![]() ![]() His breakthrough with the band came with 1976’s 2112 - the first side of the album was a rock opera set in that far-future year, combining Peart’s sci-fi vision and Rand-ian ideology (which he later disavowed, calling himself a “bleeding-heart libertarian”) with explosive prog theatrics. Peart joined Rush just after the recording of their first album, replacing original drummer John Rutsey. His teacher’s idea of punishment was to insist that he bang on his desk nonstop for an hour’s worth of detention, time he happily spent re-creating Keith Moon’s parts from Tommy. At one point, he got in trouble for pounding out beats on his desk during class. As a teen, he permed his hair, took to wearing a cape and purple boots on the city bus, and scrawled “God is dead” on his bedroom wall. Peart grew up in Port Dalhousie, a middle-class Canadian suburb 70 miles from Toronto, where he took his first drum lessons at age 13. He remarried in 2000, and found his way back to Rush by 2001. Shattered, Peart told his bandmates to consider him retired, and embarked on a solitary motorcycle trip across the United States. Five months later, Selena’s mother - Peart’s common-law wife of 23 years, Jackie Taylor – was diagnosed with terminal cancer, quickly succumbing. On August 10th, 1997, Peart’s 19-year-old daughter, Selena, died in a single-car accident on the long drive to her university in Toronto. He questioned whether he could stay physically capable of playing his demanding parts, and was eager to spend more time with his wife, Carrie Nuttal, and daughter Olivia. Rush finished their final tour in August of 2015, after releasing their last album, Clockwork Angels, in 2012. And he can do that while doing all kinds of cool shit.” “Neil pushes that band, which has a lot of musicality, a lot of ideas crammed into every eight bars - but he keeps the throb, which is the important thing. “Neil is the most air-drummed-to drummer of all time,” former Police drummer Stewart Copeland told Rolling Stone in 2015. “He was called ‘The Professor’ for a reason: We all learned from him.” “His power, precision, and composition was incomparable,” Dave Grohl said in a statement released Friday. ![]() Peart was a drummer’s drummer, beloved by his peers he won prizes in Modern Drummer’s annual readers’ poll 38 times, and was a formative influence on countless young players. A compromise is what I can never accept.” “I set out to never betray the values that 16-year-old had, to never sell out, to never bow to the man. Peart never stopped believing in the possibilities of rock (“a gift beyond price,” he called it in Rush’s 1980 track “The Spirit of Radio”) and despised what he saw as over-commercialization of the music industry and dumbed-down artists he saw as “panderers.” “It’s about being your own hero,” he told Rolling Stone in 2015. ![]() His drum fills on songs like “Tom Sawyer” were pop hooks in their own right, each one an indelible mini-composition his lengthy drum solos, carefully constructed and packed with drama, were highlights of every Rush concert. He joined singer-bassist Geddy Lee and guitarist Alex Lifeson in Rush in 1974, and his musicianship and literate, philosophical lyrics – which initially drew on Ayn Rand and science fiction, and later became more personal and emotive – helped make the trio one of the classic-rock era’s essential bands. Peart was one of rock’s greatest drummers, with a flamboyant yet precise style that paid homage to his hero, the Who’s Keith Moon, while expanding the technical and imaginative possibilities of his instrument. A representative for the band confirmed the news to Rolling Stone. The cause was brain cancer, which Peart had been quietly battling for three-and-a-half years. Neil Peart, the virtuoso drummer and lyricist for Rush, died Tuesday, January 7th, in Santa Monica, California, at age 67, according to Elliot Mintz, a family spokesperson. ![]()
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