Neil Peart - Roadshow: Landscape with Drums: A Concert Tour by Motorcycle

By 1976, I was twenty-four, and had been playing drums for eleven years. During the previous two years, I had actually been making a living at it (most of the time), touring and recording with my bandmates in Rush, Alex and Geddy. During that brief, frenetic time, we had played hundreds of concerts across the United States and Canada, and recorded three albums together. More or less by default, I had ended up writing nearly all of the lyrics, an unexpected sideline growing out of a youthful obsession with reading.

The bands first, self-titled album had been recorded just before I joined, and when it sold 125,000 copies in the United States, the record company pronounced it a promising debut. When the next one, Fly By Night , sold 125,000 copies, it was a solid followup. But when the third album, Caress of Steel , sold 125,000 copies, they called it a dog.

We were urged to be more commercial, write some singles. So, in our contrarian fashion, we recorded an ambitious and impassioned sidelong piece about a futuristic dystopia, along with a few other weird songs, and released our fourth album, 2112 , early in 1976. It was considered by the beancounters to be our last chance, and without any promotion from them, it was something of a snowballs chance.

However, constant touring and word-of-mouth began to build our reputation. When 2112 surprised everyone (including us) and sold 500,000 copies in the United States, a Gold Record, and attained the same relative status in Canada (50,000 copies), we were free to choose our own directions. From then on, almost no one thought they had the right to tell us what to do, and we went our own way. Miraculously, our audience went that way, too.

With a little success, life began to grow bigger, even as it became so much busier. Emerging from the tunnel of my music-obsessed adolescence and teenage years, I was starting to think about life beyond the cymbals, to use Bill Brufords perfect phrase.

But at first it was hard to get much beyond the cymbals. Traveling most of the time, from arena to club to college gymnasium, crammed into a small campervan (misnamed by its makers the Funcraft) while each of us drove three-hour shifts through the night, it was hard enough just to stay entertained . In the old analog days, we had no video games, satellite TV or movies, no CDs, DVDs, or iPods. Usually there was only the radio on the dashboard, crackling out 70s pop hits and Bible-Belt evangelists. Even reading was difficult in the dark, bouncing van, a crowded dressing room, or a shared room at the Holiday Inn.

Our popularity increased slowly, more or less gradually, but still eventually brought strange changes in the way people around us behaved. One afternoon, before a show at a small arena in the Midwest around the spring of 1976, three or four of us from the band and crew were on a lawn outside the venue, throwing a frisbee around. Young long-haired males began gathering, just staring at us, apparently fascinated by our frisbee-playing. We exchanged looks, but kept throwing and catching. Then some of the watchers started yelling out our names, and calling others over, until there were dozens of people around us. That kind of appreciation was what we were out on the road working for, of course, but not so much for our frisbee-playing, and as the crowd grew bigger, the fun seemed to go out of the game.

Similarly, in those early days, I sometimes liked to walk from the hotel to the venue, exploring the streets of San Antonio or San Francisco, but suddenly (it seemed) the reception committees outside the stage door became too large, too clamorous. Again, naturally you want people to admire your work, but not so much your walking around. I was simply not easy with that sort of attention; I felt embarrassed and uncomfortable.

Typically, that is the point in ones career when it is customary to lose your way, feel alienated, and start drinking too much, or taking a lot of drugs. Mostly that kind of behavior just made me throw up, so I hid out and read books. Devouring everything from the great novels to overviews of history and philosophy, I read in a fever of distraction and the drive of a high school dropouts prideto make up for lost time and learn something, preferably everything . Many of the old paperbacks in my library still have stick-on stage passes in their inside covers, from bands we opened for like Aerosmith, Kiss, Ted Nugent, Blue Oyster Cultand most of my library still consists of paperbacks, carried around on various journeys.

As our modest success continued, we stepped up to larger modes of touring transportation, from a small RV (the infamous Barth) to a series of Silver Eagle tour buses. Eventually, we even had our own rooms at the Holiday Inn. Along the way I tried various other pastimes that were portable, like a model-car-building workshop in a small road case, with a surgical array of miniature tools and an aerosol-driven airbrush. I would set it all up in my room on a day off in Jumers Castle Lodge in Davenport, Iowa (or similar), and build intricately detailed model kits. I spent weeks on one replicating Alexs 1977 Jaguar XJS, white with red interior, with full engine plumbing, working suspension and steering, and even articulated seats that folded forward and slid on little rails.

Brief fads sparked and faded among band and crew, like roller-skating around backstage corridors, racing radio-control cars on courses marked with gaffer tape, and even playing ice hockey in rented arenas after concerts. In the early 80s, I started carrying a bicycle with me on the tour bus, and that not only gave me a welcome outlet of freedom and independence, it made my world much bigger. I spent my days off roaming the country roads of South Carolina or Utah, and show days visiting art museums in Worcester, Massachusetts, Kansas City, or Seattle.

Over the years, my mental map of American cities was a changing network of not just hotels and arenas, but local hobby shops, bookstores, bicycle shops, art museums, and more recently, BMW motorcycle dealers.

During our Roll the Bones tour in 1992, I formed a backstage lounge act, the Murphtones, with one of our crew members, Skip. We would meet in a tuning room before the show and play jazz standards, Skip on guitar, and me with wire brushes on my little warm-up drums. On a later tour, Counterparts , in 1994, Skip and I published a semi-regular tour newsletter, The Vortex , lampooning touring life with humorous contributions from crew members and drivers.

The title came from a conversation in my hotel room in Pensacola, Florida, during rehearsals before that tour. Sitting around after work with Alex and a couple of the crew guys, I mentioned that I was already starting to feel that on-the-road mentality, of the world closing in on the narrow reality of performing, traveling, and just surviving .

Alex said, I know what you mean. Its like a... vortex.

I nodded, Yeah, it sucks you in.

Tour manager Liam said, Noit just sucks.

When Skip and I put together the newsletter, that became our masthead and our motto: The Vortex , It Sucks.

Under that, it said, Price: Being There.

For a couple of tours in the early 80s, Geddy and Alex and I studied French before every show, our office arranging with the local Berlitz school to have teachers sent to the arena.

During a couple of long tours with Primus in the early 90s, both bands would gather in the tuning room before the show and stage tumultuous jam sessions. Everybody played unfamiliar instruments, banged out incidental percussion on lockers and bicycle frames, and guitar players Alex and Ler brought in pawnshop accordions, violins, and flutes. It was not always terribly musical , but it was a lot of fun.