Mountains Come Out of the Sky

by Will Romano

  When the Mellotron cloud lifts, giving way to a 6/4 rhythm, the song builds slowly in volume and intensity, coaxing Collins, Rutherford, and Hackett to pound away at the unusual staccato pattern.

  This jiggery-pokery rhythm is made even more unusual by the fact that it distorts and shifts at different points throughout the song. Hackett once told the author that he couldn’t remember a time that Genesis—or anyone else—played it correctly all the way through onstage.

  Gaining confidence as a unit, the band began to branch out. It’s interesting to note that, like some of their peers, Genesis were starting to spotlight individual members of the band, as Yes had done in 1972 with Fragile. With Foxtrot, Hackett matched Steve Howe’s “Mood for a Day” with the nylon-stringed classical work “Horizons.”

  Other tunes, such as “Get ‘Em Out by Friday” and “Can-Utility and the Coastliners” are but warm-ups for the main event: the twenty-three-minute epic “Supper’s Ready.”

  “Supper’s Ready” has long been a subject of debate for fans who seek to interpret its meaning. Essentially, the song is a retelling of the entire Bible, from Eden to the birth of the Antichrist. Perhaps more importantly, it also describes a vision of the rapturous end of the world and the second coming of Christ, resting thematically somewhere between the earlier From Genesis to the Revelation and the band’s then-upcoming record The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

  Yet the imagery is so disjointed, if not idiosyncratic, it’s difficult to tie together all of the references, which point to innocent, world-weary characters. Perhaps it’s a search for love, a search for God, a search for God’s love and a new spiritual center? A new Jerusalem, as the song tells us?

  Ultimately, the song is absurdist humor, operating as a kind of lobotomy—surgically peeling back layers of the twentieth-century English psyche. Still, whatever the true intent and meaning of the song, “Supper’s Ready” was to Genesis what “Tarkus” was to Emerson Lake and Palmer: an expansive musical journey through the chicanery of madness and personal expression.

  To bring the music alive onstage, Gabriel began dressing in outrageous costumes. Genesis shows were replete with Kabuki-inspired garb, giant sunflowers, elements of show-puppet theater and mime, bat wings, Day-Glo makeup burning brightly in a dark hall with the help of UV/infrared rays, dry-ice fog, an old-man mask (donned during “The Musical Box,” representing the aging reptile Henry Hamilton-Smythe, whose disembodied spirit is given to flesh in the song), and a fox head and a red dress, à la Paul Whitehead’s iconic character from the LP cover artwork for Foxtrot, which shocked not only audience members but the band the first time it was worn.

  “You have to bear in mind that prog rock is very much a musical form that came out of the U.K. alongside surreal British humor like Monty Python,” says Ian Anderson, whose band Jethro Tull had been known for its own theatrics. “It’s impossible for Peter Gabriel to be onstage with Genesis, dressed as a giant sunflower, without having some kind of sense of humor.”

  Appropriately, the band released a live record, titled Genesis Live, in 1973, capturing the energy and majesty of their stage show. Despite the many boxed sets and live CDs the band has released since then, Live remains a standard, featuring powerful renditions of “Watcher of the Skies,” “Get ‘Em Out By Friday,” “The Musical Box,” “The Return of the Giant Hogweed,” and “The Knife,” recorded in Leicester and Manchester.

  “Genesis had an incredible work ethic in terms of writing and collaborating and rehearsing and jamming,” says Gregg Bendian, drummer for the Musical Box, a Genesis-licensed tribute band that performs note for note and rebuilds bit by bit the stage presentation of the band’s classic 1970s performances. “They lived it. You don’t get that music by showing up and making forty-five minutes of music to fulfill a contract.”

  SELLING ENGLAND BY THE POUND

  Instead of compromising and Americanizing their music, Genesis looked inward to develop a more absurd, England-centric prog rock.

  Selling England by the Pound (1973)

  Their next studio record, 1973’s Selling England by the Pound, was something akin to a string of subdued and subliminal Monty Python skits—very English, right down to the manicured landscape featured in Betty Swanwick’s cover artwork. (Gabriel’s voice even mutates into different British accents in “The Battle for Epping Forest,” a metaphor for the struggle between the forces of light and darkness, and a mixture of styles, from synth prog rock to R&B, church hymn, Caribbean, and African.)

  Despite tackling weighty subjects (e.g., war, bemoaning the loss of England’s onetime glory), Selling England by the Pound never lets the listener take the music too seriously (a by-product of the absurdity and extravagance of the humor, perhaps?).

  Opening the record, Gabriel sings a capella in “Dancing with the Moonlit Knight”—a twitchy, twinkling tune mourning the passing of England’s great nation and speaking to the erosion of modern culture (as far as the writer can decipher), alluding to the mythical Grail and Arthurian legends, in which wood and wire mesh in some form of music that’s neither baroque folk-classical nor rock.

