Bill Bruford, who is best known as the drummer of Yes in the early years and then of King Crimson (on which see my post here), comments on his involvement with Genesis once Phil Collins became lead singer in 1976 (after the departure of Gabriel, on which see my earlier post on Trick of the Tail). Bruford became Genesis’ drummer for the 1976 tour. Seeing that Bruford was, at one point, a member of all three of the most well-known progressive rock bands, it is interesting and somewhat humorous to hear his perspective.

First of all, he comments on how Genesis was viewed in the early days:

I think everybody in Yes and King Crimson thought that Genesis would never make it because they sounded like a combination of the two groups. We thought they might be too late — we’d been there and done it. We saw them along the lines of ‘Genesis are quite fun, but they’ve got a guitarist who sits down like Robert Fripp and a drummer who plays a bit like Bill; the Americans have already had that’. . . (p. 198)

Bruford also comments on the overall atmosphere of each of the three bands in connection with his own less orchestrated style:

I like to wing it a bit on stage, but Genesis were very, very precise. I’m much more accustomed to making it up as I’m going along. . . I’d learnt the tunes from the albums, and if it felt a little different from what Phil would have done, people would look at me and say, ‘Hey, Bill, could you make it sound a bit more like the record?’. . . [N]ot being much of the session type, I didn’t do terribly well at just delivering the parts. In fact, what finally drove me out of rock n’ roll was the repetition. That’s what had separated me from Yes. Why I had found King Crimson so attractive was because they were way more open: ‘Surprise us, go ahead, let’s improvise, terrific.’. . . (p. 198).

The mood in Genesis was such a contrast to the chaos of Yes, where nobody could agree what day of the week it was . . . How we in Yes ever got anything done, I still don’t know (p. 199).

Anyone who has heard an album like King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man knows what Bruford means by improvisation.

I have been a fan of Genesis for some years. Just now memories are coming back of earlier days, when I was 13 (1982-83), listening to Genesis on 103 PhD, coming out of Buffalo (for many years when someone referred to a “PhD”, I thought of that station, not some degree that an academic nut might get). That station had weekend “supersets” of three or more songs for each band played and I sat eagerly waiting to record the next set if a favourite came on (Yes, The Police, Pink Floyd, The Band, Foreigner, Led Zep, and others I still listen to were regulars on that station). Thank goodness my older brother, Stephen, had a half-decent stereo in our shared room (but he was beginning to get into Opera of all things!).

Still, in recent years my Genesis fixation had been primarily on the years when Peter Gabriel was lead-singer (the “true” Genesis as some say). There is a sense in which I too began to think of the Gabriel years as Eden and the post-Gabriel years as the Fall along with some others who preferred Gabriel (Gabriel wrote the majority of the lyrics during his time). Selling England by the Pound (1973) is perhaps my favourite among the Gabriel-Genesis albums, and still remains so.

But my views are changing somewhat now that I have been listening more often to later Genesis albums on vinyl (I’ve got just about all of them now, both good and not-so-good). In particular, the two albums immediately following Gabriel’s departure, which were both released in 1976, are consistently impressive and yet distinctive from one another. This is quite a feat considering that they were produced so closely together right after the departure of their lead singer. Both precede the shift from progressive rock to a more pop-based sound that emerged as the band went into the 1980s (the true “Fall”, if you want to put it that way). Memories of the progressive rock days begin to fade following Duke (1980).

Listen while you read: “Entangled” (audio snippet)

The first post Gabriel album, A Trick of the Tail (© 1976 Atlantic Recording Corporation; Atco SD 36-129), is cohesive and alive! The majority of the tracks are co-written by Rutherford, Banks and Hackett, but Collins is also included as co-composer of two pieces. The heavy, opening prelude that you listened to at the beginning of this post (“Dance on a volcano”) sets the stage for recurring themes that echo throughout the rest of the album and come to completion in the postlude (“Los endos”). The complicated time changes and dramatic movement (as well as some good, heavy drumming) in that opening track find echoes throughout the rest of the album in interesting variations.

Magically, the drummer, Phil Collins, who had no intentions of being the main vocalist, managed to take on the role of lead singer, seemingly without a glitch. At the same time there is not a high likelihood of confusing him with the unique vocal stylings of Gabriel (my wife gets them mixed up nonetheless). Collins may well hit the notes more accurately and cleanly, but Gabriel’s vocals had an unidentifiable mystery to them which few can capture. (For the interesting story about how Collins ended up in this role, see the Wikipedia article). Alongside the heavier tunes are rather calm and medieval sounding tracks, such as “Entangled”, which are reminscient of some more acoustic sounding songs on earlier albums. Overall, this blend of heavy and not-so-heavy provides an even balance for the album as a whole. The lyrics, too, keep things interesting as they return to the sort of fairy tale world of adventures with a medieval spin.

In many ways, the follow-up of the same year, Wind and Wuthering comes across as a darker, more moody, album in terms of both its sound and its lyrics. Still, it is also very impressive when it comes to the band’s overall performance and the intricacies of the music. Both of these albums are among the high-points of progressive rock, which was soon to fall out of vogue. Phil Collins ain’t so bad after all–if you can forgive him “Against all odds” and such (I kid: even “Against all odds” and “Sussudio” have a charm of sorts, at least for someone who grew up in the 1980s, such as myself).

Buy at Amazon

I was lucky enough to find one of Peter Gabriel‘s lesser known albums at the local record store in Waterloo (“Orange Monkey”). After leaving the then well-known Genesis to pursue his solo career in the mid 1970s, Gabriel went on to create a number of interesting and somewhat experimental albums. For full discography and other info, visit Peter Gabriel’s own official website www.petergabriel.com.

Gabriel’s experimentation went beyond many other contemporaries in that he decided to release his third album (known as “Melt” — none of Peter Gabriel’s first four albums had a title) simultaneously in both English and German, with the subtitle “ein deutsches album (a german album)” (© 1980 Charisma Records Ltd.). This was to be the first of two albums released in this way (the second is known as “Security” 1982).

The German version of Melt is especially interesting if you are familiar with the already excellent album in English. Suddenly things sound new and more intriguing again with the German lyrics. The famous “Games without frontiers” becomes “Spiel ohne Grenzen” and, appropriate to the song, “Du bist nicht wie wir” sounds a little more intimidating in German than “Not one of us”.

With this first German album, Gabriel stuck with the same basic musical tracks and made only modest adjustments here and there, so that the instrumentation sounds mostly identical to the English version. One change that was made is in the song in honour of the anti-apartheid activist Stephen Bantu Biko (who died in police custody in September 1977). Here Gabriel substituted a different African song as the lead-in. You can listen to a cleaned-up snippet of this tune here, which will also give you a taste for the German: “Biko” (audio snippet) There are other audio samples from the album on Peter Gabriel’s own site here.

In his next German album of 1982 (Security), however, he was to rework arrangements of the music more considerably. That one’s harder to find in vinyl and I’m anxious to get a hold of it soon. Don’t you dare buy a copy in the Toronto area!

Buy at Amazon