Phil Collins

“I think Invisible Touch was the group's undisputed masterpiece. It's an epic meditation on intangibility. At the same time, it deepens and enriches the meaning of the preceding three albums. Christy, take off your robe.” - Patrick Bateman, “American Psycho” (2000)

Peter Gabriel & Phil Collins
Friday, April 1, 2022

If you were to ask anyone in my graduating class who was the biggest Phil Collins fan, they might tell you it was me. If there was a time to be a fan of Phil Collins, it would be exactly those years in which I was in high school (1982-1986).

Last Friday night, Phil played his last concert with Genesis at the O2 in London. Peter Gabriel was in the audience. He played these farewell gigs seated in a chair, the last decade or so he has been affected by a variety of nerve injuries, and from all appearances lives with a great deal of pain. And yet, there he was. Doing the work. Singing, anyway. He hasn’t been able to play the drums in years.

Phil Collins appealed to me for a number of personal reasons. Because he was a drummer, he is British, his wardrobe was basic and easily appropriated, and because he wrote songs about mature relationships that were in trouble.

Perhaps it speaks to my own youthful escapades in romantic self-sabotage that at a very young age I had a tender spot for mushy ballads about endless love (Follow You, Follow Me), doo-wop songs about cuckoldry (Misunderstanding) and anthemic showtunes about struggling to maintain doomed relationships through inscrutible, symbolic lyrics and an awful lot of shouting (Behind the Lines).

It was my dad who observed that Phil Collins doesn’t so much sing as he screams, and my father really liked Phil Collins. And so did I. Big fan. I’d dress like him, in suit and tie and Chuck Taylors. This was in the 1980s, when Chucks with a suit was considered transgressive. Goofily transgressive.

I remember getting stoned in the basement of someone’s house in 1983 and they put on the just-released, eponymous release Genesis and heard the song Mama for the first time. That was a dark journey.

As Phil Collins at a 1980s Revival Party
with Debbie Gibson (Beth Stolarczyk)
and Paul Shaffer (Pat Shea)

I remember having a springtime infatuation at the end of my sophomore year, and Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now) was powerful validation of my every obsessive nerve ending.

I remember getting the cassette of No Jacket Required the day it dropped in early 1985, and how jazzed I felt hearing Sussudio for the first time. Fuck all that prog rock shit, let’s dance!

And I remember hearing the song Invisible Touch on the radio, shortly before my high school graduation. I thought it was terrible. Uninspired, basic. Even the music video signaled he was just mailing it in.*

The rest of the album, however (also called Invisible Touch) has some of my very favorite songs, and my girlfriend and I listened to them all summer. In Too Deep was a touchstone for our entanglement, Throwing It All Away our destiny foretold. It was clear, however, that the bloom was off the rose for me, even as we were committed to seeing the act at the Coliseum together after we had broken up.

He was an amazing drummer. While he did not sing on Do They Know It’s Christmas, he does play the drums and his signature fill (dun - dah dun - dah dun) is unmistakable. He was also a pioneer in the use of drum machines. The opening to Sussudio is worthy of Prince.

 
And I had Genesis posters on my wall freshman year in college, though by that time I was really Team Gabriel, and anyway I was at that time being exposed to all that stuff Butthead referred to as “college music”.

Okay, here’s a story. My dad and my ex-girlfriend and I attended the show, as I said, on January 26, 1987. You can listen to a bootleg of the entire show online, there was a live remote that night as they performed Invisible Touch for the AMAs.

When they started playing In Too Deep I announced, “I’m going to the toilet,” and got up and hopped away.

I returned somewhere in the middle of the song. She whispered to me, “How could you leave?”

I said I had to go to the bathroom.

“Yeah,” she said. “But. This song.”

I was a bit defensive, but also smug. I knew what I did. And so began a couple of years of something like dating which would complicate all of my college relationships.

It's just like a song by Phil Collins.

*"Invisible Touch" was the only #1 single Genesis achieved in the United States. I yield to popular opinion. 

Scenes From a Night's Dream

We populate your dreams.

Final rehearsal before Pandemonium. It's going to be a sweet, surreal, candy box of a dream. A Winsor McCay comic told on a dinky stage stage full of fears and fancy ... just a little over five minutes long.

Nemo! Get out of bed!
Don't tell me stories, I don't want to know!
Come on you sleepy head, we're waiting to go!

Okay, so this song, "Scenes from a Night's Dream" was my first introduction to Little Nemo. It's a little embarrassing. Bad enough to admit being such a huge fan of Phil Collins when I was in high school, without digging up what may be the worst song Genesis ever recorded.

The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway

We all have loved you, Rael.

Cleveland has always been kind to Peter Gabriel and to Genesis. When few in the United States even knew who they were, they would attract sold-out crowds here. I found a review of their 1973 gig at the Musical Hall in my high school newspaper.

