Neil Peart never enjoyed playing like Keith Moon: “That was the important lesson”
Half of the songs Neil Peart played were all about being a student of percussion.
A lot of people might not have been able to process every single thing that went on whenever they put on a Rush record, but there was no doubt that Peart studied under some of the greatest prog drummers that ever walked the Earth and applied their lessons to his playing. Even without playing any melodies, Peart was the lead instrument in the band half the time, but that didn’t mean that he catered to every other wild man that came before him whenever he stepped behind the kit.
Throughout Rush’s career, there was never a moment when anything sounded chaotic whenever ‘The Professor’ was at work. It was new and exciting listening to someone like John Bonham go wild across ‘Moby Dick’ back in the day, but there was a certain structure to every single one of Rush’s songs where Peart arranged everything in just the right way against Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson.
Then again, he wasn’t the only one making new and exciting drum parts, either. The prog rock explosion had started happening a few years before, and when listening to how someone like Phil Collins played for Genesis or Bill Bruford’s relentless grooves on some Yes records, Peart was only trying to make something that would put him in the same league as those rhythmic heroes.
But the language was still rock and roll, and there’s no one on this Earth who wouldn’t have taken a page out of Keith Moon’s playbook when approaching the drums. The Who may have been helmed by Pete Townshend, but ‘Moon the Loon’ was the beating heart of the band in many respects, even down to the massive fills that he would throw into the middle of ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ or the weight that he brought to ‘Love Reign O’er Me’.
And that magic wasn’t lost on Peart, either. Every member of Rush would have said that The Who was one of the reasons that they wanted to play loud, and Peart openly admitted to being the world’s biggest Who fan when he was a kid, but when it came time for him to start learning a lot of Moony’s parts, he started to realise that he wasn’t as thrilled with playing that chaotically every single night.
It was impressive, to say the least, but Peart always needed a bit more structure when it came to his songs, saying, “When I first got into cover bands that played Who songs, I discovered I didn’t like playing like Keith Moon. That was the important lesson that I learned, and I preferred a more compositional and organized…just as your playing should be a reflection of your nature, so mine is. The more technique, understanding and experience I gather, it allows me better to express what I find exciting in drumming.”
That didn’t mean that the band couldn’t still find time to throw in a few Who songs into their covers EP, Feedback. This was their excuse to have some fun, but even when they take a stab at a song like ‘The Seeker’, you can tell that Peart is coming from a far more structured place when he starts playing, always very meticulous in getting every one of Moon’s fills exactly right whenever he plays.
It’s not necessarily a bad way to go about playing, but it also speaks to the two schools of thought when it comes to rock and roll drumming. You can either be the wild man like Moon that can fly off the handle whenever the time calls for it, or you can spend time like Peart, always thoroughly dissecting every single layer of percussion until the song is absolutely perfect.
