Carnaby Blues
Just as Alex, Geddy and John were settling into some kind of a routine, Neil Peart was doing anything but. J.R. Flood’s time in the local limelight was not leading to a record deal, but nobody in the band seemed to mind except Neil. Meanwhile, the influences on the young drummer were growing in complexity and depth. Modern, progressive drummers such as Michael Giles of King Crimson, Phil Collins of Genesis and Bill Bruford of Yes shared one facet with his previous heroes – these were all real musicians, practiced in their art, and they wanted to share their virtuosity any way they could. As he would comment, “it was really the music that mattered and the idea of formulae for making music… was totally alien.”
Neil’s ambitions led him to think further afield than his compatriots, and his heart yearned to get closer to the action. By early 1971, as J. R. Flood was coming to an end, Neil realised he was ready to try his luck on the other side of the Atlantic. In July 1971 he bought a ticket and flew to the UK, leaving behind a girlfriend and taking only his savings, his drum kit and his record collection. He’d already contacted his childhood friend Brad French, who was a welcome point of contact. London in the early seventies was the place to be, to start bands, to listen to music, to meet and influence people. At least, you would have thought so. For Neil, things didn’t quite work out that way.
On arrival, Neil was met by his mate from home, Brad, who offered him a place to crash at his bedsit in New Barnet, North London. Neil spent the first few weeks painstakingly visiting record companies and management agencies, only to be shown the door on each occasion. Undaunted, he started working through the small ads in the music papers. He landed a few auditions, and even picked up some “unglamorous” session work, but it was never really enough to pay the bills. After a month, he started to run out of money and found despondency starting to set in – he found the attitude of many British musos to be snobbish in the extreme, and the frequent rejections took their toll. Some solace was found in books, as Neil would fill his commutes with literature of all descriptions. Not least science fiction, with the futuristic trilogy ‘Fall of the Towers’ by Samuel R. Delaney re-igniting a passing interest from childhood. “I grew up in the suburbs and it was all pretty prosaic and dull, so I started getting interested in all those kinds of things just in the belief that there must be a more interesting world out there,“ he said.
A chance meeting at Piccadilly Circus with another acquaintance from back home (Sheldon Atos) led to Neil landing a job, in a souvenir shop at Carnaby Street called Gear. More importantly than the money (though it helped), this was Neil’s first foothold in a social network that fitted with his drumming aspirations. A series of firm friendships were forged working in the trendiest street in Britain, punctuated by initiations into a variety of uncontrolled substances that were available at the time. It was also the first experience, for the small town boy, of having openly gay people as friends (one of whom, Ellis, would become the Hero of ‘Nobody’s Hero’, when he died of AIDS in the late 80’s). It was only 20 pounds a week, but it was a job. Finally, Neil’s new-found connections resulted in the opportunity to join a band, called English Rose. In October 1971 he quit his job and went on the road.
Despite Neil’s previous touring experience, this was not what he had expected at all. One by one, all of Neil’s daydreams of glamour, making it or even musical integrity were quashed as the band’s story unfolded. Neil learned that all their equipment had been stolen from another band. “Even their van was stolen,” he remembered. “I had to play it cool, just nod and say nothing.” Using the “borrowed” van, English Rose used to head out of London for gigs in the north of England, with Neil squashed between pieces of equipment for hours at a time. After a month or so, the work dried up and so did the gigs, leaving Neil to rely on the generosity of other people in the band. The equipment manager used to slip him a fiver from time to time, which Neil accepted gratefully even in the knowledge that he used to “do over” petrol stations. Fortunately, he refused Neil’s desperate offer of assistance.
Neil had a short lived gig with “Heaven” (“turned out to be hell…”), went home for Christmas with a ticket paid for by Gran, and had a rethink.
