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.
It’s fair to say none of Peart’s leitmotifs resonated more impactfully with me than the one that runs through virtually his entire oeuvre, regardless of theme or genre—that of the Restless Young Man. He’s there on the first album for which Peart provided lyrics (“Why try, I know why / This feeling inside me says it’s time I was gone / Clear head, new life ahead / It’s time I was king now not just one more pawn”) and the last (“On a road lit only by fire / Going where I want, instead of where I should / I peer out at the passing shadows / Carried through the night into the city / Where a young man has a chance of making good / A chance to break from the past”). His romantic wanderlust is palpable in “The Analog Kid” (1982):
The boy lies in the grass with one blade
Stuck between his teeth
A vague sensation quickens
In his young and restless heart
And a bright and nameless vision
Has him longing to depart
You move me —
You move me —
With your buildings and your eyes
Autumn woods and winter skies
You move me —
You move me —
Open sea and city lights
Busy streets and dizzy heights
You call me —
You call me —
Find me someone who can’t relate to that. And on the open road at long last in “Dreamline” (1991), Peart’s archetypal young man is in no way about to squander the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity he’s seized for himself:
WHEN WE ARE YOUNG
WANDERING THE FACE OF THE EARTH
WONDERING WHAT OUR DREAMS MIGHT BE WORTH
LEARNING THAT WE’RE ONLY IMMORTAL —
FOR A LIMITED TIME
He’s tested—and matures—in “New World Man” (1982):
He’s got to make his own mistakes
And learn to mend the mess he makes
He’s old enough to know what’s right
But young enough not to choose it
He’s noble enough to win the world
But weak enough to lose it —
Neil Peart’s lyrics embraced ambiguity and incongruity—that we can be, concurrently, noble and weak; that this metaphysical existence with which we’ve been endowed is a kind of finite immortality, in its way. Peart would make passionate, anthemic arguments both against and for a given subject: He repudiates the notion of predestination in “Freewill” (1980)—“You can choose a ready guide / In some celestial voice / If you choose not to decide / You still have made a choice / You can choose from phantom fears / And kindness that can kill / I will choose a path that’s clear / I will choose free will”—then seemingly submits to it in “Roll the Bones” (1991): “Why are we here? / Because we’re here. / Roll the bones / Why does it happen? / Because it happens. / Roll the bones.”
(Both “Freewill” and “Roll the Bones,” it’s worth noting, encourage personal agency regardless of whether or not the universe operates by some grand design immune to mortal intervention; the latter even suggests the arbitrary nature of fate is all the more reason to try your luck: “If the dice are hot – take a shot.” I don’t think it’s a coincidence those songs are performed back-to-back on Rush’s 1998 three-disc live album Different Stages, the characteristically clever title for which I once shamelessly appropriated for a blog post.)
Peart, ever the philosopher, understood the views expressed in “Freewill” and “Roll the Bones” are in no way contradictory; they are merely competing truths. Perhaps the earlier song, produced when Peart was in his twenties, reflects his youthful idealism, and the other middle-aged pragmatism? One could even make the case an older and wiser Peart reconciled with those incongruous truisms in “The Way the Wind Blows” (2007), in which, through the simile of a solitary pine on a sloping bank, he reasons: “We can only grow the way the wind blows / On a bare and weathered shore / We can only bow to the here and now / In our elemental war.”
As a writer myself—one who’s spent the past two-plus decades honing and attempting to better understand his own craft—what I admire so much about Peart isn’t merely his diverse array of influences, or the sublime artistry he demonstrated (as both a lyricist and drummer, though I’m unqualified to appraise the latter), but the way he regarded his vocation as a lifelong apprenticeship. That voracious appetite for literature and philosophy? It goes right to the heart of his very worldview: He observed life not through the eyes of a virtuoso, but that of a pupil. “What is a master but a master student?” he once remarked. “And if that’s true, then there’s a responsibility on you to keep getting better and to explore avenues of your profession” (ibid.).
