Hey, I'm Brian Hyatt, and this is Rolling Stone Music Now.

I'm in the studio with Andy Green and Hank Steamer, and we're here to pay some tribute to the life and music of Neil Pierge, the great drummer and

lyricist for Rush, who just died at age 67 and left fans and his family pretty devastated and the

fans are all over the world and the outpouring for him I think was maybe more

than even he would have expected I wish he could

have seen it I think it showed that he's a figure who transcended even just Rush

fans like he was a beloved musical icon I think we saw that for sure yeah and I think part of the

shock we're all feeling is no one even knew that he was sick so to go straight

to dead was so jarring and upsetting last week.

I mean, I'm still in shock.

Yeah, they kept it, very effectively kept it as a closely guarded secret to protect his family's privacy and so for everyone who wasn't a very close

confident it was basically a total shock so we're going to be talking about

Neil's life we're going to start though by playing some of a conversation I had

with him in 2015. I was looking at the transcript. There's 40,000 words of conversation between

me and Neil Pier.

It was for Rolling Stones's first cover story on Rush,

of our very be deleted first cover story on Rush,

which, yeah, took until 2015, but at least we got to do it and I was with the band while they

rehearsed for what turned out to be their final tour. This interview took place

right after I actually sat in on the rehearsals for a few hours and I remember I was I

was wearing like in-ear monitors given to me by the band because otherwise I wouldn't hear Getty's vocals

because there was no PA obviously they were just rehearsing with the but if I took

...