2020 Hero Lost: Reflecting on Neil Peart’s Impact and Influence on My Life
I never had the pleasure of meeting legendary Rush drummer and lyricist Neil Peart before his death on January 7, 2020, at the age of 67.
The closest I ever got to even being in the same room with the man was in the company of tens of thousands of other people when Peart performed with his Canadian counterparts to crowded stadiums and packed amphitheaters.
Despite never having met the man, I can still say there’s been no other person to walk the Earth that has had more of an influence on my thinking, morality, and personal growth than Neil Peart.
When people talk about the meaning they get from art and the feelings that are inspired by something another person has created, I don’t just comprehend the words.
I understand the feeling.
Peart’s art impacted me greatly as a young man, guided who I wanted to be, and rings loudly in my ears and heart even today. His death this year, coming as a complete shock, left me with one less hero — perhaps my greatest.
The Professor on the Drum Kit
As one part of the massively influential progressive rock trio Rush, Peart played a big role in creating some of the most complex and technically remarkable music between 1975 and 2012. In any conversation that involved living drummers, Peart was easily regarded in the top three if not the greatest outright.
With his passing, he’s joined the list of greatest drummers to ever sit behind the kit along with Buddy Rich, John Bonham, Ginger Baker, Gene Krupa, and Art Blakey.
A highly skilled, precise percussionist, Peart won the respect of his peers time and time again, being named Drummer of the Year 38 times by Modern Drummer Magazine. Nicknamed “The Professor” for his attention to detail, drive to improve his technique, dedication to learning more about his craft, and intense practicing regiment.
On stage, Peart strived for perfection, trying to create note-for-note previously-recorded performances for millions of adorning fans through meticulous technique and intricately woven drum patterns. Many times, he pulled off the feat while making it look easy. Despite the the difficulty of the endeavor, Peart played with a poker face that made him look as if he was playing in a room by himself and not to tens of thousand screaming fans.
Peart was also known for his elaborate touring drum kit, which often included more than 30 pieces. “Set up any old thing,” he once joked, when asked about the number of pieces in his elaborate drum kit.
Peart wrote a number of books in his time including Masked Rider, which covered adventures on his bicycle tour of Western Africa.
Other works, like Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, found the drummer dealing with the sudden loss of his wife and daughter.
In 1997, Peart’s 19-year-old daughter Selena was killed in a car accident in Brighton, Ontario. Just 10 months later, Peart’s wife Jacqueline died of cancer.
The events led Peart to considering retirement — he even told bandmates to consider him retired after Selena’s funeral. Peart so after embarked on a 55,000 mile journey across North and Central America by motorcycle, documented in Ghost Rider, where he worked through the ordeal.
He eventually returned to the band and released three more albums, including the 2012 epic Clockwork Angels, which was novelized later by Peart’s longtime friend, writer Kevin J. Anderson.
He also found love again, remarrying American photographer Carrie Nutall in 2000. They had a daughter, Olivia, in 2009.
Peart was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2013 along with his fellow Rush bandmates. In 2018, Peart retired from drumming due to chronic tendinitis and shoulder issues.
And it does not pain me to realize that, like all athletes, there comes a time to … take yourself out of the game. I would rather set it aside than face the predicament described in our song “Losing It”
Running a Marathon While Solving Complex Equations
As a band, Rush composed some of the most complex, epic music that pushed the boundaries of modern rock. Each subsequent album saw the band evolve into some new direction of music, often complicated and interesting.
Peart joined Rush in 1974 as the replacement for original drummer John Rutsey. His first album with Rush was1975’s Fly By Night, a record that departed from band’s original direction of formulaic rock and roll and explored heavier, more complex material both in composition and lyrics.
Straight-forward compact rockers like Best I Can and Making Memories appeared on the same record as heavier, edgier tracks like Anthem, Beneath, Between & Behind, and the 8-minute, 37-second odyssey By-tor and the Snow Dog.
For me, By-tor and the Snow Dog was an important, differentiating, much-needed mission statement for the band. It’s an adventurous rock song that tells the story a hero in the form of Snow Dog, the force of good, crossing the river Styx to fight the evil knight By-Tor, the Devil’s Prince, at the gates of Hell.
To get an appreciation for the ambition of a track like By-Tor and the Snow Dog, you have to think about the kind of music people were used to in 1975.
The airwaves were filled tracks like Tony Orlando and Dawn’s He Don’t Love You, James Taylor’s How Sweet It Is, and Glenn Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy. These songs and dozens more like them are all fine in their own regard and would decades later find a comfortable home in a genre aptly labeled “Yacht Rock”.
