Traveling Music

Neil Peart's 2004 tome Traveling Music: The Soundtrack to My Life and Times is an open road diary of the Rush drummer and lyricist's journey to Big Bend National Park.  It was a 2,400 mile round trip from Los Angeles, where he had had begun a new life with his new wife Carrie.  You may recall that Neil's first wife and daughter had both passed in the late 1990s, which prompted an earlier open road diary called Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road.  A real tonic for the soul, that book.  And a glimpse into the mind and heart of a sensitive human.  I was eager to dive into another travelogue.

Peart decided to make the journey by car instead of his beloved cycle.  A BMW Z-8, black with red interior, "always my favorite combination."  With typically meticulous detail, he describes the unfolding landscapes, the weather, wildlife.  Where he stayed and ate.  He recounts the contents of his CD changer during that trip:  a varied collection from the likes of Frank Sinatra, Coldplay, Pink Floyd, Roxy Music, Radiohead, Madonna, and lesser knowns like Vertical Horizon (whose lead singer he became friends with), The Tragically Hip (fellow Canadians), Dido, and Philosopher Kings.  Also, Linkin Park, God bless him.  

Neil breaks some of them down in musical terms, others in what the songs meant to him.  Where he first heard them and under what circumstances.  There will be biographical sketches of the Beach Boys, Elvis, Keith Moon, and the Beatles.  Memories of The T.A.M.I. Show.  What a pleasure to hear a gifted musician wax about his favorites.  I was excited to read his thoughts and inspirations for one of Rush's most lyrically evocative tunes, "Middletown Dreams".

Yes, the drummer does mention his bandmates, Geddy and Alex, from time to time.  Choice nuggets about touring life and making records, but certainly not enough for rabid fans like myself who could read volumes on Rush's history, especially from the point of view of one of the Canadian Power Trio. 

Each bit of Peart's traveling music triggers a litany of memories, a wealth of shared stories of growing up in Toronto, being accosted by fans (one odd fella leaves some beer outside his hotel room and then calls him!), trying to make it as a young musician in London in the early '70s, and his lovely recollections of his deceased wife and child.  The latter passages will make a poignant follow-up to the earlier book.  Every remembrance is vivid and rife with Peart's gift for prose.  Hell, any sort of writing.  I'll bet a technical journal for applied thermal engineering would be readable under his (and his editor's) watch.

Remember Brutus, Neil's eccentric pal and motorcycle compadre who got busted for a truckload of marijuana? Ghost Rider featured many letters written by our author to him while he served out a jail sentence.  He's referred to a bit, especially when Neil passes places in Texas and Mexico and thereabouts, recalling their misadventures with great fondness and wry wit.  

The chapters are called choruses and verses and such, and Chorus Four is an engrossing account of Neil's bicycle trips through West Africa.  No luxuries as he and a group of fellow punishment seekers braved the often uncultivated terrain through villages with names like Assohoum and Agbo Kope.  One of my favorite passages: Neil's account of the time he jammed (with increasingly intricate patterns, of course) on tall wooden drums along with "an older African man, gray and sinewy", mesmerizing the locals.

Traveling Music's privileged gaze into this artist's internal and external life is something most of us would never have had the honor of in "real life".  I'm extremely grateful for these books, especially since Neil's passing in 2020.  A voice that truly lives on.