“I always say this about old cars and motorcycles, and old drums: I love them, but new ones are better.”
Sustained Impact
Neil: [After discussing his injuries] At this point in the tour, you have no reserves. So a thing like this attacks, and it wears down your resistance in every other way too. And there’s no getting better. I got tendinitis in one elbow on the ’96/’97 Test for Echo tour, and then I didn’t have it again for fi fteen years—and it was the other elbow. For the rest of the tour I have to wear a brace to play, and I wear a brace at night. People say, “Oh, you just need to rest it.” Ok, I’ll do that. We’ll just send these ten thousand people home tonight while I have a rest.
MD: You’re certainly not back there playing “Peaceful Easy Feeling.”
Neil: [laughs] As you can see, I often refer to what I do as athletic. It’s not low impact. And through the teachings of Freddie Gruber, and through my own physical regimen and yoga, I’ve been able to sustain my peak for a long time and continue to get better and continue to study.
It’s a revelation for me that at age
sixty-two I can still be getting better and feel it and know it deep down. And move into a new area. Freddie had a
36 Modern Drummer January 2016
transformational eff ect on my playing. When I worked with him in the mid-’90s, he said, “You’re a compositional player.” And it’s true. My drum parts all through the ’70s and ’80s were very carefully refi ned, partly by the nature of the way we worked in those days. We were all in the studio together, learning the song, playing it again and again, and one time I’d put in a little fi gure or accent and think, This would go with that, and, piece by piece, the architec- ture, the composition, would come together. But when Freddie pointed that out to me,
I thought, That’s nice, but I want to be an improvisational player. So I set out a bit on my own to work more in that direction and to use motifs in my solo and ostinatos that would allow me to expand more. I still have a framework, because I always felt a responsibility to present a composition. When I was growing up in southern
Ontario, the climate of the time was so healthy; I was seeing great drummers all the time. I loved the way some drummers played accompanying the band, but I didn’t
love their solos, because they had no vision, they had no story to tell. Some other drummers I’d watch solo, and I could see it was a composition, a performance. Every band I was ever in, I’ve always
played a solo. It became a part of my performing life from the beginning. It was such a great vehicle to learn, because there are so many technical aspects that I learned from soloing without the responsibility of supporting a band and being in the rhythm section. That was just exploration. The same as my little warm-up drums here backstage. I can experiment on them without any consequences whatsoever. And I might think, Oh, I’m going to put that in my solo tonight. And I couldn’t have known what Freddie was going to give me. I just surrendered myself to him and basically started all over. MD: And Peter Erskine has helped continue your learning? Neil: I loved the way Steve Gadd played “Love for Sale” on the Buddy Rich tribute album that we made [Burning for Buddy], and Dave Weckl playing it live. So I made
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