  As the song progresses, acoustic and electric guitars are chased by piano, organ, Gabriel’s vocal baaing and baying, and Collins’s military march rhythms until the floor and the sky open, like all heaven and hell broke loose.

  Pound delivered the band’s first British hit, “I Know What I Like (in Your Wardrobe),” which narrowly missed the Top 20, as well as “More Fool Me” (on which Collins makes another appearance as a lead singer) and “The Cinema Show” (a track, along with “Firth of Fifth,” that has been kept in Genesis’s live repertoire for decades). The latter is remarkable both because the synthesizer instrumental section of the song was written in 7/8, and also because Banks plays a minimal amount of notes to achieve his point. Genesis were getting better at what they do, formulating a genuine style that had been established on Nursery Cryme and Foxtrot.

  “Peter Gabriel was wearing these bizarre uniforms, and they didn’t make radio-friendly records, and I would get kicked out of radio stations trying to promote the records,” says Phillip Rauls, an Atlantic Records radio promotion man. “They were like, ‘Are you crazy? We can’t play these guys. This music is like opera with a drumbeat.”’

  “I was born in 1960, and I didn’t see Emerson Lake and Palmer, Yes, Crimson, but I did listen to them,” says onetime King Crimson bassist/Warr guitarist Trey Gunn. “But not Genesis, for some reason. I think where I was geographically located, which was in Texas, for some reason, Genesis never really was big there.”

  “Exactly,” says Rauls. “It was very homophobic times, too. If you liked that band, you were a fag because of Peter Gabriel’s stage getups. Once you got beyond that, a lot of disc jockeys didn’t say the name of the artist for fear that their radio station would be associated with this phobia that long-haired, dope-smoking communist subversives were taking over.”

  There really wasn’t anything subversive about Genesis, aside from the fact that their music and career lay outside the mainstream. However, that would change with 1974’s concept double album, a milestone in Genesis’s recording history, titled The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, which alternately confused and inspired listeners with its dreamlike tale of schizophrenia.

  Peter Gabriel’s stage prowling and elaborate costumes injected a rare theatricality into Genesis’s early live performances. Also pictured are, left to right: Hackett, Rutherford, and Collins. (John Lynn Kirk/Getty Images)

  THE LAMB LIES DOWN ON BROADWAY

  Some consider The Lamb to be the absolute pinnacle of Genesis’s progressive rock period and the entire British progressive movement, due to its impressionistic characteristics. Brian Eno contributes his ambient touches—Enossification—to the band’s expansive sound with a VCS-3 synthesizer to manipulate Gabriel’s voice.

  The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway (1974)

  Yet, the importance (or lack thereof) and relevance of the musical and conceptual elements of t
he double record have been the cause of a continuous, raging debate.

  Arguably, no other rock band, progressive or otherwise, had sounded like Genesis, particularly on the last few records, as was certainly the case with The Lamb. The music simply occupied its own space and time.

  “What you don’t mean by ‘having its own time,’ presumably,” said Hackett, “is it had its own time, because it was 1975 or something.”

  Correct, Mr. Hackett. The sounds we heard on The Lamb are simply devoid of many (if any) sonic markers that would keep it in one era.

  Gabriel explained the basic premise of the plot to an audience at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles in 1975: “It tells of how a large black cloud descends into Times Square, straddles out across Forty-second Street, turns into wool, and sucks in Manhattan island. Our hero, named Rael, crawls out of the subways of New York and is sucked into the wool to regain consciousness underground. This is the story of Rael.”

  Are we experiencing a dream sequence? Is Broadway a euphemism for a new Jerusalem? Is it a metaphor for the loss of innocence? Or was Gabriel making a political commentary on the affairs of the dual nature of the religious-secular state of Israel?

  When Genesis toured The Lamb initially, they confused audiences who were expecting to hear the band’s old “hits” and instead got a recital of new material complete with stage costumes (so elaborate it became difficult at certain points in the show for Gabriel to even sing in front of a microphone), pyrotechnics, and slide shows. It was a multimedia event, with moving parts that never quite worked correctly. But perhaps this didn’t matter.

  “I saw a band live in Italy and they did a version of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway,” Hackett said. “I [was thinking] how good the music sounded. Being able to sit out front instead of [being] onstage—when you’re onstage you’re not getting the full balance. You’re getting this compromise, which comes down to [an] observation that Dik Fraser made. Dik was one of the guys who worked with Genesis many years ago. He was saying to me, ‘A band onstage never knows when it’s really doing it.’ ‘How was it for you, darling?’ You know . . .”

  “When I met Phil Collins I know he was a Weather Report fan and I a Genesis fan,” says former Weather Report bassist Alphonso Johnson, who was pivotal in stabilizing the band’s live lineup, and who had appeared on Collins’s solo debut, Face Value. “I told him that I saw the band perform The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in Philadelphia and I was maybe one of fifteen African-American people in the crowd. That concert, along with Pink Floyd’s The Wall, changed the way I perceived music and how it can affect an audience.”

