Neil Peart (67) – Rush – was born on September 12, 1952, to Glen and Betty Peart and lived his early years on his family’s farm in Hagersville, Ontario, on the outskirts of Hamilton. The first child of four, his brother Danny and sisters Judy and Nancy were born after the family moved to St. Catharines when Peart was two years old. In 1956 the family moved to the Port Dalhousie area of the town. Peart attended Gracefield School and later Lakeport Secondary School, and described his childhood as happy; he stated he experienced a warm family life.
By early adolescence he became interested in music and acquired a transistor radio, which he would use to tune into popular music stations broadcasting from Toronto, Hamilton, Welland, and Buffalo.
Peart’s first exposure to musical training came in the form of piano lessons; he later said in his instructional video ‘A Work in Progress’ that these lessons did not have much influence on him. He had a penchant for drumming on various objects around the house with a pair of chopsticks, so for his 13th birthday his parents bought him a pair of drum sticks, a practice drum, and some lessons, with the promise that if he stuck with it for a year they would buy him a kit. From then on drumming became an all consuming obsession for Neil.
Peart fulfilled his promise and his parents bought him a drum kit for his 14th birthday; furthermore, he began taking lessons from Don George at the Peninsula Conservatory of Music. His stage debut took place that year at the school’s Christmas pageant in St. John’s Anglican Church Hall in Port Dalhousie. His next appearance was at Lakeport High School with his first group, The Eternal Triangle. This performance contained an original number titled “LSD Forever”. At this show he performed his first solo.
Peart got a job in Lakeside Park on the shores of Lake Ontario, which later inspired a song of the same name on the Rush album Caress of Steel. He worked on the Bubble Game and Ball Toss, but his tendency to take it easy when business was slack, resulted in his termination. By his late teens, Peart had played in local bands such as Mumblin’ Sumpthin’, and the Majority. These bands practiced in basement recreation rooms and garages and played church halls, high schools, and skating rinks in towns across Southern Ontario. They also played in the Northern Ontario city of Timmins. Tuesday nights were filled with jam sessions at the Niagara Theatre Centre.
At 18 years old (and after struggling to achieve success as a drummer in Canada), Peart travelled to London, England, hoping to further his career as a professional musician. A time about which he has said: “I was seeking fame and fortune, and found anonymity and poverty. But I learned a lot about life.” Despite playing in several bands and picking up occasional session work, he was forced to support himself by selling jewelry at a shop called The Great Frog on Carnaby Street.
While in London, he came across the writings of libertarian novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand. Rand’s writings became a significant early philosophical influence on Peart, as he found many of her writings on individualism and objectivism inspiring. References to Rand’s philosophy can be found in his early lyrics, most notably “Anthem” from 1975’s Fly by Night and “2112” from 1976’s 2112.
After 18 months in London, Peart became disillusioned by his lack of progress in the music business and returned to Canada. He placed his aspiration of becoming a professional musician on hold and only played part time in local bands, while working for his father selling tractor parts at Dalziel Equipment.
Soon after, a mutual acquaintance convinced Peart to audition for the Toronto-based band Rush, which needed a replacement for its original drummer John Rutsey. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson oversaw the audition. His future bandmates describe his arrival that day as somewhat humorous, as he arrived in shorts, driving a battered old Ford Pinto with his drums stored in trashbags. Peart felt the entire audition was a complete disaster. Lee later remarked that he was instantly mesmerized by the way Peart played triplets, also hitting it off on a personal level (with similar tastes in books and music); meanwhile, Lifeson had a less favorable impression of Peart and still wanted to tryout one last drummer.
After some discussion between Lee and Lifeson, Peart officially joined the band on July 29, 1974, two weeks before the group’s first US tour. Peart procured a silver Slingerland kit which he played at his first gig with the band, opening for Uriah Heep and Manfred Mann’s Earth Band in front of over 11,000 people at the Civic Arena in Pittsburgh on August 14, 1974.
Peart soon settled into his new position, also becoming the band’s primary lyricist. Before joining Rush he had written a few songs, but, with the other members largely uninterested in writing lyrics, Peart’s previously underutilized writing became as noticed as his musicianship. The band were working hard to establish themselves as a recording act, and Peart, along with the rest of the band, began to undertake extensive touring.