To wit: In the 1990s, long after he was almost universally regarded as the greatest living rock-and-roll drummer (a distinction that’s only become yet more widely embraced in the ensuing decades), he voluntarily solicited the mentorship of jazz musician/instructor Freddie Gruber, receiving assigned exercises he practiced daily, like an eager grade-school student, for months on end:
A lesson with Freddie Gruber is not about notes, beats, or “chops.” It’s about the fingers, the wrists, the ankles, the feet—about the way the body moves naturally. . . .
To demonstrate the point he was making, Freddie did a little music hall dance for me, and I realized what he was showing me: It isn’t about the steps, for most of the “dance” takes place in the air. . . .
And then I saw it clearly for the first time—when we strike a drum with a stick or pedal-beater, the result is a note being sounded. But if you think about it, almost the whole motion is a “non-note”—which is to say, it is the movement that accomplishes that note. . . .
Freddie drew another vivid analogy—between hitting a drum and playing with one of those paddles attached to a rubber ball with an elastic string. He mimed the motion of it, and said, “If you just try to hit the ball, it won’t work, will it? Your motion in the air has to be circular, fluid, and responsive, or else the ‘thing’ won’t happen. Am I right?” I had to admit he was, and it was a revelation to me.
Neil Peart, “Starting Over,” Modern Drummer 19, no. 11 (November 1995): 131–32
Not long after his tutelage under Gruber, as Rush was coming off their Test for Echo Tour in 1997, “Peart’s 19-year-old daughter, Selena, died in a single-car accident on the long drive to her university in Toronto. Just five months later, Selena’s mother—his common-law wife, Jackie—was diagnosed with terminal cancer, quickly succumbing” (Brian Hiatt, “From Rush With Love,” Rolling Stone, June 16, 2015). In the wake of this one-two tragedy, Rush went indefinitely dormant, with fans left wondering if this was merely a prolonged hiatus… or, in fact, The End?
Peart remarried in 2000 (he leaves behind his wife, photographer Carrie Nuttall, and their daughter, Olivia), and Rush soon reemerged into what became their most prodigious creative period since the 1970s, with four more studio records; six tours, each of which begat a multi-disc live album; a Grammy-nominated documentary, Beyond the Lighted Stage (2010); an appearance in the Jason Segel–Paul Rudd comedy I Love You, Man; and an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s Class of 2013, which I attended here in Los Angeles.
In the summer of 2015, Rush embarked on a 35-show fortieth-anniversary celebration, the R40 Live Tour, which was largely understood to be—though never definitively characterized as—a farewell concert. Both Lifeson and Peart were feeling the grind of touring more acutely in their sixties, and both were looking to spend more time with family—Lifeson with his grandchildren and Peart his young daughter. After a distinguished career spent living in the limelight, perhaps they yearned for something a little more plain, maybe something a little more sane.
Speaking as a longtime fan, it was hard to begrudge them retirement: After having already faced, in the late 1990s, the likely possibility that the band was finished, every subsequent album, concert, and live-performance release—to say nothing of the mainstream recognition of their cultural significance by way of the Hall of Fame and I Love You, Man—felt like a gift. Over the past decade, I had friends—fellow Rush fans—who would sometimes say in exasperation, “Jesus, another live album?!” To which I responded: It may seem excessive now, sure, but someday in the not-too-distant future, their output will cease forever—and we’ll be grateful for every last recording we have.
Such is where we now find ourselves. Rush’s repertoire is complete—and Neil Peart’s limited time wandering the face of the earth is over. But his interests, beliefs, emotions, experiences, ethics, philosophies, sense of humor, and ever-evolving worldview have been enshrined and encoded in the vast catalog of work he leaves behind, to be enjoyed and interpreted in perpetuity. Such rarified perdurable legacy might justly be considered immortality absolute.
Losing Rush was a gut punch. I always loved live shows, and I saw more Rush concerts than any other by far, starting with the Permanent Waves tour and ending with their finale. They never disappointed.
You left out some of my faves, but that’s okay–Rush had such breadth of concepts and musical styles. One Little Victory is probably my all-time favorite:
A certain measure of innocence
Willing to appear naive
A certain degree of imagination
A measure of make-believe
A certain degree of surrender
To the forces of light and heat
A shot of satisfaction
In a willingness to risk defeat
Celebrate the moment
As it turns into one more
Another chance at victory
Another chance to score
Really, could anything be more evocative to an artist? (Perhaps because I also paint, I definitely consider writers to be artists. I think the debate: art vs. craft is ridiculous, like excluding potters from the fine art world.)
