Updated 2 years ago
September 12, 1952 – January 7 2020
Drummer, Rush
Once in 1983 I found a stray textbook in the freshmen building with a long essay written in it by some young man on how important Rush was to his life.
And most every kid in our high school band drum section considered Neil their hero.
I too was TOTALLY into Rush… they SPOKE to me… they were everything a teenager liked (guitars, Dungeons & Dragons style fantasy/scifi, everyman up against “The System,” intellectual libertarian pretension) rolled up into one.
I still think of me sitting in my room listening to them and reading comic books. Both music and comics were at artistic peaks back in that era. It was a perfect storm.
I got every cassette I could get my hands on. I was so jealous every time kids came back with their fancy Rush – Moving Pictures and Signal concert shirts from Houston.
By 1984’s Grace Under Pressure they started going in a direction that wasn’t me, and by their next album, Power Windows, it was complete. So I moved on to other bands that handled the electronic part more natively (i.e. the whole synthpop explosion), or not at all (U2, Police, REM).
But I always came back. All their early stuff is immortal. Neil was a super libertarian lyricist but mellowed, like me, with age. And he will go down as probably the best drummer that ever lived.
Rock on, Neil.
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