The drummer Neil Peart wanted everyone to love: “A truly gifted man”
For all of the great music Rush made, Neil Peart always knew that they were going to be a niche kind of band.
Even though they had one of the biggest cult fanbases of all time, there’s a good chance that a lot of people would have been irritated hearing Geddy Lee’s voice or just straight up confused when they heard songs that went on for nine minutes at a time with massively complex sections. But when it came to the greatest drummers that Peart studied, he knew that there were a few that were among the most beloved that he had ever seen behind the kit.
But there’s no reason to think that Peart wasn’t up there with the greatest artists of all time. His lyricism was certainly interesting for the time, talking about science fiction and more cerebral concepts when it came to love and human connection, but anyone who has ever picked up a drumstick knows that Peart is one of the strongest drummers in rock. Even if they don’t care for Rush as a whole, most people at least know to pay their respects to him.
When Peart was first studying drumming, a lot of his biggest teachers weren’t just from the rock and roll world. Keith Moon and Phil Collins certainly did amazing things and showed him the ropes when it came to how to play in a rock and roll outfit, but there were also more than a few technicians from the jazz world who shaped Peart’s mind. It wasn’t easy to master a Buddy Rich groove, but Peart was going to put in the hours if it meant learning everything perfectly.
So when the fusion genre started to gain traction in the late 1970s, Peart fell in love with what he was hearing. This was the genre where everyone finally felt free to play to their heart’s content whenever they performed, and while Weather Report had one of the greatest bassists of all time in Jaco Pastorius, Dave Tough was the kind of jazz drummer that Peart always came back to as one of the most tasteful he had ever heard.
Tough came from the era when people like Gene Krupa were becoming the most famous drum virtuosos the world had ever seen, but Tough always seemed to be slightly under the radar. He was still making some of the greatest drumming workouts that the world had ever seen, but even if he didn’t have the same kind of confidence as his bandmates, Peart felt that what he did for the instrument as a whole was beyond what anyone could have done.
There are certainly more high-profile drummers, but Peart felt that there wasn’t a single person who could have disliked Tough, saying, “With Gene, I would have asked about Dave Tough – to me, somehow the most intriguing of the old-time drummers, and a contemporary and fellow Chicagoan of Gene’s. If you judge a person by how much he was loved, though, then Dave Tough was a truly gifted man. But like some other gifted-but-conflicted drummers, like Dennis Wilson and Keith Moon, perhaps he just didn’t know how much he was loved or felt unworthy of it. Sad, but it happens.”
But if you look at how Peart carried himself during his lifetime, a lot of his playing was a love letter to the kinds of drummers that got him started. That involved more than a few tributes to Rich’s playing, getting the same kind of feel that Freddie Gruber had taught him, and even on the rare occasion, throwing a little bit of Tough’s style into his drum solos whenever he had the chance.
Peart was always going to be considered one of the best in his field, but the one thing that he could do with his star power was make sure that some of his favourite artists weren’t forgotten about. Tough deserved to be as respected as anyone else in his field, and if Peart could help him by namechecking him in interviews, that was the best that he could have hoped to do to bring some recognition to his favourite tasteful players.
