Still, instinctively seduced by a thumping, mesmerizing backbeat played almost as if a lead instrument, I sat for hours on the edge of my bed learning roundhouses and mimicking beats in time signatures I couldn’t determine—fairly competently before long, as I rosily recall—my concession to ignorance the misbelief that the snare drum is placed outside of the right knee, not between them, and unenlightened to the futility of performing two-handed snare work across my body on an actual drum kit.
Fully “awakened” to music’s magic only a few months earlier (during a genuinely epiphanic moment delivered by Jimmy Page in that same seventh-grade classroom), I, like so many soon-to-be Rush fans, turned onto the utterly unique Canadian trio through the ubiquitous radio presence of “Tom Sawyer” and “Limelight.” Electrified, I made Moving Pictures my first record purchase. Teenage-hood commenced the moment I dropped needle to vinyl.
Several years would pass before actual drums lay beneath my flailing limbs, and even longer until I put pen to paper, but I quickly found a tenuous association with Neil. Growing up in a suburban neighborhood eerily reminiscent of that featured in its music video, “Subdivisions” caught me at the precise moment of teenage vulnerability—the Signals album being released the very week I entered high school. A tall, gawky freshman, lost in a sea of faces—most of them more appealing than mine—I was living the very words Neil expressed about his high school halls. Like Neil, I was a misfit, an outsider, maladroit at making either friends or conversation and virtually invisible to girls. I even resembled that confused, pitiable boy in the “Subdivisions” video, although, mercifully, I had exchanged my bulky, socially debilitating eyeglasses for contact lenses a year earlier (though that had not improved my self-esteem very much). Possessing no idea how to be cool and unwilling to conform, I was cast out.
Before high school ended, I was a drummer, and before college concluded, a lyricist as well, adding to that tenuous bond (albeit with a fraction of Neil’s talent and monastic discipline on the drummer’s throne). When I finally joined bands after college, I insisted on contributing lyrics and quickly became the primary lyricist because it was one of the few things in which I held implicit confidence. (Unlike Neil, I’ve always considered myself a lyricist first, a drummer second.)
Though Neil was less a direct influence on my lyric writing than Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, and Pete Brown, his commitment to integrity helped me refute the age-old stigma that drummers are incapable of writing compelling lyrics and that for a band to depend upon a drummer’s words is creative suicide. I could express myself in a way that I was never able to do verbally, opening up my life in a manner that I’d never dreamed and inspiring me to write lyrics of which I could be proud even though, as a Middletown dreamer, few would ever hear them. What a dreadfully barren existence I would have suffered had Neil not provided the example of mastering words as well as drums.
Neil Peart very likely had a more profound influence on my life than any other individual. He, Geddy Lee, and Alex Lifeson made life better, for me and countless others, often when life became oppressive—or even hopeless. That’s an incalculable legacy—an even richer one than the many songs and books Neil leaves us. Although, these days, I often lament my age—and how quickly I’ve gotten to it—I feel hugely fortunate to have been born when I was so that I could come of age at the very moment at which Neil’s words and Rush’s music could catalyze my restless dreams of youth. There very well might not have been anyone to fill that role had I been born at some other time.
Neil Peart deserves a Thank you beyond my capability for that.
