The one album Neil Peart called a drumming masterpiece: “That record is sublime”
It was going to take a lot of drumming finesse for a song to get the attention of Neil Peart.
He wasn’t the kind of drummer who was into laying down a groove and letting the rest of the band build their songs around him, and when he joined Rush, he wanted to have the kind of chops that made every single drummer look in slack-jawed amazement whenever he was finished a song. But even if he wasn’t in it for the glory, he could appreciate when someone came up with the perfect fills to serve every single song they made.
I know this will shock you, but Peart did understand the meaning of the word ‘subtle’ whenever he worked on Rush’s greatest works. He understood when some songs simply didn’t need drums at all, like on ‘Rivendell’ or even ‘Resist’ from later in their career, but the lion’s share of their best work often came from when they were playing some of the most complex music that they could on albums like Hemispheres.
Not everyone was going to understand what they were doing, but Peart wasn’t trying to dumb things down for his audience. He figured that anyone could have figured out how this music worked if they tried hard enough, and since he had to do his own learning when working on his John Bonham chops, it wasn’t that hard for prog audiences to do the same thing when counting along to odd time signatures on every one of their records.
But nothing could get better than a drummer who got their point across with sheer power like Keith Moon. He wasn’t necessarily the kind of drummer that Ginger Baker was when Cream first started, but The Who practically had a madman trapped at the back of the stage whenever Moon played a show. He was like a tornado of drum heads and cymbals every time he played, but even on an album as carefully constructed as Tommy, Moon knew how to rein things in when he needed to.
And while not every song on the rock opera has a blistering drum performance, Peart had no problem calling it one of the best drumming albums he had ever heard, saying, “I went back and listened to some of the best of Keith Moon’s playing. In listening to him on the Tommy album, well, I was full of admiration. Keith’s playing on that record is sublime. The same with Who’s Next. But Tommy, to me, is such a masterpiece of drumming. It shows how smooth and flowing Keith’s insanity could be.”
That ‘insanity’ remark sounds like a joke, but you have to understand the kind of drummer you’re dealing with here. Moon always played the same way that he acted whenever he got offstage, and since he was practically somewhere between a stand-up comic and a raving lunatic whenever he tore apart hotel rooms, he was always bringing that same energy behind his drum fills.
But, strangely enough, there’s never any point where someone would think that what he’s playing is too busy by any stretch. Moon was always choosing his hits carefully whenever he played, and when you listen to that drum solo that leads into Roger Daltrey’s scream on ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’, it sounds like it shouldn’t work, but somehow it managed to sound perfect every single time he played it.
His antics might have been more than a handful when The Who were touring the world, but the fact that Moon was able to appear ready for almost any show he played was the real miracle. Peart didn’t have to respect every single thing that he played by any stretch, but after poring over all of their records, he had to admit that Moon was one-of-a-kind, that would never be seen again.