His first recording with the band, 1975’s Fly by Night, was fairly successful, winning the Juno Award for most promising new act, but the follow-up, Caress of Steel, for which the band had high hopes, was greeted with hostility by both fans and critics. In response to this negative reception, most of which was aimed at the B-side-spanning epic “The Fountain of Lamneth”, Peart responded by penning “2112” on their next album of the same name in 1976. The album, despite record company indifference, became their breakthrough and gained a substantial following in the United States. The supporting tour culminated in a three-night stand at Massey Hall in Toronto, a venue Peart had dreamed of playing in his days on the Southern Ontario bar circuit and where he was introduced as “The Professor on the drum kit” by Lee.
Peart returned to England for Rush’s Northern European Tour and the band stayed in the United Kingdom to record the next album, 1977’s A Farewell to Kings, in Rockfield Studios in Wales. They returned to Rockfield to record the follow-up, Hemispheres, in 1978, which they wrote entirely in the studio. The recording of five studio albums in four years, coupled with as many as 300 gigs a year, convinced the band to take a different approach thereafter. Peart has described his time in the band up to this point as “a dark tunnel”.
In the following years they cemented their classic rock status with the enduring favorite, Moving Pictures, in 1981. Along the way, Rush earned a reputation for their elaborate live shows and became a perennially popular touring band. Over the years their shows elevated steadily in both production and musical values. In the 1980s Neil Peart received all the well deserved accolades bestowed upon him, including an induction into the Modern Drummer Readers Poll Hall of Fame in 1983 at the age of thirty, making him the youngest person ever so honored.
An avid traveler Neil used times in between tours to bicycle the world. In the 1980s he embarked on adventure travel and bicycled through China. In later years he also bicycled West Africa.
In 1991, Peart was invited by Buddy Rich’s daughter, Cathy Rich, to play at the Buddy Rich Memorial Scholarship Concert in New York City. Peart accepted and performed for the first time with the Buddy Rich Big Band. Peart remarked that he had little time to rehearse, and noted that he was embarrassed to find the band played a different arrangement of the song than the one he had learned. Feeling that his performance left much to be desired, Peart produced and played on two Buddy Rich tribute albums titled Burning for Buddy: A Tribute to the Music of Buddy Rich in 1994 and 1997 in order to regain his aplomb.
While producing the first Buddy Rich tribute album, Peart was struck by the tremendous improvement in ex-Journey drummer Steve Smith’s playing, and asked him his “secret”. Smith responded he had been studying with drum teacher Freddie Gruber.
Rush released their sixteenth studio album entitled ‘Test for Echo’ on September 10, 1996. It was the band’s last album before their longtime hiatus. The album got very positive reviews from fans and music critics and some of its tracks hit the charts all around the world. After the album, Rush started their Test for Echo Tour on October 19, 1996, at the Knickerbocker Arena and ended on July 4, 1997, at the Corel Centre.
The tour had been great and Rush members were very happy and excited about meeting with their fans. Also, Rush fans appreciated both the album and the band’s tour but shortly after Rush drummer Neil Peart’s life fell apart.
Just over a month after the tour’s closing, and in a timespan of 10 months, he lost his only child Selena to a car accident and his common law wife of 23 years Jacqueline, to cancer. Neil described her death as a result of a ‘broken heart’ and ‘a slow suicide by apathy.’ “She just didn’t care.” He felt that he died with them too and it was so hard to move on for him.
At his wife’s funeral, Neil stated that ‘consider me retired‘ and his bandmates showed respect to his decision, but they decided not to continue without him. Rush went into an almost five-year hiatus and Peart chose a very different way to mourn his daughter and wife’s deaths. He traveled 55,000 miles sabbatical from the North Pole through North America to Belize on his BMW motorcycle and his journey was considered a spiritual one.
The drummer wanted to immortalize his journey and released his philosophical travel memoir entitled ‘Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road,’ which was based on his grief and what he had been through after losing his beloved ones. “Landscapes and wild life rebuilt me during my travels.” After his journey, Peart returned to the band. Peart wrote the book as a chronicle of his geographical and emotional journey.
In addition to being Rush’s primary lyricist, Peart published several memoirs about his travels. His lyrics for Rush addressed universal themes and diverse subjects including science fiction, fantasy, and philosophy, as well as secular, humanitarian, and libertarian themes. Peart wrote a total of seven non-fiction books focused on his travels and personal stories. He also co-authored with Kevin J. Anderson three steampunk fantasy novels based on Rush’s final album, Clockwork Angels. The two also wrote a dark fantasy novella, Drumbeats, inspired by Peart’s travels in West Africa.
