In May of 2010 I embarked on the epic Genesis retrospective. But I cheated. I started with their second album, Nursery Cryme, since that was the more acclaimed of the first two records and the first one seemed like…well, the pretensions of youth.
To compensate I also did the bulk of the solo work ( or as much as I could handle)
I reprint them here for your pleasure.
Genesis – Nursery Cryme – 1971
We’re gonna bypass the first two genesis albums for the sole reason that this was the album that Steve Hackett and, more importantly, Phil Collins, first appeared on, making it the true first album by the core members that would come to be known, in various forms, as Genesis. Am I just being lazy?
14 group records, 11 solo albums? I think I’m being as fair as I can without pulling my ears off.
Recorded at the same studios where, just a few years later, Queen would start their recording career, Nursery Cryme opens with the murder/reincarnation opus, “The Musical Box”, wherein a young girl, Cynthia, uses a croquet mallet to remove the head of a little boy, Henry. What?
Wait. It gets better. Henry’s soul returns to his body as she plays his music box. What?
Wait. Then his body ages rapidly and, rejecting his affections, she throws the box at him, destroying them both.
What?
The sprawling song is a harbinger of the kind of stuff that Yes would become famous for; epic guitar solos, key changes, extended themes, songs as novellas.
Not 4 years after Sgt. Pepper this is what the English public schools were creating. Huzzah!
More death is examined on “For Absent Friends”, notable for being the first time we’d get to hear Phil Collins on lead vocals. Funny how things turn out.
“The Return of the Giant Hogweed” is a Gabriel track about…a rampant strain of Hogweed that is impervious to pesticide and destroy the human race.
Genesis is not a happy bunch of boys.
After that first side, the second side opens with “Seven Stones” which, when matched up against that remarkable first half comes across as nothing more than an attempt to do it again. It’s confusing and confused and ultimately plays better as a short story.
All of this plays like an Off-Broadway musical directed by Tom O’Horgan, with a book by Leonard Melfi. So steeped in 70’s experimentation and alternative theatrics it’s mind boggling that we were ever a society that, between the aforementioned Yes and Ermerson, Lake & Palmer and Pink Floyd and The Who, ate up this sort of high minded culture.
Look at us now. That’s right. Justin Bieber. I’m looking at you. No, that’s not fair. In point of fact, I would venture to say that Green Day’s last two albums prove that the idiom is alive and well.
Nursery Crymes runs out of steam about 3/5 through. But the first side proves that this is a prog-rock band to be reckoned with.
Grade: B-
A Side: The Musical Box, The Return of the Giant Hogweed
BlindSide: Harold the Barrel
DownSide: Seven Stories
Genesis – Foxtrot – 1972
The cover would inspire Gabriel to don a fox mask and red dress in concerts. This would get the band noticed and put on the cover of NME and other London tabs. And, so through the stratosphere flew Genesis.
On the back of this record.
One of the first thing that I noticed on the pompous and lovingly ostentatious first track, “Watcher of the Skies” is how beefy Mike Rutherford’s Bass is. It grounds the song and elevates the entire experience to a new height. Nursery Cryme alluded to how big this band could sound. Foxtrot pays that off in spades.
While listening to this record I am slightly dumbstruck by Phil Collins’ proficiency. I should really know better. I actually had a Brand X album, a side project of jazz that Collins played on. But I get mired in the “Against All Odds” Collins. The Tarzan Collins. The “In the Air Tonight”/”You Can’t Hurry Love”/”Sussudio” Collins. But he’s really spectacular and it shows here.
By the end of the first side, I can feel Prog-rock fatigue settling in. Fortunately, “Can-Utility and the Coastliners” with it’s immediate and demanding acoustic guitars and foreboding mellotron were able to wake me from this and ready me for Side Two: a prelude and a 22 minute, seven section examination of Revelations.
Umm…..kay.
I will not report what the song is actually about, not as a whole or the sections. If you’re interested, here’s the Wikipedia link.
Knock yourself out.
All I can say is, wow, the early 70s were a madcap time to be a rock music fan. Every few months or so someone was putting out an overwrought, wondrously florid, incredibly pretentious “Rock Opera”. Thanks, Abbey Road.
O to be 17 in 1972, in possession of some righteous weed and just bliss out to this stuff.
Grade: B+
A Side: Watcher of the Skies, Horizons, Supper’s Ready
BlindSide: Can-Utility and the Coastliners,
DownSide: Get ’em Out By Friday
Genesis – Selling England by the Pound – 1973
My friend, John, had an older sister who made it clear: While we may have been in love with The Cars or Billy Joel or Queen, Genesis was the greatest rock band of all time.
I ignored her and by the time I became acquainted with them I knew them as masters of pop.