Hold Your Fire is one I’d always blast, as well as Scars, Closer to the Heart, Working Man, Bastille Day (the first Rush song I ever heard), The Larger Bowl, Circumstances, and Dreamline.
And when they quit touring, I just…quit going to shows. A Tesla concert, something I would try to make before as a hometown band, was now missable. I’d seen all the bands I really wanted to (with the exception of Led Zeppelin and the Beatles, which weren’t an option, although I did see Paul McCartney). I was tired of the prices being jacked up and dealing with the parking lot frenzy. Except for local bands at parks, I was ready to let that chapter of my life be closed. I found that curious.
Rush became a source of profound comfort in my life. Going through a bad time? Crank up the Rush, album after album, and clean the house. It might not fix what was wrong, but I’d feel a little better afterward and my house would be clean. These three guys I never met became companions through my toughest times, much like Tolkien. (That was usually the second part of self-therapy–read a Tolkien book, now that the housework was done.)
They literally helped me Keep It Together, when that outcome was by no means assured.
It’s a lot like what I want to do as an artist and a writer. Rush gave me something important, and without them my life would have been diminished in some fashion.
RIP Neal Peart, and my condolences to his family, and Geddy and Alex.
Oh, it seems I found a kindred spirit in you, Cathleen! I love it! I’m so delighted you’ve joined me to celebrate Neil’s life and career!
As it happens, I omitted many of my own faves! I could easily dedicate an entire blog post to each Rush album — possibly each song (since they must have about 200, if you figure an average of ten songs per record). “One Little Victory” is certainly one of my favorites; for me, it expresses the thrill I felt after seeing Rush return from that indefinite moratorium at the turn of the millennium. (And it’s a doozy when it’s performed live — when the circuitry on stage blows midway through the song!) Vapor Trails is a magnificent album (I own CD copies of both the original 2002 release and Vapor Trails Remixed from 2013); my favorite song off that record is probably “How It Is,” which I’m so glad was performed on the R40 Tour (and is now preserved on R40 Live).
They did indeed have a breadth of concepts and musical styles, constantly experimenting and reinventing themselves, which is one of the reasons I never tire of listening to them: I’ll go through phases whereby I listen almost exclusively to their ’70s sci-fi concept albums, then switch over to the ’80s synth sounds… and it’s a whole different experience. Eventually I move on to their “middle-aged” ’90s material, with its more mature tenor, then the “comeback” era of the ’00s, edgy and forceful as it is. By the time I cycle back around to the ’70s stuff, it’s brand-new to my ears again. It’s literally a lifetime of music they’ve given us to (re)discover.
Like you, I also quit concert-going right around the point at which Rush retired (though the timing was purely coincidental), a decision I discussed in a post called — wait for it — “Different Stages.”
Rush has been a constant influence in my life from the time I was a teenager (I first became aware of them around the time of Counterparts; I think the radio release of “Cold Fire” was when I first sat up and took notice), so I don’t go quite as far back with them as you do — to Permanent Waves! — but they have been an unwavering companion to me ever since; for that reason, I don’t really associate the band with any single season of my adult life because they’ve been with me throughout all of them. For instance: Vapor Trails was released not long after my wife and I moved to Los Angeles — we left New York City on September 11, 2001 of all days (a story for another time) — so I very much related to its themes of starting over after tragedy.
Hold Your Fire is a staggering opus, from “Prime Mover” to “Mission” (a lyric from which serves as the title of this post) to “Time Stand Still,” which could easily be the theme song of “Age of Innocence: On the Bygone Pleasure of Being City Kids.” I could go on and on. I wish I could buy you a drink so we could toast to Neil and trade Rush stories all night! But this’ll have to do.
Thank you, Cathleen — for grieving and commemorating Neil with me. Rush is finished, but Rush fans ain’t going nowhere, so we gotta stick together!
Sean
I’m not going to say anything prolific about this because you already have. I will tell a silly story, though. The tables in my high school biology class were designed with metal trays in the center. I assume they were for some purpose, but I hardly paid attention.
