|
Rolling Stone Magazine - January 2021 Words: Brian Hiatt |
Rush’s virtuoso drum hero lived by his own rules, to the very end.
For the first time since Peart’s passing, his bandmates and widow discuss his legacy and his final years
Neil Peart made it only 10 months into his hard-won retirement before he started to feel like something was wrong. Words were, for once, the problem. Peart, one-third of the Toronto band Rush, was one of the world’s most worshipped drummers, unleashing his unearthly skills upon rotating drum kits that grew to encompass what seemed like every percussive possibility within human invention. Before band rehearsals for Rush tours, he’d practice on his own for weeks to ensure he could replicate his parts. His forearms bulged with muscle; his huge hands were calloused. But he was also the self-educated intellect behind Rush’s singularly cerebral and philosophical lyrics, and the author of numerous books, specializing in memoir intertwined with motorcycle travelogues, all of it rendered in luminous detail.
Peart took constant notes, kept journals, sent emails that were more like Victorian-era correspondence, wrote pieces for drum magazines, and posted essays and book reviews on his website. Despite ending his formal education at age 17, he never stopped working toward a lifelong goal of reading “every great book ever written.” He tended to use friends’ birthdays as an excuse to send “a whole fucking story about his own life,” as Rush singer-bassist Geddy Lee puts it, with a laugh.
“I do a lot of my thinking that way,” Peart told me in 2015. “There is a quote from E.M. Forster. He used to say, ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ For me, that’s when I write.”
Peart laid down his drumsticks after Rush’s final show in August 2015, shortly before his 63rd birthday, but he intended to continue his writing career, which exacted less of a physical toll than pummeling a snare drum. He envisioned a quiet life. He’d work nine-to-five in what he liked to call his “man cave,” a plush garage for his vintage-car collection that doubled as his office, just a block away from his home in Santa Monica, California. The rest of his time he’d spend with Carrie Nuttall, his wife of 20 years, and his elementary-school-age daughter, Olivia, who adored him. He planned to spend summers with them at his spectacular lakeside country property in Quebec, not far from the former site of Le Studio, the picturesque spot where Rush recorded Moving Pictures and other albums.
Before Rush’s final tour began, Peart got a taste of the day-to-day existence he wanted. He ached to return to it, a rock star pining after mundanity like a cubicle drone daydreaming of living in the limelight. “It was awfully hard for me to turn away from a contented domestic life, a contented creative life,” he told me in 2015, sipping Macallan on ice in his garage just before the tour. “I’d wait till Olivia went to school in the morning and then come over here. I’m an early riser, as she is. I’d go pick up lunch and come back here. And again, I never take it for granted. I’ll be walking down Olympic to Starbucks or to Subway or whatever, thinking, ‘Isn’t this great?’ ”
After the tour, when Peart wasn’t working in his man cave, he volunteered for library time at Olivia’s school. “Olivia was thrilled,” says Nuttall. “She got to see Daddy at school all the time.” At night, he’d come home and cook family dinners. “He was living his life exactly the way he wanted for the first time in decades, probably,” she says. “It was a very sweet, content time … and then the gods, or whatever you want to call it, snatched it all away.”
“I just feel so bad,” says Lee, “that he had so little time to live out what he fought so hard to get.”
Peart started doing newspaper crossword puzzles back in the early Seventies, when he traveled to England from his native Canada to make it as a drummer, only to end up as the manager of a souvenir shop, with time to kill on a tube commute. For the past couple of decades, he made a ritual of whipping through the New York Times Sunday puzzle. In June 2016, he was baffled to find himself struggling with that task. “He couldn’t figure it out,” says Rush’s longtime manager, Ray Danniels. “ ‘What was the matter?’ ”
Peart kept his concern to himself, but by summer, he was showing signs of what Nuttall assumed to be depression. She broached the subject with Danniels during a visit to the manager’s house in Muskoka, Ontario. “I was like, ‘Carrie, he got everything he wants,’ ” Danniels recalls. “ ‘He won. He got his freedom. He got a huge paycheck off the last tour. This is not depression.’ ”
In late August, Nuttall and Peart’s mother both noticed that he was unusually quiet. When he did speak, he started “making mistakes with his words,” as he later told his bandmates. He rushed to a doctor, and after an MRI, ended up in surgery. The diagnosis was grim: glioblastoma, an aggressive brain cancer with an average survival time of roughly 12 to 18 months.
Genetic testing of Peart’s cancer suggested it was unusually treatable, and Peart lived until January 7th, 2020, more than three years after his diagnosis, which, in the case of this illness, qualified him as a “long-term survivor.”
“Three and a half years later,” says Lee, “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.”
Shortly before the surgery, Peart placed an uncharacteristic FaceTime call to Alex Lifeson, on the Rush guitarist’s birthday. “It was so unusual to get a call from him, because he was never comfortable on the phone,” says Lifeson. “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.”
A couple of weeks later, Peart sent an email to his bandmates with the news. He didn’t pull any punches. “He basically blurted it out,” Lee recalls. “ ‘I have a brain tumor. I’m not joking.’ ”
Lifeson was at a golf course when he got the message. “I think I started crying right there,” he says.
“You go into fight-or-flight mode,” Lee says. For Lifeson and Lee, the priority became finding chances to see their friend, who lived far from their mutual home base of Toronto.
Peart handled his illness with heroic strength and stoicism, friends say, even as he fought to survive. “He was a tough man,” says Lee. “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.”
There was a certain fatalism to Peart, who wrote song after song about the randomness of the universe, and then saw the events of his own life prove it to him. In 1997, his daughter Selena died in a car accident on the way to college; his common-law wife, Jackie, died of cancer soon after. Peart’s loss was so all-encompassing that despite his rationalist bent, he couldn’t help wondering whether he’d somehow been cursed.
“My daughter died at 19, and my wife died at 42, and I’m 62 and I’m still going,” he told me in 2015, discussing his refusal to consider quitting smoking (which is not believed to be a likely cause of glioblastoma). “How many people have died younger than me? How many drummers have died younger than me? I’m already in bonus time. … Something is gonna kill me. Look, I ride motorcycles. I drive fast cars. I fly around a lot in airplanes. It’s a dangerous life out there. I like what one old-timer said about motorcycling: ‘If you love motorcycling enough, it’s gonna kill you. The trick is to survive long enough that something else kills you first.’ ”
For all of that bravado, he couldn’t abide the idea of leaving his daughter behind. “That bothered him terribly,” Danniels says. “It bothered him that he had come full circle. At first, he felt the pain of having lost a child. And now he was leaving a child.”
