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Overview
Whether navigating the backroads of Louisiana or Thuringia, exploring the snowy Quebec woods, or performing onstage at Rush concerts, Neil Peart has stories to tell. His first volume in this series, Far and Away, combined words and images to form an intimate, insightful narrative that won many readers.
Now Far and Near brings together reflections from another three years of an artist’s life as he celebrates seasons, landscapes, and characters; travels roads and trails; receives honours; climbs mountains; composes and performs music. With passionate insight, wry humour, and an adventurous spirit, once again Peart offers a collection of open letters that take readers on the road, behind the scenes, and into the inner workings of an ever-inquisitive mind.
These popular stories, originally posted on Peart’s website, are now collected and contextualized with an introduction and conclusion in this beautifully designed collector’s volume.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781770412675 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | ECW Press |
| Publication date: | 08/11/2015 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Sales rank: | 245,844 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.90(w) x 9.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Far and Near
On Days Like These
By Neil Peart
ECW PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Neil PeartAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77090-673-0
CHAPTER 1
ON DAYS LIKE THESE
INTRO
LIKE THE FIRST VOLUME in this series, Far and Away: A Prize Every Time, these stories grew over three years of my life, work, and travels. Likewise, the manner of relating them, the voice, still aims at the feeling that someone you know took the time and care to write the best letter he could — to share his life, work, and travels.
Several thoughts along those lines have come my way recently. One was the inventive short-story writer George Saunders, who defined the difference between all the informal writing that fills our world (and its ether) and what he could only call "literary" writing. His was a one-word distinction: "Revision."
An avant-garde fictionist from an earlier generation, David Markson, never owned a computer, right up to his death in 2010, at age eighty-two. As reported in the New York Times, during a late-life correspondence with a younger poet, Laura Sims, she printed out and mailed him some of the online comments about his work. Though they all intended admiration, Mr. Markson was not impressed.
"'Hey, thank you for all that blog stuff, but forgive me if after a nine-minute glance I have torn it all up,' he wrote back. 'I bless your furry little heart, but please don't send any more. In spite of the lost conveniences, I am all the more glad I don't have a computer. HOW CAN PEOPLE LIVE IN THAT FIRST-DRAFT WORLD?' Later he wrote: 'I have just taken the sheets out of the trash basket and torn them into even smaller pieces.'"
Both authors were talking about the simple act of taking care, of offering any potential reader plain courtesy. Judging from the online chatter they both decried (this reporter's number one rule: "Don't Read the Comments!"), many people find sloppy writing genuinely offensive, an assault on one's eyes and brain while trying so hard to absorb meaning.
Carelessness is obvious, but care is better if it's not, as per the Roman poet Ovid: "If the art is concealed, it succeeds." When I am asked about the technical aspects of drumming or lyric writing, it is possible to get analytical, but only for professional, academic purposes. For the real audience, the listeners and readers who find pleasure in my music, lyrics, and stories, they don't need to be aware of flams and paradiddles, intricate rhyming schemes, and elaborate metaphors. The underlying quality I would like them to sense in a Rush song, a concert, or one of my stories is simply that "Care has been taken here."
That could be a decent metaphor for life — investing your time with care, selectively, to the work, play, and people sharing your life. Also investing that time with care emotionally — doing those things,living those things, as well as you can, for yourself or for others.
In helping me to take care, I am greatly indebted to my brother Danny for editing feedback and encouragement ("symbiotic nepotism," I call it) on most of these stories. Jen Knoch at ECW also shared editorial qualities I define as "devoted" and "trustworthy," and I will always benefit from the earlier guidance of Paul McCarthy.
A notable upgrade in this second volume is that my motorcycling partners Michael and Brutus both stepped up to SLR cameras during this period. I continued to learn what made a good photo setup, taking note of scenery, light, traffic, the absence of ugly intrusions like powerlines and guardrails, that sort of thing, and "directed" them. (There was some grumbling about always having to climb hills for the overview I wanted, but they eventually appreciated the results.) Together we ended up with a much richer choice of images to illustrate these tales, and in another form of revision, friend Craiggie helped fine-tune them in his digital darkroom.
My drive to write and revise with such care is always based on a wish to share as deeply as possible what it was like to live "on days like these" — these places, these experiences, these people. Few activities in my life seem more important than finding a way to put life into words and pictures. Sharing all that in a letter to a friend as well as I can gives me a clear vision of where I'm aiming — at you, dear reader.
After publishing Roadshow in 2006, I received a letter from a motorcyclist in Georgia who was inspired by my quest for the national park passport stamps. He wasn't able to roam that far himself, but he was creative — over a series of weekend trips, he and his riding buddy decided to collect all of the state parks in Georgia. He wrote humorously about tracking down bemused staff members in each park to give them some kind of documentation — even a check-canceling stamp.
