– You know, I don’t take for granted
that people just admire what we do,
so, whatever we do, they’ll admire.
When people talk about boredom, for example,
I can honestly say I’ve never been bored
for a second in my life.
But I’ve always found another way not to be.
If you name any band from kind of the mid-70s,
we probably opened for them.
You can’t get together with three people and say,
well, we want to have a career spanning
over 20 years and have a
really loyal audience. – Right, and here’s the plan.
– Yeah, here’s the plan.
– When people come up and say something like that,
you influenced me to play drums.
I say, apologize to your parents for me.
I stopped reading reviews long ago because
if I believed the good ones,
I’d have to believe the bad ones.
It’s a good point and most of my
rhythmic growth is evolutionary.
– He’s a Canadian American musician and author.
He’s best known as a drummer and primary lyricist
for the rock band Rush.
He’s received numerous awards for his musical performances.
He’s Neil Peart and here’s my take on his
top ten rules for success.
Number two is my personal favorite,
so I’m curious to find out which one you guys like the most.
– You know, I don’t take for granted that people just admire
what we do, so whatever we do, they’ll admire.
No, you know, I feel like, in fact, this is very true;
every audience, I feel like we have to earn them.
You know, we have to earn their dedication
and their expenditure of time and energy
and money to be there.
Every single time.
You know, every show.
It’s an old show business thing, but I really feel
that you’re only as good as your last show.
That’s the one thing I do like about touring.
If you have a bad one, you’ve got another chance.
– It seems like you’re a man of extremes.
Like, you don’t just drum,
you drum on one of the largest kits there is.
You don’t just ride motorcycles, you ride 50,000 miles.
– I’m an extremist.
– Even when you describe your appetite for reading, too.
It seems like a voracious appetite for reading.
Is that what got you where you are as a drummer?
– I would expect that it all comes down
to a kind of restlessness.
When people talk about boredom, for example,
I can honestly say I’ve never been bored
for a second in my life,
but I’ve always found another way not to be.
If I have to go to a medical appointment
or something like that, I bring a book with me.
So, that waiting is not going to be a hardship.
With the early days of touring,
when all that dead time was hanging on me, reading.
Portable, useful, nurturing; all that stuff.
So, I think I combat…
You learn to adapt to your own personality
and the extremes do come in there, too.
I wanted to read every book ever written.
Drumming-wise, my determination was more important
than talent, early on.
I think, for most things,
you do have to have a bit of a knack,
but I had to work so hard to learn so many things,
but I was relentless in terms of determination.
And with traveling, when I’ve got a day,
I’m tempted by what’s the most excellent thing I can do
which might be way too far or way too long,
but I’m going to go for that because
it’s the most excellent thing I can do.
And with writing, it just seems unstinting in the same way
because I just kind of know when I’ve done my best on it.
Maybe an editor can help make it better
and maybe somebody else could have written it better,
but I have a good built-in sense of
this is the best I can do.
I kind of accepted the definition and applied it myself.
Yes, I’m a compositional drummer.
And then, in the same breath I went,
wait a minute, I want to be an improvisational drummer.
You know?
And also push myself out of my comfort zone.
Even my solos, in the past, were always improvised
over a carefully structured framework.
But, I wanted even that to be freer.
To say, okay, it’s a performance in front of people,
so it’s not going to be like,
just coming here and playing for
a couple of hours for myself.
It is a performance and I want it to have
a certain standard of repeatability.
You know?
So that it’s going to be
satisfying for me
and for the audience every night.
So, that’s a hard line to walk, too.
But, I did work over the course of the tour to achieve that.
And, I think we did
44 shows on this first part of the
tour in this summer and this fall.
Towards the end, I was getting so outside of…
I remember I thought, bolero!
I’m going to put bolero over top of the shahato.
And did it!
What I love about my warm up, too,
it has the same freedom.
About a half hour before show time,
I go in and play for about twenty minutes and just play.
It’s the same thing.
I usually use those three rhythmic elements
that are my foundation right now.
But there’s no consequences.
It doesn’t matter what happens.
So I would just, in my warm-up that night,
I tried putting a bolero over the top of it and it worked.
I said, okay, and it went in my solo that night.
And that certain freshness that I loved,
that I’d been building on more the last couple of tours,
is being able to do that.
To say, okay, I’ve almost got this,
I’ve almost got this,
I’m going to try it.
We were an opening act for so long and
we had a really good relationship with
the guys in Kiss and their crew.
We opened for Aerosmith like 40 times
and never got a sound check.