Peart had his own mourning process to get through, says Nuttall, “for the future he was not going to have and for everything he would miss out on with Olivia, and with me, and with life itself. If anyone lived life to the fullest, it was Neil. And there was still much he wanted to do. When everyone says, ‘Oh, he was so stoic and accepted his fate,’ and all that? Yes, he did. But it also broke his heart.”
Peart was determined to make the most of his remaining time, just as he had always sought to maximize his days. “What’s the most excellent thing I can do today?” he used to ask himself. The answer often meant roaring through a national park on a BMW motorcycle before playing drums in an arena. (“You can do a lot in a lifetime,” he wrote in the lyrics to “Marathon,” one of Rush’s most powerful songs, “if you don’t burn out too fast.”) That was one of his signatures as a drummer, too, cramming an improbable amount of rhythmic information into each bar of music; he made his living by pushing the limits of time.
“He lived incredibly deeply and richly,” says one of his close friends, former Jethro Tull drummer Doane Perry. “Which might mean being on his own, reading a book at his place up in Canada on the lake — that was just as fully engaging as being onstage in front of tens of thousands of people.”
Peart’s lifelong need for privacy grew stronger. His illness was a secret kept among a small circle of friends, who managed to guard their knowledge to the very end. For Lee and Lifeson, who were doing interviews and fielding calls from friends and peers about rumors, the burden of concealment was heavy. “Neil asked us not to discuss it with anyone,” says 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.”
Peart always dismissed unnecessary discussion of unpleasant subjects with a hand wave and a hearty “never mind,” and that’s what friends heard if they tried bringing up his illness or treatment. “He didn’t want to waste his remaining time talking about shit like that,” says Lee. “He wanted to have fun with us. And he wanted to talk about real things right up to the very end.”
Peart never complained, Lee jokes, unless he “ran out of smokes.” “One time I arrived without any alcohol,” adds Lee, a serious wine collector. “And I’m famous for arriving at his house with what he used to call ‘your bucket of wine.’ And I didn’t bring it this one time. And he was just so appalled. So of course, the next day, Alex and I went to a wine store and made sure we arrived with a bucket of wine. And all was good again.”
Peart also overcame a lifelong aversion to retrospection and nostalgia, spending a significant amount of time listening to his catalog with Rush. “When we talk about his intense desire to be learning,” says another close friend, Vertical Horizon frontman Matt Scannell, “very hand in hand with that spirit is, ‘What’s new? What next?’ Back when I’d send him mix CDs, if it was old, he wasn’t interested. But I thought it was beautiful that he found something to enjoy about looking back, whereas before, it was kind of anathema.”
“I don’t think any of us listen to a lot of our old music,” says Lifeson. “It’s all been done and played. But my guess is that he was just reviewing some of the things that he accomplished, in terms of music, anyways. And I think he was a little surprised at how well it turned out. I think that happens, you kind of forget. It was interesting to see him smile and feel really good about that. And when he still could write to us, he wrote about how he was reviewing some of our older music and how it stood up for him.”
Lee wasn’t surprised. “Knowing Neil the way I do,” he says, “and knowing that he knew how much time he had left, I think it was a natural thing for him to review the work of his life. And he was finding himself very proud of how he had spent a big chunk of his life. And he wanted to share that with Alex and I. Whenever we saw him, he wanted to talk about that. He wanted us to know that he was proud.”
Fly By Night, Peart’s debut album with Rush, begins with the intro to “Anthem”: guitar, bass, and drums interlocked in a brutally syncopated riff, in ⅞ time, with some of the most crisp high-hat work the rock world had ever heard. From there, the song became a ferocious salute to Ayn Rand-inspired individualism. The Rand influence was powerful at that point for a young Peart, adhering to his public image for decades, but he’d soon regard it as philosophic and intellectual training wheels, at best. He’d eventually call himself a “left-wing libertarian” or “bleeding-heart libertarian,” and tell Rolling Stone in 2015 that he planned to vote Democratic after gaining his U.S. citizenship.
On Rush’s previous album, recorded with a far more limited drummer, John Rutsey, Lee had been singing come-ons (“Hey, baby, it’s a quarter to eight/I feel I’m in the mood!”) over bar-band Zeppelinisms; now he was screeching objectivist philosophy over thrilling, twisty prog-metal, a genre his band was inventing moment by moment. “We wanted to be the most complex hard-rock band out there, that was our goal,” Lee told me in 2015. “So I knew from the very first audition that this was the drummer of our dreams.”
Peart spent his infancy on a family farm, before his father — who would eventually run his own auto-parts business — moved the family to Port Dalhousie, a suburb of the small city of St. Catharines, Ontario. Until his teenage years, Peart’s childhood was relatively idyllic. He spent much of his time outdoors, cultivating what became a lifelong connection with nature. “Where he was really most comfortable was in nature and in quiet and a degree of solitude,” says his friend Doane Perry.
There was one deeply traumatic incident. Swimming in Lake Ontario when he was around 10, Peart grew tired and tried to grab onto a buoyed raft, before some older boys decided it would be funny to keep him off of it. Peart flailed in the water, feeling himself start to drown. At the last minute, two classmates saved his life. Peart was left with a certain distrust of strangers, and would flash back to the terror of that moment years later, when he was unlucky enough to be caught in a crush of fans. He developed a phobia of feeling “trapped” that would shape his profound discomfort with fame and his constant need to escape the cloistered world of rock touring.
Peart was brilliant enough to skip two grades, starting high school at 12. He began drum lessons, practicing for a full year without an actual kit. Peart’s first spark of interest in drums came with a viewing of The Gene Krupa Story, a biopic about the big-band drummer; big-band jazz was Peart’s dad’s favorite music, and Peart would take a serious stab at playing it later in life. Keith Moon, the Who’s wild-man drummer, became his hero, but as Peart’s skills developed, he realized he didn’t actually want to play like Moon. The chaos didn’t suit him. Peart would find a way to embody Moon’s energy while staying true to his own spirit, playing parts that were even flashier and more dramatic, but also more precise and composed, following a sort of three-dimensional geometric logic. (Ever restless, Peart, in his later years, reversed course and worked on his improvisational side.)
Teenage Peart grew his hair long and started wearing a cape and purple shoes. Local jocks were unimpressed. “I was totally happy up until the teenage years,” he told me, “when suddenly — I didn’t know I was a freak, but the world made me aware of it.” He was playing in his first bands and becoming completely obsessed with his instrument. He’d only stop practicing when his parents made him. “From the time I started playing drums, there was only drums and music,” Peart said. “I did great in school up until that point, and then it just didn’t matter.”
