Neil Peart RIP

[WOM]

Rush drummer dies of brain cancer. 67.

https://pitchfork.com/news/neil-pear...sh-dead-at-67/

[Nocturnal Submission]

One of my heroes.

RIP.

[Toby Gymshorts]

I don't know what to say. Fuck.

Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

RIP Prof. The celestial band just got the best drummer they could have.

[Toby Gymshorts]

This one really fucking hurts. Really.

I can't process it.

[Ray de Galles]

Fuck, 'A Farewell to Kings' indeed.

Rush were the first band I ever saw live and have been a constant for me in the near 40 years since. Desperately sad.

[Bored Of Education]

Peart was an incredible drummer and the first and possibly only drummer I have ever seen to make a drum solo melodic. Although we would have disagreed politically, he came across as a lovely guy. Of course, the deaths of his partner and daughter were tragic before his own death but he seemed to have accepted these as much as anyone can and had started playing again.

[Toby Gymshorts]

Although we would have disagreed politically

No, no you wouldn't. He denounced all the Rayndian shite years ago, and was a committed socialist. Can we not?

[Hot Pepsi]

That’s reassuring. That shit put me off trying to get into Rush.

The dude that went on and on about how awesome Neil Peart is was an archetype of a common sort of white guy one met in college in the US in the 90s. That’s not his fault, of course.

[Toby Gymshorts]

As an idiot wrote on Facebook earlier:

This really has made me immeasurably sad. What do you do when your idols and role models leave your plane of existence? Mourn, I guess. I never knew Neil Peart but I knew him just as well as anyone.

I listened to Limelight just this morning on the way to work, the words as always taking precedence over the stellar musicianship underpinning it all. It's one thing to know that Rush were done but still an ongoing entity, a collective that nothing could break. It's quite another to face up to the mortality of all of us and to say goodbye to a stellar talent.

Godspeed, Neil. May we walk the road together.

[Nocturnal Submission]

Nice.

[Jah Womble]

Was never especially into Rush, but that guy could really play.

RIP.

[Satchmo Distel]

The article in the OP is beautiful and moving; a true artist and great father, to whom fate was far too cruel.

[Bruno]

Sad as his death is, I was happy to learn that the news didn’t break until three days later. Here’s to the dignity of privacy that he stood for.

I can’t reduce Peart to his contributions to Rush or rock drumming. In the cultural desert where I grew up, if you were alienated by 80s pop culture and not immediately drawn to classical music or jazz or pick your high art, you could find in him a barely conceivable standard of excellence and, for lack of a better word, authenticity. In retrospect I’m not sure he was technically better than any number of other great drummers of the time, but he and Rush sounded different from everyone else, and his lyrics, or ideas shoehorned into lyrics, were well outside the mainstream. Whatever you ended up deciding about them, they woke you up to non-trivial concerns. And Rush's lack of concern about image and conformity was pure therapy for insecure little me.

Of course you could find serious themes elsewhere, and better expressed if you like, in anyone from Paul Simon to the Sex Pistols, but Rush’s music had deliberately unpopular otherworldly overtones that drew me in. What in retrospect can look like prog-rock excess felt at the time (I was 10 when I first heard Moving Pictures) like heroism and freedom, an escape to a place where nothing was trivial and popularity was truly beside the point. The memory of that stimulus makes my present perspective feel incidental and irrelevant. There were other serious-minded prog groups, but my ears gravitated toward the polished beauty of Rush’s sound, and despite some long songs they seemed more structurally disciplined, understanding the value of repetition, symmetry, and momentum-building. They also wrote melodies that were engaging and memorable without being pop, which is tricky to pull off. The leading prog alternative, Yes, seemed more into noodling and spacing out. Rush had a forceful, optimistic energy that appealed more to me, and Peart's drumming was integral to that.

Peart was more than just super-talented, he was an example of how to use your talent. You could hear his work ethic in his playing (ditto the other two). And to top it off he seemed decent and kind and humble all the way down. One of the most influential rock musicians of all.