If any readers are inspired that way, to set out on their own little shunpikers' quests, that is high praise indeed. I hope you will enjoy these stories half as much as I enjoyed the journeys, and will treasure your own even more.
CHAPTER 2TALKING DRUMS IN DEATH VALLEY
FEBRUARY 2011
THE SETTING OF THE OPENING PHOTOGRAPH is Death Valley National Park, California, near the site called Natural Bridge. The snow-topped Panamint Mountains form the backdrop, while I am gesticulating and (no doubt) pontificating in the middle, surrounded by the people and cameras of the Hudson Music crew. The subject of my little speech was drumming — specifically, drumming in front of an audience.
So that explains the title, but suggests a number of other questions. Starting with, I suppose, "Um ... why?"
Well, it started in 1995, when I made an instructional video about composing drum parts and recording them, called A Work in Progress. My collaborators on that project were Paul Siegel and Rob Wallis, and we had enjoyed working together, sharing our ideas and realizing them on film. Paul and Rob were both drummers who had gravitated to the educational side, founding the Drummer's Collective in New York City, then later Hudson Music, to make instructional DVDs. They were around the same age as my bandmates and me, and likewise had enjoyed a long, productive partnership of close to the same duration, so we understood one another.
In 2005, the three of us made another instructional video (this time "straight to DVD"), Anatomy of a Drum Solo, which investigated the title subject, based around my solo from the R30 tour. That solo had been filmed and recorded in Frankfurt, Germany, and thus was titled "Der Trommler" (the drummer). (On Rush in Rio, it was "O Baterista!" while the Snakes and Arrows version, filmed in Rotterdam, was "Die Slagwerker.")
The theme for our next collaboration seemed obvious: live performance, preparing for it and surviving it. In early 2010, we began collecting material, now augmented by a new member of the Hudson Music team, Joe Bergamini. "Jobee" is a drummer well schooled in several fields, as well as an educator and journalist, and has been particularly successful in the orchestra pits of Broadway — first-call drummer for many of the hit shows, including such richly percussive and challenging scores as In the Heights. (I loved that show.) Jobee has a frighteningly detailed knowledge of my work, my methods and influences, and thus his inputs and questions were insightful and inspiring.
In April 2010, the Hudson Music crew joined me at Drum Channel in Oxnard, California, and filmed several days of my rehearsals for the Time Machine tour. In July, they filmed an entire Rush show, in Saratoga Springs, New York, with supplementary "drum-cams" on me. They also captured the soundcheck and pre-show warm-up, when I did a bit of talking to the camera, as I had during the Drum Channel filming in April. However, we would need to shoot some more "talkie bits" to go before each of the songs from the live show, explaining the special problems or challenges in a particular song and noting technical highlights.
So, I thought, why not go somewhere really nice to shoot those?
A Work in Progress had been filmed in May 1996 at Bearsville Studios, in New York's Catskill Mountains, so we had plenty of nice outdoor settings for the narrations around the neighboring woods and lakes. Same with Anatomy of a Drum Solo, which was shot at nearby Allaire Studios in the summer of 2005.
This filming session was scheduled for January 2011, so we were limited in choices for outdoor shooting. Winter in Quebec might have been pretty, or not — you can never tell about winter weather. We might get bright, clear days with glittering snow mounded all around, or we might get gray skies and gloomy rain. I thought of Big Sur, a rugged stretch of California's Pacific coast with dramatic ocean views among redwood forests and state parks and beaches. It is one of my favorite parts of the world, but at that time of year we might be interrupted by rain there, too.
So ... I suggested Death Valley. Being the driest place in North America, averaging less than two inches of rain a year — and sometimes none — the chances of clear weather were good. I have been enchanted by that region of desolate splendor since my first visit, in the fall of 1996, when Brutus and I rode in under a full moon on what remains one of the great motorcycle rides of my life. (See "December in Death Valley" in Far and Away.)
I returned many times after that, notably on the Ghost Rider journey in 1998 and '99, and every year or two since, so I had explored the area pretty thoroughly. The better I came to know it, the more I loved it.
It seemed to me that if we could combine such splendid natural backgrounds with the existing rehearsal and stage footage, it would elevate the show enormously. I was glad when the Hudson Music guys agreed. They set about getting the necessary permits (filming in a national park has certain "conditions") and making the arrangements. Here I am riding toward Death Valley on January 10, on my way to meet the Hudson crew at Furnace Creek.
