Taking Sides: Genesis 1970-1977 Vs. Genesis 1978-91

The first episode of "The Dress Up Gang" ("Burger Buddies" episode) is relevant to this thread, I swear: https://www.tbs.com/shows/the-dress-up-gang/season-1/episode-1/burger-buddies-new-look-day-explicit

just got Selling England on good quality vinyl for cheap, lord this is great stuff. been years since I heard this masterpiece.

already noticing how much of Hackett's great work I've already forgotten.

guess I have to listen to "More Fool Me" though :/

The playing on that album, but particularly from Phil and Steve, is incredible. First track alone ...

yeah I'm at the tail end right now and it's gorgeous. and I played this shit over and over when I first heard it, but there is so much I've forgotten. it's been at least 15 years, I'm so excited for when I get to "Firth of Fifth" now.

Firth Of Fifth is so sublime (tho the lyrics are dreadful)

Gabriel is such a fucking fruit loop -

https://youtu.be/5DinP93nW8Q?t=1157

So there I am, listening to "Invisible Touch," and for the first time I hear perceptible glimmers of old Genesis. Not on the couple of proggy songs, but in "In Too Deep," of all things. I thought, hmm, replace the digital synths with something more analog, even Mellotron, and replace the production with something more analog as well, slow things down, up the Romance a bit, and it could be on, say, "Wind & Wuthering."

So basically take out everything that makes it a crappy '80s Genesis pop song and replace it with stuff that makes it a great '70s Genesis prog song? Seems to me you could do that with any number of Genesis songs.

Nah, just that those kinds of cloying melodies are definitely present in ballads like "Ripples" and "Your Own Special Way."

Fascinating interview with Chester Thompson:

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/drummer-chester-thompson-interview-genesis-phil-collins-frank-zappa-weather-report-1122064/

Good interview! I guess his son is a Nashville session guy? Guitarist? I'd actually heard from a friend of mine with Nashville session connections that Chester had tried to break into that scene, but with very limited success.

Curiously, Chester Thompson and Vinnie Colaiuta are both Zappa drummer alumni turned born again Christians.

I'm digging deeper into the Collins-era Genesis, and it's turning into a not-fun-at-all reminder of why I used to hate Phil Collins. A Trick of the Tail is a solid album, very nearly as good as the three preceding albums with Gabriel, and even the follow-up is mostly good, but "Your Own Special Way" feels like the point where things start drifting in a bad direction, and that goes double for "Follow You Follow Me" on the next album. I guess trying their hand at soul and Motown-inspired pop made them enormous sellers, but compared to other British rockers who did the same (Bowie, Paul Weller, etc.) Collins's singing is pretty dull and anemic, and the phrasing is especially disappointing coming from a fantastic drummer - considering how rhythmically inventive the great soul singers could be, the hits sound all the more bland in comparison.

idk if you're talking about Collins' singing on the mid-70s run or on the pop/soul stuff but imho his vocals on ATotT, W&W and ATTWT are unfuckwithable. He was a much better prog rock singer than Gabriel, whose strangled bark of a voice I never warmed to.

just going on my memories of the documentaries that came with the CD reissues a few years back, I dn't think Phil actually wrote the early Phil-era ballads? I think Mike wrote Follow You, and Tony definitely wrote Afterglow

yeah Phil didn't get any sole writing credits until Duke. He has a few co-writing credits on the mid-70s run, those are all for music rather than lyrics I think.

He definitely contributed some lyrics - Scenes From A Night's Dream, the chorus of Blood On The Rooftops... other co-credits I think he contributed words to could be For Absent Friends, More Fool Me and Ballad Of Big.

Oh yeah, Match Of The Day and Robbery, Assualt & Battery too

It was always received wisdom among prog-era fans that Phil 'ruined' Genesis by moving them in a pop direction. But Banks was always the main writer, and it was almost certainly a collective decision to shift away from the Foxtrot style. What were they going to do, write 10-minute epics in the 1980s? They'd have gone the way of ELP and Gentle Giant. Have to agree about the anaemic style of Collins' singing though, one listen to anything he did in the 80s (either solo or Genesis) brings on a minor anxiety attack for me.

