Neil Peart memorial | Rush close the $1m gap

Neil Peart is getting a permanent memorial, and his bandmates have made sure of it.

Geddy Lee and Alex Lifeson have donated $785,000 to the campaign for a Neil Peart memorial in Lakeside Park, St. Catharines, Ontario. That takes it over its $1 million goal.

Yes, that Lakeside Park. The one from the song.

How the money came together

The campaign was run by the city’s Neil Peart Commemorative Task Force, and fans had been chipping in long before Rush got involved. Lee had already been giving $1 from every ticket sold on his 2023 My Effin’ Life book tour.

The band’s contribution closed the rest of the gap. Lee and Lifeson handed the cheque to the task force after their hometown show at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena on 13 August, and the news went public on 23 September.

Where did it come from? A share of the VIP packages sold on the current Fifty Something tour. So if you paid extra for the good seats this summer, some of that is now going into bronze.

The fundraiser stays open until 15 October 2026. Fans can still donate, or buy an engraved commemorative panel that will sit at the memorial itself.

What is being built

Two larger-than-life bronze sculptures of Peart: one as a young man, one later in life. Artist Morgan MacDonald of The Newfoundland Bronze Foundry was picked for the job back in 2022.

A pathway will link the two, with interpretive pieces along the way covering his life, his career and his years in Rush. It sits alongside the Neil Peart Pavilion, which the city already named in his honour, and is expected to open in late 2027.

The location is the point. Peart grew up around Port Dalhousie, spent his teenage summers at the park, and wrote about it on 1975’s Caress of Steel. There is no more fitting spot.

Why drummers care

Peart played drums for Rush from 1974 until the band’s final tour in 2015, and he wrote almost all of their lyrics too. He died in January 2020, aged 67, after a private battle with brain cancer.

If you play drums, you already know the rest. He tops “greatest drummer” polls with tedious regularity. Look at Neil Peart’s kits era by era: the rotating risers, the electronics, the tuned percussion. A whole generation of drummers built bigger rigs because of him, and a fair few learned odd time from YYZ before they knew what odd time was.

What gets said less is how hard he kept working at it. He was already famous when he went back to lessons with Freddie Gruber in the 1990s and rebuilt his technique from the ground up. That is the bit worth copying.

Final thoughts

Tribute gigs end, but a pair of statues in the park he sang about will be there for a very long time. Good on Lee and Lifeson for getting it over the line, and good on the fans who got it close enough to finish.

Rush are back on the road this year with Anika Nilles behind the kit. That is a separate story, and the reviews say she is doing him proud. If you want to play the music he left, start with Tom Sawyer.

Sources: Billboard, Blabbermouth, Louder and the City of St. Catharines.