NEP 5 Years Gone - Post Your Photos and Memories

[grep]

Newark, NJ - October 2012.  My 25th show.

 

 

[Jag2112]

My tribute to his memory...

 

Remembering Neil Peart on the fifth anniversary of his passing. Some are born to move the world...

[Timbale]

I can still remember the moment I heard the news - my phone dinging with a text from a not-often-heard-from old friend as I came out of the subway.   Can't believe it's been 5 years.  A crazy marker of time as I now am dealing with cancer myself.

 

I wrote this piece when he died.  I never posted it here...

 

 

NOWHERE IS THE DREAMER OR THE MISFIT SO ALONE

 

Neil Peart wrote those words about the suburbs - about those places “in between the bright lights and the far, unlit unknown”. Of course, those places are not just geographical in nature - the title of the song is a double meaning... the eponymous subdivisions are both physical and emotional. I understood that when I was 10 years old...and I also knew that a deep relationship with some form of art - perhaps music in particular - could make a dreamer or a misfit feel much less alone. And for me, Rush was that music.

 

Carl Wilson wrote an excellent book, ostensibly about Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk About Love album, which is subtitled “A Journey to the End of Taste”. In it, he grapples with the question of why we like the art we like...and why we hate what we hate. How it defines us. How can someone (many, many someones) adore My Heart Will Go On when all I hear is the most cliched, melodramatic, saccharin schlock ever recorded? Rush is divisive like that - a hugely popular, multi-million album selling band that many people cannot stand.

 

Growing up as a fan...that was exactly how I liked it. I liked that they weren’t popular. They were weirdos with an ugly singer with a crazy voice who wrote about strange stuff and wore kimonos and quoted philosophy. You people listening to Culture Club were supposed to hate them.

 

In Chinatown, Jack Nicolson says that what he knows about the film’s villain Noah Cross is that he’s respectable, to which John Huston as Cross replies, “Of course I'm respectable - I'm old. Politicians, ugly buildings and whores all get respectable if they last long enough.”

 

And so it is too with Canadian progressive rock bands. A grudging respect began to creep in as the aughts turned to the...tens?... in the mainstream culture, with a documentary about the band that people who didn’t even like the music seemed to enjoy for the inspirational aspect of a story of a band who succeeded without compromising - a film that surely had some impact on the decision to induct them into the R&R Hall Of Fame a few years later. As I read the news of Peart’s passing - my first real childhood hero - and saw it flutter its way through social media, I was struck by the width of it’s impact. The 13 year old version of me, headphones on, Signals album sleeve in hand, could not have imagined that the passing of Neil Peart would be anything but a blip on everyone else’s radar. Such was the landscape of the time, and my personal relationship to that music.

 

I did have a couple of friends (and an older brother) who loved Rush like me - and we endlessly talked and obsessed about them — Peart in particular — but the connection to the music wasn’t social for me, it was personal. Alone between the speakers. A thoughtful, nerdy, bookish, insecure kid who could not relate to the sexy swagger of Led Zeppelin or the Stones, nor the vapid pop sensibilities of Duran Duran. That’s not to say I didn’t like other things - I did - but those things didn’t go in deep like Peart’s weird, unique perspective on both words and beats.

 

Visiting my grandparents for a couple of weeks, eleven or twelve years old...a copy of Hemispheres being the most important item in my luggage. On their floor, headphones on. Deep dive.

 

Hemispheres is a concept album. It tells the story of an ancient time when 2 gods - the God of Wisdom and the God of Love - are battling for control of the people. They are divided between their passions and their sense of reason, confused and tormented, and it isn’t until a character from the album before this one makes a cameo appearance that things get sorted out - he becomes the God of Balance. “Let the truth of love be lighted/Let the love of truth shine clear”.

 

Now, you might think that is all a load of bullshit, and that a 20 minute “song” about gods and ancient times played over shifting time signatures by 3 ugly nerds is stupid and silly and not at all what rock music is for. But if that is stupid and silly... I don’t know what we’re supposed to call something like Oh, Baby I Love Your Way. There are some fairly proscriptive ideas thrown around when it comes to what lane any artist is supposed to stay in...and pretentious is often the label smacked on you if you go to far.

 

I knew, sitting on my grandparents carpet, that Hemispheres was an allegory - albeit, perhaps an awkward one - for the struggle between emotion and rationality that exists in all of us, every day. I don’t find that essential human conflict pretentious to write about at all - and I’m glad I grew up listening to a band that chose to create something like that completely in their own unique way. I grew up to discover SO many great, unique songwriters since that time - Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, David Byrne, Elvis Costello, Leonard Cohen, Pete Townshend, etc, etc - and I find I am always drawn to people who are driving the thing, in one way or the other, into one of the other lanes. I don’t even care that much if they careen and hit the guardrail... I just appreciate the artistic instinct to grab the wheel and give it a yank.