This might be the record she was referring to.
What a difference a producer makes. While John Burns engineered Foxtrot, he has the throttle for this record along with the band. It’s a much crisper, cleaner and more direct record. “Dancing with the Moonlit Knight” ventures somewhere out to the prog-osphere and dips it’s toe in metal and lilting folk along the way.
Three records in (well, five really) and we finally get a SINGLE! “I Know What I Like In Your Wardrobe”, with its heavy percussion and straightforward narrative actually charted. I think Gabriel will be mining this thudding and thumping territory for much of his later career. Think Floyd meets Tull with Collins on drums.
“Firth of Fifth” is indescribable, delicious and hefty. An example of what happens when David St. Hubbin’s ideas are in the right hands.
“More Fool Me” is another Collins sung tune and it’s one of the most listenable tracks in the band’s repertoire. At some point it becomes incumbent upon the listener to recognize that Collins was always going to be the one to bring the uber success to this group. The Gabriel led stuff is determined to live in the high-minded rockopera world. It’s great, but it’s not accessible. Not the way Phil is.
After the schizophrenic “Battle of Epping Forest” we are entreated to listen to an instrumental piece (“After the Ordeal”) written by Steve Hackett, the band’s longtime guitarist. He would try in vain to get more of his work shoehorned on to their records and be rebuffed by Banks and Rutherford. For good reason. This goes nowhere.
I know that a lot of reviewers and musicians (Trey Anastasio of Phish most notably) call this one of the best albums of it’s kind. I find it plodding and middling at best. There are some terrific highs, but so many diversions away from listenability that, in the end, it’s just too often too difficult to penetrate.
Grade B+
A Side: I Know What I Like in Your Wardrobe, Firth of Fifth
BlindSide: Dancing with the Moonlit Knight , More Fool Me
DownSide: The Battle of Epping Forest,
Genesis – The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway – 1974
The eponymous first track of this epic double album is the actually the first, so far as I can tell, which encourages the audience to sing along. It’s a ready made chant. And it’s the closest Genesis has sounded to what I would come to be accustomed to. Namely, Duke.
There is a concept in here somewhere but I am, once again, loathe to explain it. It’s got something to do with a Puerto Rican kid named Rael encountering terrifying people and experiences in order to save his brother, John. Who might be himself. Split in two. Genesis never makes it easy.
It’s been reported that Gabriel had less to do with the writing of the music for Lamb than on previous records and that he worked out the storyline mostly by himself. If this is true, it makes a lot of sense to me. Once Gabriel left the band, Rutherford, Banks and, of course, Collins, would achieve megastardom by transforming Genesis’s sound into something more accessible and radio friendly. Whether this is because of the change in lead singers, I don’t know. But it seems right.
“Counting Out Time” is the closest the band has come to a real radio friendly song. I think I may have heard this a few times on WDHA, “The Parkway to Rock!” when I was a kid in New Jersey.
The first album ends with the decidedly Yes sounding “The Carpet Crawlers”. It’s a fitting climax to the story, taking us on a journey to the abyss to follow.
Like any double album of conceptual prog-rock, Lamb falls prey to it’s own grandiosity. Rael and John are, it seems, reunited at the end. Along the way, the (much darker) second side isn’t without it’s own shining moments of brilliance. “Lilywhite Lilith” is one of the most enticing songs the band has written. And the finale, “It”, is every bit the climax worthy of Floyd’s best moments.
The Lam Lies Down on Broadway is the true turning point for Genesis. Gabriel would leave and emerge as a powerful solo artist and king of the video age. Phil Collins would become one of the most popular balding imp drummers ever to front a rock band. But if there is one record that the band had to hang its hat on, it would be this one.
Splendid.
Grade: A
A Side: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, In the Cage, Back in NYC, Counting Out Time, The Carpet Crawlers
BlindSide: Fly on a Windshield
Peter Gabriel – Peter Gabriel (Car) – 1977
“Solsbury Hill”
It’s all about that song.
Gabriel wrote “Hill” to explain his departure from Genesis and that’s all great. It’s a much bigger and better song than that. My friend, David, calls songs like this, “Songs from the sky”. They are too perfect to have been written without divine assistance.
Whether that’s true or not, it goes without saying that “Solsbury Hill” is a classic pice of prog-rock brilliance. Brilliant, too, because NOTHING Gabriel did with Genesis suggested he was going to put out something as long-lasting and persistently current sounding as it. It’s a song. You can sing along to it. What was he thinking??? It’s lovely, folky, bold, big, but most of all, it’s a piece of pop confection in its own weird way that suggests perhaps the other members of the band were holding him back. After all, once he left they went right back to their Yes-sian roots and he came out with this.
