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Artist
Features: Neil
Peart, Part II

After Class With The Professor
Words
and Photo by Don Zulaica

If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware
of our cover story with one of progressive rock’s
progenitors, Neil "The Professor" Peart. Well, when you
get two facing chairs in a room (a la James Lipton) with
a rolling tape recorder, a couple of hours, and an
eloquent interview subject like Mr. Peart, you also get
a lot of material.

Rush’s Peart, guitarist
Alex Lifeson, and bassist Geddy Lee are currently
traversing the globe on their 30th Anniversary Tour. At
interview time they were also in the process of putting
together an EP of covers entitled "Feedback," which is
slated to include the Canadian power trio’s versions of
The Who’s "The Seeker," Buffalo Springfield’s "For What
It’s Worth," and Cream’s "Crossroads."

In the
midst of discussing progressive rock’s history through
the last three decades, and the band’s place in it, a
couple of other subjects were covered, namely the cymbal
switch to Sabian, the Drum Workshop kit that features
logos from every Rush album, and how Neil keeps in touch
with his inner 16-year-old.

DRUM!: Talk a
little about the new Paragon cymbals and how you hooked
up with Sabian. Quite a jarring change, considering
you’ve been playing Zildjian for so many
years.

Neil Peart: It was one of those
purely organic things that just came along. I’m always
curious about everything and always wanting to try
different things. There was a tie-in going back to my
very first ride cymbal when I joined the band in 1974.
The three of us got our record company advance, and we
went to the big music store in Toronto and bought new
equipment. I got my chrome Slingerland drums and a new
set of Zildjian cymbals, and one of them was a 22" ride
made in Canada at Meductic, New Brunswick.

So
there was that tie-in, and over the course of last year
I started hearing people playing Sabians and kind of got
interested. And last summer when I was up rehearsing for
the big Concert for Toronto with the Stones and all
that, I just thought about trying out some Sabians. So I
used them for the first three days of rehearsal or so,
and then I said, ‘Okay, take them down and put the
Zildjians back up.’ Frankly they blew them away. Even
just their stock ones. So, hmmm [holds
chin].

I got to talking with the company and
they invited me to come to the factory. In late
September, I rode my motorcycle from Quebec out there.
It was an amazing experience. I had never toured a
cymbal factory before, and to see how much of it was
done by hand-an old guy with his leather apron was
sitting there hand-hammering the cymbals. It really was
that way, [like] the old guilds of craftsmen. I saw that
firsthand and was very impressed.

DRUM:
You worked a lot with Mark Love in the early stages,
right?

NP: Their product specialist Mark
Love just seemed to get in tune right away with what I
liked. They had a little kit in their vault, and he kept
putting cymbals up. And I’d say, ‘Leave that one, take
that one off,’ and he immediately grasped what was
working for me. Then he had plain gray bronze discs, and
he really had a row of ‘pies’ like that. We started with
the ride cymbal as the foundation of everything, and he
would lathe the bow of it, but not the bell. The bell
was still raw bronze. And I would describe, ‘I like its
attack but it’s not very musical, it’s very clangy.’ So
he would say, ‘Okay,’ and then they would hand-hammer
the bell. ‘Okay that’s a nice musicality, but still it’s
a little to pointed and too metallic sounding.’ So he’d
go off and combine another kind of lathing and hand
hammering, and eventually all of the cymbals were
arrived at by that trial and error. And when I went
back, Mark kept sending samples down to L.A. for me to
try, and there was constant communication. He suggested
the pinpoint lathing on the top, they call it their AAX
lathing. It was the final touch that was necessary to
make it the absolute instrument. Because the pinpoint
lathing gives it such quick response, but at the same
time, the bottom gives it the depth of tonality and
musicality. The hand-hammered bell works on all of them,
even the crashes. I find myself playing the bells now
because there’s such a musicality to
them.

DRUM!: Did you use them on
"Feedback?"

NP: The ultimate test was
going into the studio three or four weeks ago to record
["Feedback"], which is kind of a tribute album to our
youth. We recorded songs by The Who, The Yardbirds,
Buffalo Springfield, Cream, and that sort of thing, to
put out as an anniversary celebration of our own. I used
the new drums and the new cymbals and just couldn’t
believe how well they worked in the studio. Both [drum
tech] Lorne [Wheaton] and I were so pleased. I got to do
things like play the downbeat on the bell of a ride
cymbal, stuff that I’d never do. I’m able to pull out
more uses of the tools, I guess is one way to put it. I
was able to find new ways to use the cymbals because of
their potential, and noticing right away the character
of the crash cymbals as a punctuation mark; this
suddenly had a whole new presence to
it.

DRUM!: What kind of balance was there
between producing something for you and your signature,
the music you’re putting out, versus. . .this is going
to be a product and it’s going to sell, and wanting it
to be something practical for drummers to
buy.

NP: You know better than that!
Absolutely, 100% to please myself. [laughs] But
it happens that my taste in cymbals happens to be of a
classic nature, classic Turkish cymbals. That’s what I
grew up with and what I played for 30 years, obviously.
So that’s going to be what I like. And we were able to
take that and develop it to remarkable extremes, but
that was still the basis of it. So I knew we still had a
really fine musical instrument. It was definitely
designed to please me, and that was Mark Love’s goal at
Sabian. It was about me playing them and seeing how they
were to play, initially. And then as more refinements
came into it, as I said, right up until the ultimate
acid test of the studio, it was so gratifying to hear
that.

DRUM!: You started using DW a while
back, but when did the idea come about to do the logo
kit?

NP: It was actually out of Sabian
that things got started on this, because they wanted to
display the new [Paragon] line at [Winter] NAMM on my
drums. I said, ‘Well we can’t use my old drums for
that.’ They were pretty road hardened after two tours
and two albums. . .and Brazil! I started talking with
[DW’s] John Good back in October [2003], and we had lots
of time before NAMM. I said, ‘I really want to build
something special for the 30th anniversary.’ John is one
of those enthusiastic craftsman, and that enthusiasm
moved me.

And fortunately I live just an hour
from the factory now, so I was able to go there every
week or so and look at ideas. John had his ideas
sonically, so I left that to him since he’s the King of
Wood. I said I wanted something really special [for the
exterior], and we looked at custom paints and different
finishes. They would do up one to look at, and then we
tried all different colors initially before I realized,
I’d never had black drums in all my life. I’d had black
chrome Slingerlands, but not the actual classic ‘piano
black.’ Black and red is my favorite color combination,
so I said, ‘We have to have that. It’s the 30th
anniversary, why not have the band logos?’

And
also, Keith Moon’s "Pictures Of Lily" kit, the famous
one that was painted in the panels around it on a piano
black background, it was a tribute to that because these
are my dream drums. I always try to keep in touch with
my inner 16-year-old. That’s the first concert I ever
went to, he was playing those. So [the DW kit] became
partly a homage to Keith Moon, to myself at 16. All of
that became part of the thinking that evolved into the
finish.

Neil Peart,
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