 1960s from health damage rooted in those years, leaving his mother to run a small discount store and hold the family together.

That history did not make him quieter. Lee later said that fronting a rock band felt like “yelling back” at authority, a way of refusing the fear that had ruled his parents’ youth. Even his stage name came from that background his mother’s accent turned “Gary” into “Geddy,” and the nickname stuck so hard that it became his legal name.

Finding music in a British invasion decade

Lee started playing music in school around age 10 or 11, bouncing between drums, trumpet and clarinet before a cheap acoustic guitar at 14 finally lit the fuse. Classroom lessons did not satisfy him, so he supplemented them with basic piano study and then with the real curriculum of the 1960s listening obsessively to records.

His ear went straight to the new British rock Lee has singled out Jack Bruce of Cream, John Entwistle of The Who, Jeff Beck and Procol Harum as early obsessions, and he has said he learned bass largely by copying Bruce’s lines note for note. That combination of Motown grooves in his parents’ store and British psychedelia on his turntable produced something unusual a bass player who treated his instrument as a lead voice rather than background thump.

By his mid teens, Lee had turned the family basement into a rehearsal bunker for a band of high school friends. When those weekend gigs at school dances and local events started bringing in real, if tiny, money, he made the move that horrified his mother he dropped out of high school to play rock full time.

The most reluctant bass player in Toronto

Ironically, Geddy Lee never set out to be a bassist at all. In a later interview he joked, “No one becomes a bass player willingly” and explained that in his first apartment bedroom band, the original bassist was yanked out by a disapproving mother, so the remaining kids simply volunteered Geddy for the job.

To make that sudden promotion real, he begged his own mother for about thirty dollars and headed to a local department store. There he bought a Canora Precision style bass, a Japanese knockoff of Fender’s workhorse instrument. Lee and his guitarist friend Alex Lifeson promptly attacked their cheap instruments with paint, covering them in hand done psychedelic patterns that looked like something straight off a 1967 Fillmore poster.

That origin story is almost the anti rock myth there is no mystical chosen one, just a teen bullied into the low end because nobody else wanted it and a mother scraping together the price of a budget bass. Yet within a few years, that reluctant bassist would be redefining what rock bass could do.

Basement volume, angry grandmother, and the first real band

Once Lee had an electric bass in his hands, the family home effectively became a youth club. Rehearsals for his early bands including the proto Rush lineups were often at his house, and the volume was legendary enough that his grandmother would shout from the kitchen while the group blasted away in the basement, often unable to hear her over their own amps.

According to the official biography Visions, neighborhood kids would gather outside the basement window to listen, getting a free preview of the group that would soon be charging admission at local coffeehouses. The music at this point was not the intricate prog fans know it was loud blues rock covers, heavy on British influences, hammered out by teenagers who valued sheer impact at least as much as finesse.

Crucially, Lindy Young Geddy’s future brother in law, who briefly played keyboards with them recalls that early Rush was not a metal band at all but more of a blues rock outfit, with Geddy still singing in a relatively low register. The famous high pitched wail and sci fi epics were still in the future; in the late 1960s he was a working class kid singing bar band material at punishing volume.

From the Coff In coffeehouse to a band called Rush

The step from noisy basement to real stage happened through a very un glamorous door. In 1968 guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer John Rutsey landed a paying Friday night slot at The Coff In, a youth coffeehouse in the basement of St. Theodore of Canterbury Anglican Church in Willowdale. Their first version of the band featured Jeff Jones on bass and vocals, and it was Rutsey’s brother who tossed out the simple, punchy name they adopted Rush.

After that first paid gig, Jones was gone within a week, and Lifeson called in his school friend Gary “Geddy” Weinrib to take over bass and lead vocals for the next show at the same church basement. The lineup was still shaky, but the basic template of Rush guitar, bass and drums, with the bassist as the main voice was already locked in.

The band’s own official site now summarizes it more smoothly: Geddy Lee joined Rush in September 1968 at the request of his childhood friend and guitarist Alex Lifeson, becoming the singer, bassist and eventually keyboardist at the core of the group. For a power trio on Toronto’s suburban fringe, the idea of ever filling arenas would have sounded like science fiction.

Late 1960s Rush: covers, name swaps and a teenage power trio

Canadian reference sources describe Rush in those years as a Toronto power trio playing a wide mix of British and American rock covers before gradually shifting into original material. By around 1969 and 1970 they were writing their own songs that leaned hard into the emerging heavy sound of bands like Led Zeppelin, with Lee’s sharp, high vocals and Lifeson’s riff heavy guitar beginning to define their identity.

The path was not straight. Fan documented histories show that for part of 1969 the core players operated under a different name, Hadrian, with lineups that included Lee, Lifeson, Rutsey and keyboardist Lindy Young before further shuffles pushed Geddy out briefly and then back in. It was a messy, very teenage process of trying on identities, experimenting with heavier material and discovering which combination of people actually worked.

What matters for the Rush story is that by the end of the 1960s the constants were clear Lifeson’s guitar, Lee’s bass and voice, and a shared obsession with taking the loud, blues based rock they loved and pushing it harder, faster and more complex than the cover band circuit really demanded.

Key late 1960s milestones at a glance

What players can steal from Geddy Lee’s 1960s grind

For musicians especially bassists there is a lot to steal from Geddy Lee’s 1960s story, and none of it requires a boutique instrument or a major label. His first bass was a cheap copy, not a collector’s piece, and he treated it as raw material to be reshaped, repainted and abused on basement stages.

• Let the band vote you into discomfort. Lee did not want bass; it was forced on him, and that “unwanted” role became his superpower. Taking the job nobody else wants can be the fastest track to originality.
• Copy first, then mutate. He spent his teens imitating Jack Bruce and John Entwistle line for line before pushing those ideas into weird new shapes. There is nothing uncool about learning by mimicry as long as you eventually twist it into your own thing.
• Use small stages as a laboratory. Coffeehouses, school dances and church basements were where Rush learned to be a terrifyingly tight band. If you cannot make a church hall sound dangerous, you are not ready for an arena.

Above all, Lee’s 1960s prove that you can come from trauma, immigrant struggle and suburban boredom and still build something singular if you marry obsession to opportunity. The glamour came decades later; the real work was grandma yelling from upstairs while the band hammered away on the song they just learned off a scratched single.

From coffeehouse noise to prog rock legend

By the time the 1960s closed, Geddy Lee was not yet a household name, but the blueprint was drawn. He was the frontman bassist of a rough but ambitious Toronto trio, playing loud covers, testing originals and already driving the band far harder than the local scene demanded.

It is tempting to see the classic Rush of 2112 and Moving Pictures as having appeared fully formed, but the truth is more interesting. It began with a survivor’s son in a cramped postwar house, a cheap bass bought on credit, and a church basement that smelled of coffee and doughnuts. Without that decade of noise and stubbornness, there is no Rush at all.