Partway through Freaks And Geeks, Nick Andopolis—the shaggy freak with an outsized heart portrayed by Jason Segel—loads up his eight-track player with a copy of Rush's Permanent Waves and gets the dry ice and strobe lights ready so he can drum along "The Spirit Of The Radio." The choice of band and idol is telling. Nick is a misfit, as uncomfortable in his own body as he is in high school, but Rush transports him to another dimension where he feels confident and of all the band members he chooses to emulate, he picks the band's drummer Neil Peart.
Nick Andopolis was hardly the only '80s teenager to idolize Neil Peart. The decade was lousy with them, each drawn to the percussionist's instrumental prowess and probing lyrics. Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, his compatriots in Rush, shared his technical skill and sensibility, but Peart became known as the band's guiding light, representing their dense and strange worldview. It's exceedingly rare for a drummer to overshadow his bandmates—maybe Don Henley and Phil Collins count in this regard, but the latter remained firmly entrenched in the background during the early days of Genesis—and it's rarer still for a member to join a band that's already active and provide them with their philosophical direction.
That's precisely what happened with Neil Peart, who joined Rush in 1974 after Lee and Lifeson already had an album of Led Zeppelin-inspired hard rock under the belt. Peart certainly had the musical muscle to play metallic rock but he also had an insatiable curiosity that pushed him into the realms of sci-fi, Ayn Rand-inspired libertarianism, and prog-rock, transforming the trio from admirable workaday rockers into a collective of majestic oddballs. Change was a constant in the life of Peart and Rush, but many casual fans and observers forever identified the trio with the music they made during the 1970s and early 1980s: records so jammed with ideas, they wound up spilling over from one record to the next.
Aggressive and arrogant in their disdain for convention, this incarnation of Rush coalesced on 1976's gloriously ridiculous 2112 and crested with 1978's Hemispheres, records that developed the backbone of their enduring fanbase by showcasing the trio's seemingly superhuman virtuosity. If they stayed in this vein, Rush would still have been well-loved by prog devotees but the group had the foresight to respond to punk and new wave by channeling their grandiosity into succinct pop/rock songs. As Peart told Rolling Stone's Brian Hiatt in 2015, when the group was in the midst of prepping for their farewell tour, Rush "(learned) how to be seamlessly complex and to compact a large arrangement into a concise statement."
It’s difficult to imagine Rush surviving, let alone thriving, in the 1980s if they hadn’t adjusted their style. Prior to Permanent Waves, Rush was exclusively the province of the dedicated—the outcasts and geeks who immersed themselves within the world created by the power trio, fans who used the band's records as guidebooks to explore other universes. The trick Rush pulled off is that they didn't lose this hardcore audience even as they expanded and refined their sound. No other album-oriented band of the 1970s adopted synthesizers as thoroughly or as seamlessly as Rush, nor were any of their peers as poised to seize the rhythmic possibilities suggested by the Police. On the group's records of the early '80s, Peart slid into reggae and worldbeat without losing a feel for a massive backbeat. No matter how busy his playing was—and it was always evident he was the heir to Keith Moon and Ginger Baker, the showiest drummers of the 1960s—Peart swung and rocked, anchoring Rush with a thunderous, dextrous groove.
Partially due to Peart's inquisitive, curious nature, Rush never wound up staying still. Consequently, each of their albums from 1975's heady Fly By Night to 2012's Clockwork Angels can sound very much of their year of release while sounding unmistakably like Rush. The trio slyly changed with the times without chasing trends, resulting in records that evoke specific phases of the golden age of album rock yet don't quite feel archetypal of the era. Even at their commercial peak—a period begun by Permanent Waves and its blockbuster 1981 sequel Moving Pictures and wrapped up with 1987's Hold Your Fire—Rush felt just out of step with their classic rock pack. Blame it on Geddy Lee's keening, clearly-enunciated vocals, the thickly layered arrangements or Peart's earnest, erudite lyrics, but Rush stood apart from their prog peers, never scoring a Top 10 hit like Yes or finding their way into rock's ruling class, as Genesis did during Phil Collins' reign as frontman. They were a big band, but never quite the biggest in the land. They were popular, but their singles rarely broke outside of rock radio or MTV; even in their homeland of Canada, where they were a beloved institution, they only had one Top Ten hit ("New World Man" went to number one in 1982).
Rush's enduring presence led them into a third act where the motivations fueling their entire career fell into sharp perspective. Once again, Peart wound up as the catalyst for this change but this time it was in a tragic fashion. Within the course of a single calendar year in the late '90s, Peart lost his teenage daughter in a car accident and his common-law wife to cancer, a pair of deaths that drove him into a period of intense soul-searching. He effectively retired from music and set out on a solitary motorcycle trip across the Americas, a journey he chronicled in 2002's Ghost Rider Travels On The Healing Road, one of many books he authored. His voyage resuscitated his creativity, in a similar fashion to his decision to take jazz lessons in the 1990s reinvented his drumming style. When Rush reemerged in 2002 with Vapor Trails, the band was reinvigorated and it helped launch a remarkable decade where the group remained inventive and vigorous, not only retaining their audience but expanding it. By the end of the decade, the trio functioned as a pivotal plot point in I Love You, Man, a buddy comedy starring Jason Segel as a dedicated Rush fan, bringing his advocation from Freaks And Geeks full circle.
I Love You, Man introduced Rush to new listeners but Rush: Beyond The Lighted Stage, an exceptional 2010 documentary, explained the group to neophytes and fellow travelers who many have known the group's AOR staples but not the band's story. Beyond The Lighted Stage is candid but in Rush's case, such honesty can't be reduced to confessions of debauchery. Instead, Peart, Lee, and Lifeson revealed their inner lives and friendship with warmth and humor, amiably recounting their loves, losses, and hobbies. All three members seemed witty and well-adjusted but, more than that, they seemed to enjoy each other's company as much off stage as they did on. The film wasn't exactly a final word—Rush recorded one more studio album and mounted two large tours—but it does function as a lovely summation of a band managed to turn their own quirky obsessions into art of lasting resonance. Upon its release a decade ago, the film's final sequence of the tipsy trio trading barbs after a long, wine-drenched dinner at a hunting lodge carried an affecting emotional undercurrent—after all these years, the trio remained close, closer than most veteran rock groups—but now that Neil Peart has died of brain cancer at the age of 67, its sweetness carries a hint of melancholy. That sadness is somewhat mitigated by the fact that this dinner shows the band living up to the ideals Peart presented in perhaps their greatest song, "Time Stand Still." Basking in each other's company, Rush found a way to "Freeze this moment/A little bit longer/Make each sensation/A little bit stronger," creating an accidental but wholly fitting epitaph to the humanistic spirit that fueled this extraordinary band.
Time Stand Still: RIP Neil Peart
Great writeup. I’m a casual Rush fan at best, but have fond memories of listening to the singles on classic radio in high school and studying Neil’s lyrics in a college Intro to Philosophy class (I had a cool professor). BTW, this article spurred me to take a yearly subscription to the newsletter.