The band Neil Peart called “the first” prog rock group
The prog rock movement that birthed bands like Rush don’t happen overnight.
There had always been bands willing to push the envelope whenever they made music, and even as far back as The Beatles, there were artists that dared to try a new approach to recording and invited their audiences along for the ride. Although Neil Peart had a much more clinical approach to his instrument than any drummer in history, he knew the tides were turning for rock when he was learning his first chops.
Because as soon as the 1960s came to an end, the rock scene looked completely different than it did a decade prior. The Fab Four had a lot to do with that by turning the studio into an instrument, but the germinations of the first prog bands were beginning around this time as well. Pink Floyd was cutting their first record and King Crimson had released In the Court of the Crimson King at the end of the decade, but before then, most hard rock acts were going back to the blues.
And it’s not like there’s anything wrong with that, either. If The Rolling Stones and AC/DC have taught us anything, it’s that basing a career off of the blues was bound to be a good marketing move, but there comes a point where everyone would get bored playing the same 12 bars, and by the time that Eric Clapton left The Yardbirds, his time as a free agent led to the greatest supergroups ever created.
While Clapton didn’t anticipate flip-flopping between different groups in such a short time, most hard rock fans should consider themselves lucky for getting Cream for a few years. Clapton was already dubbed a god at this point, but if you look at his bandmates, Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker could have been honourary deities on their instruments as well.
Despite Clapton being a connoisseur of all types of blues, Bruce and Baker were the ones sprinkling in new sounds to their songs. They could have easily kept playing tunes like ‘I’m So Glad’, but looking at their track record, Baker’s best moments came from him copying the biggest names in jazz, even throwing in a bolero beat at the top of ‘White Room’ to bring some drama to the track.
Peart was keen to explore a lot more genres before he was through, but he knew that Cream should be considered ground zero for prog, saying, “Cream absolutely might be called the first Progressive band. They were breaking out of the chains of pop. Ginger Baker’s most notable achievement that should be recognised is the first rock drum solo. Me as a 15 year-old kid at the time, I was ‘yeah, yeah. That’s the rock drummer I wanna be.’”
And with no disrespect meant to Baker, Peart took the drums to heights that no one else could have imagined. Both of them may have admired the great jazz drummers of days gone by, but the kind of stamina that Peart had whenever he played, whether that was the insanely fast groove on ‘Tom Sawyer’ or even when the band did their own version of Creams’ ‘Crossroads’ in the 2000s.
Peart would have never said that he was anywhere close to Baker’s league of drummers, but considering how quickly Rush progressed in the 1970s, they almost felt like the natural extension of what a band like Cream were supposed to be doing. Cream had covered jazz, blues, hard rock, and anything in between, but if there’s one thing that they passed down to their Canadian students, it was that there was no such thing as a genre that didn’t suit their music.
