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RIP NEAL PEART


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42 minutes ago, RutgersJetFan said:

It's weird, Rush is one of those bands that I simply could never get into but there is absolutely no denying the genius of all three guys. You have to put Peart up with the all-time greats across all genres and I always appreciated his admiration and talent for jazz.

 

Feel exactly the same way.       R.I.P

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Literally at the pub trying to wipe my eyes.

What an important part of my life he and rush is.

He was the best of all time and a great lyricist. Never wanted to be  a star and treasured his privacy.

For all the fortune the guy found, he may have suffered the most personal pain of all. I tried reading his book. The first chapter, describing the police knocking at his door and telling them that their 19 year old only daughter was just killed in a car accident and how his dogs began to howl and cry uncontrollably as if they understood every word the cops said ... wow.... then the wife gets diagnosed with stage 4 cancer a few days after the funeral  and drops dead the next month..... leaving him with no family in the world.... just wow. I tossed the book in the garbage couldnt get past that.

my first concert was madison square garden on the subdivisions tour. I remember coming through the tunnel, seeing rory gallagher jamming and was blown away by it. Then rush came on. Whoa. I never put the guitar down since and never will. 

RIP brother

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22 minutes ago, HighPitch said:

Literally at the pub trying to wipe my eyes.

What an important part of my life he and rush is.

He was the best of all time and a great lyricist. Never wanted to be  a star and treasured his privacy.

For all the fortune the guy found, he may have suffered the most personal pain of all. I tried reading his book. The first chapter, describing the police knocking at his door and telling them that their 19 year old only daughter was just killed in a car accident and how his dogs began to howl and cry uncontrollably as if they understood every word the cops said ... wow.... then the wife gets diagnosed with stage 4 cancer a few days after the funeral  and drops dead the next month..... leaving him with no family in the world.... just wow. I tossed the book in the garbage couldnt get past that.

my first concert was madison square garden on the subdivisions tour. I remember coming through the tunnel, seeing rory gallagher jamming and was blown away by it. Then rush came on. Whoa. I never put the guitar down since and never will. 

RIP brother

It’s tough,,,,  I cried and not ashamed to say it. called my buddy the drummer in Fort Lauderdale, RUSH was our growing up. this is big for us. I’m watching Exit stage left on the big TV with a scotch. 

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1 hour ago, southparkcpa said:

It’s tough,,,,  I cried and not ashamed to say it. called my buddy the drummer in Fort Lauderdale, RUSH was our growing up. this is big for us. I’m watching Exit stage left on the big TV with a scotch. 

Glad to see I'm not alone. Watching random favorite songs on YouTube with a good bourbon. Here's to you Neil!

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Some of Rock's greats on Neil's death:

The rock world reacts to the death of Neil Peart

By Fraser Lewry (Prog) 6 hours ago

Members of Metallica, Black Sabbath, Kiss, Judas Priest, Foo Fighters and more pay tribute to Rush drummer Neil Peart, who has died at the age of 67.

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  •  Neil Peart in April 1984

Neil Peart: 1952 - 2020 (Image credit: Fin Costello / Getty Images)

The world of rock has paid tribute to Rush drummer Neil Peart, who died on Tuesday after succumbing to brain cancer. He was 67.

The news was confirmed by his Rush bandmates Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson, who said: "It is with broken hearts and the deepest sadness that we must share the terrible news that on Tuesday our friend, soul brother and band mate of over 45 years, Neil, has lost his incredibly brave three and a half year battle with brain cancer (Glioblastoma)."

Fellow drummer Mike Portnoy, whose own playing was heavily influenced by Peart, wrote: "It absolutely breaks my heart to pieces to get the news of the passing of one of my greatest heroes of all time. Neil Peart will always be a mentor and a hero to me and his influence on me as a drummer for the past 40 years is absolutely impossible to measure.

"But beyond that, over the past 15 years or so, he’s become a friend... always such a gentleman and a gracious host. Always inviting me to come to soundcheck and spend some time before the show whenever Rush was passing through. Always sending complimentary copies of his new books, or holiday emails with pictures of he and his young daughter Olivia."

He continued: "I have so many memories through the years, but probably the most special was the last time I saw him. I took my son Max to see Rush on their farewell tour as I wanted him to see the band before they retired. Neil, ever the incredible gracious host, invited us to soundcheck, let Max play his drums, gave him a pair of sticks and an autographed snare drum head and opened up his dressing room to us for the evening. The point is, if you were his guest you were family."