I mean, Blue Oyster Cult, Ted Nuggent,
if you name any band from kind of the mid-70s,
we probably opened for them,
because we were an opening act.
And then we started headlining small halls
and still be opening shows in between.
So, we had that mixed bag for a long time,
which really contributed to our balance, I think.
We learned a lot about character studies
from watching other people.
And some of the lyrics that I’ve written on the subject
and thoughts that I’ve expressed on the subject
of fame and celebrity
are from witnessing how people like that
behaved and handled it.
And, in turn, how they came out.
– Neil Peart is the drummer, of course, with Rush.
30 million albums sold.
It is quite incredible.
Over 22 years.
This is a fixture on the Canadian landscape.
Do you have any understanding why?
(laughs)
– Ah no, it’s an often asked–
– [Interviewer] I mean, of course you’re talented and good.
– Well, no, obviously we know that’s not enough.
Even were it true.
It’s an often asked question
and one which no one knows the real answer.
If they did, they would bottle it and sell it
to all aspiring young musicians.
Obviously we’re glad that it sold,
but you can’t get together with three people and say
we want to have a career spanning over 20 years and
have a really loyal audience.
– Right, and here’s the plan. – Yeah, here’s the plan.
So we just did what we thought was right
and made music that we liked
and hoped other people would too,
and so far that’s been the secret formula.
Inspiration, I think, is the rewarding thing.
When people come up and say something like that,
you influenced me to play drums.
I say, apologize to your parents for me.
(laughs)
And music is certainly about sharing your enthusiasm.
The nature of Rush is that we love our music
and we hope other people will like it too.
There’s nothing calculated more than that about it.
In the writing, too, these are things that I was moved
to write about and to craft carefully enough
that I hope I can share with the reader.
If you do infect them with your fire.
Oh, that’s good.
Enthusiasm, the literal meaning of enthusiasm is
infected with the god.
If you can share that god of yours,
that fire of yours,
and to light someone else’s,
that’s a great thing, too.
– We talked about the magazine.
I said you were one of the best living dramatists.
Another poet that brings your lyrics into question,
how did you feel when you read that?
– Wow, stunned.
– They said you weren’t a really good lyricist,
but I’m sure that people obviously disagree with it,
but when you read that
how do you feel?
– You know, you can’t help but be stunned.
I don’t think that anyone that I would want to know
would be above that.
And it’s actually a beautiful illustration.
Another author, Tom Robbins, I was always
a great admirer of his novels
and I loved the way they kept getting better
and more adventurous every time.
There was one of his, I think it was “Skinny Legs and All”,
that there was just a scathing review
in the New York Times by a moron.
So, I just got angry about it and I wrote to Tom Robbins
and said look, as long time reader I want you to know
your readers are more than satisfied
and I love the way you keep progressing, et cetera.
He wrote me back a really nice answer and said
I stopped reading reviews long ago
because if I believed the good ones,
I’d have to believe the bad ones.
I took that sort of to heart
and I never read another review.
Well, really, I tend to write for a general reader
and in the case of this book, certainly,
I was writing for someone who doesn’t know anything
about Rush, or rock, or motorcycling, or any of that.
I figure it’s my job to make it interesting,
as the other travel writers that I admire.
And in every case, it was easier
when I was writing about bicycling in Africa
then it’s it’s obviously not a Rush book.
When I’m motorcycling around the US or driving
and listening to music.
It was about music, but it really wasn’t
about me as a rock drummer.
This time I used all of the same approaches
of my ideal audience.
Someone who is curious and intelligent about stuff,
but again, doesn’t necessarily know anything
about my preoccupations.
So, I was very clearly writing for that imaginary audience
in the same way that songwriting
is for an imaginary listener.
Or even when I’m rehearsing for a tour,
it’s for an imaginary audience that I’m gearing myself up.
It’s an ideal sense, but it’s also
based on what I would expect.
Because I love reading travel books myself
and about other people’s experiences.
It’s a good point.
Most of my rhythmic growth is evolutionary.
So, that what I’ve worked on grows into something else,
grows into something else.
There have been the odd times that
I would call epiphanies like that.
There’s a rhythm that I used a lot in the late 80s or so,
Nigerian music, west African music
with slightly displaced accents in it.
I heard that, I was in a village in Togo, in west Africa.
– On your ten-speed?
– Yeah, I was traveling by bicycle that time.
I just heard this rhythm
echoing across the valley
and it was just two drummers with hand drums playing it.
It engraved itself on my mind.
It became a huge influence on me, rhythmically,
after that because I had been listening to
King Sunny Ade, he was a pioneer
of Nigerian pop music
and this certain
rhythmic accent syncopations
that it was based on that I was
very influenced by at the time.
