Neil Peart

I’ve kinda been putting off writing this. I find it hard to write about him without welling up. I worshipped Neil. I was a drummer, at first for my church and then for a band for a short while afterwards. Neil was my God. Many times I would put on Rush and only listen to the drums. I would set up my kit, put Rush on headphones and try and copy him exactly. But I was never that good a drummer. Most of what he did I could barely keep up with. Which, of course, caused me to admire him all the more!

Neil himself, however, never understood the adoration his fans had for him. They didn’t know him as a person so how could they love him? He found it creepy, and he would always shy away from meeting the fans like Alex and Geddy did. He really didn’t think he was anything special. Instead of travelling between concerts on a tour bus with the others he would either ride his motorcycle or sometimes he would even ride his pushbike. So, if you were travelling around in the same country where Rush were touring chances are that you may have passed Neil on his bike and you never would have known it. His travels spawn a plethora of travel books although one of them, “Ghost Rider” deals with an altogether different and tragic travel experience.

Not long after the Test For Echo tour concluded, Neil’s only child, his daughter Selena, left the family home in her car to go to college. That was the last time Neil saw her alive. Later that day the police arrived to report the dreadful news that Selena had rolled her car off the highway and was found dead. Obviously this devasted both parents but it especially affected Neil’s wife, Jackie. She suffered a total breakdown and died herself not ten months later of cancer. Although Neil believed that she really died of a broken heart. Neil contemplated taking his own life, and considered his musical career over. Rush was finished.

“In the days following Selena’s death, I had learned for myself how a sunny day could actually seem dark, the sun totally wrong, and how the world around me, the busy lives of all those oblivious strangers, could seem so futile and unreal — as futile and unreal as what passed for my own life,” Neil later wrote, “It was hard for me to accept that fate could be so unjust, that other people’s lives should remain unscarred by the kind of evil that had been visited upon me.”

The only way he felt he was able to deal with his grief was to get on his motorcycle and just drive wherever his fancy took him. Just to be on his own, on the road, with no reminders of who he once was.

Like a ghost rider.

It is essential reading, especially if you consider yourself even a part time fan of the band. It is brilliantly written, very emotional and details the whole time from when he learns of the tragic passing of his daughter to the time when he considers getting back together with Geddy and Alex to make music again. He travels extensively, from Alaska right down to Mexico, east and west coasts of the USA. I highly recommend it.

I remember hearing Neil’s drumming for the first time on Limelight from Moving Pictures and a little later on the track Xanadu from A Farewell To Kings. It completely entranced me. I’d never heard anyone play the drums like this before. All the clever little fills, the strange beats, the inventiveness and creativity. The percussion he added to his kit such as the temple blocks, bell tree and vibra-slap, tubular bells and glockenspiel, and the way he worked them all into his playing and the writing of the songs. The way he then put an electronic kit at the back of his acoustic set and an electronic xylophone. The way he then brought electronic sampling into his set up so he could trigger short bursts of musical accompaniment to what he was playing on the drums and how that influenced the song writing and into his ever more spectacular drum solos. He was just incredible. If you want more information on Neil Peart’s drum setups over the years I highly recommend The Drums Of Neil Peart by AndyO. A wonderful website that celebrates everything Neil!

And this is without all the wonderful lyrics he wrote. The classically inspired lyrics to By Tor And The Snow Dog on Fly By Night, the interpretation of Coleridge’s Xanadu on Farewell To Kings. The incredible words on the song Entre Nous about two people that live together but never really connect, the whole album of Moving Pictures is a lyrical masterpiece (apart from YYZ of course – it’s an instrumental). Then came the lyrical excellence of Signals, Subdivisions uniting every outcast who listened to it, Grace Under Pressure with the amazing lyrics to Afterimage – about grief almost bringing the hallucinations of a recently deceased colleague (which many fans would quote upon hearing of Niel’s death) and the words to Red Sector A about the residents of a Nazi concertation camp.

Don’t even get me started on the lyrics in Power Windows. Marathon! What wonderful words it has! Territories! “In different circles we keep holding our ground, Indifferent circles we keep spinning round and round” Then the chilling Manhattan Project and the amazing Middletown Dreams which brings me to tears every time I sing along to it. We move on to Hold Your Fire and the beautifully wistful Time Stand Still – “I let my past go too fast, No time to pause, If I could slow it all down, Like some captain, Whose ship runs aground, I can wait until the tide comes around.” Presto has wonderful lyrics, The Pass about teenage angst, Available Light, Chain Lightning! Then Roll the Bones – the lyrics to the support vocals (anarchist, reactionary, running dog revisionist, Hindu, Muslim, Catholic, creation evolutionist, rational, romantic, mystic, cynical, idealist, minimal, expressionist, post-modern, neo-symbolist) No one else writes lyrics like this!

Neil Peart was a huge influence on my life far more than just as a drummer. His lyrics influenced the way I think, the way kindness needs to be at the forefront of everything. On Friday January 10th 2020 we all received the news, through one avenue or another of the death of Neil Peart. He had passed away from a glioblastoma (brain cancer) on the 7th January. He had been secretly battling the disease for three and a half years. Of course Geddy and Alex knew about it but had remained silent at the request of their dear friend. It had come as a shock to the rest of us. I felt as if I had lost a father. I was devastated. Tributes began to pour in from all over the world for this wonderful hero. We all loved him dearly – he meant so much to so many.