The prog-rock drummer Neil Peart hailed as “unparalleled”
Neil Peart has more than earned a spot on the Mount Olympus of drummers.
As much as people like to claim that everyone from Mitch Mitchell to Ginger Baker to John Bonham were the greatest to ever pick up two sticks, the clinical precision that Neil Peart had on some of Rush’s finest records always made him leagues above anyone else in his field. But what made Peart such a joy to watch was that he never forgot about the power of learning from his peers at every opportunity.
He always saw his music as an ever-evolving thing, and throughout Rush’s tenure, you can hear him fiddling around with different techniques whenever he could. The Bonham influence is evident from the moment that he joined the group, but as they started to move into poppy territory in the 1980s, people like Stewart Copeland started to become a greater part of his musical vocabulary as well as bands like Ultravox.
But Rush were already in the middle of prog’s renaissance in the late 1970s, and Peart dove in head first when listening to the best drummers in the business. Acts like Yes and Genesis were the ones that convinced Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson to dream bigger than Zeppelin back in the day, and listening to the kind of percussion coming out of both bands, it’s no wonder Peart clicked with both of them.
Bill Bruford is still one of the most technically gifted prog drummers that ever existed, and when listening to his work on Close to The Edge, it’s insane to think that anyone could have any of those three tracks mapped out perfectly. And while Phil Collins gets a lot of heat for becoming the darling of MTV in the 1980s, he could still play the drums better than anyone when working on albums like The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
Each of those bands helped break prog to the mainstream, but the real first step came from King Crimson in the late 1960s. People like Frank Zappa and The Beatles had been working out what progressive rock could look like on their albums, but In the Court of the Crimson King was where everything started to veer off in a different direction, and Peart was absolutely transfixed listening to Michael Giles play on their debut.
But what about Michael Giles made him one of a kind?
Peart had already been taking a great liking to the technicians of the drum world, but Giles’s way of weaving around what the rest of the band were doing was half the reason why Peart loved him, saying, “It is everything I wanted. It was both disciplined and exciting. He was so fired up by what he was doing. But it was contained within a structure. His fill construction and sense of ensemble playing and orchestrating a part was unparalleled and very underrated.”
Whereas most drummers play to the song half the time, hearing the way that Giles played felt like a prototype for how Peart would write his parts with Rush as well. The Canadian icons weren’t going onstage to jam for a couple of hours, and many of their finest performances were when Peart had everything completely mapped out for him before he even went onstage. That kind of discipline might have to be learned, but by listening to the records, Peart turned into one of Giles’s greatest students.
And given how many times King Crimson have changed their lineups, it’s no wonder that a powerhouse like Bill Bruford ended up replacing Giles during his time with the group. The band were meant to be a powerhouse in every sense of the word, and even if it didn’t have the same looseness you’d found out of another hard rock band, anyone could appreciate the spectacle of people that were able to play this well.
