Listen to the Neil Peart interview

By Marc D. Allan

Before he left for the current tour. Rush’s Neil Peart set a goal to learn about American art. When he has an afternoon or day off, the drummer can be found browsing in local museums.

“I’ve been to 20-odd art museums in different cities on this tour and acquired quite a lot of knowledge about it,” he says. “That’s satisfying.”

And getting some measure of satisfaction is what keeps Peart devoting six-month stretches of his life to touring, long after the personal gratification of traveling and playing live has worn thin.

Rush. which headlines Deer Creek Music Center tonight, has been together since 1974. In rock ‘n* roll years, that makes the Canadian band’s age about 200.

Peart, Geddy Lee, and Alex Lifeson have recorded 17 albums together — the latest is the strong Presto — completed dozens of tours, and earned a considerable sum of money. About the last thing they needed was another half-year of days filled with two hours of pleasure and 22 hours of boredom.

“It was a very difficult decision to make this time, whether to tour or not,” Peart says. “I guess the accomplishment factor at the end is dubious. In the early days. it was more measurable, and at the end of a tour, I would feel accomplished.

“At a certain point, you tend to peak out in your potentiality. I felt that learning curve getting shallower, and the increments of improvement becoming less measurable, so consequently the satisfaction rate was less.

“But I always feel that, for a band, playing live is the essence of it. What makes a band a living, breathing thing is getting out in front of an audience and playing live, with all the risks and the spontaneity and the immediacy of that.”

So Peart sacrificed his time at home in Canada to sit behind the drum kit for another American tour.

He brought along a carefully chosen stack of books and his bicycle, which lets him venture into “the real America and meet real Americans. too —not just fans and promoters and airport people.”

Peart makes it clear that while rock ‘n’ roll has been especially good to him, there’s more to life than music. Like writing prose; for instance.

“With music, after having played drums for 20-odd years now, the learning curve is very shallow. Learning new things is partly not that appealing, and it’s partly futile to spend six hours a day every day learning how to do a faster paradiddle.

“It seems pretty much irrelevant to me now. Whereas I can spend six hours a day, day after day, learning how to put sentences together, and it is very satisfying because it is so new and because the improvement is so measurable.”

Peart says he doesn’t fancy himself the great Canadian novelist, nor does he hope to be published. He simply likes seeing progress.

He’s seen that with Rush, which has carried the mantle of 1970s baroque rock long after the breakups of Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Yes, and similar groups. Presto, the new record, relies less on technology and more on straightforward, simple arrangements.

For some Rush fans, it’s too simple. Peart says Modern Drummer magazine forwarded him a letter complained that his drumming on the new album is lacking.

“It was so stupid because I spent more time on individual drum parts on this album than ever, ever in the past, constantly refining down each little element of what I was doing,” he says. “Some of the passages took more time to come up with than any of the more overtly complicated stuff we’ve done in the past.”

Peart says writing lyrics and recording albums is still challenging work, and even after 15 years he and his bandmates still like each other.

“If we weren’t satisfied with the work that we did together. that would end it all regardless of our friendship,” he says. “But we have fun working together and we have fun playing together. In essence, what else would you want?”