I rode through the Panamint Valley, on the western side of the Panamint Mountains. The opposite, eastern aspect of that range is shown in the background of the opening photograph. From both views, the highest, snowiest summit is Telescope Peak (11,049 feet), which was the climactic setting in Ghost Rider. Its neighbor just to the north, Wildrose Peak (9,064 feet), was featured in the "December in Death Valley" story. That day my hike up Wildrose had led me into snow in the higher elevations, and so it was when I came riding in this time. Not long after the above photo was taken, the road veered left and led northeast into the Panamints, and I began ascending the little-used road toward the Wildrose Pass. The narrow, winding track got rougher all the way, the pavement often crumbling into gravel as it twisted steeply upward.
Then, as I rounded a bend, a sheet of white lay ahead of me in a shadowy canyon, a north-facing curve covered with snow. A few four-wheelers had slithered through, and their tracks were compacted into slick ice. I stopped right there and carefully turned my bike around to head back down. I might be able to tiptoe through that one icy stretch, but there would likely be more snow higher up, and I was alone. People were waiting for me, expensively. It was no time to take silly risks.
Once safely turned around, I straddled the bike at the edge of the snow, watching as a 4x4 pickup eased up and stopped beside me. The driver lowered his window, and we greeted each other. I told him I was heading back down, and he said, "Maybe I'll try it a little farther." But when he went to accelerate upward, all four tires started spinning, zing, zing.
I smiled and said, "Maybe not."
He chuckled and nodded agreement. "Maybe not." He reversed carefully down the road until he could turn around.
I followed his truck down through the rough part of the road, then passed him with a wave as the pavement smoothed out. Now I would have to take the longer but more well-traveled and lower-elevation route over Townes Pass — which was fine, but with that unexpected dead-end detour, and no gas until Stovepipe Wells, I would have to stop and pour in the extra gallon of gas I carried on the back of my bike.
When I had loaded the bike the previous day, I had almost decided to leave that accessory behind. I felt I knew where all the gas stations were around Death Valley, and how to plan my stops, so I shouldn't have any problem.
However, the Roadcraft lesson would be that sometimes you encounter ... the unexpected. So you'd better be ready.
The next morning I was waiting at Furnace Creek when Rob, Paul, and Jobee arrived with their crew — director Greg McKean and cameramen Dan Welch, Jeff Turick, and Nate Blair. They had all flown into Las Vegas, and drove up in a rented Suburban and Ford sedan, carrying a ton of camera gear and plentiful snacks for the perpetually peckish Jobee. Over an intensely action-packed day and a half we filmed my "talkie bits," prompted by Jobee's questions, in six or seven spectacular locations. I also encouraged them to capture some "gratuitous riding footage," as I hoped to bring as much variety to this drumming DVD as I could.
My dream would be to create a show that even non-drummers would enjoy watching, and now, thinking ahead to the coming months, it will be exciting to see all of those parts, from the rehearsal studio, the live stage, and Death Valley, edited together into what we hope will be an entertaining and instructive program. The working title is Taking Center Stage: A Lifetime of Live Performance.
This story will return to Death Valley and the film shoot directly, but I have to explain that even while I was engaged with that adventure, another big project was filling my days — a new book. I have long wanted the stories I write for this department to be "dignified" and made permanent by appearing in print, and at last I made it happen.
Typically, it turned out to be a much bigger job than I anticipated, but everything does, if you aim high enough. Once I had found a publisher and stipulated that the book had to be in print before the tour's continuation in late March, they gave me a list of requirements.
I needed a title and subtitle, which would help direct the design of a cover, which I would develop with Hugh Syme, as usual. I would have to write a new introduction and afterword, supervise various copy elements for the jacket and flaps, choose photographs for them, find all the text and photograph files for each of the twenty-two stories, then read over the copyedited text, the typeset text, and finally the corrected text. All in all, it was a solid two months of work, but I was delighted to see it truly coming together — a collection of stories that had been written and published independently now took on a unity, becoming a single narrative that spanned almost four years of my life. At first I had been daunted by having to write the "Intro" and "Outro," but they proved to be the keystones in framing the twenty-two individual stories to make them feel like one.
During that process of putting it all together, it occurred to me that there are few activities more enjoyable than making things. When I was young, it was car models, go-karts, then later pop-art mobiles and laughably inept carpentry. A couple of years ago, I ran across a wall-mount "drumstick holder" I had dreamed up in my teens. It had been inspired by my dad's cue rack by his pool table, but it was a crudely shaped assemblage of gray-painted plywood, with holes drilled by an old brace-and-bit — it looked like it had been crafted by a troglodyte. But still — I had made something.
It is stimulating and satisfying to write stories, or play the drums, but most gratifying of all to me is creating a physical object: a book, a CD, a DVD. Of course it remains the content that gives the mere object its value, but many would agree, I hope, that owning such a carefully crafted object is more pleasing than just acquiring the content by whatever means. That urge may sustain the existence of things apart from their content, and that would be good, methinks.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Far and Near by Neil Peart. Copyright © 2014 Neil Peart. Excerpted by permission of ECW PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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