A number of aging rock stars have died in the past few years, including big names like David Bowie and Prince. But the recent death of a less famous figure in rock made much more of an impression on me.
Neil Peart—the last name sounds like the word “ear”, with a “p” at the beginning and a “t” at the end—died in early January, after a battle with brain cancer. For 45 years, Peart was the drummer for the band Rush, and in that time, he developed a reputation as one of the best drummers in rock. If you’re a drummer, you’re probably already aware of his technical prowess and creativity on an instrument that many people consider boring. I’m not a drummer, but I’ve witnessed enough frenetic air-drumming in the audience at Rush concerts to understand the esteem in which the man’s abilities were held by other drummers, ex-drummers, and wished-they-were drummers.
Listening to Rush back in my late teen years was, in large part, my introduction to musicians who tried to do more than play a steady 4/4 beat over a four minute song. Peart didn’t just play drums in the band, however—he was also the primary lyricist.
Though I didn’t realize it at the time, even more influential to me than his musical efforts was the idea of a songwriter who tried to do more with his lyrics than write a catchy chorus. (Some critics might say he never quite got around to mastering the catchy chorus, though I would disagree.)
I’ve always drawn a distinction between poetry and song lyrics, despite what some fans of Bob Dylan, for example, might insist. But there’s something to the rhyming, compression of ideas, and wordplay in songwriting that strikes some of the same chords. The songwriters in a few other rock bands—Van Der Graaf Generator, Marillion, and Discipline, to name three—have stood out slightly more for me in terms of eloquence, but Peart is right up there, never lacking in lyrical ambition or ability. He’s also a special case for me because over the years, he’s been an inspiration, an influence, a mirror, and an echo to my own interests in reading and writing.
In those formative years when young men tend to listen to anything but their parents, I suppose I saw Peart as a kind of role model. His lyrics on early Rush albums fed my love of fantasy and science fiction with long story-songs influenced by writers like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Ayn Rand.
The 1981 song “Red Barchetta,” a song that seems especially relevant today with the impending arrival of self-driving cars, was inspired by a short story in Road & Track magazine. These efforts served as instructive examples of how exposure to someone else’s work could inspire original, creative art.
Elements of real-life science permeated the lyrics of songs like “Cygnus X-1” (named for the first verified black hole), while “Natural Science” advanced the idea that “Science, like Nature/ Must also be tamed.” Whether influenced or mirrored, I’ve subscribed to science magazines since my late teens, and always try to catch NOVA on PBS.
Peart’s lyrics were pointers that led in all directions for curious minds: to movies, books, even philosophies. After seeing somewhere that the book Atlas Shrugged was a big influence on Peart, I was motivated to read that mountain of a book, and, like a lot of comfortably raised young men, I, too, was inspired by it. Over the years, I grew less comfortable with the polarizing “objectivist” philosophy of the book, and, somewhat recently, saw a quote from Peart in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview saying that he’d more or less come to the same conclusion some time ago.
In the 1980s, Rush hit it big with several songs that are still staples of radio airplay. In “Freewill,” Peart echoed my own burgeoning doubts regarding the inconsistencies and ultimate bleakness of certain spiritual-leaning philosophies, at a time when few public figures ventured into such topics. In 1991, Peart wrote “Roll the Bones,” which contains some of my favorite lines on the human condition, humorous and utterly succinct: “Why are we here?/Because we’re here”; and “Why does it happen? Because it happens.” With its exploration of luck as a factor in good fortune, it’s a song I’d love to play to every person who looks down on others because of his or her own “self-made” success.
Peart couldn’t have predicted it, but fate would deal him a losing hand in 1997, when his 19-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident; his wife died of cancer the following year. Those events prompted an extended, 55,000 mile motorcycle journey throughout North America and marked the beginning of his career as an author of travel-based memoirs. With Kevin J. Anderson, he wrote a novel and graphic novel to accompany Rush’s 2012 return to sci-fi, the triumphant and unrepentantly progressive Clockwork Angels, their final album as well as their first and only true concept album. The idea of writing in a variety of forms and genres always appealed to me, and I’ve made my own attempts at several. Mirror, echo, influence, inspiration? Maybe all of the above.
As a model for behavior, it helped that Peart’s personality and outlook seemed to match my own. In many ways, Peart was the opposite of a rock star. He had a sense of humor—Canadian humor, similar to British humor, only nicer—that filtered into everything he did. But he was also soft-spoken, highly protective of his privacy, and preferred reading a book to partying. He fought through setbacks with quiet determination and never stopped trying to improve his drumming, or his writing.
Though he and his bandmates eventually became rich, Rush always had a hard-working, middle-class appeal—if your car had to break down in the parking lot of a music venue, you’d want it to be at a Rush concert, since there were always plenty of mechanics in the audience, wearing work t-shirts with Rush-themed jackets over them, or vice versa. Peart’s writing style, one that could challenge without alienating, was never a conscious model for this column, but it’s a description I’d be quite happy with today.
It’s only in the last decade or so that Rush has been embraced by the rock and roll establishment, notably Rolling Stone magazine, which for years seemed to pretend the band didn’t exist. In 2013, Rush was finally inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But for a long time, being a Rush fan was like being part of a secret society (albeit a very large one)—a group of people who knew just what they had, even if the rest of the world didn’t.
I thought it would be appropriate to end a column saluting Peart’s life with a quote from his own lyrics, and it’s a testament to the quality of his output that there were many contenders to choose from. In the end, I went with a few simple lines from the band’s most famous song, “Tom Sawyer,” changed here to the past tense for elegiac purposes:
“No, his mind was not for rent/ To any god or government/ Always hopeful, yet discontent [..] Exit the warrior…”
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