“A complete challenge”: The one drum performance Neil Peart called perfect
There are countless Rush songs where Neil Peart seems to put on a drum clinic from the minute he lays down the beat.
He may not have been the original drummer of the band, but he all but secured a spot for himself in drumming Valhalla the minute that he first debuted with the band on Fly By Night. But when listening to his entire body of work, Peart always thought that there were some songs that did a much better job at articulating what he was trying to do than others.
But when you look at the greatest Rush songs ever made, there doesn’t seem to be a unique time when they overtly “sold out”. Sure, there are peaks and valleys and a handful of songs that are a lot more interested in toying with what the sounds of the time could be. Say what you will about the way the band tried to change with the times in the 1980s, but for all of the ill-advised haircuts and outfits, albums like Grace Under Pressure are still masterpieces, even if you take out some of the more dated settings on the Casio.
Then again, the beauty of a band like Rush is that they have never managed to have a moment where they tried to cash in. All of their songs usually came from a place of love whenever they started working on them, and even if some of them weren’t exactly the most simple singalongs in the world, it was a lot easier for people to be entertained by the pure craftsmanship behind songs like ‘The Spirit of Radio’ of all nine face-melting minutes of ‘La Villa Strangiato’ at the end of Hemispheres.
And for someone who relied on being perfect on nearly every single song, Peart wasn’t going to sidestep any of the more challenging pieces of his catalogue. It takes any other drummer every ounce of strength in their body to get through an average Rush song, but even when they started making some of their biggest hits, they didn’t forget about their progressive side once they reached the studio.
‘Limelight’ is still one of their crowning achievements both melodically and lyrically, and yet when listening to the tune, there are more than a few times where it goes through different time signature changes or throws in some random bars of 3/4 into the mix just for a laugh. The songs were still catchy, but Peart felt that ‘Tom Sawyer’ is one of the few songs that doesn’t deserve to be messed with again.
He was completely fine with being a bit more elastic on a few songs, but there was no reason to mess with a song that was this perfect, saying, “Our song ‘Tom Sawyer’ is a perfect example of a song that is a complete challenge for me to play years after the record came out, because it’s difficult physically and mentally. So to me, there’s no sense messing with it. I’m just trying to make it as accurate and as musical as possible. But there are other songs that do get tired or we become disenchanted with, so we certainly change them.”
And when you’ve made a record like that, there’s no sense in trying to outdo what was already there. The drum solo in the middle of the song is practically a signature piece of Rush’s catalogue, and even when Peart isn’t showboating throughout that part of the song, he’s still playing as fast as he possibly can on the hi-hat whenever he goes through the verse sections.
Any other drummer would have wanted to throw in the towel after going through that kind of thing, but whenever Peart played, you don’t see someone that’s sweating it all that much. He knew that he put in the work, and he was always laser-focused whenever the time came to hit every single note perfectly once he kicked off the song.
