Rush’s Geddy Lee & Alex Lifeson Discuss Neil Peart’s Final Years

Rush‘s Neil Peart was such a private person that few outside his inner circle knew the drummer was sick before he succumbed to cancer one year ago today. Peart’s band mates, guitarist Alex Lifeson and bassist Geddy Lee, opened up about Neil’s final years in a new interview published by Rolling Stone.

Neil was diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer in August 2016, one year after Rush's final concert. While Peart was told the average survival time ranged from 12 to 18 months, he made it much longer. “Three and a half years later,” Lee explained, “he was still having a smoke on the porch. So he said a big ‘Fuck you’ to the Big C as long as he could.”

Peart and his loved ones first realized something was wrong a few months before the diagnosis, when the drummer began having a hard time with tasks that used to come easy for him and as he told Lee and Lifeson, started “making mistakes with his words.” Neil received the harsh diagnosis and underwent surgery. First, he called Alex Lifeson on his birthday. “It was so unusual to get a call from him, because he was never comfortable on the phone,” the guitarist said. “You’d get these beautiful emails from him. But he wasn’t that crazy about talking to anybody. I was in shock. But I could tell there was something weird. I thought maybe it was a difficulty with a connection or something. But he just didn’t seem like he normally was. And I kept thinking about it afterwards.”

Neil told Alex and Geddy about his diagnosis via email. “He basically blurted it out,” remembered Lee. “‘I have a brain tumor. I’m not joking.'” Alex began crying upon receipt of the message and the two men made it a priority to spend as much time with Peart as possible. Lee shared the following of how the drummer dealt with the situation:

He was a tough man. He was nothing if not stoic, that man. … He was pissed off, obviously. But he had to accept so much horrible shit. He got very good at accepting shitty news. And he was OK with it. He was going to do his best to stick around as long as he could, for the sake of his family. And he did unbelievably well. … He accepted his fate, certainly more gracefully than I would.

Peart swore his band mates to secrecy, which weighed heavy on them. “Neil asked us not to discuss it with anyone,” noted Lifeson. “He just wanted to be in control of it. The last thing in the world he would want is people sitting on his sidewalk or driveway singing ‘Closer to the Heart’ or something. That was a great fear of his. He didn’t want that attention at all. And it was definitely difficult to lie to people or to sidestep or deflect somehow. It was really difficult.”

Alex Lifeson has fond memories of the last time both he and Geddy Lee saw Neil Peart. “We were laughing our heads off,” the guitarist said of what Rolling Stone describes as a “boozy dinner” attended by the members of Rush and Peart’s wife, Carrie Nuttall. “We were telling jokes and reminiscing about different gigs and tours and crew members and the kind of stuff we always did sitting around a dressing room or on a bus. And it just felt so natural and right and complete.”

Rolling Stone revealed Neil Peart didn’t play drums after walking off the stage at the final Rush concert. Both Alex Lifeson and Geddy Lee haven’t performed much either. “For the longest time, I didn’t have any heart to play,” Lee told Rolling Stone. “I still feel there’s music in me and there’s music in Big Al, but there’s no hurry to do any of that.”

Head to Rolling Stone for the full feature including more from Lee, Lifeson, Nuttall, Rush manager Ray Danniels and other friends of Neil Peart.