Rush Never Sleeps

What follows is difficult to describe. It involves hysteria. It involves tears. It involves air-drumming of a brio rarely witnessed — not just the standard cymbal-snare pantomime, mind you, but a dizzying recital of tom, bell, cymbal, wind chime, all in perfect sync with the onstage movements of Peart, Rush's drum god and lyricist. It's a kinetic genuflection, variations of it occurring all around me. To my right an unaccompanied woman in camp shorts raises a thumbs-up sign every eight bars. A few rows up, a man is air-drumming, guitaring and bass-playing simultaneously (a spectacle resembling full-contact hacky sack). From behind, a fortysomething man yanks my shoulder during a solo to yell, "That's an ES-355 guitar he's got there!" And for the next three hours, during songs about religion, suburbia, tidal pools and trees, most of this crowd will sing along with every word.

In a dim, soundproof rehearsal space on the shore of Lake Ontario, the men of Rush are in their last rehearsal before their tour. Each stands in a separate area surrounded by axes, pedals, knobs and modules. In the late Seventies, when Rush wanted to expand their sound without adding a fourth member, the band began multitasking with doublenecks, bass pedals, synths and other accoutrements. Today, the official Rush Website's gear list for each member is an array of Trace Elliot Quatra-VR power amps, SansAmp RPM bass preamps and Palmer PDI-05 speaker simulators. Here at the rehearsal space, such items are discreetly tucked away in cabinets that presumably house an Intergalactic Space Modulator and a Doctor WhoTARDIS.

In the center of the room stands a red and gold octagonal box that looks like an Oriental prop from a magic show: It's the rotating riser that bears the drum set of Neil Peart. There are rows of toms, snares, bells and whistles, all customized down to the experimental black-nickel drum-shell plating and developed with Peart as part of Sabian and Drum Workshop's R&D team. There are racks of Roland Brains, Glyph hard drives, MalletKat pedals — the triggers assigned not just to wood blocks and glockenspiels but guitars, keyboards, vocal effects and sound sequences from Rush's entire catalog. Since the early Eighties, Peart's growing percussion arsenal has included electronics. From the looks of it, it seems quite possible that Peart — who often displays total separation between his upper- and lower-limb patterns — could perform as Rush alone.

A ruddy 55-year-old with a Robert Mitchum-ish brow, Peart stands drinking bottled water, dressed head to toe in a ninjalike black suit topped by a black tam bearing the logo from Rush's 2007 album, Snakes and Arrows. One pant leg is cinched by a bicycle clip. His feet are in dancing shoes. "This is to absorb the sweat," Peart says of his outfit, his sonorous baritone recalling Harry Shearer's folk bassist in A Mighty Wind. The dancing shoes come from his study with jazz musician and drum guru Freddie Gruber in the mid-Nineties. "They're so you get the dance and glide on the pedals like you get on a dance floor."

[Excerpt from Issue 1056-1057 — July 10, 2008]

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