We’ve all had this experience at some point, I’m sure. You meet somebody, and sure enough, on first glance, you can see absolutely nothing extraordinary or special about that person. In fact, the only traits that stand out at first are flaws – a slight weight problem, an episode with acne, geeky glasses, whatever. But then, almost by accident, you begin to pick up on little positives – a nice smile, a good sense of humor, a general good demeanor towards life, etc. You still see the negatives, but even then, you begin to realize that they are integral in the shaping of the person, and perhaps, even to a certain (even large) extent, are an actual positive in the full context of that person (not to mention that, since we all have flaws ourselves, the flaws in others help us to see the other as that much more human, which in turn makes the positives that much more appealing). And then the next thing you know, before you realize it, that gangly, ugly person becomes the love of your life (or, at least, of the next couple of months).
For me, no musical group has come closer to that description than Genesis. Upon first listen to the group, my impressions were as follows – a somewhat hoarse, okayish singer; some decent, but not very impressive ‘generic prog’ guitar solos; use of mellotrons and synthesizers in a mostly, again, ‘generic prog’ vein. But that, my friends, is why one must NEVER EVER EVER judge a group or an album or a song after one listen. Because that album, my first Genesis album, Selling England by the Pound, is now my favorite progressive rock album, hands down. And not only that, but Genesis is a very, very close second to Yes as my favorite progressive rock group overall, and even then I have my doubts (not to mention that Genesis’ pop peak was also higher than Yes’ pop peak).
Now don’t get me wrong – Genesis’ flaws are fairly obvious, and not the easiest thing to ignore. Essentially, Genesis’ biggest problem in its art-rock days was that, quite frankly, they kept shooting themselves in the foot again and again as far as reaching a mass audience goes. What do I mean? Well, simply that progressive rock is, in general, a very tough nut to crack as far as enjoyability goes, and if there’s not much there to ‘keep one’s mind entertained’ while it’s trying to wade through the musical essence, one can be bored very easily (the sad truth is that, with pretty much every Genesis album except for Lamb, my initial listen produced a reaction of disappointment and “huh, well, I guess this will be where I stop being part of the Genesis bandwagon.” Even today, when I love Genesis and like or love listening to most of their albums, there are more than a few times when I find myself wondering, “Man, why on earth do I like this goofy music so much?”). In other words, even if you’re feeling a bit perplexed about the lengthy song structures of, say, Fragile, you can still focus on the bitchin’ bass lines or the menacing piano solo in the middle of South Side of the Sky. Genesis didn’t really do that, though, as they attempted to let the music mostly speak for itself without engaging in too many hyper-wanky guitar solos (and even the solos are incredibly well-thought out but, again, not very impressive on first listen).
And OH did the music speak for itself. Their song structures were incredibly complex, but most importantly, they were song-structures, and not just a setup for extended jamming. They wrote their songs (as opposed to just jamming them out – not that they didn’t use jams as a way to come up with ideas, but the final product almost always had the “dross” sorted out), and almost always made sure to efficiently pack in as much as they could into every second without overwhelming or losing the listener. And in that respect, nobody, NOBODY could beat Genesis in their hey-day – not even Yes, as much as I adore them.
But wait! It got better! Not only did Genesis have some of the most perfect progressive compositions imaginable, they also had an edge over every other ‘pretentious’ group in existence – the most fascinating, most entertaining and most entrancing (at least, much of the time) lyrics this side of … umm … EVERYBODY!!! And more importantly, they had Peter Gabriel to sing them (and in a large number of cases, to write them, which was good since virtually all of the best lyrics came from Peter in the first place). I will say this – Peter does not sound like anybody I’ve ever heard, and if you can’t adjust to him, you might not like it. He doesn’t have the voice of a choirboy, like Justin Hayward or Greg Lake. He doesn’t sound like an ethereal being from another dimension, like Jon Anderson. He doesn’t sound like Frank Sinatra, like Jim Morrision or, … er… Frank Sinatra. But non-standard in no way means bad, not in this case – after all, Peter has probably become my favorite vocalist of all. His voice is so unbelievably rich that it continues to take me aback to this day. I have never, ever heard a singer so unbelievably full of expression and emotion – for lack of a better term, he sucks the listener in in a big, big way, causing even the strangest lyrics to completely come to life, and to make the listener a part of that song’s world and to feel for all involved. I could go on for hours about Peter’s strengths (especially his ability to evoke strong religious overtones without becoming a boring, preachy ‘Christian rocker’), but I won’t, as there are other members of the band, after all.
