The song Neil Peart never played the same again: “Less arranged and more improvised”
The entire world of virtuoso drumming could pretty much be renamed ‘drumming derivative of Neil Peart’.
Although Peart was the last person to claim that he was the greatest drummer in the world, he certainly applied himself to learn all of his favourite fills from people like Buddy Guy and Gene Krupa and channel them into any Rush song that he felt needed that extra punch. But even with all of the complex songs that he could remember back in the day, there were pieces that were never meant to be played absolutely perfect all the way through.
Hell, even if someone tried to learn the “easy” songs that Peart played, chances are they would still have a hard time getting their head around everything. ‘Working Man’ may have been a more approachable drum part when John Rutsey was still in the band, but having to learn the advanced time signatures that Peart was working with, all while making the whole thing flow so well, would have looked borderline impossible for anyone not named Bill Bruford or Phil Collins back in the day.
The prog rock world was his oyster back in the day, but anyone who hits the ceiling is always going to have that one lingering fear in the back of their mind: if you’re at the top, where do you go next? It’s not an easy question, but when Peart began working with Freddie Gruber, he started to rethink his entire approach to drumming every single time he sat behind the kit. It was the same drummer at work on every song, but there was a lot more life behind what he played.
Which meant that the drum solos were also bound to get a lot more interesting. There are plenty of moments scattered throughout Rush’s discography where Peart seems to have the same thunder that Keith Moon did in his prime, but it was a lot more mathematical in its approach. Peart had no tolerance for playing outlandish solos when he could easily construct a solo from the ground up, but the more he thought about it, he came around to the idea of working on stretching himself some more.
There was no rule that said that he had to play everything right on the money, and by the time that he got on the road for Snakes and Arrows, he wanted to have the chance to work on new material. And while ‘De Slagwerker’ was still a fully fleshed-out piece of percussion every single time he performed, the beauty of the song was that Peart had the ability to switch things up on a dime and play the kind of fills that he didn’t get a chance to play all the time.
Whereas most other Rush songs have a clear flow to them, Peart felt the beauty of his solo was that he didn’t know what he was going to do next, saying, “Every time I played ‘De Slagwerker’ on Snakes And Arrows Live, I dared myself to make the solo less arranged and more improvised. Thus it continued to change and develop through more than a hundred shows, based on the same overall structure, but never even close to the same twice.”
If anything, that kind of playing actually puts him more in the Deep Purple area than anything else. While Purple were among the finest rock and roll bands to come out of England when Peart was learning drums, their habit of going onstage not knowing what was going to come off that stage was half of the fun when they first began tearing through half of what turned up on albums like Made in Japan.
It was never going to be as iconic as the drum fill in the middle of ‘Tom Sawyer’ or those intense moments in the middle of ‘La Villa Strangiato’, but when someone sets that high a benchmark for themselves, it’s a breath of fresh air for them to work on improvised material. A lot of what Rush played could get pretty calculated, so knowing that Peart could still wow people even when he was playing off the cuff was one of the most impressive feats he could have done at this stage.
