YouTube: rb.gy/lz66x1
1
I guess prog rock began with Emerson, Lake and Palmer.
Then again, that was the spring of '71 and King Crimson's debut had come out in the fall of '69. Then again, the first Nice album came out in '68.
In any event, the first prog song most people heard was...
"Roundabout" in the winter and spring of '72. Sure, "Lucky Man" had made inroads the previous spring, but it barely crossed over to Top 40, and it was in many ways a typical ballad, whereas Yes's breakthrough...
Not that Yes had not been mining for gold previous to this. The band's first LP was released in '69. But it wasn't until Steve Howe and then Rick Wakeman joined the band that the whole thing truly gelled.
And then the gate blew open in the U.S. We had Gentle Giant, we had Genesis, whose frontman, Peter Gabriel, left the band before it truly made it over here. The first Genesis song most people heard was "Solsbury Hill" in '77, even though that wasn't really Genesis at all. But the remaining members soldiered on, with Phil Collins as frontman, and released "Trick of the Tail." Actually, that came out in '76, as did its follow-up, "Wind and Wuthering," which is when I came on board. They were playing it over the store system in Licorice Pizza in West L.A. and...this was the one and only time I bought what a store was playing. And I liked it, but...
Not long thereafter, I found a version of "Trick of the Tail" in the cutout bin and...that I truly loved. It's playable, memorable from start to finish, but the opening cut on the second side, "Squonk," is, or at least was, an unheralded masterpiece.
Whereupon I ended up buying the entire catalog in the cutout bin except for "Selling England by the Pound," which I was dumb enough to believe was about weight. And, of course "The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway." I eventually bought those two, but that was after the next Genesis album, "Then There Were Three..." Sans Steve Hackett, the band finally had a hit, at least on the dominant FM band, "Follow You, Follow Me," and there were enough fans for the band to play the Forum...when I first became aware of them, when Peter Gabriel was still appearing as a flower on stage, they'd played the Roxy, I was just a couple of years and a couple of changes behind the memo.
And the run continued. Fans thought "Follow You, Follow Me," was an anomaly, but now "Misunderstanding," from 1980's "Duke" even had traction on Top 40!
And then came "Face Value."
You've got to know, no one was waiting for a Phil Collins solo album. Most people didn't even know his name! But I bought it when it came out because...I'm a completist, not that I expected much.
And all these years later, the opening cut on "Face Value," "In the Air Tonight," is iconic, for the drum sound and more. And I liked it back then, but it really was the second side that resonated, there was this song, "You Know What I Mean"...
"Just as I thought I'd make it
You walk back into my life, just like you never left"
I'd experienced a bad breakup.
But then there was the next song on the LP, "Thunder and Lightning."
"'Cause they said thunder and lightning
It would never strike twice
But if that's true, then why can't you tell me
How come this feels so nice"
Phil had come home from a Genesis tour to discover his wife wanted a divorce, and then he found Jill...
And that was not Phil's last rodeo.
But the optimism in "Thunder and Lightning"...really feels nice!
2
So last night I was reading a bad rock biography. How come the people are so interesting yet the writing is so bad? And I couldn't get into a new book, and I got a hankering to hear "Squonk."
So I went to Qobuz, I needed the best sound possible, and what I found was...a live version by Steve Hackett? From 2021 in Manchester.
And the stunning thing is it's the exact same guitar sound, it's astounding, I knew Steve had been playing the old material live, but I didn't know this package existed. And the vocal isn't quite as good as the guitar, but I was grooving...
And there was a delicious version of "Los Endos" and...
I got a hankering to hear the original, I went back to "A Trick of the Tail." For both these cuts. And from there, I went to "Face Value, the aforementioned numbers, and this led me to...
"Three Sides Live."
After "Duke," the remaining three members of Genesis decided to switch it up, they hired Hugh Padgham, hot off his work with Sting and the Police, and minimized and modernized the sound and...the end result was exactly right for the time. Disco had put a dent in classic rock, AOR was threatened by the English new wave and...
This was the beginning of Genesis's run to the top, to being MTV darlings, to the overexposure of Phil Collins, to the hatred of everybody involved. But before that...
3
I don't know why I delayed buying "Three Sides Live," maybe because it hadn't been that long since the previous live album, "Seconds Out." But they played the live version of "Abacab" on the radio and...
There was a way it ended. All energy, bursting to an explosion, it stopped instantly.