Next in line of people in the band I absolutely adore is Steve Hackett. Steve didn’t really have a lot of chances to shine in the group, and I wouldn’t exactly say his overall contributions to the band could be considered “immediately satisfying,” if you get me. He was a minimalist, and the combination of this and being in a band centered around keyboards was kind of fatal as far as giving Steve the “starring role” goes. Plus, it took him a little while to assert himself fully as a crucial creative force in the band, and there are a lot of stretches where he’s not exactly prominent. Still, he was a marvelous support guitarist whenever he was asked to play that role, providing solid texture and all manner of side effects, and pretty much whenever he was given the chance to shine he made the most of it. I continue to think that most of the most impressive band-defining and emotionally devestating moments of the band come when Steve is featured (The Musical Box, Dancing with the Moonlit Knight, Firth of Fifth and ESPECIALLY the parts at the end of Supper’s Ready all come to mind). Alas, though, he left in ’77, when he’d largely outgrown the role the band had carved out for him over the years.
Ok, next in line is the most controversial among most people (including myself, to an extent) – Phil Collins. Like most people, I cannot stand the ‘solo-Collins’ style – when working in the backroom of Meijer in 2000 and 2001, I would hear at least two or three Phil Collins songs a shift, and if I ever hear “You’ll be heeeeeeeeeeeeeeeere in my heeeaaaaaarrrrrrt” again, I just might go postal. Nor am I a big fan of his vocals, at least not at first; while the band could have made a worse choice for Peter’s replacement in ’75, as Phil does sound similar to Gabriel when both are belting in full force, his ability to change expression mid-song was virtually non-existent (especially when compared to, again, Gabriel), and he’s just not able to master the subtle nuances that made Peter so great. That being said; I do think that Phil was a good singer for a large number of Genesis’ ‘poppy’ songs (he sounded quite nice once he started singing more aggressively in the 80’s); I don’t totally blame him for ‘ruining’ Genesis by turning it into a pop band (though I do blame him a bit for making Genesis indistinguishable from his solo work there at the end); as a backing vocalist to Peter, he couldn’t be beaten; and most of all, HIS DRUMMING WAS FRIGGIN’ AWESOME. Seriously, if you, the reader, have never heard any pre-drum machine Genesis, you need to pick some up just for the shock value of discovering what an unbelievably talented musician Phil Collins was (and probably is) behind a drum kit. But even as far as drum machines go, Phil was, like it or not, one of the pioneers of its use and one of its more intelligent implementers – along with a couple of solo Gabriel tunes (especially Family and the Fishing Net), the drum programming on Mama is some of the most brilliant I’ve ever heard.
Ok, moving on, we have bassist/acoustic-and-occasional-electric-guitarist Mike Rutherford. He’s contributed his good share of great tunes to the Genesis canon, and while he’s certainly no virtuoso, he gets the job done, and occasionally contributes some very interesting lines. His greatest strength, actually, was his versatility – the band really didn’t miss a step when Steve left thanks to Mike’s guitar skills (though they’re much more generic than Steve’s). That being said – if you really want to blame somebody for Genesis becoming a largely generic pop band, Mike should not be totally absolved. After all, who did you think the Mike in Mike and the Mechanics was?
Finally, there’s keyboardist Tony Banks. In a lot of ways, Genesis was Tony’s band more than anybody else’s. His keyboards were the center of the band’s sound, he contributed a lot to the overall songwriting, and he set the band’s direction through much of its life. Unfortunately, while he certainly deserves credit for a LOT of the things that make me like Genesis, he also ends up as the source of a lot of the things that still annoy me about the band. The first is that, while he wrote some texts through the years that I find quite nice, I tend to find Tony to be a pretty horrendous lyricist. As a lyricist, he comes across as somebody who tries hard to be a thought-provoking universalist, but more often than not he ends up sounding like a bad Pete Sinfield imitation, only a LOT preachier. Now, when Gabriel was still around, Banks’ lyrics were an amusing diversion, designed to give just a bit of a ‘serious’ streak to the band; when Gabriel left, though, the somewhat generic, preachy “progressive” lyrical style became the band’s default mode, and that doesn’t thrill me.