Then, this other rhythm that I heard that time in Togo
was from that same heart.
The music that I heard, it lodges itself in my brain.
It engraves itself in there.
And that becomes something special.
Those are rare, I think.
When you’re suddenly hit by something that’s that strong.
Reggae, the first time reggae music really
got into my soul and I felt that upbeat, downbeat tension.
Again, I’ll never forget.
It was a Bob Marley song, “Natural Mystic”.
– Yeah.
– Just sitting in a car and hearing that song
and suddenly I got it.
I got what reggae was all about.
I’d heard it before, but hadn’t got it.
– You write in your book, because you
were talking about the art of writing,
you say and planting roots and everything,
you say magic exists but often requires some planning.
But, you were talking about writing.
I think it also seems to apply to the music.
You have some planning, but then there’s
that room for improv.
– Well said. Absolutely so.
All that effort and study and I would say
that the early records that three of us made together,
we were experimenting.
We were learning how to play our instruments.
We were learning how to write songs.
We were learning how to arrange, especially, through,
say, Farewells to Kings Hemispheres.
We were learning so much about arrangement and
orchestration in the sense of a three-piece rock band.
All of that, gathered together,
and then by, say,
Moving Pictures, 1980,
so, we’d been together six years by that time,
and then we jelled and all of those studies,
all those courses of study that we went through together
with pure innocence and pure enthusiasm
suddenly they became a unified approach that
Moving Pictures, and from then on, carried for us.
As that time, yeah, even from that time,
we continued to experiment, absolutely,
with different songs, different kinds of arrangements,
orchestrations, all kinds, different producers.
There’s another good example.
You can get comfortable working with the same producer,
and some people do their whole career,
but we always thought we wanted new brains to pick
and new criticisms, new enthusiasms,
just new,
new opinions.
– Thank you so much for watching.
I made this video because Sam Mack asked me to,
so, if there’s a famous entrepreneur that
you want me to profile next,
leave it in the comments below
and I’ll see what I can do.
I’d also love to know which
of the top ten rules hit you the hardest,
had the biggest impact on you, and why?
Which one was your favorite?
Leave it in the comments and I will join in the discussion.
Thank you so much for watching.
Continue to believe and I’ll see you soon.
that people just admire what we do,
so, whatever we do, they’ll admire.
When people talk about boredom, for example,
I can honestly say I’ve never been bored
for a second in my life.
But I’ve always found another way not to be.
If you name any band from kind of the mid-70s,
we probably opened for them.
You can’t get together with three people and say,
well, we want to have a career spanning
over 20 years and have a
really loyal audience. – Right, and here’s the plan.
– Yeah, here’s the plan.
– When people come up and say something like that,
you influenced me to play drums.
I say, apologize to your parents for me.
I stopped reading reviews long ago because
if I believed the good ones,
I’d have to believe the bad ones.
It’s a good point and most of my
rhythmic growth is evolutionary.
– He’s a Canadian American musician and author.
He’s best known as a drummer and primary lyricist
for the rock band Rush.
He’s received numerous awards for his musical performances.
He’s Neil Peart and here’s my take on his
top ten rules for success.
Number two is my personal favorite,
so I’m curious to find out which one you guys like the most.
– You know, I don’t take for granted that people just admire
what we do, so whatever we do, they’ll admire.
No, you know, I feel like, in fact, this is very true;
every audience, I feel like we have to earn them.
You know, we have to earn their dedication
and their expenditure of time and energy
and money to be there.
Every single time.
You know, every show.
It’s an old show business thing, but I really feel
that you’re only as good as your last show.
That’s the one thing I do like about touring.
If you have a bad one, you’ve got another chance.
– It seems like you’re a man of extremes.
Like, you don’t just drum,
you drum on one of the largest kits there is.
You don’t just ride motorcycles, you ride 50,000 miles.
– I’m an extremist.
– Even when you describe your appetite for reading, too.
It seems like a voracious appetite for reading.
Is that what got you where you are as a drummer?
– I would expect that it all comes down
to a kind of restlessness.
When people talk about boredom, for example,
I can honestly say I’ve never been bored
for a second in my life,
but I’ve always found another way not to be.
If I have to go to a medical appointment
or something like that, I bring a book with me.
So, that waiting is not going to be a hardship.
With the early days of touring,
when all that dead time was hanging on me, reading.
Portable, useful, nurturing; all that stuff.
So, I think I combat…
You learn to adapt to your own personality
and the extremes do come in there, too.