 

And Neil Peart, in many ways was that Hemispheres allegory. His drumming was a battle between instinctive passion and meticulous orchestration. His style was full of the flamboyant bombast of the great Keith Moon, tempered by the measured mathematical mastery of Bill Bruford. He put the drumkit at the centre of the arrangements of the band, an integral part of the sound of Rush. He is, I think, both overrated and underrated as a drummer. There are legions of fans who considered him a god who walks among us, yammering on about “the greatest of all time”, which only makes it clear that their music collection must be very shallow. The hyperbole does a disservice to his actual skills, which were great. On the flip side, I think those who hate Rush underrate his playing, focusing on his flashy, attention getting moments and missing some really inventive, powerful and musical choices.

 

As a lyricist, too, he was those warring factions - wild flights of fancy, choosing to write songs about things many others don’t - but with an attention to detail that was so measured and disciplined. (For example, using “In different circles” one time, and “Indifferent circles” the second in a stanza. That is some word nerd stuff...)

 

I have fallen down a youtube wormhole recently of “reaction” videos, watching (usually) young people listen to classic songs for the first time. It is a way to vicariously almost hear some things you know really well for the first time, and their joy of discovery can be totally contagious.

 

I watched an african american guy in his 20s from LA listen to a Rush song called Vital Signs, and I was thinking about how he is so removed by age and culture from the “these guys are gods” crap or the “CanCon has rammed the same 5 songs down my throat for 30 years” stuff.... he was just listening to a song he’d never heard before. And he was totally digging it. And he stopped at a lyric that blew him away to talk about it...and it made me smile because it is an all time favourite of mine.

 

“Leave out the fiction/The fact is this friction/Will only be worn by persistence

Leave out conditions/Courageous convictions/Will drag the dream into existence.”

 

I don’t know if that’s an easy lyric to write...but I know it isn’t an easy one to live by. Courageous convictions are a real thing...and by all accounts, Neil Peart and his band mates had’m. I think of those guys having their label breathing down their necks in ’75, telling them they need to make a commercially viable product...and delivering the bonkers 2112 album because that was the record they wanted to make...Of hitting a mainstream success with Moving Pictures, and then making their next album sound totally different, unwilling to cash in on a “winning formula” ...I think of them being slaughtered by the press...and just not stopping. Doing exactly what they wanted to do as artists. Leaving out the fictions and the conditions...and dragging that dream into existence.

 

And that guy behind that huge drumkit was the driving force for all of that.

 

I am grateful that example of pure, un-compromised artistry came my way at an impressionable age. And these many years after my intense fandom has passed...I am deeply sad that he has now passed, too.

 

“We’re only immortal for a limited time”

 

RIP Neil Peart

[Chicken hawk]

 

[The God of Balance]

2 hours ago, Timbale said:

SNIP

 

I am grateful that example of pure, un-compromised artistry came my way at an impressionable age. And these many years after my intense fandom has passed...I am deeply sad that he has now passed, too.

 

“We’re only immortal for a limited time”

 

RIP Neil Peart

 

Excellent, deftly-crafted post. Thank you for sharing. Appreciating The Guys at Work has served you superbly. Very, very best wishes for a tolerable outcome with your current challenges.

 

I just posted my account of that dark day. Writing it was hard, yet cathartic.

 

Cheers, brother.

[Timbale]

7 minutes ago, The God of Balance said:

 

Excellent, deftly-crafted post. Thank you for sharing. Appreciating The Guys at Work has served you superbly. Very, very best wishes for a tolerable outcome with your current challenges.

 

I just posted my account of that dark day. Writing it was hard, yet cathartic.

 

Cheers, brother.

Many thanks, friend, for your well wishes and your post.

[The God of Balance]

Summer 2004. We learned Rush was playing Red Rocks on my birthday. Gotta see that.

 

Drove from Texas to Colorado the day before the gig on the first extended road/camping trip of our ongoing 24 year dude/lady union. My 10th Rush gig since Permanent Waves 1980.

 

We tent camped in the Indian Peaks Wilderness the night before, my first night at high altitude. We smoked cigs back then, plus tons of the devil's (or Brutus') lettuce, so I was winded at times.

 

Gig day we drove the epic Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain NP, got a room at a hot springs spa thingee in Idaho Springs, then hauled ass to Red Rocks under a tight, worrisome time squeeze. Hopefully I didn't overload the day, for, at that point, I'd attended over 300 gigs starting with Zeppelin, April Fool's Day 1977 at age 9 and had only been late to one (STP, 2000, St. Paul MN, due to a map reading error). 