Foo Fighters leader Dave Grohl called Peart “a kind, thoughtful, brilliant man” in a statement which reads: “Today, the world lost a true giant in the history of rock and roll. An inspiration to millions with an unmistakable sound who spawned generations of musicians – like myself – to pick up two sticks and chase a dream. 

"A kind, thoughtful, brilliant man who ruled our radios and turntables not only with his drumming, but also his beautiful words.”

He adds: “I still vividly remember my first listen of 2112 when I was young. It was the first time I really listened to a drummer. And since that day, music has never been the same. His power, precision, and composition was incomparable. He was called ‘The Professor’ for a reason: We all learned from him.

Today, the world lost a true giant in the history of rock and roll. An inspiration to millions with an unmistakable sound who spawned generations of musicians

Dave Grohl

“Thank you, Neil for making our lives a better place with your music. You will be forever remembered and sorely missed  by all of us. And my heartfelt condolences to the Rush family."

Drummer Taylor Hawkins added: “Neil Peart had the hands of God. End of story.”

Elsewhere on social media, Kissguitarist Paul Stanley wrote: "Absolutely Horrible News. Neal Peart has died after fighting brain cancer for years. His later life was filled with so much family tragedy. So, so sad. I’m just shocked." 

His partner in Kiss, Gene Simmons, said: "My prayers and condolences to the Peart family, fans and friends. Neil was a kind soul. R.I.P."

Black Sabbath's Geezer Butler said: "Sad to hear of Neil Peart passing. RIP."

Broadcaster Eddie Trunk wrote: "One of my favourite days ever doing TV at VH1 Classic back in 2006. Spent the day doing an hour interview with Neil Peart. Hope someone finds it and reposts online. One of the nicest most grounded people I ever met."

King Diamond said: "It is unbelievably sad to hear that my favourite drummer of all time, Neil Peart, has left us. Very hard to find words to properly express the level of inspiration and influence he had on so so many musicians. He will forever remain at the top of my list. Farewell to a true king."

Anthrax guitarist Scott Ian said: "The greatest of all time. RIP Neil Peart. I’m going to go raise a glass and then air-drum the sh*t out of Tom Sawyer."

Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett went with a brief: "RIP to a master", while musician and comedian Jack Black had similar sentiments, saying: "The master will be missed - Neil Peart RIP".

Bass player Billy Sheehan said: "My deepest and most sincere condolences to Neil’s family and friends, and to Rush fans everywhere. What a brilliant and wonderful man. He left his mark on the world, music, drumming and so much more. With absolute love and Respect, Rest In Peace."  

Beach Boys legend Brian Wilson posted on Instagram: "I feel real bad about this – he was way too young. Neil was one of the great drummers and he’ll be missed. Love and mercy to Neil’s family."

E Street drummer Max Weinberg wrote: "So saddened by the passing of Neil Peart. Drumming legend as we all know but a truly kind man. Personally arranged for my son, Jay – then a teenager – to open at a venue in Boston for Rush. Huge for an aspiring drummer! Condolences to his family from our family."

Other artists have paid tribute to Peart, including Slash, Nickelback, Judas Priest, Korn drummer Ray Luzier, Whitesnake frontman David Coverdale and more.

Find a list of tributes below.

https://www.loudersound.com/news/the-rock-world-reacts-to-the-death-of-neil-peart
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First found Rush as a college freshman in 1975 when a hall-mate blasted Fly By Night throughout our floor.  It's not an exaggeration to say all of us were blown away not only by their songs but Neil Peart's approach to drumming.  Just sounded so fresh and radically different.  And this from guys who were fans of Bonzo, Moon, Bruford, Ward and so many other top flight rock drummers.  

Peart's power and skill--both as a drummer and writer of lyrics--were crystalized with the release of 2112, which I still consider their masterpiece (at least from their early era).  Collectively, anyone listening to that record back then had their minds blown.  Peart's drum chops and words propelled those songs--and Rush--to new heights.  Saw them on that tour and they did not disappoint.  Peart's drum solo was jaw dropping.

All these years later, I still play songs from various parts of their expansive catalog almost every day.  They never seem to show their age.  Instead I always find a previously unheard drum fill, bass line or guitar flourish.  Like so many rock luminaries before him, Peart's death leaves  a chasm which will never be filled.  RIP, Neil Peart.

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The Misfit Awesomeness of Neil Peart and Rush

 

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By Amanda Petrusich

January 11, 2020

 
 

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Neil Peart’s drumming gave the impression that he might possess several phantom limbs.