And Freddy Moore had the cassette, whenever I went to his and Demi's apartment I played it. Freddy had interesting taste, yes he was a new waver, but he also loved Olivia Newton-John's "Physical" and the Pointer Sisters' "He's So Shy," he played them every time we went up the street for burritos at Los Tacos, which we did multiple times a week.
And in the early nineties Joe Reichling was working for Atlantic and sent me the entire Genesis catalog on CD (Bad Company too!), back when CDs were gold, before they were eclipsed by files and then streams.
"Three Sides Live" is a great album, as long as you don't think Genesis cratered after the exit of Peter Gabriel, as long as you can fathom less of a prog rock sound. You see there's the aforementioned energy.
It's like someone adjusted the speed on the turntable, made it just a bit faster, and the band had something to prove. This wasn't just another gig on an endless tour, the band needed you to MARVEL! The music was no longer so cerebral, it had a kick, it had IMPACT!
And the album and a half starts with an Abacabed version of "Duke"'s second side opener "Turn It On Again." The original studio version is more anthemic, with a pulsing computerized beat. Phil's vocals are pure. The sound is a freight train...in a vacuum, in a studio, but on stage, the entire song is humanized and that freight train...you'd better get out of the way or you're going to get run over!
I know, I know, you're WINCING! Genesis? Prog rock? "Abacab"? Hasn't that been wiped from the face of the earth?
Well, Nirvana killed hair bands, but also the rock of the seventies. And everybody who writes about music for a living believes if it's not stripped down punk, it can't be good. Back then if it was commercially successful, you had to hate it, on principle. It was dreck. None of these people considered that if everybody listened to it maybe it could be good, and you could love both the AOR bands and the bands with no airplay whatsoever, like Wire.
There's still a prog scene. But it's a backwater.
The calling card of the original wave of prog was that the players could actually...PLAY! They might have been classically trained. But then that became anathema.
And in the twenty first century everything flipped, we got what has been labeled "poptimism." All the stuff that the shoegazing critics and the AOR fans despised...was suddenly considered good! To the point today it's solely about Top 40 hits, that's all the major labels are interested in. Which is one reason the acolytes of yesteryear are dumbfounded by the Spotify Top 50. You're listening to THIS?
But can I admit to listening to GENESIS??
4
The live version of "Abacab" starts off with a beat, but not from a machine, but a human. The credits don't say whether it's Chester Thompson or Collins or, maybe like oftentimes in instrumental periods during the show, BOTH!
And the beat is driving, there's a sense of anticipation, there's a bit of Daryl Stuermer's guitar...and wasn't that the essence of prog, tasteful playing? But then just shy of a minute in, the star of the show appears, TONY BANKS!
Who unlike his still standing compatriots, Collins and Rutherford, never had any solo success, so he's relatively unheralded, but he starts layering in keyboards, that crunchy synth sound of the eighties and a smooth organish sound. And then Stuermer and Banks go into call and response, and this alternating sound, edgy guitar and smoother keyboard, underlies the whole cut, at least while Phil Collins is still singing.
And one of the reasons people love metal is because it FEELS SO GOOD! And that's the guitar in this recording. It's like Daryl's taking a buzzsaw to the world, to preconceptions. And there's that synth along for the ride. And everything is in harmony, rolling down the track, just a bit faster than the average engineer would be comfortable with. And the astounding thing is the band KNOWS THIS! They know they're pushing it, without a net, that mistakes are possible, but they've thrown the control of the studio overboard.
And then four minutes into the number there's a transition, from the traditional song structure anchored by Collins's vocals to the prog of yore, instrumentalists working out. But that beat is driving. Stuermer and Banks...they're out front, they're the focus, everybody else is in support. And the riffs, they're being repeated, they're so MEMORABLE! But Banks is weaving in textures and... Stuermer is not slowing down. They're answering each other more and more quickly.
And with just over two minutes left, Banks emits a smoother sound, and he and Stuermer are interplaying like two aliens in love. The track has left the planet, where so much of the great music resides.
And then, with just under a minute left, there's a change that's not in the original studio recording. They're going down, down, down. This upbeat song is now a bit depressing, a bit dark.
And that lasts for about half a minute and then the entire band returns to the traditional riff, but only briefly, because in just a matter of seconds, the conductor of this enterprise drops his baton and the entire production stops INSTANTLY, ON A DIME, IN A WAY NO FREIGHT TRULY CAN!
And then all you can do is go back to the top and play it again.
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