The 1981 song Neil Peart said was made by accident: “Absolutely a mistake”
It’s almost unthinkable to look at Neil Peart playing drums and thinking that he could have improved in any way.
He was the gold standard for what any kind of rock and roll drummer was supposed to be, and even if Rush wasn’t to everyone’s taste when they were in their prime, no one could deny that Peart could put nearly any other drummer to shame every single time he played. But there was always room to improve in Peart’s mind, even if it meant trying to cover up those few songs that had a few blemishes in between them
When you look through their albums, though, there’s hardly a note that seems out of place at all. Any number of their records were always about making the most extravagant version of themselves that they could during the 1970s, and while Peart added some of the craziest extensions that anyone had added to a drum set, he wouldn’t rest until he hit every single one of them at least once during a gig.
Any band would love the idea of having that kind of god-like drummer, but Peart could always feel when he was getting stiff. Nothing felt right whenever he was working on some of his later drum parts, and working with Freddie Gruber was the perfect way for him to finetune what he was doing. No one would have noticed the difference if he had heard him play, but when the rest of the band was playing with him, they could definitely feel a different pulse beating every time they played.
But no one was going to complain if songs like ‘Limelight’ and ‘Subdivisions’ ended up sounding the same when they heard them in concert. For all of the crazy fills that Peart already put into his tunes, he wasn’t going to play some random jazz break during one of their tunes for the hell of it. He needed a bit more structure to what he was doing, but on an album that was pivotal for them as Moving Pictures, Peart admitted that there were pieces that he felt needed to be fixed behind the scenes.
And yes, we are talking about the band’s best-known song here as well. Even though ‘Tom Sawyer’ features the drum break to end all drum breaks and one of the fastest resting tempos that Peart ever played, there was a lot more going into it than just keeping time. He had a sketch for what he wanted the song to be when they got started, but it was through sheer luck that he was able to get through the entire take without flubbing one of the accents.
Everything else seems very orchestrated, but Peart said that the whole reason the song has that energy is because of how much tension he had going into the tune, saying, “The drum is so detailed, but when we go into the middle to the odd time part, it was improvised. I got lost and I punched my way out of it and somehow came back to the one. And that improvisation became a new part…. It’s one of those key parts that I love and it was absolutely a mistake that I just got lucky and got out of.”
But if this is what a drum god sounds like when he’s making a mistake, what the hell was the song going to sound like if it were played properly? The whole tune does have a lot of moments that are already difficult to figure out, but only someone with the kind of finesse that Peart had would have been able to make something this epic and be able to improvise on the fly whenever things went off the rails.
Rush’s music always seemed like it was on the verge of chaos half the time they were playing, but even if Peart did have a few flubs behind the scenes, the fact that he could get out of this so quickly is what made him a true legend. Because while the song is already a marathon for any drummer to take on, those little nuances are what made ‘Tom Sawyer’ one of Peart’s favourite songs to play live. It was always a struggle, but it was that much more rewarding when he got it right.
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