Instead of listening to the Bio teacher, I wrote stories about touring with my favorite rock band (Not Rush. Sorry) I also argued with some anonymous student who shared my seat some other time of the day about who the best drummer was. Neil Peart or Alex Van Halen. This student had graffitied that pointless metal tray with praise for Peart. (Clearly he didn’t know what it was for either.) And because I was a freshman and fourteen and because I could I debated him. This back and forth went on until there was no more space on the tray for our markers to fill. It was all in good fun. At least for me. I never found out who the other student was. But since Peart’s death, I have often wondered how that person, now grown and middle-aged, took the news.
I hope he found out in a way similar to yours. I am saddened by the loss of so many icons of my youth. They seemed immortal and untouchable back then. Larger than life. But that was never the case, and the more years in the rearview mirror make that evident.
Oh, my God — thank you, Stacey, for sharing that amazing personal anecdote! I guess it’s your own version of The Lake House, in a way! Ha-ha!
I honestly wouldn’t have known which side to take in that argument, because I am as big a fan of Van Halen as I am of Rush. We spend so much of our youth either defiantly justifying our pop-cultural interests or vigilantly concealing them (out of fear of mockery), especially when they’re not considered cool or in vogue. I remember loving Bon Jovi’s New Jersey album when I was in junior high, but as I entered high school, the cultural landscape shifted: grunge was “in” (this was the early ’90s), and hair metal was “out.” So, I felt (self-imposed) pressure to be dismissive of Bon Jovi, and then when I discovered Rush — with its intellectual ambition and philosophical weight — I was all the more contemptuous of Bon Jovi for their “sappy, lightweight” power ballads. At that age, you feel such pressure to “pick sides” — that you can like one thing or the other, but not both, you know?
And the pleasure of reaching midlife is that you A) stop rationalizing what you like to other people, and B) learn to recognize that variety is the spice of life. Some days are Rush days, and some Bon Jovi days; some circumstances call for Van Halen, and some for Pearl Jam. But all of them express something I relate to, and I value them all for that very reason. I love Dirty Dancing just as much as I love GoodFellas; I love Gilmore Girls as much as Justified. Such is why I spill so much ink on this blog bitching about the superhero-industrial complex: When there’s only room on the cultural stage for one type of story, we miss out on the other points of view — and the competing truths — we get from narrative/artistic heterogeneity.
And indeed it is sad to see the icons of our youth leave us. It is like losing a parent, in a way: You’re saying goodbye to a guiding hand who helped shape the way you see the world. You feel a little bit lonelier without them.
Thanks for popping by to share that story, Stacey. For those who may not be aware, Stacey’s new novel No More Darkness (Winter at the Shore Book 1) is available via Amazon.
Ah, adolescence. To fit in is survival. I’m sure none of our musical heroes “fit in” during their impressionable years. And we are the lucky ones who benefited by the kids who found their voices in music. But it takes hind sight and maturity, none of which we have in high school, to understand our choices are our own. It’s okay to like something simply because we do.
And thank you for the plug, my friend. Eternally grateful. Rock on!
“Ah, adolescence. To fit in is survival.” Indeed, Stacey — such is the lesson imparted by teen movies from the seventies (Grease), the eighties (The Breakfast Club), the nineties (Clueless), the aughts (Mean Girls and High School Musical), and so on. It’s the thematic province of “magical realism,” as well: Weird Science and Teen Wolf were movies I very much related to (for reasons I’ve discussed) as a preteen. It’s even a subject explored in one of Rush’s most popular songs, “Subdivisions”:
Before the geek subculture achieved mainstream acceptance, Rush was a band — perhaps the band — that spoke to the esoteric interests, social anxieties, intellectual preoccupations, and unquenched wanderlust of “the dreamer or the misfit” (to quote “Subdivisions”). Those of us whose youth was scored in part to their music absolutely benefited cathartically from the art — the beauty and meaning — they forged from their own adolescent experiences. Peart arguably spent the entirety of his career — from Fly by Night through Clockwork Angels — trying to dramatize and contextualize the way the dreams and choices and experiences of our younger years shape the course of our lives.