But in amongst all that AM Gold, disco fluff, and soft rock came three loud guys out of Canada playing an 8 minute track about a battle gates of Hell being. Not much of a chance it would’ve fit in nicely between the BeeGee’s Jive Talkin’ and Earth, Wind and Fire’s Shining Star.
Peart’s introduction to the Canadian rock trio seemed to be the catalyst to inspire the band to strive for much more than radio-friendly rock singles that got airplay. By-Tor and the Snow Dog hinted at more.
To compliment the lyrics, By-Tor and the Snow Dog features a musical battle in real time, casting Alex Lifeson’s guitar in the role of the Snow Dog and having it wage war against Geddy Lee’s bass as the evil prince in a long instrumental interlude at the heart of the song.
Even for non-fans, it’s worth hearing just once to appreciate the work that went into the battle sequence of the song. Lifeson’s frantic and sweeping guitar phrasing throughout the section to battle against Lee’s thunderous, gouging bass strikes that bring the evil prince to life.
And that instrument interaction, casting the guitar and bass as characters in the song and tell a story, calls back to the way classical musicians used instruments to play parts in other compositions.
Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev’s use of french horns as the Wolf and woodwinds and trumpets as the Hunters added a sense of urgency and excitement to his 1936 classic Peter and the Wolf. The William Tell Overture of 1829 by Italian composer Gioachino Rossini similarly paints a vivid picture with instruments, this time of bring to life the world of Swiss Alps with a full orchestra.
Suffice to say, the effort of By-Tor and the Snow Dog was atypical of your standard 1975 rock fair and characteristically indicative of who Rush would become.
More challenging and complex releases would follow, like the epic title track to 2112 (1976), Cygnus X-1 Book II: Hemispheres and La Villa Strangiato (An Exercise in Self-Indulgence) from Hemispheres (1978). La Villa, a sprawling, intense study in musical complexity, creativity, and composition, was a critical point in the bands career in which the group admitted to even themselves that they had probably gone too far in terms of intricacy.
Still, the band never stopped pushing boundaries musically throughout their careers. They continued to make interesting music together that expanded the idea of what rock could do.
The Lyrics
I’ve often considered my mother’s gift of introducing me to Rush and more importantly Peart’s lyrics as one of the key influential driving factors in the development of my values, perspectives, goals, and passions.
I’ve always considered myself as highly introspective in regards to how I process what’s happening in the world. As a 41-year-old man, I’ve become somewhat adept at taking in things that happen and running the events through my thought-gauntlet, letting attitudes and values hack way at the idea on the way through, and taking what comes out the other end for what it’s worth. My filter is pretty refined.
As a teenager in high school, I wasn’t so practiced. I spent a lot of time fumbling in the dark as I tried to work out the world around me and figuring out where I stood on things. I didn’t have the skills at the time to process the world and fit it into my belief system.
In other words, I was an American teenager.
Just like a lot of young people, I had factors competing and/or contributing for my development as a young man living in Western Pa. For one, my close, extended family outside of my home — my cousins, aunts and uncles — were as opinionated and loving Christian folks then as they are now, which is in no way a negative.
Said plainly, I remember spending time growing up with my extended family as loving, fun, enjoyable, safe, and no-nonsense when it came to matters of faith.
Water balloon toss, and Tang, and summer birthday parties and Jesus and Jesus and Jesus. And so it goes.
Conversely, I was the child of a mother that took me to my first Rush concert, as well as the subsequent next five or six. She was a Christian too but didn’t really embrace the concept of church as a building in the same way as the rest of my family. Instead, church to my mom was a place you take with you in your heart, so why make all the fuss.
Also, she hated getting up early. Let’s be honest.
She taught me the value of listening to lyrics in songs instead of just singing along with the song. She inspired me to finding meaning in words.
So I didn’t just hear in The Spirit of Radio that the “words of the profits were written on the studio wall,” but was made to understood what Peart was actually saying when he followed with the line:
Echoes with the sounds of salesmen.
Additionally, my mother fiercely valued the band’s perspective and Peart’s propensity for including themes of independence in his lyrics.
In addition to instilling in me the gift of music, she taught me think for myself. Her reference material was Rush’s music and teaching tools were Peart’s lyrics.
One of the most important things my mother taught me was to never blindly accept someone’s words.
Instead, I learned to reveal in the freedom to analyze the work and most importantly, defend other’s right to interrupt the art openly as well, especially if the meaning derived from it differs from yours.