[slackster]

I’ve never listened to a Rush LP, nor can I name or hum one of their tunes off the top of my head. Their look, and reports they were prog-ish AOR probably stopped me. But maybe that’s my loss. Might give them a spin on spotify, and force my fellow Record Club dads to do likewise.

[Bruno]

There's more than one Rush stylistically, they were the reinventing types. I lost interest in the direction they were going by the late 80s, but apparently they changed course again after 2000ish and I haven't taken the time to get to know the more recent stuff. According to Peart, Moving Pictures was when "Rush became Rush" by which I guess he means reached maturity. The album that put them on the map back in 1976, 2112, is quite a ways from Moving Pictures. A bit like the difference between early Yes and 90125 I suppose.

In some ways they got less complex and more straightforward after the 1970s, when prog experimentalism was peaking. I learned how to read music in junior high and can remember looking at the time at a Rush sheet-music anthology in the record store and being agog at the complexity. I think it was the first time it occurred to me that a rock song could be too hard for another group to cover. There was way more involved than figuring out the chord progressions, which were themselves jazz-level sophisticated. They switched time signatures a lot. Peart's drum tracks were micro-planned out, more than just setting a particular groove and making up some fills.

[Bruno]

slackster, maybe put on 2112 and listen with the perspective that these are 22-year old suburban kids making their fourth album, after having been told that if they made an album such as this their careers would probably be finished. It sealed their place in the Rock Hall of Fame forty years later, whatever you want to say about them.

[WOM]

I’ve never listened to a Rush LP, nor can I name or hum one of their tunes off the top of my head. Their look, and reports they were prog-ish AOR probably stopped me. But maybe that’s my loss. Might give them a spin on spotify, and force my fellow Record Club dads to do likewise.

You could do much worse than Moving Pictures as a whole LP.

But watching this brings me joy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoTxTM6kBuU

[Hot Pepsi]

I don’t recall Rush being on classic rock radio much in the 80s or ever appearing on late night shows like Letterman. They had one video on MTV that I can recall.

Were they never on a big label? Or were they one of those acts that is big in Canada but just niche in the US?

[Ray de Galles]

They were on Mercury or Atlantic their entire careers (debut aside), had fourteen US platinum albums (with 2112 going triple platinum and Moving Pictures quadruple platinum) and were arena/amphitheatre headliners for decades.

They really were a huge act for a very long time.

[WOM]

Tough question to answer as phrased. Rush were huge in the US, but never really Top 40 or MTV. From 2112 onward they were on Anthem, which was a Toronto independent label and distributed by various other labels around the world. Atlantic Records in the US. Definitely niche wherever they were popular, but huge niche...not Fall or Kraftwerk niche.

As for Letterman, Neil Peart was the big finale during Letterman's 'Drum Solo Week' which is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F2D_LZNF8I.

[Ray de Galles]

Thought I'd share this tweet by poet Patrick Jones who is the brother of the Manics' Nicky Wire, both are huge Rush fans ;

[URL]https://twitter.com/heretic101/status/1215754991367049216?s=21[/URL]

[Toby Gymshorts]

A certain Antepli Ejderha of this parish was kind enough to send me that link earlier. What a beautiful memento to have.

[Hot Pepsi]

That’s lovely

[Nocturnal Submission]

One of my mates saw Rush in the late-70s or possibly 1980 up in the Midlands. Peart threw his drumsticks into the audience and my mate managed to grab one of them or what was left of it. It would seem that Peart used to hit the drums VERY hard!

(My mate's other claim was that he threw his school tie onto the stage at an AC/DC gig and Bon Scott picked it up and tied it round his (Scott's) neck).

[G-Man]

It's a pity that I never bothered much with Rush, who had a few pretty good songs and who clearly were very influential. But the voice of the lead singer is just unbearable.