A lot of the ballads were indeed the other guys. Rutherford wrote "Your Own Special Way" and the bulk of "Follow You, Follow Me." They pretty soon start crediting all songwriting to the band as collective, but I think Rutherford wrote stuff like "Throwing It All Away," too, for example (both lyrics and lick). Collins gets too much credit for the band's shifting sound, as Banks (as he is quick to point out) and Rutherford were prime movers. Collins' biggest stylistic contribution iirc was suggesting the horns on "Abacab" (the album). Also, fwiw, "We Can't Dance" (the album) did actually mark a return to 10-minute songs!

There was a snippy Genesis interview with DeRogatis back-when that he quotes in one of his books. I know I've posted it before, but here it is again:

Did they ever wish they could lock themselves in their studio, get really stoned and cut loose to make another album as bizarrely brilliant as "The Lamb," I asked? Maybe under another name, so there were none of the expectations that came with being "pop hitmakers Genesis"?

"I suppose if one was doing that, one would probably try to be more off the wall," Banks said, transformed for a moment into the teenage musician jamming in that cottage. "I think the sheer reason for doing it would surely be to try to do a few things that might be disastrous."

"At the same time," Collins petulantly added, "it might be nice to do something like we've just done and call it a different name and see how it's received. By saying that, you're playing into -- what's your name? -- Jim's hands, because you're admitting that, because we're going in and calling it a different band, we actually have confines within Genesis that we want to stick to."

"Well, that's a fair enough comment to make," Banks said, scowling at his partner. "Because there's probably some truth in it."

outside of ATTWT and the self-titled, all their albums kinda had at least one long epic on it, right?

Banks said, scowling at his partner

To be fair, he barely uses any other facial expressions. Nice passive-aggressive move by Collins in pretending to forget the interviewer's name though, letting him know his place in the hierarchy of fame.

funny how when you get older you begin sympathize more with a band's mid-career moves, like now I think Duke is pretty much as good as any of the Gabriel albums

xpost Yeah, sort of. Lots of Part 1 and Part 2 (Abacab, Home by the Sea) to make it easy to cut down. Even "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight" tops 8-minutes, so it was cut down for a single, too (in a way similar to "Shout" by Tears for Fears, which is around 7-minutes on the album with all its frills but less than 4-minutes as a single). "Invisible Touch" does have "Domino," which tops 10-minutes, which is funny, because "The Brazilian" feels like the real epic, even at a mere 5-minutes.

I'm the same with Yes's Drama

xpost

yeah there's a real interesting era where prog, art rock, and New Wave sort of collided but I think we only kinda got glimpses of what could've been

prog, art rock, and New Wave sort of collided

With the Police at its fulcrum.

I think I'm the opposite. I feel less obliged to make the effort with those when they don't grab me (which is the case for almost anything led by Collins). I mean, I sympathize more in that I have more understanding of why artists make those kinds of choices and find them less baffling but I think that also means they don't seem like elusive expressions of the brilliance that I'm failing to understand. Like, good for you, you kept up to date and made music that people wanted to buy in the 80s.xxpost

I'll be honest, if Phil Collins was not playing drums I doubt I would listen to a lot of the stuff, because his drums always sound super-cool and if they didn't there would be a lot less going for the music.

I guess I have more understanding because the amount of time that's passed from when I first got into Genesis (through SEBTP) and now is roughly the same amount of time they spent from Trespass to Invisible Touch, so I kind of understand the whole "why they don't make records like they used to thing" because I too have gone through enough changes where recreating something I might've done when I was 21 seems impossible. In order words I don't look at something like "Dancing With the Moonlit Knight" or "Supper's Ready" and think "this is exactly what Genesis needs to be and when they got away from it they started to suck". Granted I still think the PG albums are better but it's a lot closer than I would've said a decade or so ago

Burning Rope was set the be the 'epic' song of ATTW3 but they cut several minutes off it in the end. A shame they are super reluctant to release super deluxes containing early versions, etc.