So the two perspectives — the Christian family with strong values and mother who taught independent though, reflection, and interpretation — armed me with a pretty unique set of world-processing skills.
As a young straight-as-could-be teenager trying to build up my value system and wrap my mind around something as complex as homosexuality, Peart’s lyrics neither guided nor provoked my decisions but provided perspective.
I knew he was different in his sexuality
I went to his parties as a straight minority
It never seemed a threat to my masculinity
He only introduced me to a wider realityAs the years went by, we drifted apart
When I heard that he was gone
I felt a shadow cross my heart
But he’s nobody’s hero
Nobody’s Hero is an example of a Rush track that lyrically gave me perspective on an issue that is often colored starkly black and white. In the eyes of the world’s religions, homosexuality is almost exclusively viewed as a sin and colors people’s opinions on the matter cemented on such guidance.
What Peart does with his lyrics on Nobody’s Hero is provide something different than rigid, heavy-handed direction on how homosexuality should be handled in the mind. Instead, he paints a picture of an important person in his life who happen to be different but still valuable, even if they’re not a hero who save “a drowning child”, “cures a wasting disease, ” or “lands the crippled airplane.”
The homosexual man in the song never heroically “solves great mysteries … in the unrewarding job” but seems to be the very important all the same to the person writing the song for who they are, not what they’ve accomplished.
That clicked for me, the appreciation for different people and the perspective they provide, and molded my views on people of different faiths, cultures, and sexual orientations.
Peart’s words on Freewill opened my mind to the concept of acting on our own accord without the outside interference of God or Gods, which to be clear, was a pretty heavy concept for a teenager. It enabled me to experience freedom of thought with a caution I still believe in today that “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”
His lyrics also taught me to appreciate honesty in art, whether in 1980's The Spirit of Radio:
All this machinery
Making modern music
Can still be open-hearted
Not so coldly charted
It’s really just a question
Of your honesty
Or more importantly, in Natural Science from 1980 as well, which I consider some of the greatest lyrics I’ve ever heard:
Art as expression,
Not as market campaigns
Will still capture our imaginations
As a formative teenager in the 90’s, this kind of substance was food for my development. I was constantly searching for meaning in the art that I consumed. I craved substance my music.
In a time of throwaway tracks that filled albums obviously built around the one single the band could muster, I regarded the phrase “not everything needs to be art” as just another lazy way of saying “I’ll consume whatever is given to me, it’s all just factory packed and sealed, just make it nice and simple so it doesn’t make me think.”
I wanted to think. I wanted to go beyond what was pumping out of the radio and the breezy wistful ignorance of Third Eye Blind’s Semi-Charmed Life. I wanted something more than the aimless bullshit like The Hanson Brothers’ MMMBop.
Peart’s impactful and thoughtful approach to writing spoke to me immediately. He explored deeper concepts. Fear and anger. Politics and religion. Depression, war, and famine and grief.
He painted rich landscapes with words and created worlds for you to experience in the course of a song. Why would I bother with a 2:30, versus-chorus-versus-chorus retread locked in narrow-minded, “He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not”, framework, when I could explore an idea that could expand my thinking?
Peart did that beautifully. More examples:
Falling in love when you’re young:
The fawn-eyed girl with sun-browned legs
Dances on the edge of his dream
And her voice rings in his ears
Like the music of the spheres
War, particularly with allusions to interment camps:
I hear the sound of gunfire at the prison gate
Are the liberators here, do I hope or do I fear?
For my father and my brother, it’s too late
But I must help my mother stand up straight
Bleak suburban life:
Some will sell their dreams for small desires
Or lose the race to rats
Get caught in ticking traps
And start to dream of somewhere
To relax their restless flight
On religion:
We each pay a fabulous price
For our visions of paradise
But a spirit with a vision
Is a dream with a mission
I could write at length about the man’s lyrics (I just fucking did) but suffice to say he took great care to provide insight to many parts of life and explore several subjects.
A Legacy Remembered
Neil Peart’s legacy on this Earth on a large scale will be the legions of air-drumming fans and the army of future percussionists inspired by his drive, dedication to his art, and music. And perhaps, if we’re lucky, more writers with as much heart and introspection will join bands and provide a wider perspective.
Personally, I can say that I was lucky enough to be around to experience another person’s art that inspired and molded me as a person for the better. The filter I use for how I perceive the world was crafted largely using the words of a man I’ve never met but have impacted me greatly.
It’s one thing to experience art and be inspired but yet another thing entirely to be changed. Peart changed me.
