Exit Stage Right  - Tribute to Rush

I believe the reason that Neil Peart's drumming is so revered is less about his technical mastery and more to do with his composition of drum parts. There are plenty of professional drummers who can play with amazingly fast and accurate technique. But Neil has set himself above the rest by dreaming up with some of the most memorable fills and beats in the history of rock music. His drum parts are truly musical. You can tell that he sits in a room with each song for days or weeks composing and refining the perfect part for the music that Alex and Geddy write.

One of the signature elements of Neil’s drum compositions (and of Rush’s song structures in general) is a progression within each song from simple to complex –  a constant building of intensity. As a songwriting device this is a classic way to keep a song interesting and seems to be a natural momentum in great music. A song should go somewhere. A guitar solo should go somewhere – take the famous La Villa Strangiato guitar solo as the quintessential example of that. And in Neil’s vision, drum fills and beats should always go somewhere.

To this end, in many Rush songs Neil will at some point play variations of the same fills in the same places in verses and chorus. The first verse or chorus will have a simple fill. The next time the section of the song comes around, he will play a similar version of the same fill but with more complexity or intensity added. To make this shift, he will do things such as injecting more cymbal crashes, replacing snare hits with tom hits, and generally adding more and faster notes. But he will retain some of the original character of the fill. He will also do this with his beats within a song – creating beat variations later in the song which generally have added kick drum notes or busier ride patterns.

I scanned in a few examples of this from the drum charts I scrawled out while learning songs for ESR. Instead of writing out a song in linear fashion, I would go section by section so I could see how the parts were related as the section recurred through the song.

There are some good examples in the section of Red Barchetta with the lyrics “Jump to the ground as the turbo slows…” the first time and “Ride like the wind straining the limits of machine and man…” the second time later in the song (Neil is playing a driving beat with quarter notes on a loose hi-hat during the section.)

Here I’ve written out the 3 fills in the section for the first time on the top line and second time in the song on the bottom line. Fill #1 has a crash and snare on beat 4. The second time through he starts the fill the same way but moves the kick drum and adds and extra kick beat after the crash. In fill #3 he plays a triplet pattern between the snare and kick drum in the exact same way both times. But the first time he uses an open high hat on the snare, while the second time it’s a crash cymbal, building the intensity. (Interestingly this guitar riff is also played after the guitar solo but it’s barely recognizable because Neil plays an entirely different beat over it with quarter notes on the snare.)

A similar thing happens in the instrumental section of Red Barchetta that occurs right before the previously discussed segment. Neil is playing a rock beat with eighths on the ride cymbal. The second time through, he adds intensity by hitting crashes on all of the snare back beats. In addition the fills get busier the second time as shown here.

For fill #1 he does a similar rhythm both times but uses quick hi-hats the first time and cymbal crashes the second. He also ends fill #1 with a tom run the second time where he kept it simple the first time around. Fill #2 is a basic eighth note pattern with flams on the snare drum the first time, but the second time Neil spices things up with a burst of 16th notes alternating between the snare and kick.

Finally here is a interesting segment from Tom Sawyer where Neil is playing eighth notes on an open high hat (Geddy is singing “the world is the world is…”). He plays the exact same beat pattern both times but adds a few extra kick drum beats here and there the second time through, which I circled. This increases the funkiness of the section but still retains the original theme.

I didn’t bother writing out the whole beat the second time, just the differences. When trying to memorize Rush drum parts, it’s important to find patterns that repeat so as to keep your head from exploding from information overload!

There are countless examples of this same thing happening in Rush songs once you start to watch for it. The song Freewill is another great example to listen to.

When you’re playing drums on your own songs (or covers) you can keep this building concept in mind. Don’t start out a song with your flashiest, fastest fill in the first verse. Play simple, restrained fills early and save the fireworks for later in the tune. And experiment with theme and variation on your fills and beats, bringing back ideas with small changes that up the ante a little higher each time.

