Geddy Lee has just returned home from rehab. Tomorrow, he’ll go to rehab again. At 55, Rush’s singer and bassist is recovering slowly from surgery on his knee, which he injured playing tennis, and he needs daily rehabilitation, probably provided free of charge by Canada’s notoriously charitable government health care.

Rush are middle-aged gentlemen: Lee is a wine collector who often plays tennis at a Toronto club with guitarist Alex Lifeson (who is also part-owner of a golf course), and Lee recently saw a photo of Neil Peart that made it clear the drummer had put on some kingly pounds since the trio’s Snakes & Arrows tour ended last July. But oddly, 35 years after their first album, this is Rush’s moment.

They were always an easy punch line, because of Lee’s high-pitched, scared-schoolgirl vocals, Peart’s epically endless drum solos, the band’s 20-minute science-fiction suites and their preeminent popularity among virgin males. More and more, cool culture has deemed Rush cool: Beastie Boys and Foo Fighters have declared their admiration, South Park gave a shout-out and the Mars Volta and Coheed and Cambria emulate Rush’s twisting hard-rock concertos. In July, they played live on The Colbert Report, and long before the band had a walk-on as the heroes of the recent I Love You, Man, they were saluted in the B-movie Orgazmo: “Geddy Lee. Best bass player ever.” Plenty of people believe that’s true, and not all of them ice-skate to work and eat doughnuts for dinner.

Today’s high temperature in Toronto is -5 Celsius, and snow falls relentlessly. As Lee’s teenage daughter heads out to rehearse for her high school’s production of Fiddler on the Roof, her dad limps around a well-appointed modern living room, passing a piano and a shelf of empty wine bottles with the kind of faded printing not found on Two Buck Chuck. Rush fans have submitted some very wacky questions for Lee to answer. “And you picked out the wackiest ones,” Geddy quickly realizes.

How is it being the greatest musician of all time, playing in the greatest band in the history of man?
What drugs are you taking, Stale? And are they over the counter or under the counter? (laughs)

Sometimes I listen to my voice when I was really young and it makes me laugh, because I was so cartoony. It’s like looking at an old photograph: Holy fuck, what was I thinking? Why was I wearing a ponytailthat  made me look like I was wearing a beaver skin cap? You’re supposed to be crappy when you make your first three or four records. But even in our middle period, we did this song called “Tai Shan,” using a poem Neil wrote about climbing a mountain in China, and when I listen to that it’s like, Bzzt. Error. We should have known better.

What about the voice of Geddy Lee? How did it get so high? That’s a lyric from a Pavement song [“Stereo”]. I’ve always had a high voice—the one year I was in the school choir, I was a soprano. Rush was modeled around bands like Blue Cheer, the Who, Led Zeppelin and Humble Pie—they all had screeching vocalists. People always tell me they’re shocked by my speaking voice. How weird is that? [In falsetto] What do you expect? I couldn’t talk like that 24 hours a day. Only Mickey Mouse can.

What Rush song has the highest vocal note?
Oh God. There are moments of Hemispheres that are pretty high. We tried to rehearse “A Farewell To Kings” on the last tour and I couldn’t successfully sing that without hurting myself, so we gave up. So yeah, there are moments of the past I cannot sing anymore. We play “2112” one semi-tone down, to keep me from burning my throat out.

You’re Canadian, and you’re Jewish. What are the most Canadian things about you, and what are the most Jewish?
The two most Canadian things about me are my soft-spoken nature and my pale complexion. The two most Jewish things about me are my nose and my sense of humor. I’m kind of a Jewish atheist: I bathe in the racial beauty of Judaism, but I don’t really see what that has to do with a belief in God. The only time I pray is on the tennis court.

I think I saw you in the Baltimore airport a year ago, but I’m not sure. How can I know if it was really you? 
I look exactly like Geddy Lee. Although I get mistaken for Bono a lot—sorry about that, Bono. And Latino people always think I’m Ozzy Osbourne. “Hey man, thank you for ‘Iron Man.’” I guess it’s the glasses and the hair.

You rapped on the title song to 1991’s Roll the Bones. On a scale of Vanilla Ice to Lil Wayne, how would you rate yourself as a rapper?
I don’t know Lil Wayne at all. We didn’t think of it as rap—we thought of it as comedy. We wanted to have John Cleese [of Monty Python] do that part, but he wasn’t available. Being the Jewish guy in the band, and therefore the funkiest guy in a band of white Canadians, I was the obvious choice.

Is it true that you were a bare-knuckle boxing champion? That’s the rumor I read online.
No, that’s a rumor we started. We had it on our Website in a fake list of accomplishments. Whenever there’s an opportunity to be goofy, we employ that, but it’s only in recent years that we’ve become more overt with our comedy, bringing it onstage and to our films. Our new motto is: “Less music, more comedy.” We got mail about the Colbert appearance: Fans were outraged that he interrupted the guitar solo by running onstage and doing comedy.

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