“I got lost”: The Rush song Neil Peart said contains a massive mistake
There are hardly any rock and roll drummers who can even manage to understand what Neil Peart was capable of.
Other prog drummers may have had the muscle and the precision that anyone else would kill for, but watching Peart play with Rush is like watching a superpowered version of John Bonham, especially when he carefully calculated each part of his drum solo to sound absolutely perfect whenever he performed. Not many drummers could ever claim to reach that level if they tried, but the most reassuring thing about Peart was knowing that even he was fallible half the time.
Because, really, Peart was never comfortable being viewed as one of the greatest drummers in the world. He only got into the business because he wanted to be good at what he did, and even if he had idols like Keith Moon to look up to, he was far more focused on the amount of ideas that he could fit into one of Rush’s songs. And it’s not like every single one of those records came easy to all of them once they started work on them. I mean, just look at a record like Hemispheres.
From the cover to the elongated instrumentals, this is what happens when a band goes a little too far up their own ass, but even then, Peart has some standout moments that no one else could have touched. It takes a true feat of human endurance to make it through a song like ‘La Villa Strangiato’, but even if the band set a new high for what they could do, Peart was the one who admitted that he never wanted to make that kind of album again because it would have been too much for him.
So the next few albums felt like a band slowly coming back down to Earth. Not every one of their songs was going to be a hit by any stretch, but by Moving Pictures, they hit upon the perfect middle ground for their sound. The Police had already inspired their experimentation with different genres like reggae, but everything from ‘Limelight’ to the instrumental ‘YYZ’ had little features that anyone could sing along to.
But Peart is most likely always going to be remembered for ‘Tom Sawyer’. It’s the band’s signature song for a reason, and while the actual composition is already great, Peart’s drum solo is still one of the crowning moments in his recording career. Anyone else would have been proud to nail this take in one go, but when speaking to prog drummer Mike Portnoy, Peart felt that some pieces of the song weren’t exactly perfect.
When he listened back to the tune after a long time, he remembered a few sections where he got distracted from the groove and almost got tripped up, saying, “In the old days when we would be out there thrashing away all together, you would use editing in the tape days, and sometimes through that meandering and experimenting, something accidental would happen. ‘Tom Sawyer’ is a perfect example of that. In the middle of the instrumental section I got lost, and it just went (flails his arms) and it brought me out great. To learn it afterwards became a funny challenge.”
Accident or not, that instrumental section still sounds fantastic in context. The keyboard riff being transposed over to bass gives the track a lot more teeth, and since Alex Lifeson really gets to shine during this part of the tune with his piercing guitar solo, it’s almost like Peart’s accident was him getting a bit more energy into the track, just like Stewart Copeland might have done on one of The Police’s tracks.
So even if there were pieces that weren’t supposed to happen, learning it back again is part of the job in rock and roll. Not everything that someone lays down is supposed to happen, but when you hear it in the right context, it’s hard to think of anything else that could have replaced it in the mix.
