Shock Rock II was published by Pocket Books in 1994, and when I sent Neil his half of the $250 payment (a very reasonable professional rate), he responded jokingly, “I guess I won’t quit drumming anytime soon.”
And I’m glad he didn’t. Neil invited me backstage to every Rush concert tour since 1990.
The response to “Drumbeats” was very favorable, and the story was reprinted several times. In 2005, I asked Neil to write the introduction to one of my collections, Landscapes, and he graciously agreed, but our greatest collaboration began in 2011, when he asked for my brainstorming help for a new concept album he was developing, a steampunk fantasy adventure, Clockwork Angels.
Our novel version of Clockwork Angels became a New York Times bestseller and won the Scribe Award. We wrote a second novel in that universe, Clockwork Lives, which won the Colorado Book Award and (even more meaningful to me) Neil deemed it, “surely your finest work.”
Many fans kept asking about our story “Drumbeats” and scoured used bookstores for Shock Rock II or other places where the story had been reprinted. We decided to put it up as an e-story, with a new Afterword by Neil. That version was available for those who just wanted the text.
For years we talked about releasing an expanded, illustrated print edition, convinced that we would always “get around to it.” We also did a lot of development work on a third Clockwork novel, Clockwork Destiny, which remains unfinished. Each time we saw each other, we talked about the third novel, but it was never to be, at least not in Neil’s lifetime … and we both knew it.
The Clockwork Angels album, which Classic Rock magazine dubbed the greatest rock album of the decade, was the last studio album from Rush.
Neil Peart died after a long battle with brain cancer on January 7, 2020. He was my coauthor on two novels, two graphic novels, and this short story. He was my friend for more than thirty years. And he was, and is, my inspiration for most of my life.
—Kevin J. Anderson
Drumbeats
After nine months of touring across North America—with hotel suites and elaborate dinners and clean sheets every day—it felt good to be hot and dirty, muscles straining not for the benefit of any screaming audience, but just to get to the next village up the dusty road, where none of the natives recognized Danny Imbro or knew his name. To them, he was just another White Man, an exotic object of awe for little children, a target of scorn for drunken soldiers at border checkpoints.
Bicycling through Africa was about the furthest thing from a rock concert tour that Danny could imagine—which was why he did it, after promoting the latest Blitzkrieg album and performing each song until the tracks were worn smooth in his head. This cleared his mind, gave him a sense of balance, perspective.
The other members of Blitzkrieg did their own thing during the group’s break months. Phil, whom they called the “music machine” because he couldn’t stop writing music, spent his relaxation time cranking out film scores for Hollywood; Reggie caught up on his reading, soaking up grocery bags full of political thrillers and mysteries; Shane turned into a vegetable on Maui. But Danny Imbro took his expensive-but-battered bicycle and bummed around West Africa. The others thought it strangely appropriate that the band’s drummer would go off hunting for tribal rhythms.
Late in the afternoon on the sixth day of his ride through Cameroon, Danny stopped in a large open market and bus depot in the town of Garoua. The marketplace was a line of mud-brick kiosks and chophouses, the air filled with the smell of baked dust and stones, hot oil and frying beignets. Abandoned cars squatted by the roadside, stripped clean but unblemished by corrosion in the dry air. Groups of men and children in long blouses like nightshirts idled their time away on the street corners.
Wives and daughters appeared on the road with their buckets, going to fetch water from the well on the other side of the marketplace. They wore bright-colored pagnes and kerchiefs, covering their traditionally naked breasts with T-shirts or castoff Western blouses, since the government in the capital city of Yaoundé had forbidden women from going topless.
Behind one kiosk in the shade sat a pan holding several bottles of Coca-Cola, Fanta, and ginger ale, cooling in water. Some vendors sold a thin stew of bony fish chunks over gritty rice, others sold fufu, a doughlike paste of pounded yams to be dipped into a sauce of meat and okra. Bread merchants stacked their long baguettes like dry firewood.
Danny used the back of his hand to smear sweat-caked dust off his forehead, then removed the bandanna he wore under his helmet to keep the sweat out of his eyes. With streaks of white skin peeking through the layer of grit around his eyes, he probably looked like some strange lemur.
In halting French, he began haggling with a wiry boy to buy a bottle of water. Hiding behind his kiosk, the boy demanded 800 francs for the water, an outrageous price. While Danny attempted to bargain it down, he saw the gaunt, grayish-skinned man walking through the marketplace like a wind-up toy running down.
The man was playing a drum.
The boy cringed and looked away. Danny kept staring. The crowd seemed to shrink away from the strange man as he wandered among them, continuing his incessant beat. He wore his hair long and unruly, which in itself was unusual among the close-cropped Africans. In the equatorial heat, the long, stained overcoat he wore must have heated his body like a furnace, but the man did not seem
