14 Jan Neil Peart 1952 – 2020

I first became aware of the band Rush when I was nine years old. The album Moving Pictures was released in February of 1981, and by March two songs from that album, Limelight and Tom Sawyer, were in heavy rotation on rock radio in Boston and in Billboard Magazine’s Mainstream Rock Top 10. I remember taping both songs off WBCN on my sister’s Panasonic boombox until I was able to earn enough money mowing lawns, raking leaves, and shoveling snow to buy the actual album. While those songs were sliding off the charts by the time I turned 10 that October, the Moving Pictures cassette was on constant, auto-reverse playback, from Tom Sawyer to Vital Signs and back again, ad infinitum. It kicked off a love of Rush that sent me back in time to discover all the great records I’d missed, and carried me forward into my teens, twenties, and beyond with a consistent level of musicianship, song craft, and personal resonance. Pivotal to this newfound fascination were the lyrics, written by the band’s drummer, Neil Peart.

Some of Matt’s collection of Rush tour shirts

By 1981, Rush had already recorded and released seven studio albums and a double live set. Many of the band’s fans were the same age as the band, themselves, having followed them from Working Man on their self-titled debut and into the deep prog of 2112 and onto the new wave shift of Permanent Waves. But to be ten years old and listening to the lyrics of Tom Sawyer on an album of one’s own for the first time was a real gift. Tom Sawyer was one of the books that was required reading in fifth grade, and from that summer to the next, here was this song in the zeitgeist. More than being a kick-ass song at the apex of album-oriented-rock radio, it was the first song I’d heard to mix synthesizers and hard rock, as the majority of my short life up to that point had consisted almost entirely of The Beatles, The Monkees, and Kiss. As a kid born in Salem, MA and already thoroughly obsessed with the adolescent-friendly sci-fi books of Ray Bradbury, the deeper tracks Red Barchetta and Witch Hunt, seemed to have been written almost specifically for me. These lyrics were not about rocking and rolling all night and partying every day, as the anthems of Kiss declared; this was important and literate stuff.

Matt’s A Farewell to Kings LP signed by Geddy Lee, Alex Lifeson & Neil Peart

This was about the same time that I discovered Dungeons & Dragons and the first back-catalog Rush record I got my hands on was a used copy of A Farewell to Kings. It sounded like nothing else I’d ever heard in my life. To my ten-year-old ears it was a lost gospel. The record’s inner sleeve had the lyrics printed on it, and recognizing the opening lines of Xanadu as having been taken from Samuel Coleridge’s Kubla Khan (a poem I’d had to remember and recite in a Project Summit class in 4th grade), my faith in Rush was affirmed. This was much more than mere coincidence. This was music being made for me and people like me, and the next era in the band’s career would soon reveal just how many of us there were out there.

Exit… Stage Left

Exit… Stage Left was a live concert recording of material appearing on albums released between 1976 – 1981, and footage from the accompanying concert film (sold on VHS) popped up in videos getting regular airplay on MTV. This introduced me to the albums between A Farewell to Kings and Moving Pictures that I’d not heard yet. Recorded during the Permanent Waves and Moving Pictures tours, it had live versions of the timeless classics The Spirit of Radio, Freewill, The Trees, and A Passage to Bangkok. I remember being incredulous that I had not heard these before–were these not hits?  But it was the band’s next studio album, Signals, and the lead track Subdivisions that (following Tom Sawyer) established the pattern of the right song for the right time of my life that persisted throughout the band’s subsequent catalog. Subdivisions was the perfect anthem for outcasts; it was ample justification for not fitting-in at a time when standing-out was particularly difficult. Approaching puberty and having this song drop as though summoned was probably lifesaving. Even more synthesizer-centric than the prior record, Signals opened up a whole new world of possibilities for piano-lesson kids who wanted something with a bit more heft than the synth pop of the day. Since I now knew that their LPs came with lyric sheets (and since cassette tapes frequently did not), I bought the record (not the tape) of Signals at the local department store just a few weeks ahead of my eleventh birthday. I received an LP of Moving Pictures as a birthday present, which was perfect since I had practically worn out the cassette by then. The lyrics printed on the inner sleeve alerted me to the fact that I had been mistaking “universal green” for the intended “universal dream” when I sang along to Limelight.