I wanted to read every book ever written.
Drumming-wise, my determination was more important
than talent, early on.
I think, for most things,
you do have to have a bit of a knack,
but I had to work so hard to learn so many things,
but I was relentless in terms of determination.
And with traveling, when I’ve got a day,
I’m tempted by what’s the most excellent thing I can do
which might be way too far or way too long,
but I’m going to go for that because
it’s the most excellent thing I can do.
And with writing, it just seems unstinting in the same way
because I just kind of know when I’ve done my best on it.
Maybe an editor can help make it better
and maybe somebody else could have written it better,
but I have a good built-in sense of
this is the best I can do.
I kind of accepted the definition and applied it myself.
Yes, I’m a compositional drummer.
And then, in the same breath I went,
wait a minute, I want to be an improvisational drummer.
You know?
And also push myself out of my comfort zone.
Even my solos, in the past, were always improvised
over a carefully structured framework.
But, I wanted even that to be freer.
To say, okay, it’s a performance in front of people,
so it’s not going to be like,
just coming here and playing for
a couple of hours for myself.
It is a performance and I want it to have
a certain standard of repeatability.
You know?
So that it’s going to be
satisfying for me
and for the audience every night.
So, that’s a hard line to walk, too.
But, I did work over the course of the tour to achieve that.
And, I think we did
44 shows on this first part of the
tour in this summer and this fall.
Towards the end, I was getting so outside of…
I remember I thought, bolero!
I’m going to put bolero over top of the shahato.
And did it!
What I love about my warm up, too,
it has the same freedom.
About a half hour before show time,
I go in and play for about twenty minutes and just play.
It’s the same thing.
I usually use those three rhythmic elements
that are my foundation right now.
But there’s no consequences.
It doesn’t matter what happens.
So I would just, in my warm-up that night,
I tried putting a bolero over the top of it and it worked.
I said, okay, and it went in my solo that night.
And that certain freshness that I loved,
that I’d been building on more the last couple of tours,
is being able to do that.
To say, okay, I’ve almost got this,
I’ve almost got this,
I’m going to try it.
We were an opening act for so long and
we had a really good relationship with
the guys in Kiss and their crew.
We opened for Aerosmith like 40 times
and never got a sound check.
I mean, Blue Oyster Cult, Ted Nuggent,
if you name any band from kind of the mid-70s,
we probably opened for them,
because we were an opening act.
And then we started headlining small halls
and still be opening shows in between.
So, we had that mixed bag for a long time,
which really contributed to our balance, I think.
We learned a lot about character studies
from watching other people.
And some of the lyrics that I’ve written on the subject
and thoughts that I’ve expressed on the subject
of fame and celebrity
are from witnessing how people like that
behaved and handled it.
And, in turn, how they came out.
– Neil Peart is the drummer, of course, with Rush.
30 million albums sold.
It is quite incredible.
Over 22 years.
This is a fixture on the Canadian landscape.
Do you have any understanding why?
(laughs)
– Ah no, it’s an often asked–
– [Interviewer] I mean, of course you’re talented and good.
– Well, no, obviously we know that’s not enough.
Even were it true.
It’s an often asked question
and one which no one knows the real answer.
If they did, they would bottle it and sell it
to all aspiring young musicians.
Obviously we’re glad that it sold,
but you can’t get together with three people and say
we want to have a career spanning over 20 years and
have a really loyal audience.
– Right, and here’s the plan. – Yeah, here’s the plan.
So we just did what we thought was right
and made music that we liked
and hoped other people would too,
and so far that’s been the secret formula.
Inspiration, I think, is the rewarding thing.
When people come up and say something like that,
you influenced me to play drums.
I say, apologize to your parents for me.
(laughs)
And music is certainly about sharing your enthusiasm.
The nature of Rush is that we love our music
and we hope other people will like it too.
There’s nothing calculated more than that about it.
In the writing, too, these are things that I was moved
to write about and to craft carefully enough
that I hope I can share with the reader.
If you do infect them with your fire.
Oh, that’s good.
Enthusiasm, the literal meaning of enthusiasm is
infected with the god.
If you can share that god of yours,
that fire of yours,
and to light someone else’s,
that’s a great thing, too.
– We talked about the magazine.
I said you were one of the best living dramatists.
Another poet that brings your lyrics into question,
how did you feel when you read that?
– Wow, stunned.
– They said you weren’t a really good lyricist,
but I’m sure that people obviously disagree with it,
but when you read that
how do you feel?
– You know, you can’t help but be stunned.
I don’t think that anyone that I would want to know
would be above that.
