The “simple pop” song that made Neil Peart fall in love with drumming
It’s easy to picture Neil Peart as being the kind of kid who was mathematically studying what drumming could be.
No one becomes that kind of artist overnight, and even when delivering the greatest drumming performances anyone has ever seen, it was hard not to listen to Peart’s drumming and not picture the amount of hours it took for him to become an icon like that. But if you look at any prog-rock band from around Peart’s time, it was always about more than musical exercises that got him to where he was.
While Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson were running through their scales when they were practising half the time, what Peart was doing had a lot more to do with the precision and power behind all the drummers that he saw. He was a die-hard fan of bands like The Who and Led Zeppelin, and it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see how a song like ‘Tom Sawyer’ found its roots in technicians like John Bonham.
But the number-one rule that Peart always had was to keep listening out for new sounds in the world. There were plenty of artists who could make classic tunes outside of the prog genre, and judging by the band’s classic output in the 1980s, it’s clear that they were taking as much influence from bands like The Police and Ultravox as they were from Yes and Genesis at the time.
When first starting behind the drum kit, no one can immediately start by listening to Buddy Rich and trying to copy that. Getting that kind of rhythmic flow takes a lot more time, and if you listen to every other drummer that Peart grew up with, it was about finding that one song that starts off the journey before diving headfirst into the craziest drumming licks imaginable.
And if rock and roll was the best place for guitarists to start, drummers can be all over the map. You could start with the likes of Bonham or even Ringo Starr’s iconic breaks for The Beatles, but before Peart had even caught wind of the likes of Mitch Mitchell or Gene Krupa, he was already transfixed when a song on the radio had something that was a bit more offbeat than normal like the song ‘Chains’.
While the Fab Four had recorded their own version of the girl-group classic, but when hearing the original, the shuffle rhythm was everything that Peart needed, saying, “I still remember the first song that galvanised me: Chains, a simple pop tune by one of those girl groups, with close harmonies syncopated over a driving shuffle. No great classic or anything, but as I listened to that song on my transistor, suddenly I understood. This changed everything.”
It’s not like ‘Chains’ is the hardest song in the world to play drums to, but the real power behind the tune comes from the backbeat. That shuffling rhythm is what really gives the song the right pulse half the time, and even though The Beatles were convinced that Starr was the guy for them after hearing him play Ray Charles’s ‘What’d I Say’, hearing him play ‘Chains’ may have been night and day compared to how Pete Best played it in the Cavern.
There were a lot more time signature changes and 32nd-note runs in Peart’s future, but knowing that this song gave him the musical bug first is almost encouraging. Because if this simple pop song is enough to convince one of the biggest drum gods to pick up the sticks, perhaps there’s hope for the rest of us to get at least a fraction of that covered.
