As you read through this issue of MMR you’ll run across the newest installment of award-winning retailer Menzie Pittman’s excellent “Small Business Matters” column, which discusses – from a dealer perspective – the influence of the late Neil Peart.
Since I’d already begun this editorial and because we’re approaching the subject from different angles (and because I am going to write about Peart’s passing, goddamnit!), I will be covering similar ground. Take it as equivalent to when publications or sites run two album reviews of the same disc, maybe.
I am a Rush fan. I’m not the biggest acolyte and my interest sags considerably after 2112 and almost completely after Moving Pictures, but the band’s – and Peart’s – influence on my “musical life” really can’t be overstated. I learned to listen to music like a musician thanks to Rush.
By ninth grade I was already a fully formed music geek, metalhead, hard rocker, et cetera. I regularly got detention for drawing my favorite groups’ logos on school desks, I poured over articles in Hit Parader, Rolling Stone, Circus (fun fact: I later wrote for Circus!), Maximumrocknroll, and Flipside, and I had taken up guitar. It wasn’t until a buddy of mine introduced me to Rush in freshman year, however, that I turned a significant page in my fandom – and, more importantly, as a musician and music aficionado.
“Did you hear that drum fill?” asked this friend as we listened to All the World’s a Stage that fall. Did I hear it? Well, I mean, I know there were drums there and, yes, I heard it, but… what?
Again: I was already a bigtime music fan (snob, even!), but the act of parsing out what individual instruments and components were doing in a particular song or passage – this was new stuff for me and it opened up an entirely larger comprehension.
In subsequent decades I’ve been told (frequently) by significant others, friends, co-workers that when I say something along the lines of, “That bass line right there – Oh, man!” they have no idea what I’m talking about (and, more often than not, find it eye-roll worthy).
As it turns out, “close listening” to music does not equate to “listening as a musician” and the latter is a skill (or curse. Ask my ex) that I owe almost exclusively to Rush. We talk a lot in this industry about “Where are all the guitar gods now?” and “When’s the next truly big band going to come around?” to drive sales. These are valid, important, and reasonable questions because those individuals and artists ultimately generate interest and profit for the MI industry.
Bands like Rush and musicians such as Neil Peart create the true, life-long music makers that we also are so often seeking out. I’m not one of the many I met while a student at Berklee for whom Rush was a gateway drug to prog and jazz. I’m not someone who – after absorbing the virtuosity of Peart, Lee, and Lifeson – went on to spend hours upon hours honing my own chops to near-perfection.
I’m someone who was introduced to Rush and the playing of Neil Peart as a young dude and learned how to hear and understand the language and nuance of music in an entirely new and bigger way which has enhanced my life immeasurably. In the weeks since he died, it’s become clear – albeit in no way surprising – that many others shared that experience.
Thanks, Neil.