And the older I grow, the more I see what he was getting at: I recently completed a novella called Spex about two 12-year-old suburban boys who come into possession of a pair of magically functional “X-ray specs,” and soon begin to see that not everything behind closed doors — or even in plain sight — is quite as it appears. It’s a story about that prepubescent developmental stage when wide-eyed wonder gives way to adolescent disillusionment, and even I was surprised how deep I had to dig into my own experiences to make Spex as (uncomfortably) truthful as possible. Perhaps I’m only now coming to recognize just how much the music of Rush — with its elements of Aristotelian narrative, fantasy adventure, and boyhood élan — has influenced my own work.
And on that note, I am always happy to support a fellow scribe! You’ve been enviably prolific, it seems! Good for you! I hope your books are getting the wide readership they deserve.
I’ve never heard of Peart but there seems to be a lot to like. “The new guy”–that’s perfect and rings true for lots of groups, a love of Ayn Rand–check that one off. Seems to be a man worth walking with.
Rush has often been referred to as “the biggest cult band in the world,” Jacqui, because the group ranks only behind the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in terms of album sales, and yet they’ve (mostly) never enjoyed the household-name recognition of those other bands; to be a Rush fan is to be in an “exclusive club” of millions. It’s utterly paradoxical… and yet somehow perfectly on-brand. That’s changed somewhat in the last decade, though, as Rush has finally earned mainstream recognition for the reasons I discuss in the post above. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if you hear them referenced in conversation or in an article in the coming months… and now you’ll know a little bit about them and why they’ve been so (quietly) culturally influential!
Thanks for partaking in my little eulogy for Neil, Jacqui, which means all the more to me being that you weren’t previously acquainted with him, but cared enough to participate anyway.
Ayn Rand, that demented ghoul that stayed in this world far too long (77 years too long), was no objectivist. She was merely a sociopath and narcissist whose promotion of greed, apathy, and the stripping away of everything that makes us human, arguably inspired generations of politicians to rationalize the most savage of policies that are hurtling us toward extinction.
I realize no one is perfect, but it is disheartening that Neil Peart used Rand’s psychotic scrawls in Rush’s music is disheartening. I hope he put the hag’s warped philosophy to constructive use by denouncing it and explaining why it is inhuman.
As a writer myself, I can tell you that riffing off an idea doesn’t necessarily mean that you admire the original work or the author. It simply starts a train of thought. In fact in one case, I was so incandescently angry over how someone wrote about the death of a parent, I had to rewrite that whole situation, just to see it done “properly.” (https://cathleentownsend.com/2015/09/20/red-rose/)
I wouldn’t “credit” the person whose story I read, since I thought their piece was absolutely without any morally redeeming factors, but pinwheeling off a dystopic idea, like in 2112, is a situation where credit might be appropriate.
Also, I do know that at one point, Rush credited someone else, although it was a song, not a whole album. “The Analog Kid,” from Permanent Waves, was originally inspired by a line from Styx’s “Too Much Time on My Hands.” Neil flipped it and turned it into “Too many hands on my time,” and that became the genesis of the song. I remember him giving credit for that. Perhaps he was merely careful about giving credit where he felt it was due.
Well said, Cathleen. As I’ve argued on this blog (most prominently in “Artistic Originality,” the thesis of which was developed from a Geddy Lee quote, in point of fact), the narrative arts are a continuum: Every new work stands on the shoulders of something that came before, and — best-case scenario — synthesizes multiple disparate sources of inspiration to create something that speaks to its times in the voice of a singular artist. (In “The Man Behind the Mask,” I demonstrated the assorted influences that contributed to the creation of Batman.)
Neil Peart, to his great credit, has been very generous about (voluntarily) attributing authors of work that had an influence on his lyrics, be it Ayn Rand (“2112”), Richard Foster (whose short story “A Nice Morning Drive” was the basis for “Red Barchetta”), Daphne du Maurier (“The Wreckers”), or Voltaire (“The Garden”). I’ve always loved the wordplay of “Too many hands on my time,” but I did not — proving the very point I raised in the piece above — realize that was a conscious reversal of a Styx lyric. Bless Neil for citing at least some of his influences, because trying to identify all of them would be a lifelong crusade of Da Vinci Code proportions!