When Neil returned to Britain the following year, he took the offer of a post from Bud, his old boss at Gear. True learning experiences are rarely pleasant, but there were a few good things that came out of Neil’s sojourn. Not least a Persian co-worker at the gift shop, Ahmed, introduced him to a piece of music called Movements. This included playing by one of London’s most versatile drummers at the time , Harold Fisher, whom (without knowing who it was), Neil found to be an utter inspiration. Neil found some solace in revisiting his dad’s music, “the big band stuff like Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Frank,” buying his own copies of albums from a second hand shop such as Sinatra at the Sands and listening to them on headphones because the speakers were so poor (“because we were so poor”).
Reading offered a continued escape. On his way from work one day, Neil procured a copy of a The Fountainhead’ by Ayn Rand, from a tobacconist in the tube station. Remembering Ayn Rand as a pretentious read from his school days, Neil found the book to be a revelation, as he explained a few years later. “For me it was a confirmation of all the things I’d felt as a teenager,” he said. “It is simply impossible to say all men are brothers or that all men are created equal – they are not. Your basic responsibility is to yourself.” In Rand’s character Howard Roark, himself loosely based on architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Neil found an antihero that he could relate to absolutely, the ambitious individual who had no concept of compromise. The wake-up call coincided with Neil’s discovery that the only person he could play in life, and in his drumming, was himself – and not any of his drumming idols. “All I wanted to do was get in a band that would play some Who songs so I could wail like Keith Moon did” he explained. ”When I finally got in a band that was playing Who songs, it was all so crazy that it didn’t suit my character. My personality demanded structure and organization, and… it wasn’t me.” One thing Neil did learn from Keith Moon was that drumming needed to be visual as well as aural. As such, he worked on twirling his sticks and flicking them in the air – it was part of the show.
Things were finally stabilising for Neil, not least his finances. In the spring of 1972, he and Brad moved to a larger flat near Wimbledon, and Neil was even able to splash out on a new hi-fi. He continued to look for gigging opportunities, and had varying levels of success: a band called Music came and went, and Neil managed to hook up with the jazz-prog combo Seventh Wave, but nothing he tried ever came to much. Neil found the honesty of such bands refreshing. “Most acts have the attitude that they won’t get anywhere anyway, so they might as well do what they want and to hell with it. Groups have nothing to lose from being as crazy as possible, or from being themselves.” He also saw his fair share of ego issues, which as a developing individualist, he could live without.
Despite these insights, by the end of 1972, Neil remained disappointed: if pots of gold existed at this end of the rainbow, they had eluded him. If there’s one place it’s not good to be destitute, thought Neil to himself, it’s London. Feeling “sadder and wiser”, he once again came home for Christmas, but this time it was for good. “I was searching for fame and fortune. It wasn’t there,” he said, but he recognised the value of the experience. “It was worth more than success at that time.“
Neil’s return was accompanied by some big decisions. Drumming as a hobby was fine, he thought, but a career as a professional musician? No thanks: “I decided I would be a semi-pro musician for my own entertainment, would play music that I liked to play, and wouldn’t count on it to make my living.” In the spring of 1973 Neil took a short-term job back with his father at Dalziel Equipment, and found an apartment of his own. Before long he was working at the St Catharines’ branch of Sam the Record Man, where he worked with colleague and friend John Fillion, as well as Keith and Steve Taylor. Their younger sister Jackie also worked on the tills for a while, and caught his eye.
As a self-proclaimed “adolescent car nut”, Neil graduated from building models of cars to owning them, buying first an MGB and a Mercedes (“Neil could never drive a car that was too big,” says friend Andrew MacNaughtan). By his early twenties he was sharing a house with the Taylor brothers, in the countryside just near St Catharines. Neil’s feet were well and truly back on his home ground, but he couldn’t put off playing the drums for long. A couple of members of J. R. Flood had formed a band called Bullrush, but they had no need for a drummer; instead Neil hooked up with a few local musicians to help re-form the semi-pro band Hush , with Brian Collins and Paul Lauzon on guitar, Bob Luciani on Bass and Bob’s brother Gary, on vocals. They played a variety of Seventies blues-rock covers, including The Who, Zappa and Genesis.
Then, a Toronto-based manager called Vic Wilson turned up at Dalziel Equipment for a chat, and everything changed again.