Neil Peart's "News Weather and Sports" - December 2008 "December In Death Valley"

Neil Peart has updated his website with the latest installment of "News Weather & Sports". Titled "December In Death Valley", Neil shares with us his motorcycle trip he took through the California desert on December 4th. In one point of his narrative, Neil discusses the ghost town of Amboy, which is pictured on the Snakes & Arrows desert road image.

'Leaving the park at Twentynine Palms, I continued north on the road to the ghost town of Amboy, and Roy’s Motel, which appeared in Ghost Rider. In fact, unknown to most people, Amboy also appears on the booklet cover of the Snakes and Arrows CD, and lately, on the new concert DVD, plus at the beginning of the "What’s That Smell?" film that played before "Far Cry" during our concerts this past summer. I watched it every night from my "waiting-chair" behind Geddy’s ampline (er, rotisseries), before the second set, and it always gave me a smile. Back in 2006, when Hugh Syme and I were trading ideas for that Snakes and Arrows cover, we discussed a surreal desert highway scene. As a reference, I sent him one of my Ghost Rider photographs, taken on a stretch of old Route 66, looking west toward the cluster of crumbling buildings at Amboy, with the unmistakable Amboy Crater in the distance. Hugh ended up "building" the scene on that original photo, which had been taken in 1998 (as a slide, in those days). Like the Monument Valley ten-years-apart photo that appeared in a story earlier this year, "South by Southwest," I decided to pause for a ten-year anniversary shot of Route 66 and Amboy.'

Another interesting point are his comments regarding an abandoned song titled "Telescope Peak" written in the time of Vapor Trails.

'In the glimmer along the peaks, I saw a dusting of white around the highest summit, Telescope Peak, where I hoped to hike the following day. Telescope Peak was an important place in Ghost Rider—and in my life, really. In October 1999, when I had been rambling aimlessly around the West for the better part of a year, trying to find some way to face the world again, I hiked to that 11,049-foot summit. The next day, I rode on to Los Angeles, where I met Carrie, and my whole life changed completely (and needless to say, positively). An irresistible metaphor seemed to arise there—that I had climbed to the highest point in Death Valley from the lowest, then descended to travel onward and find Life again. In the book Ghost Rider I had used Telescope Peak as an important symbol, and had written some lyrics called "Telescope Peak," too, around the refrain of "the last lonely day." Those lyrics hadn’t found a musical home with my collaborators, Alex and Geddy, during the songwriting sessions for our Vapor Trails album in 2001, but fair enough—those guys shared enough of my grief, in life and in art. In any case, the best lines from "Telescope Peak" were recycled into other songs, like "Ghost Rider" and "How It Is," so nothing was lost...Early next morning I rode about sixty miles across the valley and up Emigrant Canyon Road, aiming for a hike in the Panamint Mountains. I was still thinking of going for the "big one," Telescope Peak, as I wanted to close that circle of more than nine years ago—revisit the place that had also inspired another line in "Telescope Peak" that ended up in "Ghost Rider:" "From the lowest low to the highest high."'

For the complete entry visit NeilPeart.net.