The one musician Neil Peart thought “the world needed”
Neil Peart knew Rush was never going to be a band that reached the mainstream.
They earned their stripes as one of the most popular cult bands in existence, and even if they didn’t have the massive chart hits, it didn’t matter so long as their fans were along for the ride. But the drumming professor knew that he wouldn’t have had a shot if other legends hadn’t opened the door for people to get a little bit weird.
For the longest time, any type of weirdness on the charts was either novelty songs or simply didn’t exist. The pop charts always wanted something with a widespread appeal, so if anyone came in with a song in a left-of-field time signature, told a convoluted story, or lasted longer than three minutes, there wasn’t a chance for it to become a mainstream hit. That is, until the 1960s came along.
Rock and roll was a relatively new concept on the charts, but bands like The Beatles didn’t always want to make the same song whenever they performed. They needed variety, and everything from ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ to ‘I Am the Walrus’ served up a new adventure for people to hear when it reached the hit parade. Then again, that’s still a long way off from anything Rush would do.
The Canadian icons had been known for extravagant songs that went on well past ten minutes, so how the hell was anyone supposed to get on board with that? There had been bands like the Grateful Dead who tried to set up a mood, but the likes of Yes and Genesis were bound to be dead in the water had Frank Zappa not come first.
But, really, Zappa seemed to be the furthest thing from traditional rock and roll. He would have gladly accepted the compliment of his music progressing the genre forward in many respects, but when releasing an album like Freak Out in 1966, he single-handedly made it alright for artists to think outside the box. No one would have dared to release a massive double album full of everything from comedic tunes to massive jams, but Peart felt what Zappa was doing was necessary for the genre to thrive.
Any genre of music is always doomed to become stale, and Peart felt a profound weight when he passed away after writing the song ‘Afterimage’, saying, “The death of Frank Zappa was sad to me because the world needed people like Frank Zappa. He had so much knowledge, but he’s not long for this world, and all that knowledge is going to be lost. That’s the tragedy. When some people go, I feel that kind of wrench.”
It’s not like Peart is wrong about his vast knowledge of music, either. The man was truly a one-off that threw caution to the wind every single time he went into the studio, and had he not passed away in the 1990s, chances are he would have still been making strange genre experiments that felt like the exact opposite of what a mainstream hit was supposed to sound like.
Although most of the mainstream may have seen Zappa as being a thorn in the side of the music industry, it’s not like he made the business a worse place to be in by any means. He wanted to show people what one musical mind could do, and as long as he had the right idea behind him, he helped show everyone listening that there didn’t have to be rules in rock and roll. All you needed to do was pick up your instrument, figure out a few mechanics of it, and then express yourself however you wanted to.
