RUSH Drummer NEIL PEART: 'That's The Way We Roll'

July 15, 2007

RUSH drummer Neil Peart has posted the following diary entry from the band's current "Snakes & Arrows" tour:

"With only a few days at home after the first leg of the 'Snakes & Arrows' tour (16 shows, 7,257 miles of motorcycling),this will definitely be the 'short version.' Still, I wanted to try to put up something new.

"Photographs of the performances are plentifully available elsewhere (my view of the audience this tour is studded with innumerable cell-phone cameras, sticking up like periscopes),so I thought I might just display a couple of motorcycling photos. On this tour Michael and I haven't even carried cameras with us on the bikes, let alone bothering to ease our steady pace to take photos, but recently we had a camera-happy 'guest rider,' Richard S. Foster. The name might ring a bell to dedicated readers of album credits — our song 'Red Barchetta' had a note on the lyric sheet, 'Inspired by 'A Nice Morning Drive' by Richard S. Foster.'

"I know that Rick (as he is known to his friends, among whom I now number myself) plans to tell our story himself in another forum, and it's quite an amazing sequence of coincidences and synchronicities.

"The short version (I keep saying that) is that despite my attempts back in 1980 to contact the author of the short story that had inspired 'Red Barchetta' — a story I had read in a 1973 issue of Road & Track — we only recently managed to actually make contact.

"Rick rode with Michael and me through the back roads (the very back roads) of West Virginia for a couple of days between shows in near-DC and near-Pittsburgh (so many of those amphitheaters are in the exurbs),and then he attended his first RUSH concert in (or near) Boston.

"But that's his story, and I'll leave it to him to tell. Michael only left Rick with one request, from the movie 'Almost Famous', when the singer says to the young journalist, 'Just make us look cool.'

"How well Rick succeeded with that challenge, the reader may judge at this this location."

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