In 1974 they released their most ambitious and ill-fated album to date, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. "Concept" albums were already a worn-out phenomenon, and yet the band created a two-album set that weaved out an utterly bizarre tale from the mind of Peter Gabriel, following what we would call a "Nuyorican" kid (of whom Gabriel knew none) named Rael, who is transported to an "Alice In Wonderland" type underworld in pursuit of his lost brother John.

He is frozen in space, is forced to confront his first, humiliating sexual encounter, is made love to by a mythical beast, has his penis surgically removed, and finds out he and his brother are actually the same person.

I love this record.

Unfortunately, the album had not yet been released when they began their world tour in America. Imagine paying good money to see your favorite band, but they refuse to play anything you have ever heard before. Some may have been thrilled, most were not. This "performance event" also involved over 1,000 slides and many large, unwieldy costumes which Gabriel had designed with no thought given to how to get the mic anywhere near his mouth.

As you can imagine, there were plenty of "Spinal Tap" moments. The show closes with a strobe on Rael and his doppelganger (a mannequin) at opposite sides of the stage, making it look like he's in two places at once. Closing night the dummy was missing and in its place a nude roadie. And after 120 performances, it was never filmed.

According to manager Tony Smith, the day came, early in the tour, when Gabriel announced that he was quitting the group. The fact that he decided to tell his manager this news in a hideous, orange-paneled hotel room at Swingos makes yet another notable moment in Cleveland Rock and Roll history.

In 2005 (Jesus, really? Six years ago?) I took Josh to see The Musical Box, a French-Canadian tribute band that recreates the Gabriel-era Genesis tours in exacting detail. They brought The Lamb to the Allen Theatre. I had asked my father, but he was going to be out of town. He was pretty interested in Genesis around the same time I was, during my high school and college years. This time around, however, he asked me, and I was only too delighted to accept.

So last night we saw The Lamb in the State Theatre. Myself and a 76 year-old man. The median audience member was a guy somewhere between mine and my father's age. There were assorted wives, but also other women who looked like they actually wanted to be there. I noticed this time, as opposed to five years ago, a number of teenage girls with their fathers. The father-daughter combo seated behind us were cute, she was really interested in the program they'd bought, and he was only too happy to share his insight.

It's a great show. I mean, it's a tribute band, but I would much rather see this than, say, 1964: The Tribute because once you get beyond the "Whoa! They sound just like ..!" factor, what do you have? Why pay to see someone impersonate the Beatles when you can just listen to a CD or watch a movie?  

Watching these guys is like seeing a play or something, rock storytelling, there's a lot to look at and listen to -- with a crowd of like-minded creeps who applaud and whoop and cheer. And, if you are the guy sitting in front of me, light up a marihuana cigarette.

For an encore, they played Watcher of the Skies and, yes, The Musical Box.

Sources:
Genesis: Chapter and Verse (Collins, Banks, Gabriel, Rutheford, Hackett)
Peter Gabriel: An Authorized Biography (Spencer Bright)

WMMS 101 FM

In 1968 the call sign for WHK-FM was changed to WMMS (reflecting then ownership of the MetroMedia corporation) and fiddled around with several different formats - "Progressive" Rock, adult contemporary - until 1973 when John Gorman took over as music director. Gorman would shepherd the station for the 13 years, establishing a popular rock music identity that, to this Gen-X citizen, remains the longest-lived and only truly distinctive personality a pop music station in Cleveland has ever had.

What other radio station gets a heads-up in Almost Famous? That's right.

WMMS takes credit for breaking Bruce Springsteen, as well as a largely disproportionate number of other Columbia Record label stars of the 1970s and 80s. Wait, did I say that?


Genesis played a two-night gig at the Music Hall on April 14 & 15, 1976 promoting A Trick of the Tail, their first studio album without original frontman Peter Gabriel. The second performance was broadcast on WMMS.


Click to enlarge.
Former Plain Dealer columnist Karen Sandstrom is now a burgeoning illustrator, and keeps a very handsome blog chronicling her work and her progress. Yesterday she shared a sketch for a potential book, a drawing of the legendary creature Squonk. A North American mythical creature, when captured the Squonk will weep so terribly that it entirely dissolves into tears.

Squonk (as Sandstrom notes) is the subject and title of the first track on A Trick of the Tail. Considering the concern many fans had that reedy-voiced drummer Phil Collins would never be able to step out of Gabriel's shadow, Squonk sounds almost intentionally brash, deep and rich.

There remains controversy as to whether or not the final refrain is a very personal jab at their recently departed lead singer:

All in all you are a very dying race
Placing trust upon a cruel world.
You never had the things you thought you should have had
And you'll not get them now,
And all the while in perfect time
Your tears are falling on the ground.

Unfortunately, this 1976 performance of Squonk was, for some reason, not recorded by WMMS for broadcast.

Sources:
The Complete Guide to Live Genesis Radio Shows
Pen In Hand
Dalla Maratona Ai Gensis