PG

Our show at Tuttle's was momentous occasion for us, being our first attempt to fill a whole evening with Rush music. Previously the longest show we had done was about 90 minutes. Since then we have added at least a dozen songs and were ready to try to play everything we knew in one night without any supporting act. It was unknown if we had the endurance to maintain a high level of playing throughout such a long show. We all play in other cover bands which play standard 3 set shows and it's nothing terribly difficult, but playing 3 hours of Rush music is something else entirely. For whatever reason, playing the songs takes a level of concentration and energy far beyond what is required for basic bar cover songs.

We were also going to play all of the songs from the Moving Pictures album in sequence. This was an idea we had early on in the history of the band, but we hadn't learned the final song Vital Signs until last winter and we hadn't had a long enough show to play the whole album. When we heard that Rush themselves would be playing the album on their upcoming tour, we were validated and felt renewed urgency to present the mighty Moving Pictures. It resulted in some interesting changes to our normal song order because we tend to start or end the show with Limelight or Tom Sawyer, two of the most universally popular Rush songs. But unlike many cases with "hit songs" from other bands which tend to be a low denominator, those two Rush hits are also very satisfying to play and masterpieces of songwriting that we never get sick of featuring in our shows. This turned out to be a lot of fun during the show, and ending the first set with Vital Signs was perfect given the climactic ending section.

We cruised though the first hour plus set at Tuttle's without too many problems. The sound was great thanks to our house engineer Bob. He has seen every Rush tour since Caress of Steel so he knows the material and Rush sound as well as anyone. At that halfway point we were pretty spent and were thinking we still an hour and half of music to play. Refreshed a bit after the break and talking to some of the great fans at the bar, we went up for set number two. We started with 2112, which we had only played a handful of times in rehearsal. It actually is not as hard as some other songs in the Rush catalog, but then we only did the R30 arrangement of Overture / Syrinx / Finale. Hopefully we will learn the rest in the near future. Within the rest of the second set, we proceeded to play several of the epic 10 minute songs in our catalog - Xanadu, Cygnus X-1, La Villa Strangiato, Jacob's Ladder. We were all definitely feeling tired by the end but we made in through fine. We certainly gained a new appreciation for the level of physical endurance that Alex, Geddy, and Neil must have to play such demanding music night after night on tour.

In addition to performing Pictures, we also went on to realize another dream which was to play 'side 3' of Exit... Stage Left (if you had the double LP like me) which of course featured the connected arc of Broon's Bane, The Trees, and Xanadu. This went over well. Before the show we had never actually heard Rob play Broon's Bane all the way through and he played it flawlessly. We are in fact now only one song away from knowing the entire Exit... Stage Left album - the abridged version Beneath, Between,and Behind. Well two songs, if you count the famous YYZ drum solo. I have attempted to learn bits and pieces of that solo but it is really the point where mere mortals cannot hope to imitate Neil's super human drumming skills. That is the definitive Peart solo for me, even though it is much shorter than his contemporary solos and does not feature any electronic percussion. I still hope to do a version of it someday.

Surprisingly one of the most satisfying moments was our closing encore of Working Man. We had never played this song live before and had only really played it in rehearsal a couple of times, but we knew it was ready. The contrast with the complex Rush music was obvious when we ripped through it on our first try. Normally when we learn a new Rush song, it is barely recognizable for the first several weeks of practice and we slowly learn bits and pieces until we can put everything together correctly. We had previously looked down on Working Man a bit as an immature work, but we now realized it was just plain fun to play and a song that the audience really responded to. After seeing the Rush movie, we were also reminded that it has a very important place in Rush history, being the song that first got Rush onto mainstream radio when it resonated with listeners in Cleveland. Rush themselves have said that they like to put some of their more straightforward songs at the very end of the show and we learned first hand that this is a good strategy. But the bottom line is, Working Man rocks!

PG