“The nerves I was going through”: the rock band Taylor Hawkins was terrified playing with
Canadian trio Rush is one of popular music’s biggest anomalies. A genre-island unto their own, Rush’s highly distinctive melting pot of hard rock, progressive complexities, and later synth-heavy pop coatings brought commercial success but a dogged critical bewilderment. Such an outlier of mainstream consensus garnered a fiercely loyal fanbase, collectively fuelled by a dash of besiegement from the tastemakers who sniffed at their run of power-prog anthems that ran a lyrical gamut across esoteric philosophy, science fiction, and fantasy themes.
Forged by a love of Yes as much as Led Zeppelin, Rush ploughed on with their progressive rock monster headfirst just as their prog pioneers were lapsing into cultural irrelevancy. Following drummer and principal songwriter Neil Peart’s recruitment on 1975’s Fly By Night and establishing the classic line-up, Rush travelled their own parallel trajectory of stadium conquest, seeing off punk’s threat and finding themselves unlikely stars of the MTV age well into the 1980s, as well as hovering half-in half-out with the heavy metal explosion of the day.
Such an atypical band with a highly idiosyncratic musical make-up has attracted a legion of high-profile fans from a vast array of backgrounds, Rush counting everybody from Trent Reznor, No Doubt, Manic Street Preachers and Elliot Smith as committed devotees. One lifelong Rushead was Foo Fighters’ late drummer Taylor Hawkins, who professed to owe much of his musical ambitions to first hearing the trio during their new wave-inspired heyday.
“I got into prog when I started drumming,” Hawkins told Prog shortly before his death in 2022. “I must have been ten or 11, and the first band I heard were Rush. It was the live album Exit…Stage Left. I picked up so much from listening to Neil Peart”.
Even after acclaim with Foo Fighters and part of Alanis Morissette’s band during her Jagged Little Pill era, Hawkins was still just a Rush fanboy despite his rock fame. “In fact, I got the chance to play with Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson when I was in Toronto not that long ago,” he recalled.
Adding, “The guy who produces us, Nick Raskulinecz, also worked with Rush on their Snakes & Arrows album, and he called them up and arranged it all. You can imagine how nervous I was, but I got through ‘YYZ’ with them. Even though they told me I was playing too fast! The nerves I was going through; here I was replacing Neil Peart in Rush – well, almost!”
It was a bold move, stepping behind the kit of one of the most acclaimed drummers in rock, but Hawkins’ guest appearance at Rush’s 2008 Molson Amphitheatre show went down a storm with the crowd. From one fan to another, Lee and Lifeson honoured Hawkins’ life at his Wembley tribute send-off organised by Foo Fighters frontman Dave Grohl, picking up the sticks and playing ‘2112 Part I: Overture’ and ‘Working Man’ before leaving former Dire Straits percussionist Omar Hakim to handle ‘YYZ’—a feat the nerve-ridden Hawkins’ managed with aplomb all those years ago.