Photograph by Fin Costello / Redferns / Getty

 

Neil Peart, the lyricist and virtuosic drummer of the Canadian progressive-rock band Rush, died on Tuesday, in Santa Monica, California. He was sixty-seven, and had been fighting brain cancer for several years. Rush formed in Toronto, in 1968 (Peart joined in 1974), and released nineteen studio albums, ten of which have sold more than a million copies in the U.S. According to Billboard, Rush presently ranks third, behind the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, for the most consecutive gold or platinum albums by a rock band.

Peart was wildly literate, and his earnest love of science fiction informed Rush’s singular aesthetic. Along with the singer Geddy Lee and the guitarist Alex Lifeson, he helped pioneer an audacious strain of brainy, intricate hard rock that perhaps borrowed more voraciously from Ayn Rand than the blues. Though the band’s influence was vast, something about its music seemed to speak deeply and directly to marginalized young men. Both Lee and Lifeson were the children of immigrants who had left Europe following the Second World War (Lee’s parents were Holocaust survivors; Lifeson’s fled Yugoslavia after the war), and a person gets the sense that the members of Rush had internalized a certain degree of cultural exclusion. Rather than retreating, they embraced ideas that eschewed convention.

Rush was struggling commercially when, in 1976, it made “2112,” an intense, ambitious, and unrelenting record about a dystopian future. The band had spent the previous year playing small, grimy venues. (In the 2010 documentary “Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage,” the band jokingly referred to this stretch of shows as the “Down the Tubes” tour.) No one seemed particularly energized about the next album. Rush’s manager, Ray Danniels, had to cajole Mercury Records into not dropping the band entirely.

“2112” was a Hail Mary, but rather than dutifully capitulating to the marketplace—making something more aligned, spiritually and compositionally, with, say, Steely Dan’s “The Royal Scam” or the Rolling Stones’s “Black and Blue,” two of the most beloved commercial rock records of 1976—Rush instead assumed a kind of ****-it abandon. The band had not assembled an audience via extensive radio play or critical adulation or corporate positioning but by people tapping each other on the shoulder and saying, “Dude, check this out.” For “2112,” the band leaned further into its idiosyncrasies rather than trying to curb them.

The album opens with its title track, which is twenty minutes long and takes up the entire first side of the LP. Peart wrote the lyrics, which have something to do with an interplanetary federation and an odious, vaguely fascist organization known as Priests of the Temples of Syrinx, who command “great computers”—to be honest, I’m not overly confident on the narrative particulars. What the song does convey, unambiguously, is a kind of maniacal amplitude. Peart wanted to tell vast, complex stories that both embraced and rejected formal structures. The rest of the record is a little bit goofier, but no less unique. “A Passage to Bangkok,” which Peart also wrote lyrics for, is a doting homage to weed, and various cities and countries around the world where it is cultivated: Colombia, Jamaica, Morocco, Acapulco, Thailand, Afghanistan, Kathmandu, Lebanon. “We only stop for the best!”

Since Peart’s death, photos of his drum kit—an expansive, fascinating structure of drums, cymbals, and assorted percussive tools—have been circulating around social media. Trying to make sense of its maze of components is nearly impossible for anyone not intimately acquainted with drum gear, yet the kit nonetheless communicates, in a glorious and unambiguous way, Peart’s vigor. It must have felt so excellent, ensconcing himself in that golden tower, an ever-expanding assemblage of surfaces to whack! Until his death, Peart was considered by many to be the greatest living rock drummer; watching him play, it’s hard not to start thinking he possessed several phantom limbs. The sound was merciless.

Misfit culture has been codified and romanticized over the years (we think of James Dean in a leather jacket, coolly smoking an unfiltered cigarette while leaning against a hot rod, or of David Bowie, vamping in full “Aladdin Sane” makeup), but the members of Rush were weird in a way that didn’t reliably translate in mainstream culture. As such, they offered their followers a very precise and rarified solace. Rush could be something of a private pleasure. I think of a television commercial for the Volkswagen Golf, from 1999, in which the actor Tony Hale sits alone in a parked car, listening to “Mr. Roboto,” by Styx—another beloved prog-rock band of the nineteen-seventies, with similarly immodest ambitions—at top volume, dancing like a deranged cyborg. Some music just feels destined for secret communion.

