“Two fat fingers” — that’s how Geddy Lee describes it. The singer and bassist for Rush is sitting in a private room of a restaurant that doubles as a wine cellar, and he’s just pulled a few choice selections from the shelf. He uncorks one and serves Alex Lifeson, fellow founding member and guitarist, who deadpans, “Oh, I’ve stopped drinking… but I’ll just start again now.” Lee fills his glass from a second bottle, bantering away with his lifelong pal before picking up a third. It’s not vino but a rich, brown spirit. Macallan 25, to be exact. This was the poison of choice of Neil Peart, Rush’s drummer for over 40 years. Whenever they’d finish for the day in the studio, or when Lee or Lifeson would drop by Peart’s place for a visit, he’d usually break out the Scotch.
And then Lee puts his digits next to the bottom of a tumbler and pours out “two fat fingers'” worth of Macallan into it. The glass sits there, untouched and gleaming in the light. They toast their absent friend. “The missing wingman,” Lifeson says. “The chair that isn’t here,” adds Lee.
It’s less than five minutes into Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple, a new documentary on — let’s not mince words — the greatest rock drummer of all time, and you can already feel yourself tearing up. The laughter and spontaneous applause within the Princess of Wales Theatre (located, appropriately enough, on King St.), where the movie premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival last night, will be punctuated by audible sniffles for the rest of the screening. An extension of Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen’s definitive 2010 portrait Rush: Beyond the Lighted Stage, this moving look back at Peart’s life and work is a proper farewell to a king behind the kit. But it’s also a belated wake, celebrating the life of a philosopher who provided the words and pulse for a power trio that continually pushed the boundaries of where a rock song could go and what it could say. Instead of mourning an absence, it provides you with a presence. For the next few hours, the missing wingman doesn’t feel like he’s missing at all. The chair is right there in front of you.
Lee admits early on in the doc that he’d long wanted to pay tribute to Peart, who died on Jan. 7, 2020, but the pandemic threw a wrench into any immediate plans for a large-scale goodbye. A concert, which would have been the logical way to honor the man and his music, was eventually ruled out in favor of a documentary by filmmakers that he and Lifeson knew would handle the subject with sensitivity. Performance had to be a part of the mix, however, and the surviving members of Rush came up with a conceptual way of making it happen. Peart had a fraternity of “drum brothers” he’d befriended over the years, musicians who would hang out with him on the regular. Lee and Lifeson invited a quartet of them to jam on classic Rush songs. All of these drummers knew the parts. More importantly, they all knew Peart personally, which meant they had a genuine sense of the guy who created them.
So, yeah: If you’ve ever wanted to see Stewart Copeland take on “New World Man,” or Tool’s Danny Carey rock those insane fills in “Tom Sawyer,” or the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith bash out “Working Man,” or King Crimson‘s Gavin Harrison dig into the Roll the Bones deep cut “Dreamline,” now’s your chance. It sounds gimmicky, until you see a) how ecstatic everyone, especially Geddy and Alex, is while playing, and b) how the music allows them to collectively memorialize their late comrade. You witness how humbling it is for these hall-of-famers to try mastering the odd time signatures, weird switch-ups, and endurance-testing tours around the rack toms; it takes Carey, someone who can fluently switch between a 5/8 and 7/8 beat in the same song, more than several tries to nail the opening to 2112‘s “Overture.” And you also hear everyone use these tracks as a way to reminisce about Peart’s generosity, his kindness, his wicked sense of humor, and his way of filtering his perspective on the world through polyrhythms.
That’s just one aspect of No One’s Disciple, mind you — Dunn and McFadyen may be lucky enough to capture some truly once-in-a-lifetime sessions, but the focus remains on chronicling Peart’s arc from gangly Hamilton kid to worldly rock god. Using a number of interviews they conducted with the drummer for Beyond the Lighted Stage and testimonials from Neil’s old friends and other drummers, the film goes deep on his work ethic, his literary preoccupations, how a decision to relocate to London in his early twenties broadened his horizons. Upon initially meeting their future bandmate, Lee and Lifeson immediately judged the skinny dude bounding out of a Pinto as “goofy” and not nearly hip enough to join their group. Then he started playing triplets, and guess who was suddenly really cool? Neither the guitarist or the singer was keen on being the resident wordsmith, so Lifeson recalled saying to Peart, “We’ve noticed you read six to seven books a day — how’d you feel about writing lyrics?” The result was “Anthem.” The rest is history, etc.
Numerous milestones, from Peart studying with jazz player Freddie Gruber and reinventing his playing style to writing Ghost Rider, a memoir about riding motorcycles and grieving the loss of his wife and daughter, are dotted along the way. Both Lee and Lifeson reminisce about the gent nicknamed “the Professor,” occasionally becoming choked up. Yet the mood is never maudlin or sentimental. Lifeson isn’t above doing a devastating impersonation of Peart reciting the lyrics to “Working Man” in a stilted, staccato lilt, and everyone talks about how notoriously prickly he could be regarding his relationship to fans and fame. (The dude wrote a banger of a song about it!) Peart was well-known for being intensely private and virtually unknowable to most of the general public, but everyone in the film shares the Peart they were lucky enough to bond with — someone who valued loyalty, friendship, and sharing a Scotch with those who loved and admired as much as his happy solitude.
That the Toronto crowd who showed up for the premiere was in the pocket for all of it was not surprising — when “The Spirit of Radio” played over the end credits, everyone immediately broke into the audience-clapping part that’s long been a staple of the concert version. But Neil Peart: No One’s Disciple isn’t out to court fan service. The doc simply wants to be the tribute that Lee and Lifeson wanted to throw for their friend, and the joyous look back on a life that Peart deserves. It might be sadder hearing them play Rush songs with an all-star rotation of famous guests were it not for the epilogue, which introduces Anika Nilles and reminds folks, as if anyone needed reminders, that their current Fifty Something Tour finds them in extraordinary form once again. (During a post-screening Q&A, the documentarians noted that they found out the band was going back on the road in the middle of filming, but had become suspicious when the songs sounded like the two had definitely logged in rehearsal time before the cameras started rolling.)
Everyone knows Peart is irreplaceable. No one’s trying to replace him. Hearing his friends play those songs in the film, and hearing Nilles recreate his parts onstage, you realize that they’re not just honoring the legacy but preserving it. Peart is no longer here, but he remains in those songs. And while those present at the premiere were reverent, it fell upon Lee and Lifeson to add levity to the proceedings and keep things from feeling funereal. After walking onstage to applause during the introduction, Lee introduced his childhood friend as recent Toronto visitor “Alex Lifesberg.” “I would just echo what Ged said, if I understood a word of it,” Lifeson wisecracked. Both thanked the filmmakers, and let Chad Smith, also present, say a few words of praise. Then they let the movie, and the music, do the talking. It felt like Peart was there in theater, nodding at the lack of pomp and circumstance. Hopefully he was sipping two fat fingers of Macallan as well.