And it’s actually a beautiful illustration.
Another author, Tom Robbins, I was always
a great admirer of his novels
and I loved the way they kept getting better
and more adventurous every time.
There was one of his, I think it was “Skinny Legs and All”,
that there was just a scathing review
in the New York Times by a moron.
So, I just got angry about it and I wrote to Tom Robbins
and said look, as long time reader I want you to know
your readers are more than satisfied
and I love the way you keep progressing, et cetera.
He wrote me back a really nice answer and said
I stopped reading reviews long ago
because if I believed the good ones,
I’d have to believe the bad ones.
I took that sort of to heart
and I never read another review.
Well, really, I tend to write for a general reader
and in the case of this book, certainly,
I was writing for someone who doesn’t know anything
about Rush, or rock, or motorcycling, or any of that.
I figure it’s my job to make it interesting,
as the other travel writers that I admire.
And in every case, it was easier
when I was writing about bicycling in Africa
then it’s it’s obviously not a Rush book.
When I’m motorcycling around the US or driving
and listening to music.
It was about music, but it really wasn’t
about me as a rock drummer.
This time I used all of the same approaches
of my ideal audience.
Someone who is curious and intelligent about stuff,
but again, doesn’t necessarily know anything
about my preoccupations.
So, I was very clearly writing for that imaginary audience
in the same way that songwriting
is for an imaginary listener.
Or even when I’m rehearsing for a tour,
it’s for an imaginary audience that I’m gearing myself up.
It’s an ideal sense, but it’s also
based on what I would expect.
Because I love reading travel books myself
and about other people’s experiences.
It’s a good point.
Most of my rhythmic growth is evolutionary.
So, that what I’ve worked on grows into something else,
grows into something else.
There have been the odd times that
I would call epiphanies like that.
There’s a rhythm that I used a lot in the late 80s or so,
Nigerian music, west African music
with slightly displaced accents in it.
I heard that, I was in a village in Togo, in west Africa.
– On your ten-speed?
– Yeah, I was traveling by bicycle that time.
I just heard this rhythm
echoing across the valley
and it was just two drummers with hand drums playing it.
It engraved itself on my mind.
It became a huge influence on me, rhythmically,
after that because I had been listening to
King Sunny Ade, he was a pioneer
of Nigerian pop music
and this certain
rhythmic accent syncopations
that it was based on that I was
very influenced by at the time.
Then, this other rhythm that I heard that time in Togo
was from that same heart.
The music that I heard, it lodges itself in my brain.
It engraves itself in there.
And that becomes something special.
Those are rare, I think.
When you’re suddenly hit by something that’s that strong.
Reggae, the first time reggae music really
got into my soul and I felt that upbeat, downbeat tension.
Again, I’ll never forget.
It was a Bob Marley song, “Natural Mystic”.
– Yeah.
– Just sitting in a car and hearing that song
and suddenly I got it.
I got what reggae was all about.
I’d heard it before, but hadn’t got it.
– You write in your book, because you
were talking about the art of writing,
you say and planting roots and everything,
you say magic exists but often requires some planning.
But, you were talking about writing.
I think it also seems to apply to the music.
You have some planning, but then there’s
that room for improv.
– Well said. Absolutely so.
All that effort and study and I would say
that the early records that three of us made together,
we were experimenting.
We were learning how to play our instruments.
We were learning how to write songs.
We were learning how to arrange, especially, through,
say, Farewells to Kings Hemispheres.
We were learning so much about arrangement and
orchestration in the sense of a three-piece rock band.
All of that, gathered together,
and then by, say,
Moving Pictures, 1980,
so, we’d been together six years by that time,
and then we jelled and all of those studies,
all those courses of study that we went through together
with pure innocence and pure enthusiasm
suddenly they became a unified approach that
Moving Pictures, and from then on, carried for us.
As that time, yeah, even from that time,
we continued to experiment, absolutely,
with different songs, different kinds of arrangements,
orchestrations, all kinds, different producers.
There’s another good example.
You can get comfortable working with the same producer,
and some people do their whole career,
but we always thought we wanted new brains to pick
and new criticisms, new enthusiasms,
just new,
new opinions.
– Thank you so much for watching.
I made this video because Sam Mack asked me to,
so, if there’s a famous entrepreneur that
you want me to profile next,
leave it in the comments below
and I’ll see what I can do.
I’d also love to know which
of the top ten rules hit you the hardest,
had the biggest impact on you, and why?
Which one was your favorite?
Leave it in the comments and I will join in the discussion.
Thank you so much for watching.
Continue to believe and I’ll see you soon.
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