inside the time strictures and gradually learning to hear what wasn’t there: the click. So when those two bars went away, I could still feel them. Eventually I surprised myself by coming
back in on time. The fast ones are a little easier. I’ve heard from other prominent drummers that when they fi rst tried to do it, it was like, There’s something wrong with this thing. [laughs] What it gave me, unexpect- edly, was the confi dence of time that freed me to be improvisational. Because I could feel that pulse, organically. Freddie was about motion. He’d say that
that my summit. I wanted to aspire to that performance. Don Lombardi from Drum Workshop and
I agreed that Peter Erskine would be the right teacher to take me in a better direction for big band drumming. And he lives ten minutes from me. So I started going to his house for lessons, and he started me on a course of practicing with the Quiet Count feature in Roland’s V-Drums brain, which is a metronome that gives you two bars of click, then two bars of silence, and [so on]. So my assignment was to set that to a
slow tempo and then a fast tempo and play to it, just hi-hat. And then he gave me some play-along stuff to enhance the feel and understand the swing drumming, people like Sonny Payne with Count Basie. So every single day I sat at the hi-hat and set a very slow tempo. At fi rst…impossible. And I didn’t want to keep time [with the rest of the kit]. Practice doesn’t have to be tedious. So I
never got bored with the hi-hat, for months. I was riffi ng on it, learning things
when you hit the cymbal, it was that, but he also liked these gestures. And Peter had studied with Freddie too. Peter asked me to play quarter notes on a ride, and I was putting in this little curl. He asked what that was, and I told him it was timekeeping. He said, “No,” and pointed at my chest and told me the time is there. He wanted me to play those quarter notes with laser accuracy and linear motion. And he had transcended Freddie’s teaching, as I learned to. That feeling, that curl that Freddie had put into timekeeping, I intuited it. And I worked on it for months and went back to Peter to play those quarter notes. Like any student, I was nervous about the teacher. And at the end he said, “Perfect,” and I was so happy. MD: Did you feel your internal clock change? Neil: Rush was on a hiatus and I had a year and a half where I could practice. Later, when the three of us got together, I started putting down drum tracks for the demos. Geddy and Alex said, “Well, it still sounds like you. It doesn’t sound any diff erent.” And I was kind of disappointed. But when they went to play with it, it was completely diff erent. The clock had just changed, altered that much. And that remains to this day. If we revive one of the older songs from prior to that time, I play it as I would play it now. One song we revived, “Presto,” we play
so much better now, and Geddy said, “We have a diff erent clock now.” So they got it. There was something fundamental and seemingly intangible, because they couldn’t hear it. It was more of the freedom now. On the last two Rush albums, I haven’t
composed the drum parts—I’ve performed them. We worked with producer Nick Raskulinecz on the last two records, and I would play through the song a few times, see what would work, and then he’d come
in and we’d start recording. And he would conduct me, because our arrangements can be obtuse, and it used to take a long time for me to learn them. I used to say it took me three days to
learn one of our songs and put together a drum part. I don’t like to count. I don’t like to write notes. I want to play this thing like music. On this tour we’re playing a lot of our older stuff from the 1970s with bizarre times. Why did we do this stuff ? Because we were kids. We were learning how to do it. Because we could. I play that stuff completely diff erently now, with a much better lilt and feel and natural fl ow. MD: In your last MD interview, in 2011, you said that studies with Gruber and Erskine helped you retain accuracy but feel good inside. Has anything changed? Is that even better now? Neil: I’m still evolving in the ways that they have guided me. Sometimes I’ll do an interview with non-musicians and they’ll ask why I practice so much and take lessons. Well, I have the privilege of being a professional musician. It’s my responsibility to devote myself to being all that I can be to the people that have given me that opportunity. MD: Not everyone thinks that way. Neil: I know, but they should. [laughs] I live by example. As a drummer, set a good example and don’t work the audience. And when other drummers tell me I’ve inspired them to play drums, I tell them to apologize to their parents. [laughs] Like for this tour, I started preparation three months earlier. I’d play along with tracks all day and work on solo ideas, fi ve days a week. So by the time we get to band rehearsals, I’m ready. MD: How did the reverse chronological order of the set list come about? Neil: Alex and I were excited to fi nd the deep tracks, the songs we never play live. And we wanted to do a theatrical presenta- tion where the show devolves back in time. So then we started thinking of how the songs should be chosen, and you’ve got two responsibilities—set one and set two, like two sides of an LP. So they’d have to start and end somewhere, and carry the audience dynamically. Years ago we were talking about a certain
order of songs, and Alex said we couldn’t do that because they were all in the same key—something no one would think about. And I’m conscious of that tempo-wise. And for Geddy as a vocalist, he might not want to sing certain songs in a row.
January 2016 Modern Drummer 37
Craig Renwick
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