But of course, Tony’s main contributions to the band came from his playing, and this is where things get tricky. It would be a major overstatement to say that I hate Tony Banks’ keyboard playing, of course, because if I hated it, Genesis fandom would be difficult to justify, no matter how much of a fan of Gabriel and Hackett I might be. There are certainly lots of Banks keyboard passages that are absolutely breathtaking, both in how well-played they are and in how well-written they are. Great moments aside, though, I have some issues with the overall approach that’s taken. My first issue with Tony’s keys (henceforth referred to as Banksynths (tm George Starostin, 1998), even though they weren’t always synths) has to do with the “choppiness” (for lack of a better term) of a lot of his parts. While there are certainly many instances where Tony plays in a stereotypical prog manner (a la Wakeman or Emerson), and where he shows himself very capable along those lines, there are a lot of moments where he just seems to hit the chords in sequence X-Y-Z without putting in any “ornamentation” between X, Y and Z. I do concede this might be a major positive for somebody who hates typical wankathon prog keyboarding; personally, though, I like ELP and Keith Emerson’s style a lot, because even when he’s clearly just fancying up the parts for their own sake, he does it with so much hyperactive energy that it ends up enjoyable more often than not. With Tony, this style, one that very often has him seemingly putting an accent on every note and avoiding legato like it’s the plague, tends to work for me when his keys latch onto an interesting riff or chord sequence, and tends to make me fidget otherwise. For all that I love about The Fountain of Salmacis, not the least of which is Tony’s playing in most of the track, when I hear the mid-song keyboard passage, I still hear a baseball organ trying to make me yell “CHARGE!!!” and that does not make me happy.
Complaint number two regards his choice of tones. Far, far too often my enjoyment of a Genesis song is marred simply by his choice of instrument and sound for a specific part, and that’s something I don’t think I’ll ever change my mind about. Example: don’t you ever wish Banks would be using a grand piano in Guaranteed Eternal Sanctuary Man instead of that wimpy little casio-sounding thing (I mean, I got used to that tone eventually, but it seriously bothered me for a lot of listens)? I swear, sometimes it was like Genesis, in the early albums, was shooting for having the worst produced Hammond organ sound in the world (which, to be fair, was just as much the producer’s fault as it was Tony’s). Plus, well, I don’t really like a lot of the tones used in the first three albums after Gabriel left; I actually end up preferring his 80’s sound to those sounds by quite a bit, at least until Invisible Touch. Yes, there are a lot of times when Tony’s keyboards totally make a song, but there are also many where I either enjoy a song largely despite his keys (focusing instead on the band’s other great aspects) or even find that he mostly spoils the song.
Still, having a “supporting” keyboard approach, even if it doesn’t always have the best sounds associated with it, isn’t the worst crime in the world. There are plenty of instances of great prog keyboardists who didn’t constantly wank all over the place like Wakeman or Emerson could: two that immediately come to mind are John Evans and Kerry Minnear. Genesis, though, was centered around Banks’ keyboards, which meant the person whose general style had the most aspects that annoyed me was at the very front of the instrumental mix. The man who suffered the most from this, of course was Hackett; he did have some moments where he could shine on his own, with Tony taking a step back as needed, but the only album with a significant concentration of these moments was England (it’s no coincidence that that’s my favorite Genesis album, and one of my all-time favorites). In particular, there are several instances where an interesting Hackett part ends up obscured by a much less interesting Banks part that’s playing along with it, presumably in the name of keeping a “balance” to the sound (a balance that, of course, gets largely ignored much of the rest of the time when Banks is dominating the sound). The most egregious example of this comes in Ripples, where Steve’s amazingly beautiful solo (underpinned by a great Banks piano line, no less) is constantly interfered with by an uninteresting synth part that should have been buried in the mix for texture, nothing more; there are other examples too.
Playing aside, of course, there’s also the fact that I feel Tony bears a significant responsibility for Genesis’ disintegration over time. It was Tony, after all, that helped make Steve feel pretty marginalized in the end, and he certainly contributed to the conditions that led to Steve wanting to take off. It was as much Tony as anybody that helped push the band in a synth-pop direction in the 80’s; this worked out fine for a while, of course, but it opened the door for Collins to start to bring in significant elements of his own solo style, and we know how that ended up. And, of course, it was Tony who wouldn’t just let the band die in the late 90’s, leading to the infamous Calling All Stations, an album so horrendous that even the most perfect career should be punished for it.
But still, it was a great, great career overall. I love this band to death despite all of its many, many weaknesses, and happily give it a 4. This was never the most consistent of bands (actually, one of the things that strikes me most about Genesis is that, in some way or another, every one of their albums represents some integral feature of the band in transition, whether it be the rise and fall of Steve’s prominence, or the transition to being a pop band, or one of many other examples) but when they did well, they produced music so stunning that it continues to boggle the mind to this very day.