The drummer Neil Peart was scared to work with: “Can I really do this?”
There’s probably no other drummer in the world as fearless as Neil Peart. Though he tended to be fairly introverted whenever it came time to receive accolades, the amount of artistic flair he put behind the kit in Rush is still unparalleled to this day, including some of the most tendonitis-inducing fills that anyone would have ever attempted. Every drummer can improve, though, and Peart admitted that he was almost too intimidated when working with Freddie Gruber in the late 1980s.
By that point, if Peart never wanted to take another drum lesson for the rest of his life, that probably would have been fine. The Canadian icons were already working just fine in their synthesiser phase, and no one said that Peart needed to stop going down the same road.
Behind the scenes, though, Peart was getting a little bit touchy about his drumming, telling Beyond the Lighted Stage, “I started to get conflicted about my own drumming at that point. I’d been working so much with sequencers and click tracks for so many years, and I had developed a certain precision of time, but I felt a certain stiffness because of that.”
After playing for a tribute to jazz legend Buddy Rich, Peart ran into Gruber and thought that it would be a good idea for him to rethink his approach to drumming. There wasn’t anything wrong with what he was doing, but he thought that there was a lot more humanity that could be put into his performance rather than just playing everything exactly like it was supposed to go.
It wasn’t an easy decision to make, with Peart even saying, “I had time, so I thought, ‘Yeah, I’m gonna try this’. Not to make it sound easy because when I studied with Freddie, I asked myself, ‘Can I really do this? Will I have the discipline?'”. Just like most things related to drums, Peart gravitated to it like a fish in water.
Compared to the concept of playing the drums exactly on the beat, Gruber helped put the breath back into his playing. There are certainly elements of Peart’s drumming that were always going to sound like him, but that jazzy element made him pay attention more to the spaces in between the beat rather than just when the next hit was coming.
Although Peart was initially disappointed when he heard his bandmates say they didn’t think anything changed, it was like night and day once they started playing together. Peart was a new drummer now, and the back half of Rush’s career was when they started to really flex their muscles a little bit more.
Listening back to everything from ‘Driven’ from Test for Echo to ‘Far Cry’ from Snakes and Arrows, Peart has just as much attention on where he’s placing his massive drum hits, almost approaching it in the same way that someone like Buddy Rich might have if he had cared at all for rock and roll.
The choice to do anything after conquering the prog-rock world was noble enough, but Peart figured that once you became the best drummer in the world, it was time to learn how to reach beyond and somehow become even better.
