Why was Neil Peart “embarrassed” around Rush fans?
It was a commonly-known fact among Rush fans – if you got tickets to meet the band before a concert, you were only going to see two band members. Although all three members of the band had sterling reputations as exceedingly nice people, true to their Canadian roots, only Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson would take the time to shake hands, sign autographs, and take pictures. Neil Peart, the band’s indispensable drummer and lyricist, would not be on hand to chat up the general populace.
Peart began to take on a mythic kind of hermit status while on tour. Instead of travelling with the band on their private plane, he would drive his motorcycle from city to city. His warm-up and pre-show preparation would often take place away from his bandmates, only coming into the main dressing room right before the band was set to take the stage. Once a concert was finished, he would run as fast as possible off stage, throughout the backstage area, and out the back door.
The other members of Rush recognised Peart’s reticence to interact with people outside of his circle. “Neil has a real struggle with fans, and it’s not a personal thing,” Lee explained in the documentary Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage. “It’s a shyness thing. He’s not able to be as relaxed around strangers as Alex or I am. He doesn’t mean to hurt anyone’s feelings by it. He’s not trying to be rude. He’s just not comfortable.”
“It’s purely a self-defence mechanism,” Peart told Powerkick magazine in 1992. “We aren’t interested in the glamour side…of course, for a lot of musicians their reasons for starting were to become famous and to become known and all that, but for none of us was that the case, you know, it was a separate mission to become good on our instruments. I kind of believed in youthful naivety that everything followed from that. When I started playing drums I thought, “All I have to do is get good.” I never thought that I had to have the right haircut or compromise what I knew about music to deliver a hit single or any of that, I didn’t know any of those things existed.”
“We never chased it…it wasn’t like we were in it and backed away from it,” he added. “We never asked for it, looked for it, wanted it…(laughs) To us, it was just a totally alien part of the music business that had nothing to do with what makes me happy or makes us happy or theoretically what makes a music lover happy, but it’s part of the factory. It serves a whole industry agenda that has nothing to do with you or me or anybody who really likes music or who likes playing their instrument.”
Years later, Peart related his shyness back to one of his favourite bands. “I was the world’s biggest Who fan as a kid: I never dreamed of trying to find their hotel and knock on their door or interfering in their lives in any way,” Peart explained in Beyond the Lighted Stage. “I don’t understand. I love being appreciated. Being respected is awfully good, but anything beyond that just creeps me out. Any sense of adulation is just so wrong.”
“If people have a fantasy, I don’t want to trample on it, but I also don’t want to live it,” Peart added. “People can think that I’m anti-social or a sourpuss or anything else – it’s really not. It doesn’t make me mad: it embarrasses me. The other guys are obviously comfortable with it and they do the meet-and-greets every night. They can do it.”
