In 2004, the veteran rock band Rush launched their Thirtieth-Anniversary Tour, performing fifty-seven shows in nine countries, in front of 544,525 people.

Drummer and lyricist Neil Peart launched his own parallel tour, riding between those fifty-seven shows on his BMW motorcycle. From Los Angeles to Nashville, Salt Lake City to Key West, Prague to Berlin, Peart covered 21,000 miles, through ninete… Moreen countries. Along the way he kept a journal of his impressions, writing about those countries, and those fifty-seven shows, with the aim of documenting the tour as “the biggest journey of all in my restless existence: the life of a touring musician.”

[Selected excerpts]
Sunset Boulevard. The name alone resonates like few street names in the world, and few streets in the world were ever as beautiful as Sunset Boulevard at 5:30 in the morning, May 14, 2004, from the saddle of my motorcycle. Winding through the pre-dawn twilight, framed by luxuriant foliage, cool, fragrant air, and the solitude of the road, I felt the quiet thrill of beginning a long journey.

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After five weeks of hard work, good lunches, and lots of soup, the two long sets had come together, and we could more-or-less play them all the way through, most days. It was a marathon performance for all of us, well over three hours of music, and as the drummer, it was particularly demanding, even athletic, for me. The show was longer than we had intended, and certainly longer than I wanted, but despite some creative medleying, we hadn’t been able to bear cutting it.

…

Turning up Laurel Canyon, then east along Hollywood Boulevard, I pulled up outside the apartment building where Michael lived, and parked beside his gunmetal gray BMW GS. Michael had agreed to be my riding partner once again for this tour, as he had for the Vapor Trails tour in 2002, and although I had stressed to him that this beginning cross-country blitz was optional — just something I wanted to do to reacquaint myself with the country I would be traveling in for the next five months — Michael had insisted on riding it with me.

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Michael and I were setting out from Hollywood on a 2100-mile journey to that other entertainment capital, Nashville, where the final pre-tour rehearsals would be held with the band and crew, and our full production of lights and staging. I wasn’t sure how long this first ride — another kind of pre-tour rehearsal — might take, given variables like weather and traffic, not to mention unexpected obstacles like flat tires or mechanical problems. I figured if we could average at least 500 miles a day, we could still do it in four days, arriving on Monday in time for rehearsals. Of course, I wanted to do better than that.

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At the end of a long day on the road, I felt the mixed buzz of all-day vibration, overstimulation, and weariness — the underlying awareness of having gone the distance, enjoyed it, and survived it. I had once come up with a refrain that often played in my head: “When I’m riding my motorcycle, I’m glad to be alive. When I stop riding my motorcycle, I’m glad to be alive.”

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Now that we were getting close to opening night, Alex, Geddy, and I played through that show with earnest dedication to getting everything right. I was giving it everything I had, straining and sweating, and in fact, I was already playing for an audience, though they were imaginary. It is a defining trait in my character and attitude toward performing that no audience is more unforgivingly critical than an imaginary one. They knew exactly how well I was supposed to play, and whether I had or not.

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