The drummer Neil Peart said changed rock forever: “There was no archetype”
A lot of budding drummers often make the mistake of thinking that they need to be busy in their playing style in order to garner praise and attention, but not everyone has the raw talent that the likes of Neil Peart possess.
Armed with a gigantic rack of toms and an even more mouthwatering selection of cymbals, the Rush drummer was known for his extravagant playing style, and there was rarely a dull moment when it came to the rhythmic aspect of the band, with Geddy Lee providing an equally extraordinary bass accompaniment.
With Alex Lifeson also delivering virtuosic performances on guitar, you can hardly say that Rush didn’t pull out all the stops when it came to composition, but this is only really something that the most advanced songwriters and musicians can manage. There’s little to no point in trying to add in whistles and bells unless you’re adept enough to make all of these complex features coalesce well with one another, but Rush were masters of this.
However, for Peart, it was a case of wishing to emulate some of his favourite drummers who he grew up idolising, and given how he was an impressionable youngster during the 1960s when the advent of rock music as we know it began to take the world by storm, there were plenty who he could look up to as a guiding light on how to play drums with flair and precision.
Of course, being part of a trio means that there’s a greater deal of responsibility placed upon you to fill the extra space that would otherwise be occupied by another musician, and so when considering his own approach to playing in Rush, he turned towards other drummers known for having played in trios as his main source of inspiration.
One such drummer who he considered to be among the greatest of all time, and who totally reinvented the rulebook when it came to rock drumming, was Ginger Baker, who, alongside the equally peerless Eric Clapton and Jack Bruce in Cream, was an emphatic force from behind the kit. With a jazz-informed style and the sort of attitude that rendered little impossible to him, Baker was the exact representation of what Peart wanted to achieve as a drummer.
Speaking in the 2012 documentary, Beware of Mister Baker, Peart argued that before Baker, there was nobody of his kind, and that there hasn’t really been anyone else like him since. “He was really at the forefront of a complete revolution of rock,” Peart proclaimed. “It is hard to find fault with the notion he was the pioneer of a rock drummer. There was no context for him, there was no archetype.”
It’s not just Peart who was a fan of Baker’s work, as both of his Rush bandmates also argued that he was one of the greatest musicians to walk the earth, and in their early days as a group, they performed a number of Cream covers in a show of appreciation for rock music’s preeminent power trio.
Peart continued to dole out the praise for Baker, claiming that he was the one responsible for performing the first-ever rock drum solo. “Me as a 15-year-old kid at the time was, ‘Yeah, yeah – that’s the rock drummer I want to be!’”, he recalled. Arguably, that’s exactly the rock drummer he became, and it’s all thanks to Baker’s influence.