He dropped out at 17, and by the next year made his way to London. He spent 18 frustrating months there, returning to Canada with very different ideas about his musical career. He decided he couldn’t stand playing music he didn’t believe in for money, and would rather work a day job and play for fun. “I set out to never betray the values that 16-year-old had, to never sell out, to never bow to the man,” he told me.
He was offended by what he saw as pandering and corrupt commercialism in the rock world; there’s genuine contempt in the line about the “sound of salesmen” he’d later write in “The Spirit of Radio.” After a stint at the local record store, where he worked with the brothers of his future wife, Jackie Taylor, he settled into a job as parts manager at his father’s business, helping to computerize the inventory system.
Peart’s first attempt at ordinary life lasted barely a year before he was recruited to audition for a Toronto band already signed to a major label. Peart joined Rush, and began 40 years of recording and touring. “You look at him in photographs in the early days,” says Lee, “and he had a great smile. He was very happy for a very long time. Only after years of grueling road work did that smile start to wear away a little bit.”
From the beginning, though, Peart found the downtime on the road stultifying. He started putting it to use, plowing through ever-growing stacks of paperback books, filling in the gaps of his education. At the same time, he laced Rush’s early albums with some of rock’s oddest and most colorful lyrics. (“I have dined on honeydew!” Lee famously yelps on the 1977 classic “Xanadu.”) In his songwriting, Peart drew at first on his love of science fiction, fantasy, and Rand, before shifting to more earthbound concerns by the Eighties.
Rolling with some of those early lyrics was a “leap of faith” for the band, Lee acknowledges: “Sometimes you weren’t into it! And you didn’t want to do it. You had to talk about it.” As the years went by, the process became ever more collaborative. “For many years,” Lee adds, “Neil sat beside me in the control room when we listened back to vocals, and we’d talk about something that could be improved and he would rewrite it on the spot.” Later, Lee might pick just a few lines he liked, and Peart would rewrite songs around them.
The band’s breakthrough, 1976’s monumental, riff-happy rock operetta “2112,” was dead serious in its furious salute to personal freedom; the priests of Syrinx, who controlled everything in their dystopian society, were a thin stand-in for record execs who wanted Rush to sound more like Bad Company (and for teenage fans, parents who just didn’t understand).
There was more humor in the band and in Peart’s Seventies writing than some of his critics understood — 1975’s “By-Tor and the Snow Dog” was inspired, for instance, by the nicknames of two dogs Danniels owned. “I remember one morning saying to Geddy, wouldn’t it be funny if we did a fantasy piece on By-Tor and the Snow Dog?” Peart told me. Even in their peak-prog moment, 1978’s Hemispheres, the band was self-aware enough to give the wry subtitle “An Exercise in Self-Indulgence” to “La Villa Strangiato,” a twisty masterpiece of an instrumental.
“The Spirit of Radio,” from 1979’s Permanent Waves, lived up to its title, winning Rush extensive FM airplay, followed by their biggest-ever album, Moving Pictures, with Peart’s awe-inspiring performance on “Tom Sawyer,” highlighted by some of the most indelible drum fills in rock history. Rush were now huge, and Peart wasn’t enjoying it. When he heard Roger Waters’ depiction of rock alienation on Pink Floyd’s The Wall, he wrote Waters a letter of appreciation for capturing his own feelings so well.
His friend Matt Stone, South Park’s co-creator, was stunned to find how ill-at-ease Peart could be about being recognized in public, even late in his career. “He was a really weird guy about his fame,” Stone says. (For that reason, Peart particularly loved Stone’s Halloween parties, where he could meet people while in disguise — which, one year, meant full drag.)
Peart developed strategies to break free. “I carried a bicycle on the tour bus and sometimes on days off I’d go riding in the country,” he told me, “and then, if the cities were a hundred miles apart, I could do it on my own, and that was the biggest thrill. The whole entourage left, and I’d be in the little town in a motel room and on my own, and in those days no cellphones or anything. Just me and my bicycle.” He took extracurricular trips, too, riding through Africa (toting, on one trip, a copy of Aristotle’s Ethics and a collection of Vincent Van Gogh’s letters) and China. The deprivation he witnessed in Africa was transformative, pushing the “bleeding heart” part of his libertarianism to the surface.
Peart tried to end Rush’s touring days as early as 1989, when his daughter Selena was 11 years old. “After much wrestling in my own mind I came to the realization, if I’m going to call myself a musician, then I’m going to have to perform live,” he told me. “I like rehearsing much better than performing. It’s got all the challenge and gratification, but without the pressure. And you don’t have to leave home. Even in ’89, I was thinking, ‘Imagine if they had a hologram, so every day I just went to one place and played my heart out, and then went home.’ ”
Peart felt intense pressure, night after night, to live up to his own reputation. “He never rated himself as highly as everyone else did,” says Police drummer Stewart Copeland, another friend. “But he did very much feel the responsibility that he carried to be the god of drums. Kind of a burden, actually.”
In May 1994, at the Power Station recording studio in New York, Peart gathered together great rock and jazz drummers, from Steve Gadd to Matt Sorum to Max Roach, for a tribute album he was producing for the great swing drummer Buddy Rich. Peart noticed one of the players, Steve Smith, had improved strikingly since the last time he had seen him, and learned that he studied with the jazz guru Freddie Gruber. In the year of his 42nd birthday, while he was already widely considered to be the greatest rock drummer alive, Peart sought out Gruber and started taking drum lessons. “What is a master but a master student?” Peart told Rolling Stone in 2012.
He was convinced that years of playing along with sequencers for the more synth-y songs in Rush’s Eighties catalog had stiffened his drumming, and he wanted to loosen back up. (For all of his efforts and mastery, there were some areas even Neil Peart couldn’t conquer: “To be honest, I am not sure that Neil ever fully ‘got’ the jazz high-hat thing,” Peter Erskine, who took over as Peart’s teacher in the 2000s, wrote affectionately.)
Rush as a whole were feeling some creative exhaustion on their next album, 1996’s Test for Echo, but Peart felt he’d done his best playing to date, thanks to a revamped sense of time. He also found a new way to make touring bearable, even pleasurable, traveling from date to date on his BMW motorcycle. “I’m out in the real world every day,” he told me, “seeing people at work and going about their daily life, and having little conversations in rest areas and gas stations and motels, and all the American life every day.” Five years would pass before the band toured again.
On August 10th, 1997, Peart and his wife Jackie helped 19-year-old Selena pack up her car as she prepared to drive to the University of Toronto to begin her sophomore year. Her expected arrival time came and went without a phone call. A few hours later, a police officer came to Peart’s door. At Selena’s funeral, Peart told his bandmates to consider him retired, and Lifeson and Lee assumed the band was over. Jackie was shattered, and within months received a diagnosis of metastatic cancer. She responded “almost gratefully” to the news, Peart wrote. Jackie died in June 1998. She is buried next to their daughter.
