Reflecting on the real Neil Peart

How do you honour someone like Neil Peart?

The answer is complicated, because the Rush drummer was a complicated person.

He was a rock star who was introverted. A prolific author who would rather go unrecognized when he was out and about.

With Rush, he performed nightly before thousands of people, yet left the meet-and-greets with fans to bandmates Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee.

He shied away from signing autographs because he didn’t agree with the concept of celebrity. He believed in humility and remained humble.

Peart, who died from cancer last week at age 67, grew up in Port Dalhousie and is known the world over as the drummer for the iconic Canadian rock band Rush.

Modern Drummer magazine ranked him No. 3 all-time among drummers, behind only jazz percussionist Buddy Rich (Peart’s idol) and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin. Rolling Stone magazine put him at No. 4.

Port Dalhousie was home for the first two decades of his life. It’s where he learned to play the drums, joined local bands and went to high school.

The announcement of his death shocked us. His illness was kept from everyone but his family and closest friends, who respected his wish for privacy.

For a lot of people, Rush provided the soundtrack to their lives from the mid-1970s through to its final concert in 2015.

They were just always there, touring constantly and putting out new music that changed with the times as they themselves grew as musicians and writers.

For Rush fans, Peart’s death might have hit hard the same way others felt when John Lennon or Elvis Presley died. That’s the kind of bond Rush has with its fans.

By early Tuesday, nearly 11,000 people had signed an online petition calling on the City of St. Catharines to honour Peart, possibly with a plaque or statue at Lakeside Park where he once had a summer job working a carnival booth. A park he immortalized in song.

But when we memorialize Peart, we need to take into account not just the drummer and author we knew, but also the man he was.

In the song “Limelight,” he wrote: “Living in a fish-eye lens, caught in the camera eye. I have no heart to lie. I can’t pretend a stranger is a longawaited friend.”

And he meant it. It’s not that he didn’t like his fans; he was friendly and courteous when they approached him respectfully. But he never considered himself any more special than any of them.

People’s grief is sincere because Peart, and Rush, never disappointed us. They were rock stars without the rock-star attitude. You knew them as guys you’d like to hang out with.

So let’s honour Peart, for who he was.

One way is to read his books — most start from the premise of his travels, but are more about his personal feelings on life, stardom, his personal losses and his love for music. He was an observer.

By all means, we should memorialize him. He was special. And while he didn’t seem like a statue kind of guy, there are many other ways to do it. And his family should be involved.

In an essay he wrote for The St. Catharines Standard in the mid-1990s, Peart wrote, “maybe the role models that we really need are to be found all around us, right in our own neighbourhoods.”

“Not some remote model of perfection which exists only as a fantasy, but everyday people who actually show us, by example, a way to behave that we can see is good, and sometimes even people who can show us what it is to be excellent.”

Unintentionally, Neil Peart was describing himself. He will be missed.