When Peart was introduced to photographer Carrie Nuttall in Los Angeles by longtime Rush photographer Andrew MacNaughtan, his life went back on track for the next decade and a half. They married on September 9, 2000. In early 2001, Peart announced to his bandmates that he was ready to return to recording and performing. The product of the band’s return was the 2002 album Vapor Trails. At the start of the ensuing tour in support of the album, the band members decided that Peart would not take part in the daily grind of press interviews and “meet and greet” sessions upon their arrival in a new city that typically monopolize a touring band’s daily schedule. Peart always shied away from these types of in-person encounters, and it was decided that exposing him to a lengthy stream of questions about the tragic events of his life was not necessary.
In early 2007, Peart and Cathy Rich discussed another Buddy tribute concert. At the recommendation of bassist Jeff Berlin, Peart once again augmented his swing style with formal drum lessons, this time under the tutelage of another pupil of Freddie Gruber, Peter Erskine, himself an instructor of Steve Smith. On October 18, 2008, Peart once again performed at the Buddy Rich Memorial Concert at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom.
Peart and Rush experienced immeasurable success throughout his forty-plus-year tenure with Rush. The group released twenty-four gold albums (for 500,000 units sold), fourteen of which went platinum (1,000,000), and three of which went multi-platinum. A brief summary of the band’s honors includes induction into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Canadian Music Hall of Fame; numerous Grammy nominations; nine Juno music awards; and an admission into the Officers of the Order of Canada, Canada’s second-highest sovereign honor. And in 2014, MD’s readers ranked Peart third best among the top fifty greatest drummers of all time—behind only Buddy Rich and Led Zeppelin’s John Bonham. It’s easy to see why Peart ranks so highly among the legends. His playing on Rush songs like “Free Will,” “Limelight,” and “Subdivisions” inspired generations of drummers to pick up the sticks. He was a master at making odd time signatures feel right at home on an FM dial. And while Peart didn’t invent the rock drum solo, he certainly refined and expanded the art over the years touring with Rush. Devotees pore over the evolution of “the Professor”’s elaborate live drum setups. And even those who’ve never sat down at a kit found themselves air-drumming to Peart’s parts.
In the June 2009 edition of Peart’s website’s News, Weather, and Sports, titled “Under the Marine Layer”, he announced that he and Nuttall were expecting their first child.
Peart described himself as a “retired drummer” in an interview in December 2015:
“Lately Olivia has been introducing me to new friends at school as ‘My dad—He’s a retired drummer.’ True to say—funny to hear. And it does not pain me to realize that, like all athletes, there comes a time to … take yourself out of the game. I would rather set it aside than face the predicament described in our song “Losing It”.
Peart had also been suffering from chronic tendinitis and shoulder problems.
At first Geddy Lee clarified his bandmate was quoted out of context, and suggested Peart was simply taking a break, “explaining his reasons for not wanting to tour, with the toll that it’s taking on his body.” However, in January 2018, possibly after having received the news of Peart’s cancer diagnosis, Alex Lifeson confirmed that Rush is “basically done”. Peart remained friends with his former bandmates.
Neil Peart died from glioblastoma, an aggressive form of brain cancer, on January 7, 2020, in Santa Monica, California. He had been diagnosed three and a half years earlier, and the illness was a closely guarded secret in Peart’s inner circle until his death.
What is your purpose in life? Neil Peart’s answer:
“You can ask those questions, but what’s the point? The point is I’m here and making the best use of it. Why am I spending my life in this particular manner? Most times that tends to be a combination of circumstances and drive. The fact that I wanted to be a successful drummer was by no means a guarantee that I was going to be. But circumstances happened to rule that I turned out to be one.”
Neil Peart didn’t want to be like everyone else. He just wanted to be Neil. He loved being a rock drummer, but he also loved literature. He loved poetry. He loved the outdoors. He didn’t care what society thought a rock star was ‘supposed to be’ — he wasn’t afraid to be himself, and he didn’t really care about fame. He just wanted to be good at what he did — and he was! — and he just wanted to share his music with the fans.
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