The one drum solo Neil Peart thought was too hard to play: “I felt so stilted”
There are hardly any drummers in the world who could manage to match what Neil Peart was doing.
Even though he never claimed to get into the industry to earn trophies by any stretch, the kind of performances that he gave when he was in Rush are still well beyond anything that even a virtuoso would dare to try. Every other tune he worked on was practically a litmus test for what a great rock and roll drummer was supposed to be capable of, so to have something that was out of his range was well beyond rational thinking, right?
Well, it’s not like Peart ever wanted to be known as the best drummer in the world. Any kind of attention like that embarrassed him, and he would gladly have given that distinction to some of his fellow rock drummers. But if you wanted to be a true virtuoso, it was always through going back to the early days of the biggest names in jazz. Buddy Rich was a God-like genius as far as Peart could tell, but Max Roach wasn’t too far behind when he started to hear some of his drum solos.
When you think about traditional drum solos, Roach was a lot more rooted in what Peart was going for. Other drummers would have taken the time to show off or go on for God knows how many bars and create as much chaos before the band comes in behind them, but when you listen to Roach’s playing, there’s a certain formula to what he was doing. He was still trying to make the greatest music that he could, even when he was featured, and ‘Drum Also Waltzes’ turned Peart’s mind inside out when he heard it.
It wasn’t anything out of the ordinary for a traditional jazz musician, but Peart felt that whatever he was doing was beyond him when he first heard it, saying, “I’ve had a huge breakthrough with the ‘Drum Also Waltzes’ recently, which I use in my solo and in my warm-up routine. It’s basically a 3/4 pattern with my feet. It comes from a famous drum solo by Max Roach but I saw Bill Bruford do it years ago and Steve Smith uses it, too. Waltz time is so difficult to do anything else on top of and at first I felt so stilted by it, but I kept working at it.”
That sounds strange coming from the same guy that made ‘La Villa Strangiato’, but it wasn’t out of the question for him to have a few slip ups here and there. A lot of Rush’s more complicated songs could only come from them working those riffs out slowly over time, and even if they had a lot of miles under their belt, being able to play what Roach was doing with that much fluidity is the kind of thing that Peart always strived for.
The same could be said about the drummers he mentioned. Steve Smith is one of the great drumming technicians in the fusion world, and while that kind of drumming might come a little more naturally to him whenever he performs, Peart needed to get more than a little bit of an education after first getting interested in drums by listening to the reckless abandon of someone like Keith Moon.
But if you look at some of Rush’s greatest instrumentals, they have taken a few bits from the fusion world as well. If we can go back to ‘La Villa Strangiato’ for a second, the middle riff of the song feels like a traditional swing line that wouldn’t have felt out of place if it was played by a big band rather than three lanky dudes that thought wearing kimonos onstage was the high end of fashion at the time.
Peart needed to go through his paces before he was ready to learn that, but that just goes to show that even the gods had to start somewhere. Half of them needed to work themselves up to become legends whenever they played, and it wasn’t hard to see where they got all their chops from if you were willing to do your homework on them.