This, for me, was always one of the most lovable and admirable things about Peart and Rush. For decades, the band was hugely uncool. It’s fun to look up the early reviews—peeved critics huffing and puffing about bombast and pretension. How dare this band try so hard! In the 1979 Rolling Stone Record Guide, Alan Niester gave “2112” two stars (out of a possible five) and described Lee’s voice as “a cross between Donald Duck and Robert Plant.” (To be fair, this remains the most interesting and lawless era of Rolling Stone; the magazine didn’t especially care for “Blood on the Tracks” or “Exile on Main Street,” either.) If you can’t have a good time blasting “Tom Sawyer,” then some awesome part of you has withered. I say, raise a joint to Neil Peart tonight, and go get it back.

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/the-misfit-awesomeness-of-neil-peart-and-rush

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On 1/10/2020 at 5:53 PM, shevys said:

Or because of Keith Moon. RIP regardless. 

Scott Devours:
 
After a night of embracing significant sadness in solidarity with millions of people around the world, today I feel like sharing a little story about Neil Peart to celebrate the incredible effect he had on my life and my career. Now I’m a little weary of the story coming off in a “back door brag” fashion, so if it does in any way, please forgive me. Regardless of my shortcomings as a writer, I really think the story really illustrates how deeply the man touched my life.
Like countless fans, I too have numerous memories of how I studied the man’s records as a 12 year old kid, bored the crap out of my neighbors as far as 20 houses away while I played Hemispheres over and over, or when I finally got to meet my hero when I was 18 by camping outside the Sheraton hotel near the dark tour bus that said “No One You Know” on the front, lol. It seems his influence has been woven into the fabric of nearly everything I loved. But the story I want to tell comes much later in my life in the most profound “full circle” moment imaginable. This requires a little background to appreciate.
Please indulge me, if you will..
My music career took a while to take flight after moving to CA in 1993. Lots of bands, styles of music, ups and downs, church gigs, stinky bars, near misses, no hits, close calls and then eventually landing the gig of a lifetime, which was becoming the drummer for Roger Daltrey in 2009. This moment felt like the highest high imaginable and in many ways, it still does. From 2009-2012 I pretty much felt that there weren't any more musical “mountains left to climb,” so to speak.
But then in 2013-14 my life took another incredible turn when I got the call to play with The Who on their European Quadrophenia tour. And once again, life would prove me wrong. I thought the high couldn’t get any higher? Boy was I wrong! The very first night playing with Pete & Rog and The Who I was so excited that I almost fell of my drum throne. As a matter of fact, I think I probably did, lol.
So, just after I played the first couple of US shows (subbing for Zak), that’s when I was informed that I’d be doing the entire European leg of that tour. That gave me a few weeks back in Long Beach to start really preparing, studying live recordings, and especially designing the ideal yet complex drum kit for this new challenge. And with that I had to begin choosing cymbals.
Fast forward a few days when I made a call to the best cymbal rep in the world, Christian at Sabian to discuss some cymbals for the future and apparently, I caught him at lunch with “a friend”. Now with me being so stuck in my own world of stress I guess I didn’t even realize who he was at lunch with when he told me. At the end of the call I remember Christian saying “lookout for something I’ll be sending you soon”. Giving no additional thought to his comment, I hung up and retreated back to my little room to continue drumming my ass off.
A couple of days go by when a small Fed Ex package shows up at The Space. I crack open the box to find a little Paragon splash cymbal with a hand-written note saying:
“To Scott-
You stole my dream gig!
Enjoy it!”
-Neil Peart
My heart skipped a beat almost as if “a shadow crossed my heart”. I could not believe what I was reading. The fact that he took the time to write that, to send it to me, and especially the fact that I simply forgot how much Neil himself was a Who fan growing up, that is what made this a truly a mind blowing full-circle moment for me. I was and still am so touched and honored by that gesture that I struggle to find the words. Having your childhood hero acknowledge you if only for a second, connect with you personally and to give you positive energy really is a moment that I’ll never ever forget. I’m tearing up as I write this sentence.
So, I want to take this moment in time to acknowledge the life of Neil Peart. He was a true original. He had such a sensitive soul. He had been through the kind of loss that breaks weaker men in two and yet still managed to find personal happiness again. Neil was one of the most thoughtful, inventive and influential drummers ever, and though I would never pretend that he had any kind of real personal connection with me, I can say confidently that he played a huge role in every musical accomplish I ever had. And he helped give me the tools as a young drummer to enable me to share the stage with one of the greatest rock bands in music history, and for THAT, I will always be grateful.
Thank you, Neil for sharing your gift with the world. Your inspiration will live on in countless drummers around the world, me especially. My condolences to Ged & Alex, and all of Neil’s surviving family and close friends. The world grieves with you too.
Scott
No photo description available.  Scott 
 
 
 
 
 
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