Another Week: Number 102

My Effin’ Life, by Geddy Lee

One of the books I was reading over the last week was My Effin’ Life, the autobiography of Rush‘s singer and bassist Geddy Lee.

I saw Rush open for Kiss at the Kenosha Ice Arena when I was 14, and I saw them again in Chicago when I was 18, but I have never been a real fan. Of the 3,800 tracks in my iTunes library, “The Spirit of Radio” is the only one by Rush — mostly because I associate it with my days in Chicago radio.

Somehow — even though I go along with plenty of Bob Dylan’s nonsense and tolerate David Bowie’s space-glam — the lyrics of Rush songs strike me as clumsy. I cannot brook “the priests of the Temples of Syrinx.”

Nevertheless, after reading a few excerpts via online music sites, I bought Geddy Lee’s book and steadily slid it through my Kindle. It’s a particularly compelling read during the parts about death and tragedy.

First of all, Geddy Lee’s parents were both survivors of several Nazi concentration camps. That’s how they met. Then Lee’s dad died when the boy just twelve, adding serious grief to the nerdy Jewish kid’s alienation during his early adolescence in suburban Toronto.

Much later, after years of working their way to rock and roll stardom, the band’s drummer and lyricist Neal Peart was hit by a series of breathtaking tragedies.

In between, there’s all the performing, songwriting, recording, mixing, touring, pot smoking, acid dropping, and cocaine snorting. The whole rock and roll treadmill sounds incredibly tedious as the band grinds away devising material, producing albums, and then putting on concerts in different cities each night for months on end — then repeats the cycle year in and year out. These chapters become a slog.

Lee generally comes across as a thoughtful and gentle soul — but there are flashes of anger at a few people, including Billy Preston and Bill Graham. One of the most aggravating features of his text is the overuse of footnotes for incidental digressions. These keep you constantly jumping back and forth. Parentheses (or simple inclusion in the main body) would be less annoying.

Through it all, the three men keep their corny senses of humor and their loyalty to each other, gradually polishing their skills and their art into a significant catalog. It’s a lot more than most of us have accomplished.

One thing I did find helpful was that, immediately after finishing Lee’s book, I watched Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage during my free trial of Qello Concerts. It’s a more compact version of the same story, but being able to hear the music adds so much — and amazingly, the documentary even includes multi-camera footage of 17-year-old Alex Lifeson‘s family arguing over his decision to drop out of high school and pursue a career as Rush’s guitarist.

Cape Fear (1962)

Saturday night at my Mom’s we watched Cape Fear, the 1962 psychological thriller starring Gregory Peck as a lawyer in Georgia who, eight years ago, interrupted a rape and testified at the rapist’s trial, and Robert Mitchum as that rapist, now released from prison and looking for retribution.

Peck’s character has a wife (Polly Bergan) and a 14-year-old daughter (Lori Martin), and things get deeply creepy very fast in their neighborhood.

The creepiness creates both the movie’s suspense and its moral dilemma. According to Wikipedia, censors had problems with the “continuous threat of sexual assault on a child.”

Mitchum doesn’t have much to do here beyond being menacing, which he is. The only thin story here is the extent to which Peck abandons his law-and-order principles when his loved ones are endangered.

The movie’s not a masterpiece, but it has its moments.

Jim Gaffigan: The Skinny (2024)

I’m not sure how many Jim Gaffigan comedy specials I’ve seen, but it has now certainly been too many.

Eventually — somewhat like a Catholic mass — the routine, rhythm, and intonation become so familiar that the material becomes immaterial.

(Is he talking about Gaffigan’s whispery asides?)