And as you demonstrate with “Red Rose,” Cathleen, sometimes a work of art can be anti-influenced, if you like, by another. A great case in point would be David Brin’s The Postman (1985), which was a conscious repudiation of stories like The Road Warrior, among other “post-apocalyptic books and films that seem to revel in the idea of civilization’s fall.” To say The Postman is inspired by Mad Max is true… and in no way complimentary. So, there is that.
But I stand by what I said in my direct response to Michael: Artists need room to grow and to experiment creatively. I would further suggest that any artist who stands wholeheartedly behind every piece of work he’s ever produced (and the values/messages he expressed through it) probably isn’t one who’s ever created anything of real or lasting value. Evolution is a process of trial and error, and — as I’ve said before — there’s even value in trying and failing. Anyone who’s had the courage to do that owes no one any explanations, apologies, excuses, or retractions.
I imagine it won’t surprise you, Michael, to learn that I am no admirer of Ayn Rand, either. But neither, for that matter, was latter-day Peart. When asked in 2012 if her writings still spoke to him, here’s what he had to say:
Peart’s views may’ve evolved, as he puts it, but evolution is only possible when we explore different ideas and ideologies and philosophies in youth and then eventually reconcile them with our practical, real-world experiences in adulthood to form an enlightened, matured worldview. I certainly consider positions I once took or views I once held on a host of issues (political, theological, cultural, romantic) to be embarrassing and/or in no way reflective of how I feel now, but I wouldn’t have arrived at my current grade of intellectual/ethical enlightenment had I not taken those beliefs out for a “test drive,” so to speak.
Unlike Peart, however, my evolution occurred privately. That’s not only true of my worldview, but of my craft, as well — all the “ambitiously flawed” stories and screenplays I produced while trying to find my voice. Thing is, the bad ones I wrote led me down the path to the good ones. Peart sometimes wished his discography could begin with Permanent Waves (1980), with the 1970s material being banished from canon — if not existence itself. As he explains in his autobiography:
I think one of the kindest things artists (who are a self-critical lot if ever there was one) can do for themselves is to view their past beliefs and past works not as mistakes to disown, but rather markers of personal and artistic growth. If we had all the answers in utero, what, after all, would be the point of life or art? Among its other virtues, the music of Rush serves as a reminder to me that creativity is a worthwhile pursuit insofar as we employ it to experiment — to challenge our artistic and moral imaginations. The art we produce — and I consider this to be true of even the essays I publish here on my blog (I’ve said as much repeatedly) — should never be deemed a final declaration, but rather an opening statement.
On that note: Thanks, as always, Michael, for contributing to the dialogue. Much obliged.
“When you were playing the drums–was that hard?”
“Yes, it’s hard.”
He was a genius in so many different ways and he’ll be sorely missed. For fun, I was googling “hardest drum solo” and La Villa Strangiato came up as number one on so many sites. I remember when I was very young, hearing that Neil’s drum kit was the biggest (at the time) of any rock band–and he was CANADIAN. So cool. the man was a machine with the heart and soul of a poet.
Neil was once asked if he ever gets bored performing “Tom Sawyer,” to which he said no — because “Tom Sawyer” is a hard song to play, and when he plays it well, he feels good! He never “went through the motions,” whether he was performing music or composing it. As I noted in the reply directly above this one, he challenged himself to be a better drummer (like when he trained under Freddie Gruber), to try for more narrative complexity in his songwriting (Clockwork Angels stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Tommy and Quadrophenia, as far as I’m concerned), and to be an all-around “master student,” as he put it — to continue learning and experimenting and using his chosen mode of creative expression to provide cultural feedback. And as a fan, you felt that passion, that earnest ambition. One didn’t necessarily have to like every song, album, or era (some don’t care for Rush’s synth period in the eighties, for instance) to at least appreciate Peart’s commitment to artistic growth and to delivering the best product possible. You never knew what to expect every time Rush put out a new album — other than that it would be produced with the highest caliber of artistry. Few bands maintain their popularity for four-plus decades, and fewer still do so without leaning on nostalgia to one degree or another. True to one of their mid-career songs, Rush’s creative precept could be summed up as follows: “I’m not looking back — / But I want to look around me now.”
