The Third Man
Not seventy miles away, around the shore of Lake Ontario in the town of St Catharines lived a lad called Neil Peart, the latest in a few generations of Pearts. Neil was born on 12 September 1952 in Hamilton hospital, not far north from the family dairy farm near Hagersville, a wide open space in the middle of wide open spaces. Neil’s parentage was hard working, farming types, descended from solid Welsh stock. By way of example, Neil would explain, “My Dad gave Mom a choice of a vacation in Bermuda or an automatic dishwasher, and she chose the dishwasher.”
When Neil was 3 his mechanically-minded father, Glen, took a job as parts manager at the International Harvester farm machinery dealer Dalziel Equipment in St Catharines. The Pearts moved to a duplex (that’s a semi-detached house) on Violet Street in St Catharines, “a big old house” and his mom found work in a restaurant called The Flamingo. Shortly afterwards Neil gained a brother, Danny, and then a sister, Judy; little Nancy came a few years after that. Despite choosing urban life over farming, the Pearts never really lost touch with their roots. “I grew up in the suburbs, but at the same time, most of my relatives had farms,” said Neil. “So every summer or holiday I’d be out at the farm.”
Neil went to kindergarten at McArthur School and then he went on to Gracefield, a stone’s throw from Violet Street. It was a picturebook childhood – of bike riding and apple-scrumping, hiking and swimming, exploration and family trips at the weekends. Neil’s musical education also started from an early age: he would go to see Elvis films with Mom, and was fed a constant diet of Big Band Jazz from his father; he even had a foray into piano lessons, but they didn’t stick. In 1962 Neil built his own crystal radio set, and a diet of more modern music started to feed his consciousness. His minor epiphany was when he heard a song called “Chains” by an obscure artist – something about it just clicked. “It was no great classic or anything,” he remarked, but it set in train his desire to be an active part of something musical.
Neil was never destined to be the physically strongest or the most co-ordinated kid, but he could hold a beat and he found himself drawn towards the rhythm section. Taking some inspiration from his Uncle Richard, already a drummer in a band, Neil picked up the “hitting things with sticks” bug when watching Sal Mineo playing jazz musician Gene Krupa. “Big Town, here I come! Me and my drums! Me and this crazy rhythm!” said Gene in the film, and pre-teen Neil wanted to do exactly the same. He was drawn to the exuberance as much as the discipline, and was fascinated at how a harmonious relationship could be found between both.
That was it, Neil had found his mojo. He slapped, tapped, bashed and beat his way around the house for the next year or so, playing chopsticks on the every available surface and his sister’s playpen (no doubt to her utter delight) before his parents gave in to the tortuous tappety-tappings. On his thirteenth birthday, they paid for some drum lessons at the local Peninsula Conservatory of Music and gave him a practice pad and some sticks, drawing the line at a full kit. No parent wants to invite a drum kit though the door unnecessarily, so the aspiring percussionist was told he had to prove himself truly worthy before his parents would buy him one of his own. “I used to arrange magazines across my bed to make fantasy arrays of drums and cymbals, then beat the covers off them!” Neil laughed. From early on his teacher, Don George showed Neil techniques that were way beyond his reach, creating challenges that would continue to drive him long after the lessons had finished.
Though other oldstyle drummers, such as Buddy Rich and Billy Cobham, were also helping define Neil’s ambitions, it was Keith Moon, the drummer in his then-favourite band The Who, who continued where Gene Krupa left off. “The Who was the first band that made me wanna play drums and write songs,” he recalled later. Perhaps above all, it was the physicality of the drums that inspired Neil. “One of the things that I liked about drums from day one was that you hit them,” he said. It wasn’t just the sound of the drums, but the look – the kits came in various sparkling shades and Neil was fascinated by the whole visual and aural experience. “It was a physical relationship that I responded to right away.”
When another full year of banging, clanging and haranguing had passed, by 1966 Neil’s parents relented once more and bought him a Japanese-made Stewart kit, “in red sparkle”. One has to feel sorry for the Peart family, not to mention the neighbours at this point – as Neil himself would say, “It’s the drummer’s curse – all your life no one wants to hear you practice”. Not least Violet Street as he honed the technique of playing with the “butt-end” of the sticks, for extra oompf. A passion for drumming wasn’t the only thing Gene and Keith taught the young Canadian: both drummers lived on the edge, and crossed it frequently. With his death, the Keith Moon story in particular was a cautionary tale about the excesses of rock stardom, and where they could lead. Neil may have been a maverick, but he wasn’t stupid.
