The musician Elton John called “one of the definitive drummers”
No one was ever listening to an Elton John record thinking about the intricate rhythms behind any of his tunes.
John was always trying to make the best melodies he could, and while he needed a proper backbeat to get a song like ‘Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting’ off the ground, it made a lot more sense for him to have the right tune on the piano instead of building a song from a drum machine or anything like that. He knew that the hook was what was going to lead the listener in, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t acknowledge when someone was a master of percussion.
From the first time that he settled on his classic band lineup, Nigel Olsson was already giving John exactly what he wanted behind the kit – Goodbye Yellow Brick Road is a record that lives and dies on the strength of the songs, but if you look at the way that John is playing the piano, it’s a lot more percussive than you realise whenever he kicks off the opening to a song like ‘Bennie and the Jets’.
You have to remember that the piano is a percussion instrument first and foremost, and while John wasn’t the heaviest hitter of the keys by any stretch, he was going to make every single one of his notes count whenever he played – to be a great piano player meant having a great time, and he could adapt his feel to whatever the song needed, whether that meant playing like Ringo Starr or John Bonham whenever the time called for it.
But compared to every other drummer, Neil Peart certainly threw John for a loop when he first heard Rush perform. Peart was a lot more calculated in the way that he played the drums, and while that might get a little bit tiresome for someone who wasn’t as invested in progressive rock, it’s impossible to look at any of the footage from him playing ‘Tom Sawyer’ over the years and not think that he is one of the greatest in his field.
And even when Peart passed away, John couldn’t deny that the world had lost a legend in the percussion world, saying on his radio show, “Right now, we’re going to the most legendary Canadian band of all time, Rush. This is a song called ‘Tom Sawyer’. It’s inspired, obviously, by Mark Twain’s 1876 novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The legendary drummer and lyricist Neil Peart passed away last year, and it was such a tragedy because I think most musicians considered him to be one of the definitive drummers.”
On the surface, it looks like the Canadian power trio are miles away from John’s brand of glam-coated pop music, but if you look at the way that both he and Peart approached their craft, it’s easy to see how well they overlap. Both he and Peart constructed parts that needed to be played correctly every single time to sound like the song, and just like the beginning of ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down On Me’ is decently iconic at this point, so too are the massive drum hits that kick off a song like ‘Limelight’.
And considering that Peart also managed to write some of the greatest lyrics for the band, he was both John and Bernie Taupin all rolled up into one. You didn’t necessarily want to hear him sing or play guitar by any stretch, but when he first wrote down a lyric, it wasn’t that hard to see what the song needed once Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson got their hands on it after the fact.
So while there aren’t too many Rush fans that are going to be singing along to every single Elton John track ever made, John could at least see what the Canadian icons brought to the table throughout their career. Most people would have tapped out after one too many epics on their albums, but what Peart was doing brought an intellectual edge to every one of Rush’s best records, all while sounding like an absolute madman.
