Rush bassist and singer Geddy Lee recalled in an interview with Classic Rock magazine when he watched Led Zeppelin live for the first time. He went to the concert with guitarist Alex Lifeson and original Rush drummer John Rutsey.
Geddy Lee recalls when he watched Led Zeppelin for the first time:
“They literally brought the house down. They were doing two shows. We were at the first show. I went with [original Rush drummer] John Rutsey and Alex [Lifeson]. It was general admission. We lined up for hours. We got in and we sat in the second row. And I swear they didn’t walk out on stage – they floated out. They literally brought the house down, because by the end of the night there was plaster falling from the ceiling.”
“I remember when the first album dropped. We waited at our local Sam The Record Man store in Willowdale, grabbed the record, ran to my house, put it on and sat on my bed freaking out over Communication Breakdown. They were a huge, huge influence on us. We wanted to be them instantly. But their stuff was hard to play. We tried a number of Zeppelin songs when we played in the bars, but we felt we couldn’t pull them off. We did have Livin’ Lovin’ Maid in our set for a while though.”
“The phrase ‘heavy metal’ didn’t suit Zeppelin. They had a sound that constantly surprised. They used influences and they took chances that other heavy metal bands just would not conceive of, maybe sparked by Robert Plant’s lyrics. He had that Tolkienesque majesty about his lyrics, and people don’t like that about his writing, but I do. I love the imagery that he uses. And it is the combination of the way Jimmy’s acoustic guitar is used and the presence of that blues background. It gives their music much more depth than your average heavy metal band.”
When Geddy met Robert Plant at a hotel
In an interview with CBC’s The Hour a few years ago, Rush members Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson recalled the funny story of how they met Robert Plant and Jimmy Page.
“I was on a bycicle trip with my wife in Morroco and we ended up at this beautiful hotel in the Atlas mountains. I was given the room key, my wife and I were in this room that only had… just two rooms, one on the right and one on the left and I was checking in, turning the key to open my door and I head the other door opening and I turned around and it was a guy that looked just like Robert Plant coming out of there.”
“He looked at me and I looked at him and we both kind of went ‘That’s weird. He went his way, I went my way and I said ‘that guy looked like so much like Robert Plant’. And then we were on the dinning room having dinner and he came up to me and he said: ‘What are you doing here?’. We chatted and he’d be coming to this hotel for years.”
“We kind of exchanged numbers and stayed in touch. So when he came to Toronto he called. So the two of us (Points to Alex Lifeson) went to watch them (Page & Plant project).”