![]() ![]() But he wasn’t that crazy about talking to anybody. “You’d get these beautiful emails from him. “It was so unusual to get a call from him, because he was never comfortable on the phone,” says Lifeson. Shortly before the surgery, Peart placed an uncharacteristic FaceTime call to Alex Lifeson, on the Rush guitarist’s birthday. So he said a big ‘Fuck you’ to the Big C as long as he could.” “Three and a half years later,” says Lee, “he was still having a smoke on the porch. Genetic testing of Peart’s cancer suggested it was unusually treatable, and Peart lived until January 7th, 2020, more than three years after his diagnosis, which, in the case of this illness, qualified him as a “long-term survivor.” The diagnosis was grim: glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer with an average survival time of roughly 12 to 18 months. He rushed to a doctor, and after an MRI, ended up in surgery. When he did speak, he started “making mistakes with his words,” as he later told his bandmates. In late August, Nuttall and Peart’s mother both noticed that he was unusually quiet. He got a huge paycheck off the last tour. “I was like, ‘Carrie, he got everything he wants,’ ” Danniels recalls. She broached the subject with Danniels during a visit to the manager’s house in Muskoka, Ontario. Peart kept his concern to himself, but by summer, he was showing signs of what Nuttall assumed to be depression. “He couldn’t figure it out,” says Rush’s longtime manager, Ray Danniels. ![]() In June 2016, he was baffled to find himself struggling with that task. For the past couple of decades, he made a ritual of whipping through the New York Times Sunday puzzle. Peart started doing newspaper crossword puzzles back in the early Seventies, when he traveled to England from his native Canada to make it as a drummer, only to end up as the manager of a souvenir shop, with time to kill on a tube commute. “I just feel so bad,” says Lee, “that he had so little time to live out what he fought so hard to get.” “It was a very sweet, content time … and then the gods, or whatever you want to call it, snatched it all away.” “He was living his life exactly the way he wanted for the first time in decades, probably,” she says. “She got to see Daddy at school all the time.” At night, he’d come home and cook family dinners. He planned to spend summers with them at his spectacular lakeside country property in Quebec, not far from the former site of Le Studio, the picturesque spot where Rush recorded Moving Pictures and other albums.Īfter the tour, when Peart wasn’t working in his man cave, he volunteered for library time at Olivia’s school. The rest of his time he’d spend with Carrie Nuttall, his wife of 20 years, and his elementary-school-age daughter, Olivia, who adored him. He’d work nine-to-five in what he liked to call his “man cave,” a plush garage for his vintage-car collection that doubled as his office, just a block away from his home in Santa Monica, California. Peart laid down his drumsticks after Rush’s final show in August 2015, shortly before his 63rd birthday, but he intended to continue his writing career, which exacted less of a physical toll than pummeling a snare drum. He used to say, ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ For me, that’s when I write.” “I do a lot of my thinking that way,” Peart told me in 2015. Despite ending his formal education at age 17, he never stopped working toward a lifelong goal of reading “every great book ever written.” He tended to use friends’ birthdays as an excuse to send “a whole fucking story about his own life,” as Rush singer-bassist Geddy Lee puts it, with a laugh. Peart took constant notes, kept journals, sent emails that were more like Victorian-era correspondence, wrote pieces for drum magazines, and posted essays and book reviews on his website. But he was also the self-educated intellect behind Rush’s singularly cerebral and philosophical lyrics, and the author of numerous books, specializing in memoir intertwined with motorcycle travelogues, all of it rendered in luminous detail. His forearms bulged with muscle his huge hands were calloused. Before band rehearsals for Rush tours, he’d practice on his own for weeks to ensure he could replicate his parts. Peart, one-third of the Toronto band Rush, was one of the world’s most worshipped drummers, unleashing his unearthly skills upon rotating drum kits that grew to encompass what seemed like every percussive possibility within human invention. Neil Peart made it only 10 months into his hard-won retirement before he started to feel like something was wrong.
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