Neil Peart, the lyricist and virtuosic drummer of the Canadian progressive-rock band Rush, died on Tuesday, in Santa Monica, California. He was sixty-seven, and had been fighting brain cancer for several years. Rush formed in Toronto, in 1968 (Peart joined in 1974), and released nineteen studio albums, ten of which have sold more than a million copies in the U.S. According to Billboard, Rush presently ranks third, behind the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, for the most consecutive gold or platinum albums by a rock band.
Peart was wildly literate, and his earnest love of science fiction informed Rush’s singular aesthetic. Along with the singer Geddy Lee and the guitarist Alex Lifeson, he helped pioneer an audacious strain of brainy, intricate hard rock that perhaps borrowed more voraciously from Ayn Rand than the blues. Though the band’s influence was vast, something about its music seemed to speak deeply and directly to marginalized young men. Both Lee and Lifeson were the children of immigrants who had left Europe following the Second World War (Lee’s parents were Holocaust survivors; Lifeson’s fled Yugoslavia after the war), and a person gets the sense that the members of Rush had internalized a certain degree of cultural exclusion. Rather than retreating, they embraced ideas that eschewed convention.
Rush was struggling commercially when, in 1976, it made “2112,” an intense, ambitious, and unrelenting record about a dystopian future. The band had spent the previous year playing small, grimy venues. (In the 2010 documentary “Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage,” the band jokingly referred to this stretch of shows as the “Down the Tubes” tour.) No one seemed particularly energized about the next album. Rush’s manager, Ray Danniels, had to cajole Mercury Records into not dropping the band entirely.
“2112” was a Hail Mary, but rather than dutifully capitulating to the marketplace—making something more aligned, spiritually and compositionally, with, say, Steely Dan’s “The Royal Scam” or the Rolling Stones’s “Black and Blue,” two of the most beloved commercial rock records of 1976—Rush instead assumed a kind of fuck-it abandon. The band had not assembled an audience via extensive radio play or critical adulation or corporate positioning but by people tapping each other on the shoulder and saying, “Dude, check this out.” For “2112,” the band leaned further into its idiosyncrasies rather than trying to curb them.
The album opens with its title track, which is twenty minutes long and takes up the entire first side of the LP. Peart wrote the lyrics, which have something to do with an interplanetary federation and an odious, vaguely fascist organization known as Priests of the Temples of Syrinx, who command “great computers”—to be honest, I’m not overly confident on the narrative particulars. What the song does convey, unambiguously, is a kind of maniacal amplitude. Peart wanted to tell vast, complex stories that both embraced and rejected formal structures. The rest of the record is a little bit goofier, but no less unique. “A Passage to Bangkok,” which Peart also wrote lyrics for, is a doting homage to weed, and various cities and countries around the world where it is cultivated: Colombia, Jamaica, Morocco, Acapulco, Thailand, Afghanistan, Kathmandu, Lebanon. “We only stop for the best!”
Since Peart’s death, photos of his drum kit—an expansive, fascinating structure of drums, cymbals, and assorted percussive tools—have been circulating around social media. Trying to make sense of its maze of components is nearly impossible for anyone not intimately acquainted with drum gear, yet the kit nonetheless communicates, in a glorious and unambiguous way, Peart’s vigor. It must have felt so excellent, ensconcing himself in that golden tower, an ever-expanding assemblage of surfaces to whack! Until his death, Peart was considered by many to be the greatest living rock drummer; watching him play, it’s hard not to start thinking he possessed several phantom limbs. The sound was merciless.
Misfit culture has been codified and romanticized over the years (we think of James Dean in a leather jacket, coolly smoking an unfiltered cigarette while leaning against a hot rod, or of David Bowie, vamping in full “Aladdin Sane” makeup), but the members of Rush were weird in a way that didn’t reliably translate in mainstream culture. As such, they offered their followers a very precise and rarified solace. Rush could be something of a private pleasure. I think of a television commercial for the Volkswagen Golf, from 1999, in which the actor Tony Hale sits alone in a parked car, listening to “Mr. Roboto,” by Styx—another beloved prog-rock band of the nineteen-seventies, with similarly immodest ambitions—at top volume, dancing like a deranged cyborg. Some music just feels destined for secret communion.
This, for me, was always one of the most lovable and admirable things about Peart and Rush. For decades, the band was hugely uncool. It’s fun to look up the early reviews—peeved critics huffing and puffing about bombast and pretension. How dare this band try so hard! In the 1979 Rolling Stone Record Guide, Alan Niester gave “2112” two stars (out of a possible five) and described Lee’s voice as “a cross between Donald Duck and Robert Plant.” (To be fair, this remains the most interesting and lawless era of Rolling Stone; the magazine didn’t especially care for “Blood on the Tracks” or “Exile on Main Street,” either.) If you can’t have a good time blasting “Tom Sawyer,” then some awesome part of you has withered. I say, raise a joint to Neil Peart tonight, and go get it back.