Peart left everything behind, got on his motorcycle and rode. He felt alienated from himself; at one point, he watched one of his old instructional drum videos and felt like he was looking at a different person. There was part of him left, though, “a little baby soul,” and he did his best to nurture it. There were times when he sought the “numb refuge of drugs and alcohol,” as he put it in his memoir of the period, Ghost Rider. Midway through his journey, before embarking on a run through Mexico, Peart broke out of his isolation for a week, spending some time in Los Angeles with Rush photographer Andrew MacNaughtan.
One of the few things that made him laugh during that period was South Park, so Peart was pleased when MacNaughtan introduced him to Stone. “Andrew was like, ‘Neil’s coming to town,’ ” Stone recalls. “ ‘Let’s get wasted and hang out.’ I got some party materials and went up to the Hollywood Hills. Because of what happened, it was, ‘Don’t talk about girls. Don’t talk about children.’ So we talked about art and philosophy and rock & roll and travel. … But it was a guy who was just fucking sad.”
Over the course of more than a year and 55,000 miles’ worth of motorcycle trips, Peart began to heal. He ended up in Southern California for good, ready to start over. “When I first moved here it was remarkable, because my life was one suitcase, a bicycle, and a boom box,” he told me. “All the possessions I had. I rented a little apartment by the Santa Monica Pier. And I joined the Y here. I would do yoga or the Y every day, ride around on my bicycle, come home and listen to my boom box, and it was great.” Through MacNaughtan, he met Carrie Nuttall, a gifted photographer, and fell in love. They married in 2000. Peart called the band and told them he was ready to get back to work.
Rush were as popular as they had ever been by their 40th anniversary in 2015, having been belatedly absorbed into the classic-rock and pop-culture canons. After many stylistic reinventions, they had re-embraced their core approach with what would turn out to be their last studio release, the triumphant concept album Clockwork Angels, in 2012.
But Peart had again grown reluctant to tour. He and Olivia, now five, were very close, and during the band’s 2012-13 tour, she found his absences painful and disturbing. Peart relented only because Lifeson developed arthritis, and the guitarist worried that it might be his last chance to play. “Realizing I was trapped,” Peart wrote, “I got back to my hotel that night and stomped around the room in a mighty rage and an attack of extreme Tourette’s.” After the tantrum subsided, he decided to follow an adage of Freddie Gruber’s: “It is what it is. Deal with it.”
As the tour went on, Lifeson started feeling better. It was Peart who suffered. He kept up his motorcycle routine, a 62-year-old man riding hundreds of miles a day, sometimes in the rain, before playing three-hour concerts. He developed a painful infection in one of his feet, among other issues. “He could barely walk to the stage,” says Lifeson. “They got him a golf cart to drive him to the stage. And he played a three-hour show, at the intensity he played every single show. I mean, that was amazing.”
At the beginning of the tour, Peart was feeling good, and signaled to Danniels that he might be open to adding more shows. His feelings changed along with his physical condition. “Partway through the second run,” says Danniels, “he made it clear to me, ‘I can’t do any more. I don’t want to do any more.’ And, you know, I was frustrated.” So were Lee and Lifeson, who were in the middle of one of Rush’s greatest tours, with a fan’s-dream set list that ran through the band’s catalog in reverse chronological order.
“My relationship with him had been one of coaxing,” Danniels adds. “But even getting angry couldn’t move him. He wasn’t a racehorse anymore. He was a mule. The mule wasn’t going to move. … I eventually let go. I realized I was going to negatively affect my friendship with him.”
The band never really spoke about the significance of what was happening at Rush’s final show, at a sold-out Forum in L.A. At least not aloud. “The conversation took place onstage,” says Lee, “all through the show, in our eyes.” Peart made it clear that something unique, and most likely final, was happening when he came up to the front of the stage with his bandmates at the show’s conclusion. It was the first time he had done so in 40 years. “That was a beautiful moment,” Lee says.
For all the finality, there was always some hope that the band would find some way to continue. “Do I think Neil would have done something again?” says Danniels. “Yes. He would have one day. [Something] different, whether it was a residency in Vegas or whatever. I think, yes, before the illness. That’s what stopped this thing from ever coming back.”
The years of Peart’s illness were filled with uncertainty. Early on, he was in remission for a year before the cancer returned. “In a way, every time you said goodbye to him, you said goodbye,” says Lee. “Because you honestly didn’t know. Even when he was doing pretty well. It was three and a half years of really not knowing. The timeline kept moving. So when you said goodbye, it was always a giant hug.”
During one visit, Lifeson stayed in L.A. by himself for a few days. “And when I left, I gave him a big hug and a kiss,” the guitarist says. “And he looked at me and said, ‘That says everything.’ And, oh, my God. And that, for me, was when [I said goodbye]. I saw him a couple times afterwards, but I can see him and feel that moment.”
The final time Lee and Lifeson saw their bandmate, they were able to have one last, glorious boozy dinner with him and Nuttall. “We were laughing our heads off,” says Lifeson. “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.”
Peart had some degree of impairment as the disease progressed, but “really, right up to the end, he was in there,” says Perry. “He was absolutely in there, taking things in.” (A report after his death that Peart was confined to a wheelchair and unable to speak was entirely false, friends said.) He kept up his routine, heading to his man cave each weekday, seeing friends there, even throwing himself a final birthday party in the fall of 2019.
When Peart could no longer drive, his friends Michael Mosbach and Juan Lopez shuttled him there. “I’m just really grateful and proud,” says Nuttall, “that I was able to provide Neil with the ability to still do all those things he wanted to do, really up until the very end. But I couldn’t have done it without Juan and Michael.”
Peart never played drums again after Rush’s final show. But there was a drum kit in his house. It belonged to Olivia, who was taking lessons and seriously pursuing the instrument. Peart’s parents had allowed him to set up his drums in their living room, and he did the same for Olivia. It said everything about Peart that his daughter wasn’t shy about tackling the instrument in the shadow of his own achievements. “Neil immediately said, ‘She has it,’ ” says Nuttall. “She did inherit what he had. And of course, that thrilled him. … He made a huge effort not to make her feel intimidated by him — he didn’t sit there and stare at her having her lesson. He would be out of sight, but he’d be listening.”
With Peart’s passing closely followed by a global catastrophe, it’s been a dark and surreal year for his friends and family. In a world frozen in place, it’s been hard to process grief. “It feels like it wasn’t very long ago,” says Lee. There was more drama in the Rush camp, too. Lifeson became terribly ill in March, and was hospitalized for a few days and placed on oxygen. He tested negative for Covid-19 but positive for the flu, though he did lose his sense of taste and smell while he was sick. Lifeson has since fully recovered.
A planned private Toronto memorial for Peart had to be called off, but there was a small dinner with the band and friends in Los Angeles, and a formal memorial there hosted by his widow weeks later. “Carrie picked a beautiful place overlooking the Pacific,” says Perry. “It was a beautiful afternoon. It was a healing time for everyone. Carrie put together a wonderful slide show of pictures, going right back to when he was a boy.”
Some of Peart’s friends — Scannell, Perry, Copeland, prose collaborator Kevin Anderson — spoke in front of an audience that included his bandmates and other famous drummers: Taylor Hawkins of Foo Fighters, the Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Chad Smith, Tool’s Danny Carey. In Copeland’s speech, he noted that thanks to Peart, all of the drummers in attendance shared the indignity of meeting fans who’d tell them, “You’re my second-favorite drummer!”
At the end, Olivia Peart, age 11, got up and talked about her dad. “She was wonderful,” Perry says. “She’s really Neil’s daughter, a really smart little girl.”
Olivia and her mother are, of course, still struggling with the loss, compounded by pandemic-era isolation. The Canadian border has been largely closed for months, separating them from Peart’s extended family. “Our lives were turned upside down when Neil died,” says Nuttall, who spent Christmas alone with her daughter. “And then eight weeks later we were alone at home together, and it’s been tough. … We both think about him every single day, and talk about him every single day, and miss him every day.” Through it all, Olivia is continuing her drum lessons.
Since Peart’s passing, Lee and Lifeson have found little interest in picking up their instruments. “I love playing, and I never, ever wanted to stop,” says Lifeson, during an emotional joint video call with Lee. Lifeson was in his studio, where nearly a dozen gleaming guitars hung behind him. “And I thought, you know, ‘One day, when I’m just sitting around shitting my pants, I’ll still want to play guitar.’ And that’s kind of gone now. After he died, it just didn’t seem important. But I think it’ll come back.”
“For the longest time,” says Lee, “I didn’t have any heart to play. … 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.”
Even as they mourn their friend, Lee and Lifeson are adjusting to the idea that Rush, too, is gone. “That’s finished, right? That’s over,” Lee says. “I still am very proud of what we did. I don’t know what I will do again in music. And I’m sure Al doesn’t, whether it’s together, apart, or whatever. But the music of Rush is always part of us. And I would never hesitate to play one of those songs in the right context. But at the same time, you have to give respect to what the three of us with Neil did together.”
After the final Rush show, Peart stuck around the venue, instead of bolting off on his motorcycle. He was, for once, having a great time backstage. “He was ebullient,” Lee says. Neil Peart had finished his work, held on to his standards, never betrayed his 16-year-old self. He was still playing at his peak.
“He felt like it was a job well done,” says Scannell, who hung out with him that night. “And who could deny that?”
Geddy Lee on the Genius of Neil Peart
The most important collaboration in my life has been with Geddy," Neil Peart wrote in 2014. As Rush's drummer and lyricist, Peart had a profound link with Geddy Lee, the band's bassist, singer, and keyboardist — though he also emphasized the importance of guitarist Alex Lifeson. "Certainly I don’t want to diminish Alex’s role," Peart continued. "After all, he is our Musical Scientist, the Funniest Man Alive, and a shamefully underrated and thoroughly wonderful guitar player. But the musical relationship between bass player and drummer, the rhythm section, is famously tight (or ought to be!). And of course the bond of trust necessary between lyricist and singer is even more intimate."
Lee felt the same way about Peart, who died on January 7th, 2020. In an interview for our recent digital cover story on the drummer's life and music, Lee looked back on 40 years of close collaboration.
Neil once described your bass playing as passionate and methodical. Of course, that very much applies to his approach on the drums as well.
Yeah. The two of us really gravitated to each other. We really were like-minded almost from the beginning. When he first came into the band, we were just getting to know each other, not only as people but rhythmically. He was ambitious and I was ambitious. He loved to be hyperactive. I loved to be hyperactive. So in a sense, it was a marriage made in heaven. We looked at each other very much as equal parts of a whole.
We really strove to create an individual style of rhythm section that suited the kind of music we were playing. Of course, having a three-piece, in a way, is heaven-sent because every time Alex broke into a solo, you have to get busy, so it doesn't sound like the bottom of the earth just fell away. So that really suited us quite well, and we got to a point onstage where we could really intuitively feel where each other wanted to go, even when we were improvising. One of the great joys of my life was playing in a rhythm section that consisted of only two people with that fellow, because we really jibed. We really were in sync.
Neil said two things about the guitar-solo sections. He said he always was very respectful of the vocal during verses, but there was no such rule with the guitar during the guitar solos. And he also said that you saw the guitar solos more like full-band solos.
Yeah, I think that's true. And we had the benefit of laying down our tracks first so Al had to work around us. So we would go mental and do our thing and then poor Al would have to come in and go, "Shit, do I work around that part? Do I go with that part?" So we constantly made life more difficult for our blond-haired fellow.
I've been listening a lot to Fly by Night, since it marks Neil's arrival into the band. What do you remember about the birth of this version of Rush, and starting to form those arrangements on that album, especially stuff like "Anthem"?
First of all, we didn't have a whole lot of time. Neil joined the band, and two weeks later we were doing our first gig, opening for Uriah Heep, so we had to learn as many songs as we could and head out. So it was through that whole first tour that we were getting to know each other musically. We had a lot of dead time but not dead time where we actually had our instruments in our hands. So we couldn't jam really. Our whole day was leading up to 26 minutes onstage, and then you're off.
We got very few soundchecks until we started playing with Kiss on a regular basis. That meant we didn't have a lot of opportunity to investigate certain things, so that all had to be done on the fly and it had to be done during the playing of the songs. Subtle things would start to change night to night as Neil got to know the songs better and as we got to understand each other better as players. That kind of chemistry started to develop. By the time we hit Fly by Night, we were just so amped to do something new. And the "Anthem" riff that we had jammed on during Neil's first audition with us was a direction that Alex and I had already started going down the road. We were listening to Yes more. We were listening to Genesis. We were influenced by the more proggy English bands that were coming out.
So in a sense, Neil just kind of fit in like a glove. And when we started writing, even in our hotel rooms, in the back of our minds we had an idea of where that could go. But it really wasn't until we got into the recording session, and started doing stuff like "By-Tor and the Snow Dog" — which really developed in the studio — that a whole other side of our nature was formed. That was a real getting-to-know-each-other album, but at the same time it was surprising how quickly it all came together. I mean, we recorded that album in 10 days.
You also were singing Neil's lyrics for the first time, obviously. You always mention that "Beneath, Between and Behind" was almost impossible to sing at the pace that was required for the song.
Yeah, and it's funny, I listened to that song the other day and I was surprised how, aside from its hyperactive nature, how unhurried the lyrics sounded to me now. But back then, I felt like I was racing with the rhythm section to get all the lyrics spit out, but it's funny how hindsight gives you a different perspective on it.
Not to belabor the Ayn Rand of it all, but you were presented with some pretty out-there lyrics at that point. "I know they've always told you selfishness was wrong. … Begging hands and bleeding hearts will only cry out for more." Even beyond the ideology, which we all know that Neil moved beyond, I'm curious what you made of that at first. On any level, those were not typical rock lyrics.
Exactly, and at first it was a huge leap of faith for us to just accept that. It wasn't his idea to write the lyrics. Alex and I sort of said, "Make him do it. He reads a lot of books. Let him do it." When they first started coming along, I think the first one he wrote was "Beneath, Between and Behind." And then when he wrote the lyrics for "Anthem," they were a little more intense, and a little more about things that I would say were not second-nature to our thinking, at least expressed in that way, like some of the lyrics you just quoted, "begging hands and bleeding hearts."
That whole thing was not something Alex and I thought of or talked about. Once we got on the road and got to know each other more and started sharing reading material, I think we got a better understanding of Neil and he got a better understanding of us. A lot of times he would inspire us to read something that was a little out of our comfort zone and so through all that we kind of developed that acceptance of that style of lyric, but it was definitely night and day when that album came out. As much as some people loved it, other people were disturbed by it, because that was not the Rush they had invested in from the previous record. It was definitely a new band.
"Xanadu" is one of the greatest Rush songs, and at the same time, you had Pete Way from UFO teasing you on the road for singing about dining on honeydew. Again, you must have had a reaction when you were first handed those lyrics.
Well, yeah. Sometimes you weren't into it and you didn't want to do it and you had to talk about it. If I didn't write them, I had to put myself in the writer's perspective. I had to be sort of an actor playing a role and so all those things had to feel comfortable on some level, and that required discussion, of course. As our relationship developed over the years, you got bolder about what you would accept and what you wouldn't accept, and there's a bigger trust that was formed between us as singer and lyricist.
I marvel at the relationship that we developed because in the early days we were just happy to get lyrics. So yeah, "These sound OK. We'll do this kind of music with it." We didn't think too much about it, and our biggest concern was, can we make a powerful song out of it? How is this going to work? We were making two records a year back then, so we didn't have a whole lot of time to sit back and go, "Well, I think we should try six different versions of this."
But as time went on, we developed a rapport and a feel for each other and a consideration for each other. Neil, in terms of writing, became more and more considerate of what I had to do, of my job not just as a singer of words but as a shaper of melody, and someone who also had to express emotions. He was very sensitive to that, and always for many years, sat beside me in the control room when we listened back to vocals. If we talked about something that could be improved, he would rewrite it on the spot.
In later years, while we were writing the material, he pretty much gave me license to choose the bits of his lyric that moved me the most, that I felt I could write a melody to or arrange a song around. Even if it was four lines out of six stanzas, he would go back and he would rewrite the song around those four lines. Neil was a perfect example of a guy who checked his ego at the door.
He was a proud guy, but at the same time he was a team guy in terms of Alex and me, and he really trusted, in the end, my opinion and my take on what I felt worked best for a Rush song and what didn't. Which is not to say we never had an argument. Certainly we would argue about a concept or if I had changed the meaning of a line or something that was really important to him, of course, we would work something out. But he turned into an incredible collaborator and a very considerate song partner as time went on.
Matt Scannell from Vertical Horizon told me that when he collaborated with Neil on a song, he was handed almost like a beautifully handwritten medieval manuscript of lyrics. Was that your experience as well?
Yeah. They were all handwritten and he had little drawings at the top of all of them and he loved cartoons that described the song, and the titles were always a little on the ornate side. That's how it would start, and even if he had to rewrite the thing four or five times they always came properly presented. He almost never just banged them out on a typewriter or something. Later on, when it was a computer age, he still managed to find a way to make his presentations to us as artful as possible. It was a big source of pride for him, and in the early days when we were writing on the road, he used to add in the top corner which towns we were in when he worked on that song, so it also served as a little travelogue.
It seems like you loved it when his lyrics started to turn to the more earth-bound in the Eighties.
Oh, of course, yeah. His lyrics became more about the human condition to a large degree. You could say that he was always talking about one part of the human condition or another even through the years of using science fiction as a device, but it started to become more overt in style and more traditional in shape. I gravitated to that a lot because it helped me as a songwriter and helped me in terms of the direction that I wanted to go in.
And of course, the overall sound of the band kept shifting in many ways as well.
Neil and I as a rhythm section were trying to get earthier and slightly funkier and trying to experiment with moving the songs in a different way instead of just kind of at breakneck speed. We always were a band that played fast. I mean, when you listen to an old Rush album, the first thing you notice is, "Jesus, slow down!" But we were in a hurry. I mean, we were in a hurry. So we consciously moved in to find a deeper groove and the idea of groove became different than the idea of groove as a young prog-rocker. So I think his lyrics changed at the same pace. As we were looking for a deeper groove he was looking for a more real way of expressing himself, a more earthbound way shall we say.
A song like "Bravado" is a great example of both of those changes.
Exactly, yeah. I think that's one of his best lyrics. It's one of my favorite Rush songs. I always loved to play it, and it was emotional. I love to sing that song.
You've got formidable skills of your own, but were there times when you were truly kind of awed with stuff that Neil either conceived or was just pulling off technically?
With regularity. I've never met a musician like him. He was a monster drummer of the highest magnitude. I've met some great musicians but I had the pleasure to watch him every night onstage and watch him improvise, as he got older, through his solos. When he became determined to add improvisation as part of his drum solo every night, that's a bold, brave step for him and the level of complexity that he functioned at. I don't know many other musicians that can function at that level.
So for me, I was always trying to live up to his watermark, so to speak, because he pushed me. He would say the same thing about me, but of course, I always thought, "No, no, I'm following you." And he'd go, "No, no, no. You're making me sound good. Here's all my rough edges." So it was a partnership. But he awed me over and over again. He was relentless in the studio and he would play it as many times as required. Half the time, you'd be going, "Well, that's a take, right?" And he would say, "No. It wasn't a take." Not for him. He was so incredibly demanding of himself and of course, you have to rise to that level. It just happens that way. It just becomes your band mantra when you see a guy working that hard. You work that hard.
One of the things that's unique about Neil and Rush is the number of songs where there's entirely different rhythmic approaches for different verses. How challenging was that not only as the bass player but the bass player who had to sing at the same time?
It was intentional and it was discussed. Even way back when we did "Beneath, Between and Behind," if you look at the third verse of that song, we said, "Hey, let's just shift the emphasis and go back on the beat." It almost turns into a shuffle for one verse. So we both loved doing that kind of thing. That's the fun part.
It wasn't a challenge. I mean, singing was always a challenge over the rhythm-section parts that we would sing together but I always worried about that later. It was the writing of it and the thinking up of those parts that was so much fun for us. Whenever we finished an album, we always ran off one version that was just bass and drums just so that we could glory in the quirkiness of our rhythm section together and also the unblemished sound of bass and drums before all that white noise [laughs] came and got plastered on top of it.
So you have your own personal, bootleg versions of Rush albums that are just bass and drums?
Yeah, somewhere. I haven't dug them out in years but somewhere I have our original bass and drums as did he.
Neil wrote in his book that he was very proud of the drum solo he did your final tour, and he was under the impression that you and Alex never said anything to him about it.
Yeah, and it's not really true! I told him lots of times. I've heard that before and I don't know why he felt that way. I mean, I listened to that drum solo every night in awe and I talked to him about it numerous times. I don't know why he thought we didn't give him enough respect for it. He was hard of hearing so maybe he didn't hear me. [Laughs] It bothers me that he didn't feel that we gave him his due on that tour, because most certainly we did and his drum solo was incredible and different almost every night on that tour.
Neil felt a lot of pressure to be the drum god people expected when he played. How did you see that weighing on him?
He set the bar really high for himself, and as his body started to let him down he worried that he would betray that. He was really big on that. He used to say all the time that he never wanted to let down the kid in him. He would visualize him as a kid watching his own drum performance and never wanted to let that kid version down. But it was really a very difficult gig and as time went on and his body started to, as I said, let him down, it became much more difficult for him to get through it. Yet somehow he did. Any talk of a compromised version of one of our songs, it's just not in the cards. If he couldn't do it the way he'd done it in the past, he didn't want to do it, and that was pretty much it.
Still, you pulled off everything on the R40 tour, didn't you?
Yeah, I know. But he struggled through that tour. He had lot of weird issues, physical issues, a tendency to get infections. He was so fucking stoic. He would never let, you know … You'd see him limping or something and you'd go, "Man, what's going on?" "Oh, fuck … I need to tell you." But you had to guess if he even had a cold, because he didn't grumble about that kind of stuff. He was the exact opposite of me. When I have something wrong, everyone in the fucking organization knows I have something wrong. [Laughs] I really tried to teach him how to whine but he just couldn't learn.
"You had to guess if Neil even had a cold, because he didn't grumble about that kind of stuff. He was the exact opposite of me. When I have something wrong, everyone in the fucking organization knows I have something wrong."
When and how did you first become aware of Neil's discomfort with fame and compliments and all of that sort of thing?
Well, it happened over time. In the early days, he didn't behave like that. I think he always had a little bit of stage fright, but he got over it as soon as he hit the stage. But it really happened over time, the more demands that were made of his time and the more notoriety he was garnering as a drummer and as member of the band. All that stuff started to play on his nervous system, and he started reacting in a much more extreme way as he got older.
I was thinking about this the other day. Early on, the first few tours we did, he was laughing a lot, having a lot of fun onstage. There was a time when we would even sit backstage after a gig and sign autographs for fans, especially in the U.K. The U.K. fans were used to lining up to get autographs after certain gigs; there would be literally hundreds of people lined up. So we would sit there in the drafty hallway as they were ushered in, and Neil would sign for everybody. As we got into the Eighties, something changed in him that made him much more sensitive to his private time and his exposure to the public and he started backing away from it.
He started taking off on his own between shows, first on a bicycle and then on a motorcycle. How did you feel about that?
Well, every once in a while it was odd for us. We missed him. We wanted him to hang out after a gig sometimes and just get wasted with us as we used to do in the early days. But it was his only method of staying sane, and he needed to do that. So we allowed him that luxury. There was no way you were going to stop him, anyway. It's not like we would say, "Hey, Neil. Don't do that." That wouldn't have flown. With Neil, it was, "This is who I am. This is what you have to deal with."
It didn't really affect our closeness, I would say. But sometimes you weren't quite sure, and then you'd see him the next day at soundcheck, and he just couldn't stop talking your ear off about this or about that. So there was always something that drew us back together and of course, our dinnertime conversations were really important to him. That was his touchstone with Alex and I, and that was our time to catch up and take a breath together.
But he was prepared to forgo after-gig partying. On days off, sometimes we would find each other in some town where he wasn't staying 100 miles away, and we would have strategically organized meals together from time to time. I would say Alex and I probably wanted him to hang out more than he did, but we just accepted that was who he was and that's what he needed to stay sane.
He always made sure to arrive at the venues early, but was it stressful to know that one third of a band was off on a motorcycle somewhere on the day of a show?
It did make us nervous from time to time, especially when he was cycling through South America. We didn't know where the fuck he was, but you just get inured to it. You just get used to him taking care of himself and that's why he had Michael [Mosbach] with him. Michael was his security guy as well as his buddy, and he had [a satellite phone] so no matter where he was he could reach us.
You worried about his safety, but he was a safe driver. I remember one time, I did a bicycle ride, and you've never seen a guy observe every single road rule like him. I mean, he always had his wits about him.
Can you point to drum parts of his that you loved the most?
It's a big library of drum fills, but I loved his playing in "One Little Victory." That was one of the few times that we could convince him to play the same part more than once. It was very difficult to get him to play the same part more than once in the same song but that was one of them. That whole triplet, double-bass-drum feel always blew me away, and in fact, I think that was the first thing that blew me away about him when we first met him. He got behind this little drum kit he had with 18-inch bass drums and he started playing those triplets, and wow. He had a thing.
He tuned his drums perfectly, too. A lot of drummers are great technicians, but not all of them tune their drums with the kind of fanaticism that he did, and his drums were very melodious because of that. They actually make his drum parts sing more and make them more memorable because of that fact. So that's a very important aspect of his musicianship is the way he tuned his drums, not just the way he banged them. Rhythm parts are one thing, but the melodious nature of how his drum kit was presented and tuned by him made him a really unique player in my view.
What were your usual methods for developing parts together?
We just went down the rabbit hole when we did our bed tracks. In later years, I would write my part first and then he would write his drum part. In early years of course, we worked everything out on the floor together. When we wrote "YYZ," for example, we would just talk it right through.
As I was writing the melody for that, we would talk through what he was going to play and where his bass drums were going to go, and I would go with it during rehearsal. Then you lay it down, and I could you hear what he's doing with his bass drum a little more clearly, and then I can move my notes around to smack right when he's smacking it. In later years, Alex and I would write the songs apart from him and send Neil a finished demo with, like, two versions, one with Alex's genius drum-machine parts, and one that had no drum-machine parts so that he could envision his own thing.
Then once we got together in the studio, he would play to a guide track of the part that I had written, and he would find it too stiff to play to, because it was obviously played to a machine. So very often I would plug in live while he was doing his drum track and play the part again, and this way we could figure out a groove together. I would then take his new part and change what I had written so that it was more simpatico with his presence on the track. So it was a kind of convoluted step-by-step process. We chased each other a little bit, but at the same time we always ended up where we wanted to be and by that time you really can hear all the nuances of the rhythm part.
What do you remember about Neil developing his parts on something like "La Villa Strangiato"?
That was really hard to play, that song, when we first wrote it. We couldn't get through it. We kept fucking it up because there's so many details, so many rhythmic shifts. Again, we wrote that kind of in sync with each other so I don't know how to describe that process really. As you're working on one section you're intimate with what he's playing, and then I'm intimate with what I'm playing and we try to make sure we can hear each other and I'll go to some new place and he'll go, "Oh, I like that. OK, I'll go there with you." And vice versa. And that's how you sort of build it and then you try to remember that sucker and that's not so easy.
How was it to deal with just someone who could be so methodical and perhaps rigid about certain things, and then being part of a triangle with him?
Well, it wasn't always easy because he could be rigid. He could be unmovable on certain subjects. But I used to say this to the producers that we worked with: "Just be honest with him. If you're trying to get him to do something, you have to, first of all, explain yourself very well. If you can't explain yourself very well, you're going to lose."
So when I dealt with him, he trusted me; I trusted him. He loved me; I loved him. I knew that; Alex knew that. But there are times where you're at loggerheads. So you have to make your case, and if you make your case well and it's not bullshit, you actually are making sense, he will see your side of it, and so that's really what life with him was like. Sometimes he would be insistent that, "No, I don't agree with you and that's not cool with me." We would just agree to disagree and maybe the part doesn't go anywhere. Maybe we don't use it. But more often than not we find a happy meeting place. He was a very reasonable dude, but what he wouldn't stand for is giving him a reason to do something that didn't hold water.
What were the kinds of things that he would truly put his foot down about?
Well, gigs for sure. How often he would play, when he wouldn't play, how far the drives were between. He was very determined to do a tour his way. That's one thing. In the studio, I don't know. He was pretty good to work with in the studio. I don't remember many hissy fits. But if he'd done a song too many times and you wanted to ask him to change it, you'd better have a fucking good reason to ask him to change it, because he'd been chopping wood all day.
He's not there to keep playing until you've satisfied every fucking weird experiment in your head. He would take that for a while, and pretty soon he would be done with that. You're talking about a guy that left a serious amount of broken sticks behind him at the end of every session. That's how hard he played. I mean, you could make a fire back there. So he had good patience, but he didn't suffer fools, and if you were going to play the fool, he didn't suffer you, either, no matter how much he loved you.
"You're talking about a guy that left a serious amount of broken sticks behind him at the end of every session. That's how hard he played. I mean, you could make a fire back there."
You've said that there aren't really Rush outtakes, but is there really nothing in this studio archive as far as perhaps different versions, Beatles Anthology–type stuff?
No, there's nothing. There's nothing there. There's nothing left. There might be half-finished demos somewhere where we got halfway through and went, "Oh, this song sucks." And it never got made.
And it's not really in keeping with your ethos to put stuff like that out.
No, it's not. I mean, some of those things may not even be in a stage that there's drums on them. You'd know when you're working on a song if you're beating a dead horse. If that song wasn't really coming together — and especially with me as I got older — I had less patience for staying with a song that obviously wasn't working.
Sometimes you come in the next day, and Alex and I would be working on a demo, and we'd go, "What the fuck is this song, anyway?" He's like, "I don't know. I've forgotten why we were doing it." So you just trash it and start again. We didn't record anything and then at the end say, "No, that doesn't make it onto the record." Those things don't exist at all.
Neil once said he didn't really count in his head, despite the complexity of your songs.
Well, first of all, he did count. [Laughs] We both counted. There's certain things you count, especially pauses. You count pauses. When you're playing off time and you have a lot of pauses in a song, you'd better be counting in the same meter or you're going to just blow it when you come back. You wrote your parts and this is where we thought the same. This is where we agreed. You learned the part and the part had a determined length of time, and you glued all these parts together.
So if you're remembering the part, you don't have to count it because the part goes this long and then the next part goes this long and the next part goes this long. So maybe that's completely unconventional, when you don't read music, to write like that, but that's how we did it. We wrote these parts and we put them all together and you just remembered them one after the other, after the other. Whether he was capable of remembering them into his seventies, I don't know. I don't know if I'm capable of remembering them into my seventies. And maybe that was something that played at the back of his mind about playing when you're older, because your memory is not as sharp.
It's not like you can have sheet music in front of you.
No, you're out there naked and if you lose it mentally, if you lose the count mentally, or the part disappears on you, which happens from time to time — we have some fantastic train crashes once in a while onstage … But that's a bigger fear, I think, than anything onstage, is trying to recall that bit that has somehow ran away from you.
I told Neil that watching him rehearse, I got the idea that his parts worked in a sort of three-dimensional geometry, and he actually said that was the way he thought of it as well. Did you ever talk about the way he saw rhythm?
I think he had his way of splitting his mind into so many segments. He had true independence, as many drummers do, but he pushed that independence to its very limit and I think he equated it in a way of me singing, playing bass, playing foot pedals, all that. That requires a kind of separation of brain too. So I think from that perspective, he viewed his gig sort of like my gig, but I don't know how he fucking did half the shit he did because it was just so independent. Just the other day I was playing with my grandson and I was trying to teach him that idea and you start when you're a kid tapping your head and rubbing your belly. So you put that at the power of 1,000 and then you've got Neil Peart.
I mean, Neil was right — you were also pushing the limits of that kind of rhythmic and musical independence onstage.
Yeah, but my wife doesn't think I can multitask just because I can't make the main course and the appetizer part at the same time. So I'm not very good at multitasking, apparently. [Laughs]
-| Click HERE for more Rush Biographies and Articles |-