The drummer Neil Peart called a “constant and continuing influence”
The late Rush member Neil Peart was one of the finest drummers the world has ever seen. Universally hailed as being at the top of the game alongside Led Zeppelin counterpart John Bonham, Peart left behind a myriad of albums with the prog trio that evidences the gravity of his talent.
Notably, Peart fused an eclectic mix of influences to create his dynamic style. Famously, jazz drummer and bandleader Gene Krupa was the one artist he credited with making him want to pick up the sticks and, appropriately, was his favourite of all time. “Gene Krupa was the first rock drummer in very many ways. Without Gene Krupa, there wouldn’t have been a Keith Moon,” he once said of his idol and his impact on the timeline of rock drumming.
Speaking to Zildjian in 2003, Peart further added of the influential drummer: “The first time I remember feeling a desire to play the drums was while watching the movie The Gene Krupa Story, at the age of eleven or twelve.”
As is well known, another man who had what Peart described as a “constant and continuing influence” on him was The Who’s Keith Moon. A frenzied player in the same vein as Gene Krupa, according to Peart, there were so many similarities between his two heroes that he deemed Moon to have been Krupa’s “heir”.
He said: “I think (Gene Krupa’s) rock ‘n’ roll heir was probably Keith Moon. In fact, I see a lot of direct similarities between their playing styles.”
When speaking to drumming legend Mike Portnoy for Rhythm in 2007, it was put to Peart that after his younger peer had played Rush and Who tributes “back to back”, he could see the “surprising similarities” between him and Keith Moon. Portnoy explained that although his opposite number was “incredibly disciplined and calculated” and Moon was “completely reckless and spontaneous”, somehow he could still hear a lot of the latter’s work in the former’s. To Portnoy, this is especially apparent on the 1975 Rush album Fly By Night.
It was then that Peart agreed and labelled Moon a “constant and continuing influence”. He cited the late Who drummer’s phrasing as one key aspect that enraptured him. Neil Peart said: “Yeah. It’s his phrasing for me. It’s a constant and continuing influence. I saw a TV documentary on the making of Who’s Next, and Roger Daltrey was in the studio just bringing up the tracks and talking about how Keith Moon framed the vocals.”
He continued: “It’s so obvious from Tommy and Who’s Next and his mature playing just how sensitive he was to the song. I absolutely still use phrasing ideas from Keith Moon because that was his magic. He seemed to play chaotically, but it wasn’t – it was an intuitive sense of musical phrasing.”
Watch Keith Moon in action below.
