Neil Peart died a few days ago. He was the drummer and lyricist for the band Rush (in case you didn’t know). It’s affected me more than I expected, and more than most any death I can remember that was not someone I knew personally. From my high school years on, I’ve drawn inspiration from their music, and how they lived their lives. I’ve just finished a complete listen of every studio album they did (no, not maudlin at all :)), and it’s an amazing body of work. Having trouble shaking the sadness so I thought I’d write a quick post and maybe get some of it it out of my system.
I grew up on Rush. From the youthful energy and ideas of 2112, and the libertarian poetry of The Trees, to the more nuanced, middle-aged days of Vapor Trails and Snakes & Arrows, Rush was different. While other rock bands were singing about sex, drugs and rock & roll, Rush was singing about ideas, things that matter – dreams, inspiration, loneliness & alienation, the Holocaust, the atom bomb, aging (Losing It, Time Stand Still), fear and not giving in to it, and chasing experience, religion, chance and fate (Between the Wheels, Free Will, Roll the Bones, You Bet Your Life), drive & the costs of chasing your dreams, doggedness (We Hold On, Something for Nothing), the dark side of fame, the mob and fear, car racing in the future when cars are outlawed, suicide (The Pass), Samuel Taylor Coleridge poems, a near symphonic rock rendition of a metaphorical / cultural battle between Apollo and Dionysus (I’m not making this up).
OK there were some trips through black holes and encounters with priests from the future, and for God’s sake a song about baldness too.
Anyway they were different. And inspiring. Whenever I get down or feeling like I’m not making progress, there’s a Rush song to get me moving again. Neil was fond of quoting Bob Dylan:
“The highest purpose of art is to inspire. What else can you do for anyone but inspire them?”
Well done, Neil.
And the older I get, the more I appreciate artists who continue to innovate as they age, raise their game, do not give in to the dying of the light (Robert Plant comes to mind as well). These guys were (and are) the musicians’s musicians – complete virtuosos, and ever so humble. And at the heart of their music was Neil – the lyricist and the driving beat.
You can read elsewhere about Neil’s life, but he suffered unimaginable personal tragedy, but managed to claw himself back to life, and to continue performing and creating, and finding a new personal life. That he died of brain cancer at 67 just isn’t fair. But he knew, and wrote often, about how life isn’t fair.
Not to be morbid, but none of us know how long we have.
One of Neil’s mantras was, “What is the most excellent thing I can do today?”.
Find someone and something you care about, and commit yourself to them. Say no to the things that don’t matter. There’s not a moment to waste.
Oh. The master at work: