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Interview: Neil Peart of Rush

by Don
Zulaica
liveDaily Contributor

July 30, 2004
03:49 PM - Rush is currently headlining its 30th
anniversary tour, the band's first outing since the trek
supporting 2002's "Vapor Trails."

Although the group--bassist-keyboardist-vocalist Geddy
Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer-percussionist Neil
Peart--doesn't have an album of new material out, it recently
released "Feedback," an EP of covers that includes The Who's
"The Seeker," Buffalo Springfield's "For What It's Worth" and
The Yardbirds' "Heart Full of Soul."

Over their three-decade career, the Canadian rockers
sponged musical influences from progressive rock and fusion to
funk and reggae, and persevered through a cloudy period after
the well-documented tragedies of the late '90s, when Peart
lost his daughter in an automobile accident and his wife to
cancer less than a year later. The band hung tough and
released "Vapor Trails," and the subsequent tour was
documented on the Juno-winning CD/DVD "Rush in Rio."

St. Catharines, Ontario native Peart actually played piano
before he took up drums at the age of 13. Besides being
something of a drumming icon today, he also is Rush's
lyricist.

liveDaily: So did you get your first drums when you were
13?

Neil Peart: No, no drums. For my 13th birthday, I got a
pair of sticks and a practice pad. My parents said, "Once you
show that you're going to stick with it for a year, then we'll
get you some drums." That's the way that went down. Fair
enough. I'd do the same thing.

Once you got that first pad, was it a galvanizing thing
right away?

Oh yeah, it was before that, really.

When did you say to yourself, "This is what I'm going to
do"?

Well, I was never that sweepingly unrealistic, but it
certainly was what I wanted to do. And even without drums, I
would take magazines and lay them out on my bed, and pretend
they were drums and cymbals, and beat the covers off them. It
became total obsession.

What was the idea behind "Feedback?"

Our vision was 1966, when we were teenagers. We just
decided to pick songs from our youth that we liked and make a
tribute album to the people we grew up on. For instance, we
did "Summertime Blues" and kind of combined the arrangements
of Blue Cheer and The Who, and did Buffalo Springfield's "For
What It's Worth," and this other obscure '60s band called
Love, a song called "Seven and Seven Is." All of us loved
being freed from the material--in other words, not being
responsible to think it up. And we did it our own way, of
course, but we paid a little due respect to the times. We
called the project "Feedback" because when Geddy and Alex were
working on demos, they decided to have feedback and backwards
guitar on every song.

After seeing the "Rush in Rio" DVD, it seems amazing
those shows happened at all. Explain how they came together,
the weather, and everything else.

We went there with the wide-open expectation that it would
be out of our control, basically, and that we wouldn't have
our usual tight reign on everything, technologically and
personally, as we can in the United States or Canada. So we
went there very much open-minded, with an attitude of:
whatever happens, we'll deal with it along the way. There were
three shows, all outdoors in big soccer stadiums, and it
constantly rained.

The first day they couldn't get the monitor board working
at all, and they were figuring out how to move the house
mixing board down beside the stage so our front-of-house mixer
could mix live sound and the monitors from the side of the
stage. It was about problem solving. The electronics went out
on the second night in Sao Paolo, where we were in front of
60,000 people and it had been raining off and on, and blowing
rain right in our faces--it was surreal. It was something you
might see in a video, but not in real life.

How did you deal with that?

That night in Sao Paolo--when all of the electronic drums
and MIDI marimba and everything were gone--immediately my mind
was thinking ahead, not only getting around the parts that
night, because it was like, "Okay, what am I going to do
tomorrow night? How am I going to play my solo without
those things?" I'd be thinking ahead to the next song, "What
do I do? Okay, I won't have that sound. Here's how I can
imitate it or get around it or whatever." I was already
starting to orchestrate a new solo that wouldn't have those
things, because that's what you have to do.

And the next day in Rio, the trucks were late and didn't
arrive until late afternoon, and we're filming and recording
the last night of the tour, our one and only chance that we
really wanted to capture on that tour. So this was the last
and final chance under the most … impossible is not too strong
a word. No sound check. Minutes before we went on, [drum tech]
Lorne [Wheaton] came up to tell me the electronics were
actually working. They had no sound check for the recording
truck, no test for the cameras, everybody had to adopt that
attitude of, "Okay, here's what we do." And did.

One
telling anecdote that I love, the carpet that we used on stage
got so soaking wet during those days that we had to leave it
behind. It was too heavy to ship home. It was so waterlogged
that it would have cost way more than it was worth to ship it
home, so we just left it there. It's in some Brazilian guy's
living room. [laughs]

Without naming names, there are a lot of veteran bands
putting out product that don't look like they're having near
the amount of fun you were having on the DVD.

It was one of those magical nights, despite all. I not only
remember that show now, I knew at the time it was going really
well. And, yeah, in retrospect I really like the way the video
came out. Alex spent a lot of work on the audio trying to
rescue all that went wrong in that truck during the course of
the show. There was a lot of technical fixing up to do that
took him a lot of work. But in the final analysis it was a
piece of work I'm proud of.

Tour Itinerary

[Note: The
following tour itinerary has been provided by artist and/or
tour sources, who verify its accuracy as of 11-Feb-2003.
Changes may occur before tickets go on sale. Check with
official artist web sites, ticketing sources and venues for
late updates.]

July 2004
30 - Tampa, FL -
Tampa Bay Amphitheatre

August 2004
1 - Atlanta, GA -
HiFi Buys Amphitheatre
3 - Bristow, VA - Nissan
Pavilion
4 - Camden, NJ - Tweeter Center at the
Waterfront
6 - Hartford, CT - ctnow.com Meadows Music
7
- Scranton, PA - Montage Mountain Amphitheater
9 - Saratoga
Springs, NY - Saratoga Performing Arts Center
11 - Wantagh,
NY - Jones Beach Theater
12 - Mansfield, MA - Tweeter
Center
14 - Holmdel, NJ - P.N.C. Bank Arts Center
15 -
Darien Center, NY - Darien Lake Six Flags P.A.C.
21 -
Montreal, Quebec - Bell Centre
22 - Toronto, Ontario -
Molson Amphitheatre

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Previous News

Briefly:
Ryan Adams, George Strait, Rush, Wyclef Jean

CD
Review: Rush, "Feedback" (Atlantic)

Briefly:
Aretha Franklin, Britney Spears, Alex Lifeson,
Bonnaroo

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Rush news (13 stories)

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