Hugh Syme’s back cover design for Power Windows

Growing up during the crescendo of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, the constant fear of nuclear annihilation loomed. Being a teenager in 1984 was suddenly akin to being a teenager during the Cuban Missile Crisis twenty years earlier. But not much of the popular music of the day reflected the danger of brinkmanship that threatened to end the world. Nena‘s 99 Red Balloons was pretty much it: a peppy number from a Germany still divided by a communist wall. It seemed less like a cautionary tale than an oddly celebratory conclusion. But a mere month after Nena topped the US charts, Rush’s Grace Under Pressure opened with the much more concerning Distant Early Warning. This wasn’t a danceable metaphor, this was a panic-inducing premonition of mutually assured destruction from the three most gifted musicians on the planet. The record starts ominous and gets even more consequential with tracks dedicated to lost friends (After Image), concentration camps (Red Sector A), dystopian futures (The Body Electric), and paranoia (The Enemy Within) without getting precious or preachy. It was comforting to know that the world’s weight wasn’t only on my shoulders-especially in that very Orwellian year. 1985’s Power Windows doubled down on the themes of Grace Under Pressure, presenting almost a history lesson of how we’d gotten here in Manhattan Project, but presenting a somewhat cheerier set of possibilities both lyrically and sonically. Big Money, Marathon, and especially Mystic Rhythms harkened back to the non-conformst message of Signals, and reminded fourteen-year-old me that there were bigger issues at stake than my self-imposed insecurities. Most of these songs provided the core to 1989’s A Show of Hands, the band’s third live album, and the live record that I listen to more than any other (with Dead Can Dance‘s Toward the Within ranking a distant second).

The back cover of Rush’s Moving Pictures LP

I got my first Compact Disc player in high school, and the first three CDs I bought were AC/DC’s Back in Black, The Who’s Who’s Next, and Rush’s Moving Pictures–which was the first album that I owned on LP, cassette, and compact disc. I would eventually locate an old 8-track, and finally a digitally remastered downloadable reissue, making it the only album I’ve purchased on five different formats.

One of the last cassette tapes I bought before I started saving my money to move to California was Presto, and one of the first cassettes I bought when I arrived in Los Angeles was Roll the Bones. By now, cassettes all had fold-out inlay cards with lyrics and liner notes, and while I took my record collection with me when my best friend Todd and I tossed all our shit into a Uhaul and drove west, I didn’t really have the luxury of space that a record collection required anymore. I was committed to cassettes and CDs, both of which played in my Sony DoDeCaHorn boombox. Those two albums have the two songs that, to this day, resonate most with me, and, as I type this–one week after the death of Neil Peart, are the most difficult to hear without welling up:

The Pass and Bravado.

Presto & Roll the Bones

I’ve got a lot of friends and acquaintances that just don’t get Rush. Some them aren’t into the technicality of the music and may think of it as noodling. Some of them just aren’t fans of Geddy’s voice. While most of them are willing to concede that Geddy Lee is one of the best players to ever hold a bass guitar, and all of them must admit that Neil Peart is the greatest drummer/percussionist in rock history, getting them to otherwise acquiesce to the genius of the band is more than a struggle. And yet, if presented with the lyrics alone (without crediting Rush or Neil), I’m pretty sure those same people would believe it if you told them those words were written by Leonard Cohen or Jeff Buckley or Paul Simon or Peter Gabriel. And you can be damn sure they’d have a bit of reverence. Removed of the fact that they are songs by a Canadian progressive rock band, they might be given the respect they deserve. Not that Neil ever cared about that. But I challenge anyone to recite the lyrics of The Pass or Bravado (or The Garden from Rush‘s 2012 swan song, Clockwork Angels) and not feel the weight of the poetry within. Those songs carried me through some real dark nights of the soul. They talked me out of some really bad ideas. If not for the powerful and timeless messages with which Neil infused Rush‘s music I can’t guarantee you I’d still be alive. And I am not alone.

After tremendous tragedy befell Neil, with the death of a daughter and wife in the span of ten months, after taking a much needed and deserved break, he returned to write even more introspective and inspiring words. Expanding beyond just song lyrics, Neil wrote an incredible book about overcoming grief–about staying alive by staying on the move. If you know anybody who is going through the pains of mourning I encourage you to buy them a copy of Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road.

Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road by Neil Peart

After a career that earned him the undisputed God of Drums distinction, he continued to learn and improve and inspire and share. He found love again and remarried. And while he chose not to mingle much with the fans, his love for them was evident in his lyrics.

I actually met Neil once. It was at a private tasting at a whiskey bar in Santa Monica in 2008. I recognized him, but knew of his aversion to fans, so I didn’t cop to knowing who he was. We discussed our taste in scotch, bicycles, movies, books –everything except music. I wanted to tell him how much his music and his words had meant to me. It was an incredible act of self-control not to tell him how a song (more than one, really) he had written had actually saved my life. But I recognized in the moment that the best way to say thank you was to not put him on the spot. We were introduced to each other only as Matt and Neil, and over the course of the evening we each bought the other a drink. As we were leaving, we shook hands and he said, “Thank you.”

I said, “No, Thank You!”

My thoughts and condolences are with Carrie and Olivia Louise, and with Geddy & Alex, and with the millions of other Rush fans to whom Neil meant so much.