Geddy Lee’s opinion on Neil Young

As a music fan and aspiring musician in Canada during the 1960s, Geddy Lee was well aware of his country’s music scene and followed the careers of some of the most influential artists of that generation, including Neil Young. Although Rush‘s music eventually took a very different direction, Lee continued to follow Young’s career and has shared his opinion about him over the years.

What is Geddy Lee’s opinion on Neil Young

Geddy Lee has always been a big fan of Neil Young and when asked to pick an important song of the musician, he chose Buffalo Springfield’s “Mr. Soul” and explained he was one of his heroes. “When we were growing up in Toronto, we were all big Buffalo Springfield fans, and Neil Young was one of our first heroes. We used to play Mr. Soul when we were a struggling bar band. We were trying to play our own material, but you couldn’t get work unless you played cover songs.”

“So we tried to find cover songs that were not so obvious, not Top 40 songs. We were pretty crude and pretty loud, and so is ‘Mr. Soul’, so it would go over pretty well with our crowd. Neil Young is someone I really respect. We met in 1985 when a bunch of Canadian artists got together to record a single to raise money for African famine charities (under the name Northern Lights). We did a song called ‘Tears Are Not Enough‘ that Bryan Adams wrote, and all these different singers each sang a line. David Foster was producing, and I remember watching another of my heroes, Joni Mitchell, sing her line.”

He continued:

“In my view, it was perfect the first time, but David made her sing it over and over. Then Neil Young sang his line, and Foster said, ‘Can you do it again? I think there’s a little bit out of pitch.’ But Neil said, ‘Hey man, that’s my style!’ And that was that. That really summed up Neil Young for me. The guy’s got big balls,” he told Mojo in 2026.

Rush released their version of “Mr. Soul” in 2004 on their covers album “Feedback”. During the recording of that charity song was when he first met Neil and as Geddy once remembered, he was “totally coolest guy of the whole day. “I had never met Neil Young before. He was totally the coolest guy of the whole day. Joni Mitchell was there. I was thrilled to be in the same room as her. I was always a big fan. Burton [Cummings, singer of the Guess Who] was a good guy. They were all kind of hanging out for the day, recording this song. It was a very unusual experience for me. (…) Being with some of those guys was surreal,” Geddy Lee said in an interview with Rolling Stone in 2013.

Rush was asked to play Neil Young songs many times during their early days

It’s common in countries with major national musical heroes for emerging artists to be heckled during their shows, with someone in the audience shouting at them to play a song by one of those legendary musicians. That happened to Rush during the early days of their career, when people would shout at them to play something by Neil Young. There was also a funny episode when the band was performing in the region where the legendary Canadian artist was born, and one audience member wouldn’t stop shouting that Neil had been born there.

“The owner (of the place) was a real dick who wouldn’t advance us any money; being broke, we couldn’t go out for so much as a 99-cent burger and had to take all our meals on credit in the hotel, running up a food bill that in the end would come off our pay. His only kindness was just before the final Saturday matinee (attendance, two to three drunk patrons), when he sprang for a couple of jugs of draft beer, which of course we annihilated before the set—half of which Alex and I ended playing horizontal. It hardly mattered to the crowd, such as it was.”

He continued:

“I recall one regular yelling, ‘Neil Young was born here! Neil Young was born here! Neil Young was born here!’ Okay, dude, thanks for letting us know . . . again,” he recalled in his autobiography “My Effin’ Life”. In the same book, he mentioned Neil’s track “Helpless”, which was recorded by CSNY, when talking about Thunder Bay, in Canada.

“In February 1975 he (our manager) booked us a week of dates beginning some 800 klicks north of Toronto. When my fellow countryman Neil Young sang, ‘There is a town in north Ontario,’ he was singing about Thunder Bay. But I’m referring to an even smaller, more obscure one called Cochrane, where you can still catch the Polar Bear Express,* and where it was cold—like, well-below-zero cold. I mean, like, thirty-eight-degrees-below-zero cold,” he said.

Geddy is a big fan of all Canadian Folk artists

Neil Young is not the only Canadian Folk musician that Geddy admires. When asked once which artists would be part of the soundtrack of his life, he mentioned Young and Joni Mitchell. There are so many, going way back … Certainly the Who played an important part in my early life. Joni Mitchell, in a way, I used to love her music when I was young. Neil Young … so many artists.”

“I was such a huge music lover when I was a kid, and I had an enormous record collection. I don’t know if one message or one person’s music helped me psychologically. But I know the music of many, many bands and many individual artists always moved me and made me want to be a musician. So in that sense, they affected my life very directly,” he said interview with CNN in 2002. Geddy also listed Joni Mitchell’s album “Blue” (1971) as one of his favorites of all time.

He said:

“As a young Canadian, I was very aware of the Canada’s folk legacy. From Gordon Lightfoot to Neil Young. Of course, Joni Mitchell loosely falls into that broad category although her music is impossible to pigeonhole, really. Even as far back as Blue you could hear traces of jazz… oh, all sorts of things. Everybody seemed to have this album.”

“It is one of those records that always seemed to hang in the air. The songwriting is sublime and has never dated. It is not a record that actually had any effect on the formation of Rush. But it was something that captured those times and can instantly transport me back there. I don’t know if it is her best album but it is certainly the one that cut through all the other music around. It is also very, very beautiful,” he said in an interview with The Quietus.