The one drummer Neil Peart said was out of his league: “Too far out of reach”
There’s never any sense in trying to reach the same level as Neil Peart behind the drum kit.
As much as he might have been the perfect player in Rush, there’s something unique about his sense of feeling that’s nearly impossible for anyone to copy, even if they’ve been practising off and on for the better part of 30 years. But when looking at Peart’s own track record, there were even a handful of artists that could put him to shame every now and again.
At the same time, Peart never saw music in terms of competition all the time. He liked the idea of being good at his instrument whenever he played, but there was also a sense of accomplishment that came with him doing justice to a Keith Moon drum fill or putting the same power into his playing that you would see in someone like John Bonham. But that kind of music doesn’t happen just by happenstance, either.
While some people like to think that rock and roll drumming sounded like Ringo Starr and Charlie Watts before getting heavy, there was a much clearer evolution. Starr had taken to beating the life out of his cymbals all the way through songs like ‘Helter Skelter’, and when that blossomed into listening to people like Mitch Mitchell and Ginger Baker, the percussionist suddenly became one of the most important people in the band, right behind the lead guitarist.
But the one thing that connected all those technicians was that they all came from the same school of thinking: jazz. Baker never considered himself a traditional rock and roll drummer, and despite Watts being the most goddamn straight-ahead drummer that fit in perfectly with The Stones, he had a strong appreciation for all of the jazz greats before he even decided to join Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
So if Peart wanted to get really good at his instrument, he was going to need a bit more grit to get him over the line. And while the likes of Gene Krupa may have been what ignited Peart’s interest in the drums, Buddy Rich was demonstrating how much someone could assault the drum kit within the span of a few seconds. Compared to the other jazz greats, he was playing the kind of drums that seemed ripped out of a metal song, and Peart was definitely taking notice.
Although Peart did plenty of tributes to Rich throughout his career, he remembered being convinced that he was never going to reach that point when he first saw him on television, saying, “In those same years, I would often see Buddy Rich play on television, on the Tonight show, but I would just shake my head-he seemed too far out of reach. As Gene said about Buddy, ‘There are all the great drummers in the world-and then there’s Buddy.’ It would be a long time before I even began to understand what I was seeing and hearing when Buddy played, but eventually I would know as well as anyone why he was so revered.”
If he couldn’t get anywhere close to that, though, he was at least going to find a way to get good enough to stand a notch below them. Listening to a song like ‘La Villa Strangiato’, the kind of playing that he does on that song would be enough to fill any other drummer with dread, but when listening to the swing that he puts into some of the middle section, it’s not all that different from listening to what Rich used to do back in the pre-rock and roll days.
Although Peart relied on power a lot when working on his best moves, Rich was out there to teach every single drummer a valuable lesson. Many people have tried to make the most technical music they can, but it doesn’t have the pocket and the life in it; it’s not going to mean a damn thing.