And you should absolutely take pride in Rush’s Canadian heritage, Suzanne! Their music had universal appeal, but a distinctly Canadian sensibility. Just as you can’t remove any of the three of bandmates from the equation and still consider it Rush, you can’t discount the alchemical influence their homeland had on their worldviews. Why did it all come together so serendipitously? Because it came together. Roll the bones.
Found this cool link:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nICgCOJ7BS8
My wife (not a fan herself but supportive because she knows how much the band means to me) was once explaining Rush to some Millennial colleagues who’d never heard of them, and I’ll never forget how she put it: “They put on a three-hour concert, and at least half of it is the drum solo”!
I love when the editor of the concert videos cuts to the overhead shots of Neil, so you can really get a sense of how colossal and elaborate that drum kit is (Stephen Colbert once accused Peart of having a “drum addiction”), and how skillful he was to make such versatile use of it. I mean, sometimes he’s using all four limbs simultaneously — each keeping its own metronomic pace! Incredible!
I’ve always loved drums (one of my life’s regrets is being relegated to ‘flute’ in Grade 7 music class while one of the boys got drums, even though I ASKED) so watching him play is so amazing–I wonder what kind of incredible left brain right brain thing he had going on.
In the New York City public-school system, we all learned to play the recorder (a variation on the flute). Christ, I can only imagine the ear-splitting cacophony we must’ve produced in that auditorium when Mrs. Schwartz had the entire class perform “Hot Cross Buns”!
I took guitar lessons for a while as a kid, but I just never had a talent for music, alas. I’ve talked about this elsewhere on the blog: The two components of creativity are talent and skill — the former is congenital, the latter cultivated. No matter how skilled I may’ve been determined to be on guitar, I was never going to have the requisite talent for it. Fortunately, when I was in high school, I discovered sequential illustration (I studied for a while under legendary Batman artist Carmine Infantino), which I had some talent for, and creative writing (jury’s still out on whether I have any talent for that!). Those were artistic outlets better suited to my innate predispositions.
I think we’ve all stood in awe of creative genius and yearned for that special superpower. Even Peart knew that feeling, as he so eloquently expressed in “Mission”:
A lovely tribute, Sean. I was already out of college when I discovered Rush and became a fan, though life didn’t allow for much immersion in music at the time. But I do have some vivid memories of the band, the vocals, and the lyrics. Sad news as the icons of our youths pass away. They’re the heralds of our own mortality.
Thanks, Diana! How nice to hear you’re a fan, too, if only a casual one. I suspect the reason our artistic influences can be traced almost exclusively to our formative years, and rarely extend into adulthood, is twofold: 1) we’re more impressionable in adolescence; and 2) we have nothing but time on our hands and space in our brains at that age, so we fill both by (informally) studying the books and movies and albums we love, constantly revisiting them and discussing them with friends. I know once I got into college, I no longer had the time to watch the same dozen movies over and over, or to listen to albums beginning to end on a continuous loop.
On the plus side, the breadth of my cultural knowledge expanded as I was exposed to so much more art, literature, cinema, and music — that’s the very point of higher education, after all — but, outside of a class in which we might spend a semester studying Citizen Kane, I never again took a “deep dive” into any single artistic work or oeuvre, never again exhaustively experienced and examined a given work of art. That level of immersion is simply a privilege of youth, I suppose. I suspect if I had found Rush even a little bit later, I wouldn’t have ever had the inclination or opportunity to engage with their repertoire as deeply as I did. Reminds me of a lyric from “Time Stand Still”:
Thanks, Diana, for stopping by and sharing a word. On the subject of mortality and the cycle of life, here’s hoping the impending spring season is supplying both your spirit and your work with renewed vitality…
Sean
His words will live with me forever.
Indeed, Wendy. I feel a twinge of heartache now when a Rush song comes on the radio… but I also know that will lessen in time, and that I’ll grow ever more grateful to hear Neil’s voice from “beyond the grave” for all the rest of my days, imparting its wisdom — and reassurance — as it has for as long as I can remember.