While Neil’s home life was a delight, his time at school was anything but. At the age of 12 Neil had gone to Lakeport High School two years early, straight in at Year 9. Immature and somewhat out of it relative to his peers, he was an obvious target for ridicule. The lessons Neil found a bit of a distraction, apart from English that is. “I was always in love with language,” he said. Indeed, and not for the last time he would find solace in fiction, absorbing the words from the pages like a sponge.
Neil’s own outward demeanour didn’t help his case – he would never have been labelled an extrovert. He wasn’t so much a loner, more a guy who knew his own way and wasn’t going to compromise. “I really wanted to be an only child, I never liked to share,” said Neil of the arrival of his siblings, describing a principle that he would apply again and again. He stood out from the crowd and wasn’t prepared to muck in for the sake of it (not that he could, if he’d wanted to – at school dances, he was nicknamed “Birdman” due to his rather unconventional moves). Above all, he was in control of his emotions, a coiled spring to be released on his own terms. “When I was a teenager, I recognized that I had a bad temper, and set out consciously to control it and keep it back,” he would say. All the same, part of him suffered for his stance. He dared have long hair (“below the ears, that is”) and wear vibrant items of clothing, in an age where dulled-down conformity was essential to a quiet life. He didn’t fit, and occasionally suffered as a consequence, but that only spurred him on to conform even less. Eventually he conformed only with the “freaks”.
There was always the drumming. He pursued his hobby with a passion, over time building his skills and hooking up with others to play. By the age of 15 he played his “first public performance” at the school’s annual variety show, as part of a three-piece called the Eternal Triangle. He even threw in a drum solo, and to his surprise and no little, coy delight, for the first time in his life he felt genuinely cool. It was all he needed to determine whether the path was good – if life held any options for him before, now there was only one. To the continued exasperation of his teachers, Neil spent more time thinking about drumming than the subject matter at hand.
Fortunately for Neil, his parents were right behind him. When Neil joined his first real band, Mumblin’ Sumpthin’, he convinced his dad to underwrite a $750 loan for a full Rogers drum kit. From then on, his leisure time was spent on the roads of Southern Ontario, as he would recall later. “We lived for that weekend gig at the church hall, the high school, the roller rink, and, later, so many late night drives in Econoline vans, sitting on the amps all the way home from towns like Mitchell, Seaforth, Elmira, and even as far as Timmins.” There was nothing that he wanted to do more in life than this. Soon afterwards Neil packed in the drum lessons, but the discipline was set, and he would practice two hours every day. “It was no sacrifice, it was a pleasure,” he said later. “I’d come home every day from school and play along to the radio.” As Neil left, teacher Don admitted he was impressed by the lad, commenting that he was one of the few pupils he had seen that had the potential to make it as a pro.
When Mumblin’ Sumpthin’ slipped apart, Neil tied up with a band called Wayne and the Younger Generation, which changed its name to The Majority shortly after. “All the first bands I played in were blue-eyed soul bands,” he said. “All of us grew up playing ‘In The Midnight Hour.’ “ After a few attempted break-ups, The Majority came to an end for a final time and Neil was without a band again. One of the best bands in the area was J.R. Flood, and Neil began lobbying the members (apart from the drummer, of course) to convince them that he’d do a better job. Surprisingly to Neil, they tried him out and agreed to go with him. J.R. Flood’s music wasn’t all standard blues, it included some epic tunes such as the 8-minute ‘You Don’t Have To Be A Polar Bear To Live In Canada’.
Soon after Neil had joined the band, at the age of 17 Neil talked his parents into letting him call school a day and go into music full time, ostensibly for a trial period. Free of the shackles of education and drifting ever further from conformism, he learned the character-building effects of travelling on a public bus to band practices with “a frizzy, obligatory Hendrix perm, long black cape and purple shoes.”
Neil wrote his first lyrics with J.R. Flood and had his first experience of working in recording studios, not least Terry Brown’s Toronto Sound Studios, over on the other side of the lake. At the weekends, Neil helped his father back at at Dalziel’s Equipment. Neil had made his choices, and would take the consequences until he chose to move on.
He was that kind of kid.