For all they are, as many would claim, a seemingly unrecognisable band by the 80s, there's always these moments that reveal that the earlier DNA is still present, for example, No Reply At All, which is considered very 'Phil' with the EWF horns etc., but it also has a bridge section that you could easily imagine 70s Gabriel singing

I guess I have more understanding because the amount of time that's passed from when I first got into Genesis (through SEBTP) and now is roughly the same amount of time they spent from Trespass to Invisible Touch, so I kind of understand the whole "why they don't make records like they used to thing" because I too have gone through enough changes where recreating something I might've done when I was 21 seems impossible.

Yeah, 100%. But, conversely, so much has changed that someone who liked something I did at 21 (I'm sure they exist) has no real reason to need to gaf about what I'm doing at 41.

idk if you're talking about Collins' singing on the mid-70s run or on the pop/soul stuff but imho his vocals on ATotT, W&W and ATTWT are unfuckwithable. He was a much better prog rock singer than Gabriel, whose strangled bark of a voice I never warmed to.

I like his singing on those albums. Granted those two ballads I mentioned may be a harbinger of things to come, but even there the crooning is very understated. And I actually like Gabriel's singing, he became a much better vocalist by the time they got to Foxtrot and he got even better over the course of those final records. Collins's first album as the sole vocalist is all the more impressive for how seamless he makes that transition - his voice and phrasing is similar enough that one could mistake him for Gabriel if they weren't paying close attention.

Even without looking at the credits (or the interviews at the time), it's hard to believe the other two were opposed to their new direction. And to be fair, they didn't go all in right away, Duke and Abacab sound like they're trying to put all those disparate pieces together, sometimes in the same song. ("Turn It on Again" was the lead single to Duke, and while a lot of it sounds a lot more conventional, they still based it around an unusual time signature.)

I know a guy who graduated with a music degree who could go on for hours about how weird and unique "Turn it on Again" was for a hit single

Well, the time signature for sure. Other than that, it's pretty straight-forward, imo.

It's pretty strange, multiple unusual time signatures and the main hook only comes in at the end.

the way the melody runs a tiny bit ahead of Collins' vocals is also pretty odd

The feeling of that song is hard to pin down, but it's amazing. Especially in the live Duke Suite.

With the Police at its fulcrum

Re: Duke, the long intro to "Duchess" (over 2 minutes, it's almost a track in itself) is beautiful. It gets overcooked and bombastic after that, but before that happens, it's like a great lost Eno track.

I can see the Police landing somewhere in that confluence - if you need a big selling-act, they'll do very well, but maybe not as much as Peter Gabriel's solo material.

Andy and Copeland have prog roots, and especially the last couple of albums have all sorts of progressive digressions, imo.

Came across this intriguing photo recently.

Bob Marley enjoying Armando Gallo's Genesis book. pic.twitter.com/mybrVWYTHj

— World of Genesis (@WorldofGenesis) April 1, 2015

(Hard to know if Marley was actually a Genesis fan. I'm guessing Armando Gallo may have showed him the book while interviewing him.)

Andy and Copeland have prog roots, and especially the last couple of albums have all sorts of progressive digressions, imo.

even something like "Reggatta de Blanc" or "The Other Way of Stopping"...you wouldn't hear say, The Clash doing anything like that

think Gary Numan fits somewhat into this conversation as well

Re: Duke, the long intro to "Duchess" (over 2 minutes, it's almost a track in itself) is beautiful. It gets overcooked and bombastic after that, but before that happens, it's like a great lost Eno track.

I am forever in search of music that sounds like the first two minutes of Duchess

The first minute or so of Carl Craig's "Televised Green Smoke" comes to mind

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twqwXOxZvnc

Payola's Eyes of a Stranger?

I'd count early-1980s Rush stuff like 'Tom Sawyer' in that art rock, prog, and new wave collision too.

xp Also CFCF's The Colours of Life might work for you, given that it was heavily influenced by PC's Hand In Hand