“He was lost”: The tragic reason Neil Peart walked out on Rush
Since they started, Rush have always been rock and roll’s most unassuming group of badasses. They could certainly play circles around almost any other band in the progressive rock sphere, but no one in the group ever considered themselves gods among men. The trio preferred proceeding to their normal lives the minute that the final notes rang out at every concert they played. The group still had tension, though, and Neil Peart came dangerously close to leaving his drum throne for good.
At the same time, there was no reason to think that any member of the band wasn’t happy. By the 1990s, they had survived their turn as synth-heavy superstars in the previous decade, and even if their sound blended towards heavy dad rock in some respects, it was still fairly decent takes on the genre like on ‘Driven’ or ‘Animate’. Once Test for Echo came out, Peart was dealt the body blow no one else could have faced.
Right as he was about to send his daughter to college, she was involved in a terrible car accident and lost her life. Even though Peart was the most clinical member of the group, he wasn’t made of stone, either, and that raw pain only got worse once he found out that his wife, Jackie, was terminally ill with cancer.
Although Geddy Lee remembered always being there for Peart, he felt that there was no way of bringing him back down to Earth for a while, saying, “They got out of Toronto to get away from all of the reminders, and then Jackie got sick. After she passed away, he was lost.” All band activity was already kept to a minimum, but after Peart had his heart ripped in two, he got on his motorcycle and never looked back.
Always a lover of the open road, Peart embarked on a spiritual journey that would have done a number on anyone. Crisscrossing the US and travelling over 55,000 miles, he was completely off the grid, eventually recalling, “I remember there was a chain of people [back home] saying, ‘Oh, I heard from him today’ or ‘I got a postcard’. Because a lot of things could have happened to me even by accident, let alone by design.”
Once he did decide to come back home, though, it was still a question as to whether he wanted to play music anymore. He had blocked his drumming status out of his mind for years, but by the time the band began work on Vapor Trails, he came back stronger than ever, ditching the synth sounds of the past and getting back to his roots as one of the greatest drummers the world had ever seen.
And when everyone bothered to listen to the lyrics, they were in for a tear-jerking experience. Although some songs were more convoluted than others, hearing Peart talk about experiencing the raw pain of losing his family and attempting to get stronger every day was one of the most impressive emotional moments of Rush’s career.
It took a while before they were up onstage again, but the fact that Rush was able to come back from the brink wasn’t lost on any of them. The only way anyone can appreciate their love of playing music together is when they are faced with the idea that it might not ever happen again.
