22 Things You Learn Hanging Out With Rush
For years, Rush had an uneasy relationship with an oft-skeptical rock press. So fans got to know the band members’ diverse personalities largely from live shows, tour books, videos and drummer Neil Peart‘s own prose. But as the band proved this month in their first-ever Rolling Stone cover story, they’re great profile subjects in a classic rock & roll mode, more than willing to get candid and irreverent. Here’s even more from their cover-story interviews:
There’s a reason there are few, if any, unreleased songs from Rush’s studio sessions. “That’s not how we’ve ever worked,” says Alex Lifeson. “The album is what it is. ‘We’re going to do eight songs. So let’s do those eight songs and concentrate on them and devote all of our time to them.’ Why would you write 20 songs and pick the 12 best? Does that mean that the other eight are just bullshit? You were wasting your time!”
The uniquely formal language of some of Neil Peart’s lyrics (“one must put up barriers to keep oneself intact”) stemmed from his literary influences.
“It was because my reading was so broad and so precocious at the time,” he says. “I was reading John Dos Passos. And a big influence on me was John Steinbeck’s The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights, which he never finished in his lifetime. It opens with a little preface that said, ‘Some people there are. . .’ I said, why? Strange turn of phrase. But he had obviously deliberately chosen it. And some of those formal phrasings were because I was very much driven by rhythm of words – and still am. A line will strike me just because of its drumming rhythm.”
Peart says all three members of Rush had moments of partying too hard in the Seventies.
“Oh yeah, we all did,” says Peart. “And I wrote about that one time and used Winston Churchill’s quote. I said, yeah, we went through everything. But Churchill said, ‘When you’re going through hell, keep going!’ We were lucky we had each other to ground us a little bit. If anybody got out of control, they would be sniped at. But we all went through all that together and just kept going and moved beyond it. Drinking and drugs just made me throw up. So that’s a pretty good way to keep yourself in line.”
Peart had trouble revisiting his Seventies playing on the band’s latest tour – because he’s a better drummer now.
“Doing stuff I would never do and with a clock that I have transcended now, it was hard. And then after having done it for a few days, when I came back to the modern me, I was playing along and I said, ‘Why can’t I settle into this? What’s wrong with me?’ And it was just that transition. I had immersed myself in the 40-year-old version of me and now when I come back to the modern me, it’s much more evolved – musically, time sense, touch, technique, emotion – all that stuff is so much better now. I look at the past with a tolerant smile now but it was unformed. Immature is the right word. I know I have a mature, hard earned mastery of the instrument now.”
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