What you say about his company
Is what you say about society
On Friday January 10, it was announced that the drummer for Rush, Neil Peart, had died. This was probably one of the biggest shocks that I’ve had in a while. The cause of death was announced as a brain cancer that he had apparently been fighting for three years. So already 2020 is looking to be a suck-ass year. As far as I’m concerned, 2016 really started when Lemmy died.
Rush started out as an Ontario hard rock band in 1974, composed of guitarist Alex Lifeson, bassist-singer Geddy Lee and drummer John Rutsey, and gained a certain level of Great Lakes fame with the song “Working Man.” But due to health issues complicated by drinking, Rutsey was replaced with Peart after Rush’s debut album. (In the retrospective documentary Beyond the Lighted Stage, Peart is still described as ‘the new guy.’) Not only was Peart a quantum leap ahead of Rutsey as a drummer, he became Rush’s lyricist, at first basing songs on contemporary Fantasy themes like those that inspired Led Zeppelin and would later inspire the creators of Dungeons & Dragons. Rush attracted more attention, not all of it positive, when Peart drew inspiration from writer Ayn Rand, actually naming a song “Anthem” and dedicating the 2112 suite to Rand directly. In later years, Peart was at pains to disassociate himself from Rand, but 2112 – which resembles Rand’s Anthem but is even more dystopian – was the album that really put Rush on the map after early years of struggle. It established Rush as “the thinking man’s metal” and Peart himself as one of the most talented lyricists in rock in addition to one of its most talented drummers. In fact, as Peart continued to explore the themes of individualism and progress against superstition and collectivism, he did so to a greater depth than Rand, going in different directions as in the Permanent Waves song “Natural Science”: “Science, like nature/ Must also be tamed/ With a view towards its preservation/ Given the same State of integrity/ It will surely serve us well/ Art as expression/ Not as market campaigns/ Will still capture our imaginations.”
Not exactly the same approach as Rand, whose work came across to many as a right-wing capitalist mirror to Soviet Socialist Realism.
Peart was not afraid to change his mind or admit his limitations, as when he famously restructured his entire percussion technique after being invited to play with the Buddy Rich Big Band and realizing he couldn’t keep up. It’s generally agreed by journalists and fans that Peart’s transition into what he called a “bleeding-heart libertarian” was pushed greatly by his first real brush with death. That is, not his own. In material terms, if death is simply the end of existence, then none of us really experiences death, because “experience” ceases. What most of us call death is the loss that we feel from the death of other people. In 1997, Peart’s only daughter died at the age of 19 in a car accident. His wife Jacqueline died of cancer just 10 months later, although he described it as the result of a “broken heart.” Utterly devastated, Peart left Rush for several years to take stock of his life. While he did eventually remarry and have a child – and did of course return to Rush – he spent an unscheduled amount of time traveling North America on his motorcycle before returning to music. In 2002 he wrote a book based on his notes of the experience, called Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road. I had been told this is a great book to read even if one never got into Rush’s music. But I just never found the time to buy it and read it.
I will have to make the time.
But today, I can only give thanks to Neil Peart as a true role model for living with integrity, and for writing my personal fight song:
You can choose a ready guide in some celestial voice
If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice
You can choose from phantom fears and
kindness that can kill
I will choose a path that’s clear
I will choose free will