“Modern Love” finds Gabriel ROCKING out. Perhaps the organ is a bit of filigree that was unnecessary, the song is strong enough as a rocker without it. When Peter veers away from the verse or chorus structure it comes across as a bridge. And that’s enough traditional songcrafting for me.
The a capella barbershop quartet and burlesque of “Excuse Me” is something that we would never be treated to on a standard Genesis record. It’s whimsical.
“Slowburn” opens side two and sounds like a hybrid of Pete Townshend solo work, 80s soaring metal and grand rock opera. It almost doesn’t work, except that Gabriel has such a good sense of how to navigate these waters. It ends up being quite a great piece. If The Lamb Lies Down is a jagged pill, Gabriel has figured out how to help us swallow it.
“Waiting for the Big One” is a piano driven blues number that calls to mind Tom Waits or, at least, Randy Newman and is, once again, completely unexpected. To follow that with the epic cinematic power of “Down the Dolce Vita” is inspired.
The musicianship on Peter Gabriel is solid, sure. We would expect nothing less. The songs are so far removed from the 6 albums he did with Banks & Rutherford et al, though. It’s such a refreshing experience. I love it.
Grade: A
A Side: Solsbury Hill, Moribund the Burgermeister
BlindSide: Modern Love, Excuse Me, Waiting for the Big One, Down the Dolce Vita
DownSide: Humdrum
Peter Gabriel – Peter Gabriel – 1978
The second eponymous Peter Gabriel record in as many years is also known as “Scratch” by fans due to the cover. It was produced by Robert Fripp and features no less a ubiquitous figure as Roy Bittan on piano.
It opens with the hard rockin’ radio ready “On the Air” which, to me, sounds more like where Solo Gabriel and Gabriel-less Genesis converge. Except the production is dry as a bone and more lifeless than the last record. Peter is still playing in the consumer-friendly milieu. Trouble is, this is an ugly sounding record. The transcendence of “Solsbury Hill” is noticeably absent. I would hasten to say that Gabriel is turning himself into David Bowie and the world doesn’t need another one of those. Especially when Bowie does Bowie better than Gabriel does.
A lot of the time, Gabriel seems very self-conscious and a little gun shy. He knows that he has a lot to live up to with that debut and at the same time he’s serving masters of the old Genesis. I’m not sure how ready he was to eschew them completely or if he just let the avant-muse take hold.
The album doesn’t show any sign of life or verve until we’re into the second side and the jaunty “Animal Magic” plays. But you might not get there for the almost inert “Indigo”. And knowing that it’s nestled between that and the quasi-funk “Exposure” might mean that you’ll never get to hear it. And the record’s closer, “Home Sweet Home” is about as mid-70s Bowie as one can get. I’m surprised Bowie didn’t sue for personality infringement.
I’m not the biggest fan of this album. I know that it’s gotten high marks from others but I think it’s a step backwards, sideways and inside out from the previous record.
Grade C+
A Side: Animal Magic
BlindSide: A Wonderful Day in a One Way World, Perspective
DownSide: Mother of Violence
Peter Gabriel – Peter Gabriel (Melt) 1980
By the early 80s punk and New Wave had gone in two very distinct and divergent directions. One would prove to be a dead end for the movement and the other would open up an entire world of possibilities and financial remuneration.
The punkers would hang out in their clubs and listen to DJ Don Letts spin some of the most interesting Reggae. They, most notably the Clash, would incorporate this sound into their repertoire. How much Reggae are you listening to today?
The New Wavers, Adam Ant and Peter Gabriel among them would look also to black rhythms, but they would go further to the east. To Africa. The Burundi Beat for Adam and the southern tip of Africa for Gabriel.
It would result in one of the best songs of the era on one of the better albums of the same era.
Peter Gabriel’s 3rd record is mired in another form of 70s aesthetic: Paranoia. The productions confined, manipulated to the point where the oxygen is removed from the instruments and some of them are played backwards. The effects would prove to be of great influence on the hired drummer for the album, Phil Collins, and he would employ them to bigger success on his solo record.
The big songs on Melt are brilliant pieces of political attack: “Games Without Frontiers” and “Biko” are the ones you know. They are met with equal power by “Intruder”, a harrowingly effective piece of terror. And the equally horrifying, “No Self Control”.
Gabriel keeps the songs terse and tight. There’s no room to go on divergent journeys. The music is stripped to the core. It’s about the songs, the themes, the messages.
Grade: A
A Side: Games Without Frontiers, Biko
BlindSide: Intruder, No Self Control, And Through the Wire
Peter Gabriel – Peter Gabriel (Security) – 1982
The over-arching paranoia continues….
I could analyze each song as is my wont but I think I’ll just this record wash over me with all it’s sampling and electronica and see how I feel at the end.
