Category: Artist Profile

Word arrived as announcements of death often do:  suddenly; stealthily.  It hadn’t yet begun trending—or perhaps I wasn’t keyed into Twitter at that precise moment; either way, I was at least spared the impersonal shock of viral notification.  My wife, working at the other end of our home, tenderly and sympathetically broke the sad news:  Neil Peart, drummer and lyricist for the Canadian prog-rock band Rush, had died.  He was 67 years old.

Peart’s death from glioblastoma on January 7 so stunned me not strictly on account of the closely guarded secrecy of his three-and-a-half-year battle with the illness, but because, to my mind, the rockers who came to prominence in the sixties and seventies—the ones who scored the soundtrack of my youth—tend to follow a reliably predictable pattern with respect to their mortality:  They seem to either die tragically young (Keith Moon, Bon Scott) or, alternatively, not at all (witness, for instance, the numinous constitutional resilience of Keith Richards and Eddie Van Halen).  But at 67?  To brain cancer?  However naïve it was, especially at my age, I’d come to regard Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson, and Neil Peart the way a child views his parents:  uncannily exempt from illness or death.

Peart joined Rush in 1974 as replacement for debut-album drummer John Rutsey, and, despite his steadfast position in the power trio over the next four decades, was lovingly and perennially referred to as “the new guy” by Lee and Lifeson.  He was also commonly known as “the Professor,” owed to his refined vocabulary and uncommon book smarts; indeed, his early lyrics are heavily influenced by literature, particularly science fiction and fantasy, and philosophy, notably the Objectivist (and controversial) views of Ayn Rand.  On their own, Peart’s particular ideological passions and penchant for mythic tropes made for some atypical songwriting, but it was his instinct for linear narrativity, the Campbellian hero’s journey structure of his compositions, that, to my view, helped the band—heavily (and justifiably) criticized at that point as being too baldly derivative of Led Zeppelin—establish a singular musical and aesthetic identity.

Consider Rush’s breakout concept LP 2112 (1976), which depicts a futuristic society in which creativity has been outlawed by a totalitarian priesthood, and the idealistic hero with an ancient “weapon”—a guitar—who leads a revolution through music; filmmaker George Lucas was exploring similar themes at that same time in THX 1138 (1971) and even Star Wars (1977).  Or “Red Barchetta” (1981), about a boy’s countryside car chase in an indeterminate future where such high-performance dragsters are prohibited.  (Sensing a motif here?)  And, of course, the band’s swan song, Clockwork Angels (2012), an album-length steampunk adventure about a young man who sets out into a world of alchemy and anarchy, presided over by a mysterious figure known only as the Watchmaker, which draws inspiration “from the likes of Voltaire, Michael Ondaatje, John Barth, Cormac McCarthy, and Daphne du Maurier” (Martin Popoff, Rush:  The Illustrated History, [Voyageur Press:  Minneapolis, 2013], 172).

Even absent an explicit narrative through-line, though, Rush’s albums are almost invariably constructed around a unifying subject or theme, be it fate (Roll the Bones), love (Counterparts), communication in the Information Age (Test for Echo), religious fanaticism (Snakes & Arrows); one can even reasonably glean the nature of the content from the title alone.  Explains Peart:

In many of our albums that seem to be disparate songs, I’ve got a bone in my teeth, or my preoccupations at the time tend to come out.  In the 1980s, both Hold Your Fire and Power Windows emerged with a pretty strong theme running between them that I hadn’t even considered . . . What I’ve learned over the years is that the craft of songwriting is trying to take the personal and make it universal—or in the case of telling a story, taking the universal and making it personal.

Andy Greene, “Neil Peart on Rush’s New LP and Being a ‘Bleeding Heart Libertarian’,” Rolling Stone, June 12, 2012

As an angst-ridden teenager, I depended on hard rock—I’m certain you can relate—for the healthy emotional outlet it provided, but I never expected (or thought I needed) it to challenge me intellectually.  And as a student getting his first intoxicating taste of literary criticism—learning to decipher subtext and recognize motifs in the fiction of Salinger and Forster, the dramas of Beckett and Pinter, the cinema of Eisenstein and Welles—the music of Rush yielded dividends each time I revisited it; there was always a previously overlooked cultural reference to catch, philosophical notion to ponder, poetic turn of phrase to appreciate, insight to reap.

That thrill of discovery in Rush’s music continues to this day:  The more classical art and literature and philosophy I’m continually exposed to, the more of it I recognize, with a self-reprimanding slap to the forehead, in Neil Peart’s lyrics.  (How well-read was he?)  His songs are intellectual treasuries:  They offer a different experience each time one hears them; they even mean something different at different periods in one’s life.  Such is the reason why I’ve never moved on from Rush as I have so many other transitory interests; even now, at midlife, I’ve never ceased growing up with them.  The band’s music—their twenty studio recordings and umpteen live albums—never take me back to the days of yore the way, say, Guns N’ Roses’ or Temple of the Dog’s might, but rather push me forward.  Well, hell—I suppose that’s why they call it progressive rock.