Like most rock ‘n’ roll bands formed in the late ’60s, the early days of Rush were marked by influence from the same remarkably broad list of influences you might expect to find elsewhere, from Cream to the Beatles to Jimi Hendrix to the Beach Boys and more, witnessing the sea changes of rock music as it was sanitized by white players then reinvigorated by psychedelics, witnessing Hendrix burgeon, blossom and die, the coming of Led Zeppelin, and the shift from straight ahead pop to haggard and hoary rock to psychedelic music to art music and eventually onward to prog. The earliest lineup didn’t even include Geddy Lee, the group’s iconic bassist, vocalist, and synth player, who would only come to replace initial bassist Jeff Jones some few months after the band’s proper founding. Rush’s history, of course, begins prior to Peart’s introduction to the band. They were even one of the few prog bands to break through into punk and hardcore spaces in the years when prog was deeply unfashionable, partly off of the back of their musical mercuriality that never sacrificed their playing, only adapted it to new surfaces and contours and textures. Almost every serious musician of rock and metal has drawn from them. Every single progressive rock and metal player and band in the years after would come to cite them as a major influence. They influenced goddamn near everybody, from Metallica to Rage Against the Machine to Dream Theater to Mastodon and more. There is no true telling of the history of progressive rock or even just rock ‘n’ roll more broadly without mention of Rush. They produced 20 albums, 19 of which featured Peart behind the kit. He was the drummer for Rush, one of the greatest rock bands of history, and with them became one of the top three drummers rock music has ever produced, alongside John Bonham and Keith Moon. One can’t conceive of Neil Peart’s life as anything short of well-lived. We do not create and value creation merely because they staunchly reject death but on their own merits there is a power and privilege to life and experience for its own sake, divorced from those darkling anxieties which roar out in the silence of 3 a.m. Terror is not abstracted and immaterial we feel this pressing anxiety, one that parsing the deaths of those we care about seems to be able to address if not perfectly solve, because of the firm materiality of life, of living.
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But we mustn’t view dying as a singularity that blossoms out to encompass the whole of life, even if in many ways that’s what art making is: a staunch rebellion against the coming tide of night, quiet dark waves lapping at our ankles and growing closer to our lips and nose and ears and eyes with each passing breath. Understanding the nature of a person of interest’s passing can help us grapple with the finite amount of time we ourselves have, a fact that at once seems trite and like it will choke us to death, cluttering up the bad inspirational writing of empty authors while keeping those of us past a certain age up at night shaking and weeping in quiet contempt of what often feels like time wasted in disease and addiction and idleness. And while those things are certainly important, they mean more to his direct friends and family than they do to outsiders. One could fixate on the nature of his passing, or how long he suffered, but to do so would be to privilege the disease over the life, the dying over the living. Neil Elwood Peart passed away on Januat the age of 67.