See you in 45 minutes.
It seems that Gabriel as held on to the artistic aesthetic of his youth while at the same time broadening his world view and musical tapestry without employing the theatrics of his Genesis days or sacrificing his integrity.
Security is an album, more so than his others, should just wash over you. Hypnotic, especially at the beginning and more so as it continues. In order to get the full reward of what Gabriel’s doing here, you do need to pay attention. And there are places where it doesn’t really fulfill it’s ambitions. Like the snoozefest, “The Family and the Fishing Net” and the cloying “Lay Your hands on Me” (a concept owing much to Phil Collins and suffering greatly in comparison). And there are places where it does, like the massive hit “Shock the Monkey”. I’m very proud of my generation for embracing a song like this and making it a smash. It doesn’t pander, it is the next step from “Solsbury Hill”.
I think some of the lackluster reviews of this album might have to do with Gabriel fatigue. Because I am impressed and thoroughly enjoyed it. I can also see where the line from “Intruder” through this record to hits on “So” can be drawn. Watching a musical genius grow is awe-inspiring.
Grade: A-
A Side: The Rhythm of the Heat, I Have the Touch, Shock the Monkey
BlindSide: San Jacinto, Kiss of Life
DownSide: The Family & the Fishing Net. Lay Your Hands On Me
Peter Gabriel – So – 1986
What a big year it has been. Phil Collins put out his ubiquitous, diamond-selling No Jacket Required, Genesis goes singles crazy with Invisible Touch and Peter Gabriel outdoes them all with So.
I’m not talking in terms of units sold. All of that comes out in the wash. There’s plenty of duckets for everyone.
So is a rich and rewarding album in every way that those others are not. Instead of taking what he has learned about art, music, world music, soundscapes, songwriting, etc, and going for the easy middle road, Gabriel pushes his own envelope just a little. Just to the center of accessibility enough to convince you that he is radio-friendly.
Is he? In a way, sure. He one ups Collins by appropriating the Motown sound and using it crush the listener in a wail of desperation on both “Sledgehammer” and the anti-80s screed, “Big Time”.
He incorporates dreams in “Red Rain”. He’s emotional in his pleas on “Don’t Give Up”. And he writes the quintessential love song in “In Your Eyes”.
In other words, he proves why he’s who he is and why it was such a good thing for him to leave Genesis when he did. In the 80s, amidst all the pablum and MOR pandering, we needed to know that there was a way out, that it would all be fine.
So.
Gabriel led the way.
So is urgent in the way that the best of Gabriel’s work as been. I don’t think he’s sounded this confident since Melt and, that’s saying something considering how strong Security was. He hasn’t sung this way in years, or rather, he hasn’t written melodies this exciting in a while. These songs are indestructible classics in a way that nothing save “Solsbury Hill” is.
A track like In Your Eyes is indelibly connected to that Cameron Crowe movie, right? But, on it’s own, it makes you forget that movie, which is an achievement since the song exemplifies the movie in how it was used. It’s stronger than that. It’s perfect.
I’m a sucker for Anne Sexton’s poetry so I have a great appreciation for “Mercy Street” and it speaks to Gabriel’s literary understanding, his ability to translate higher themes and darker images to his music. He’s the anti-Collins. He’ll get you dancing, like in “Big Time” but he’s mocking the “go-go gotta get rich” yuppie aesthetic. You’d best do the same. (It’s actually my favorite track on the record) That big bass slap sound was achieved by the bassist doing the fingering and the percussionist hitting the strings with his sticks. It didn’t hurt to have Stewart Copeland handle the drums on the song, either.
“We Do What We’re Told (Milgram’s 37)” is one of the most harrowing songs Gabriel has committed. It’s Gary Numan with direction and empathy. The song is based on the Milgram Experiment of following orders in an effort to understand Nazis. You can read more about it here. I suggest you listen to the song while you do.
In the 80s it was no secret that I loved Laurie Anderson and I was so glad to hear, “Excellent Birds”, the collaboration between her and Gabriel. The two of them fit so well together.
This record is perfect.
And it is here that I say goodbye to Peter Gabriel as well. As I stated in the No Jacket Required review, what I want to see is how the various members of Genesis grew from that band. It’s fairly obvious that Gabriel had a muse to follow that, while he must have wanted to sell records, had larger ambitions. I feel like Peter was writing to his muse, not the fans. The audience is supposed to come with him on this journey, he’s not catering to them. If they follow him and his muse they will be rewarded. The same can not be said for the other members of the band that started his journey.
Grade: A+
A Side: Red Rain, Sledgehammer, Don’t Give Up, In Your Eyes, Big Time
BlindSide: That Voice Again, Mercy Street, Excellent Birds, We Do What We’re Told