 

Traffic getting into the venue was bad. Our parking was far away with an uphill slog. We were almost out of time, so we had to hump it hard. Chest burning. Knee, partially blown off due to a hunting accident when I was 12, buckling. Long line to get in. We were not going to make it.

 

Fortunately The Guys were in the habit of delaying lights out when too many fans were still outside the gate. Right when we got in and sprinted to within view of the stage, they cut the lights and the Three Stooges Theme played. Hell yeah!

 

The set and experience were magnificent. But, the latter part of the main set, from 2112 to Working Man, was ludicrous. By-Tor was off the chain. Xanadu was a candidate for the best thing I've ever seen - the pleasure dome > Kahn part is burned in my mind forever, I was in a state of ecstasy. The surprise polka intro > morph into Strangiato was epic. The MVP of the show was one Neil Ellwood Peart.

 

We would see Rush there twice more, plus STP, TOOL twice (again on my birthday - caught Danny's end of show tom head frisbee heave from the front row), Sessanta, Opeth/Gojira/Heavy Devy at that unparalleled venue, but nothing could match the emotion and majesty of my first Red Rocks gig with the rampaging Guys At Work.

 

Rush Concert Setlist at Red Rocks Amphitheatre, Morrison on June 29, 2004 | setlist.fm

[grep]

It was this exact time of the day 5 years ago when I heard the news.

Working from home, and one of my co-workers texted me. "Neil Peart died".

I wrote back, horrified, something like "No f***ing way".

Then I came here, and saw the thread.

My heart sank, and the tears welled up. I don't cry for celebs, but there have been a few. John Ritter, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, and then Neil.

Even now all this time later, the thought of it ...it's just so sad. His parents were still alive...all he'd been through.

May he continue to rest in peace.

[Pags]

Something about the milestone years... 5, 10, etc.. they are tougher to endure.  Not sure why.  I am thinking about his widow and daughter, his close friends and family.  Today just seems like it would be rougher on them.  I wish them peace.

[lerxt1990]

What a bad day that was.  What a premature exit for a great man. Cheers to Neil.

[ozzy85]

On 1/7/2025 at 2:02 PM, grep said:

It was this exact time of the day 5 years ago when I heard the news.

Working from home, and one of my co-workers texted me. "Neil Peart died".

I wrote back, horrified, something like "No f***ing way".

Then I came here, and saw the thread.

My heart sank, and the tears welled up. I don't cry for celebs, but there have been a few. John Ritter, Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, and then Neil.

Even now all this time later, the thought of it ...it's just so sad. His parents were still alive...all he'd been through.

May he continue to rest in peace.

I was coming home from work when I heard the news. I had to stop at the store on the way and had to keep the tears away going  inside. A few people looked at me somewhat  distraught.  I realized I had worn a Rush t-shirt to work that day.

[zepphead]

The news came right out of the blue for me. Like so many others I did not realise that Neil had been so seriously ill. 

 

This sad situation is what prompted me to join TRF. I just felt the need to connect with similar minded Rush fans. In hindsight I wish I had joined long before this.

 

Neil's passing raised so many emotions within me. One I am not particularly proud of was sense of being 'cheated' by the fact that Rush never played any UK/Europe dates in the R40 tour.

I would have so loved to have seen them on one final occasion.

In some ways I don't feel quite so bad having these somewhat selfish feelings after I just read Geddy's comments in a recent interview relating to his views on the short nature of the tour.

He says that in some ways he felt that he had let the UK fans down and would have liked to play some UK dates.

However, Neil was clearly close to the end of his tether with regard to touring so his decision had to be respected, however hard it was for us in the UK to take.

 

Edited Thursday at 10:05 AM by zepphead

[lerxt1990]

 

You have likely all seen this, and maybe will want to watch it again.  Something struck me one time, whilst watching this but was only "listening" to it.  Especially at 7:15 but elsewhere too, listen to Neil laugh.  He laughs a number of times in a way that dispels (as he himself has described) his reputation as a grump or a grouch.

 

As you watch and listen to this gathering you are reminded of his nerdy intelligence, seriousness, but also his sensitivity and humor and love with trusted friends (and this was in front of a camera).

 

But if nothing else please go to 7:15 and listen to him laugh (he actually isn't even on camera at that moment.)

Edited Thursday at 01:53 PM by lerxt1990

[lerxt1990]

3 hours ago, zepphead said:

One I am not particularly proud of was sense of being 'cheated' by the fact that Rush never played any UK/Europe dates in the R40 tour.

I would have so loved to have seen them on one final occasion.

 

 

You I am sure are aware that Geddy shared these feelings in a way enough to cause tension between he and Neil - so if Geddy can forgive himself..  We can all understand that.  I live in a place they always played and took that for granted.