The 1950s singer Neil Peart called cooler than everyone else: “The epitome”
Neil Peart was never one to think about what was popular when composing music for Rush.
His entire motivation was to challenge himself every time he went into the studio, and even if they weren’t too far away from the mainstream at any given time, they were happy to be thought of more as a cult band than a band that followed trends everywhere they went. Peart figured that it was better for them to have their own say in what they made, but that didn’t mean that they couldn’t be inspired by whatever was happening.
During their peak years, they were still young enough to be inspired by what their favourite bands were doing, and since The Police and Ultravox were quickly turning into the biggest names in music, Peart had no problem trying out reggae rhythms on ‘The Spirit of Radio’ or making songs that had straight-ahead choruses. But the one make-or-break piece of the musical puzzle every time they played usually came down to Geddy Lee’s voice.
Everyone and their mother has had more than a few things to say about the way that Lee sings every time a Rush record came out, but it was never overdone to the point where it hurt the song. The band were always working on woodshedding the songs until they were as perfect as they could be, but they knew that Lee was going to be the kind of person who could shatter everyone’s illusions of what a good lead singer was supposed to sound like.
Then again, it’s not that Peart was actively trying to make music that tested what Lee could do. He knew that he had the kind of range back in the day that could go toe-to-toe with Robert Plant, and even though Led Zeppelin were a big deal for them in their salad days, Peart wasn’t afraid to test the waters and start talking about the kind of pop singers that existed well before rock and roll became a thing.
Every rock vocalist usually comes to a point where they want to copy Little Richard, but Peart was much happier listening to the softer sounds of jazz music. Robert Plant and Mick Jagger were practically synonyms for cool during rock’s first major explosion, but Peart felt that he could drift away for as long as he wanted whenever he heard Frank Sinatra singing his favourite ballads.
Sinatra already had one of the greatest songbooks to choose from every time he made a record, but Peart felt that no other singer had the same sense of cool that he did, saying, “Sinatra in Paris must be his finest live recording. All the classic songwriters are represented: Cole Porter, the Gershwins, Cahn and Van Heusen, Rogers and Hart, Johnny Mercer, and on and on. For most of his life, Frank Sinatra was the living epitome of ‘cool’, and he even died cool, buried with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a pack of Camels, a Zippo lighter, and ten dimes.”
And while Rush was always deemed terminally unhip by most of the rock and roll gatekeepers of the world, they had their own sense of cool whenever they made their records. They weren’t afraid to get weird with every single song they made, and the fact that they stood up to their record company when making 2112 and still managed to walk away with one of the best albums of their career is almost punk rock in how cool it is.
So while Sinatra was a far different singer than Lee was, Peart saw someone who stuck to his principles just like he did whenever ‘Ol’ Blue Eyes’. He didn’t take shit from anyone whenever he sang, and Peart was going to do the same whenever someone tried to question where Rush was going at any particular time.
