And where did you get to sit behind that prefer of rock and roll history?
A complicated story...
Peart had several drum kits over the course of his Rush career, but he always kept the same snare that he used from the beginning up to about the year 2000 - and that was a Slingerland “Artist” model, wrapped in copper.
For those of you not familiar with the “Artist” model, that wasn’t the cheapest model (that was the “student”) and it wasn’t the most expensive (that was “the radio King”). As good marketers, Slingerland had five models, for varying budgets and the Artist was just below the radio king. As a result, they sold very few artist models - I mean, why buy “almost the best” in a five tier structure? Just go ahead and buy the best! And there were EXTREMELY few of those artist models wrapped in copper - less than 5, and only two are known to exist - Neil has one and there’s one in the hands of a collector in Italy.
Anyways, I decided (about 2007 or 2008) to make as perfect a replica of Neil’s snare as I could - so I got a plastic wrapped Artist, de-laminated it, and then wrapped it with the correct gauge of copper (from chatting with the guy in Italy). I was proud of my effort and posted pics on a couple internet boards...
change gears to the other thread that will come together in a bit...
back in the mid/late 80s, Peart decided he didn’t need his old drum kits so he organized a competition with Modern Drummer magazine for readers to send in a recording of their original drum solos - and the ones that Neil like best would win one of his kits (including all hardware, but minus his snare and any cymbals). There were three kits as I recall, one of which was his early album Slingerland...
The guy that originally won that kit ended up selling it - and I don’t know how many times it changed hands, but by about 2008 it was in the hands of a guy that owned a small chain of pizza restaurants in New York and he had decided to donate the kit to the PASIC (Percussive Arts Society) museum. He had period correct cymbals and had added on some of the other stuff (like gong), but he didn’t have a correct snare.
He contacted me, I built another replica snare, and now that kit (with my snare) is in the PASIC museum - and, as a result of being the snare builder, I got to play the kit.
And that’s all I have to say about that - Forrest Gump
