Reprinted without permission from an unknown source. I actually got this review from an old photocopy I made about six years ago. If you know the name of the book that this review came from, let me know!

GENESIS REVIEW

Peter Gabriel (vocals) Tony Banks (keyboards) Steve Hackett (guitar) Michael Rutherford (bass, guitar) Phll Collins (drums, vocals)

In the beginning, Genesis merely wanted to be pop songwriters, selling their ditties to other recording artists who would turn them into hits. The group's core - Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, Michael Rutherford, and Anthony Phillips--met as students in 1966. In short order, they were penning songs, though only pianist Banks had any real musical proficiency. Nonetheless, their demo tapes impressed pop wunderkind Jonathan King, who christened them Genesis and gave them their studio baptism. After a few flop singles they recorded their first album From Genesis to Revelation in 1968, while on a school break. It was a best-forgotten affair, saddled with a cumbersome concept ("man's evolution") and sunk by King's heavy-handed production.

Somewhat chastened, they retreated to the proverbial country cottage to ponder their future. The next summer Genesis emerged with an endearingly eccentric, though at times downright macabre, sound and vision. Their oddball world view found its way onto their next four albums--Trespass, Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot and Selling England by the Pound. Against a lush, near-orchestral backdrop, Gabriel would weave fanciful narratives. And what stories he'd tell! Giant hogweeds overrunning the earth . . . an eavesdropping lawnmower relating old folks' teatime gossip . . . the bizarre, Dorion Gray-like tale of murder, reincarnation, and desire of "The Musical Box." A scene from the latter, one of Genesis's signature tunes, adorns the cover of Nursery Cryme: on a surrealistic croquet green, a cherubic young girl is preparing to knock the disembodied head of a young man through a wicket with her mallet. No wonder one perplexed writer called them "a most peculiar band."

Nursery Cryme, their third LP, found Genesis in a lineup that would not change (except by attrition): Gabriel, Rutherford, Banks and newcomers Steve Hackett (guitar) and Phil Collins (drums). Around this time, thc group began to animate its songs in concert. Peter Gabriel would don a different theatrical guise for every song--he'd appear as a giant sunflower in "Willow Farm," a glowing-eyed extraterrestrial in "Watcher of the Skies," an anguished old lecher in "Musical Box." (And to think that not much earlier he'd been so stage shy he wanted the whole group to perform behind a black curtain.) Gabriel's stagecraft bccame the focal point of their live shows; the other members positioned themselves inconspicuously in a semicicle near the rear of the stage. Hackett and Rutherford actually sat on folding chairs, so intent were they on the proper concentration. Despite the gasping superlatives of scribes and fans, Gabriel was self-effacing about it all: "Ijust poodle about and put on silly costumes."

In 1974, Genesis unveiled a two-record masterwork, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Instead of the usual epic-length compositions, there were twenty-three titles, and the playing was considerably looser (for them). If the music had grown more accessible, Gabriel's lyrics were harder to crack than ever. The Lamb told a story--albeit elliptically--about Rael, a New York street punk, and his quest for spiritual self-discovery. As usual, Gabriel was unruffled by the general bafflement with which the work was greeted. How much one got out of it, he opined, depended on how much one put into it.

Coincident with the album's international release, Genesis embarked on a grueling six-month tour. The stage adaptation of The Lamb was a multimedia leviathan: supplementing the de rigeur costume changes and mime was the surreal accompaniment of 2000 slides and a host of special effects.

At tour's end, Gabriel dropped a bombshell: he was leaving the band. The British music press ran banner headlines and mourned the split. Critics predicted the imminent demise of Genesis, figuring Gabriel was Genesis. Four hundred singers were auditioned before Genesis decided not to replace their ex-leader; vocal chores fell to Collins. Gabriel went into seclusion. Gencsis went into the studio.

A Trick of the Tail (1976) came as a complete surprise to everyone. Phil Collins's voice bore an uncanny similarity to Gabriel's, and the songs were rich, vivid miniatures (though they lacked thc madcap dementia that was Gabriel's special contribution). Wind and Wuthering (1977) offered more of the same. Technical perfectionism had by now become an end in itself, and Genesis's musical collages were so seamless one could scarcely separate Steve Hackett's guitar lines from Tony Banks' synthesizer. Genesis sans Gabriel was regarded as awesomely accomplished by some, coldly sterile by others.

Having lost their visual focus, they compensated with a spectacular light show and a sea of dry-ice fog. Phil Collins strode out from behind his drum kit to sing front and center, and the band would use a temporary fifth member as drummer while on tour. (Collins, incidentally, led an offshoot project in his spare time, the jazz-rock band Brand X.) When Steve Hackett departed following the live album, Seconds Out, the band continued as a three-piece (their next album was wryly titled ... and Then There Were Three). The onus was now squarely on Tony Banks's keyboards, and Genesis suddenly seemed much less fun, a somcwhat murky stew (though their 1980 album Duke was admittedly more spirited, a pleasant rebound). All three have also cut solo albums; among them, Phil Collins' Face Value was an unexpectedly snappy set, featuring horns by Earth, Wind and Fire. It became a big radio favorite in 1981, and Genesis's Abacab, which appeared later in the year, benefited further from Collins's more extroverted, upbeat input.

Gabriel, on the other hand, emerged from two years of hiding in 1977 with a vision that'd grown even more black-humored. Over the course of three solo albums --each of them titled Peter Gabriel--he described a desolate world, populated with dislocated individuals and flirting with apocalypse. With generous assistance from pals like Robert Fripp and synthesizer whiz Larry Fast, he fashioned a music that was stark and scarifying - like the world he saw around him. Without doubt, this oddball visionary has proved himself one of pop music's most fertile minds and inconigible enigmas.

(PARKE PUTERBAUOH)

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