The one band Neil Peart said moved him the most: “They were exciting”
When listening to Rush, it’s hard to imagine that Neil Peart was always thinking about the sentimental side of his art whenever he got behind the drum kit.
Sure, he could pour his soul out into his lyrics, but when someone is able to play that fluidly throughout two hours of a show, there’s no way that they’re thinking about how one lyric is going to hit someone right in the chest in between the mammoth drum rolls he was playing. But even when there weren’t any words in their songs, Peart knew that there was a way to wow his audience through the sheer taste behind every single note he played.
After all, you could feel the passion in his heroes like John Bonham and Keith Moon, so why should his art be any different? ‘La Villa Strangiato’ was never intended to have lyrics, and even though the end result is one of the most difficult Rush songs that they had ever attempted, Peart was always willing to take a chance and make a song that would push him to the brink whenever he played. But somewhere along the line, he seemed to lose the breath in his playing when they went electronic.
There’s nothing wrong with him using more artificial drum machines alongside his usual technique, but when you start relying too much on the click track, the drumming starts to be a little too stiff. This is why Freddie Gruber became a godsend to Peart when he started to reshape his usual method of playing. He still sounded like himself, but after years of being mathematically perfect, hearing him sound a lot more free in his playing was what he had been striving for since hearing his first drum heroes.
Because while many drummers of Peart’s generation would single out Buddy Rich as an influence, he wasn’t looking to be precise every time he played. He wanted to have the best chops that he could, but the importance was working with every member of the band whenever he played. Playing a song should always be like a conversation between players, and Weather Report was a smorgasbord of different soundscapes when they first started playing in the late 1970s.
This was the height of the fusion bands, and while Peart was much more ensconced in prog rock, he could definitely hear what they were trying to do. Aside from having one of the greatest bass players of all time in their roster, hearing an album like Heavy Weather was like watching a bunch of technicians cut loose for a couple of jam sessions, and that’s exactly what Peart wanted to become.
Rush weren’t going to become a fusion band overnight or anything, but compared to every other rock and roll band out at the time, Peart felt that Weather Report was the only one that moved him, saying, “Weather Report’s Heavy Weather I think was one of the best jazz albums in a long time. Usually, just technical virtuosity leaves me completely unmoved, though academically it’s inspiring. But that band just moved me in every way. They were exciting, and proficient musicians. Their songs were really nice to listen to. They were an important band, and had a great influence on my thinking.”
But even if they could put together an entire album of soloing, they didn’t forget about their stage presence, either. Jaco Pastorius was a wild animal whenever he played the bass, and even if he was technically gifted, seeing him throw his bass up in the air and let it hit the ground after one of his outlandish performances was the same kind excitement that you’d expect out of Iggy Pop performing with The Stooges or Jimi Hendrix setting his guitar alight.
Peart may have kept his showmanship solely to his drum solos, but even if Weather Report stood on stools whenever they played, he still would have been in love with what they were doing. Not many bands this proficient end up seeing that much chart success, but Heavy Weather is the kind of album that’s too technically perfect to really poke holes in.
