histories2

In September 1965, Neil Peart turned thirteen. For his birthday, Neil�s parents gave him Saturday morning drum lessons. He had never been interested greatly in the piano lessons he had already taken, �But with drums, somehow I was interested.�
For a year-and-a-half, Neil studied drums under his instructor, Paul. �He turned me in a lot of good directions, and gave me a lot of encouragement,� Peart said. �I�ll never forget him telling me that out of all his students there were only two that he thought would be drummers. I was one of them. That was the first encouragement I had which was very important to me. For somebody to say to you, you can do it. And then he got into showing me what was hard to do. Although I wasn�t capable of playing those things at the time, he was showing me difficult rudimental things, and flashy things. Double hand crossovers and such. So he gave me the challenge. And even after I stopped taking lessons those things stayed in my mind, and I worked on them.�
Eventually Peart tired of the lessons, but not of drumming itself. �When it got to the point of being bored with lessons, I wasn�t bored with playing,� he said. �It was something I wanted to do everyday. So it was no sacrifice. No agony at all. It was a pleasure. I�d come home everyday from school and play along with the radio.�

�And finally I learned how to do a double hand cross-over,� he said. �I remember thinking how proud I would be if my teacher could see it.�
In 1966, Neil got a summer job working at the carnival in Lakeside Park. Lakeside Park was a grassy beachfront park located on the west banks of Port Dalhousie Harbour.
�In those days, it was still a thriving and exciting whirl of rides, games, music, and lights,� Peart later remembered. �So many ghosts haunt that vanished midway; so many memories bring it back for me. I ran the Bubble Game�calling out �Catch a bubble; prize every time!� all day�and sometimes the Ball Toss game. When it wasn�t busy I would sit at the back door and watch the kids on the trampolines, and Mr. Cudney wasn�t amused. I got fired.�

In 1966, Alex and Gary both attended Fisherville Junior High School, located in Toronto not far from the intersection of Drewry and Bathurst. There, in a history class, Gary Weinrib and Alex Zivojinovich first met. The two were just acquaintances at first, not especially close friends, but they would share jokes and hang out.
In December 1966, Alex received an inexpensive guitar as a Christmas gift. �I got a Kent classical guitar for Christmas,� he said. �It was $11.00 new, right off the shelf, and the action was about 14� above the neck.� That cheap guitar would set the direction of his life. He soon learned his first song, the commercial jingle for Noblesse cigarettes.
Gary, too, was becoming interested in playing guitar. �As a pre-teen I picked up an acoustic guitar that my neighbour had, and found that I could figure out chords,� he said. �I eventually got a guitar and began to figure out songs that I liked from the radio.�
On Gary�s first guitar, a cheap acoustic with palm trees painted on the front, he learned his first song, �For Your Love� by the Yardbirds.
At about the same time, one his Gary�s friends took notice of his mother�s Polish/Yiddish accent, and turned it into a joke which would have a profound impact on Weinrib.
�When I was about twelve years old,� he said, �I had a friend who, whenever he heard my mother pronounce my name, he thought she was calling me, �Geddy.� He started calling me �Geddy,� and eventually, all of my friends started calling me �Geddy,� and eventually my mother started to call me �Geddy�, for real.�
Before long, both Alex and �Geddy� were regularly seen around their school sitting on the steps and playing their guitars. Eventually somebody approached Zivojinovich to suggest that he might take classical and Flamenco guitar lessons. Alex declined. �I thought it would be simple �Mary Had A Little Lamb� things,� he later said.
Alex wasn�t content for long playing only on the Kent acoustic guitar. �I progressed to a Conora electric, a Japanese solidbody�$59.00 for that one.�
�At a very early age I got a Fuzz Face distortion,� he said. �Even before I could really play guitar, I had an effect.� But Alex didn�t have any amplifiers yet; he would have to improvise. He figured out how to plug his guitar into the family television set so he could play his Conora with the Fuzz Face distortion and hear it from the small, tinny speaker of the television set. Makeshift, yes, but it was the best he could do at first.

�That sounded pretty lousy, but with the Fuzz Face, I thought I was hot stuff.�
Right across Pleasant Avenue, Alex�s friend John Rutsey was just starting out playing drums on a small kit. The two friends, each just beginning to learn to play their instruments, naturally began playing together for fun and practice.
Alex eventually damaged his Kent classical guitar, and resorted to makeshift methods to repair it. �I remember cracking the nut on it and trying to repair it with poly filling,� he said. �It looked horrible!�
Despite not having an amplifier of his own, Alex still found opportunities to play through one. �I didn�t own an amp, so I borrowed them�Gibson Les Pauls, Kents, and things like that. Geddy had a Traynor, a twin-15 with a Bass Master head, and we used to go to his house after school and just sit around and play, both of us plugging in to it.�
Music wasn�t the only way Alex was expressing himself. He was also enjoying painting. He was one of a number of students who collaborated to paint a mural on the walls of his school as a class project.
Meanwhile, down in St. Catharines on the Niagara Peninsula, Neil Peart�now 15 years old�was developing his drumming skills. �I grew up listening to big band jazz, which my father loved,� he said. �Glenn Miller, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, and the great drummers who played with them.�
Although he admired and even emulated the jazz drummers, it was rock music that Neil was most interested in. �I was personally inspired by the Who. They were the first band to make me wanna play drums and write songs.�
Neil had his drumming debut in a Christmas pageant at St. John�s Anglican Church Hall in Port Dalhousie. He and several other kids mimed to the Rollin Stones� �Get Off My Cloud.� Soon after, Neil became involved in in a trio called The Eternal Triangle with Don Brunt on piano and Don Tees on sax. The band performed at the Lakeport High School variety show, and went on to play more small gigs with a few original songs in their set list.