  Toward the end of the American tour for The Lamb in the late fall of 1974, as if it were a shock to anyone, Gabriel announced he was leaving the band. “It’s difficult to respond to intuition and impulse and yet work within the long-term planning of the band’s career,” Gabriel said of his exit in a statement to the press.

  It was assumed, because Gabriel was such a lightning rod for attention, that the singer was the creative force behind the band. The press, as did so many others, virtually wrote Genesis off.

  “At the time we were running around with Greenslade, Genesis was just bubbling over and their management put a huge amount effort and money to getting into the States and launching them,” says drummer Andrew McCulloch (Greenslade, King Crimson, Manfred Mann), who did rehearsal sessions with Gabriel after the singer left Genesis. “Greenslade liked what they were doing. But when Peter Gabriel left, we all thought, ‘Well, they’re in trouble now,’ because Peter had incredible charisma. We thought they were finished.”

  Determined to prove to the world (and themselves) otherwise, a Gabriel-less band thrust full speed ahead.

  The first order of business? Finding a new singer . . .

  PHIL COLLINS, FRONT AND CENTER

  “I witnessed the auditions for the new singer for Genesis,” says Stephen W. Tayler, an engineer at Trident Studios in London, where Genesis’s post-Gabriel studio record, A Trick of the Tail, was cut. “It just so happened that I was . . . assisting in the engineering process, helping out the engineers at a couple of sessions for what would become A Trick of the Tail. They were in the studio for quite some time recording the backing tracks. They had no idea who was going to be the vocalist. I got the feeling that Phil was kind of going, ‘Please, can I have a go.’

  “The band brought in a number of singers, and the only one I remember specifically by name was Bernie Frost, who had been a session guy and would appear often in the studio doing backing vocals for people. I believe he was a very important component to Status Quo’s vocal studio sound,” continues Tayler. “I remember some other singers just being awful. They sang, I believe, to the backing track of a song called ‘Squonk.’ Then, I remember the moment the band actually [let] Phil have a go ...”

  “Phil really half nominated himself,” adds producer David Hentschel, laughing. “I think he felt he could do it, but there needed to be a push to convince the other guys.”

  The band was reticent to bring Collins from behind the kit to handle the lead vocal duties, despite the fact that the drummer had sung minimal lead and frequent backing vocals for the band on tour and studio efforts.

  “Phil’s voice, particularly in the upper ranges, was not dissimilar [to] Peter’s, and so not a lot of people realized that he sang,” says Hentschel. “The timbre of the voice, if you like, was similar.”

  “We were hanging around together playing in Brand X [Collins’s jazz-rock side project with Robin Lumley, John Goodsall, and Percy Jones],” said Bill Bruford, whom Collins had admired from his Yes days. “We were playing some dates together—I was playing percussion to his drum set. Phil was just talking about the problem he had with Genesis. That they were auditioning singers and he, Phil, thought that they were all hopeless and he thought he could do a better job, anyway. But if he went up front, he’d be worried—like any drummer would be—that the music would fall apart. I said, ‘Why don’t you go out front and I’ll play the drums on tour or something.’ He knew my style and he knew I could play the music. So he’d be comfortable that the music wouldn’t fall apart behind.”

  Suddenly it became a real possibility. And once the band had heard Collins sing, they knew they had what they were looking for, right in their midst.

  Genesis may have had dramatic musical interactions in the past, but nothing approached this “British prog on steroids” feel before. A Trick of the Tail reached number three on the U.K. charts. Melody Maker readers even voted it their favorite album of 1976, beating out Led Zep’s Presence, Steely Dan’s Royal Scam, Queen’s A Night at the Opera, Dylan’s Desire, Jon Anderson’s solo record Olias of Sunhillow, Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, and Peter Frampton’s enduring live record, Frampton Comes Alive.

  “People had always behaved toward the group as if Peter was Genesis,” Collins remembered. “We made one album without him and suddenly it wasn’t a problem.”

  With Bruford backing them, the band embarked on an international tour to support A Trick of the Tail in 1976. The tour, the first without Gabriel, unveiled the new band to the world just as it presented two English drumming powerhouses.

  Collins soon grew into his own man as a Genesis singer (and studio drummer), having dispensed with Gabriel’s “mysterious traveler” persona in favor of his own, as he put it, “bloke next door” stage presence, which carries him through to today.

  Collins and Genesis were changing rapidly. Even the decision to bring in Bruford, whom the band perceived as a kind of star, proved to be perhaps, in the end, musically a bit of a challenge.

  Bruford came from a different world. On one side of the stage was the stoic Tony Banks, whose studied and dexterous approach to keyboards were perhaps the antithesis of what Bruford wished to be as a musician. There were moments one felt that Bruford (with Hackett) might tear it up, even for a few brief measures, to derail the music and release it from the strict confines of song structure. Occasionally, it happened, most no
tably with “The Cinema Show” and in the nightly Collins-Bruford drumming duet. This uncommon tension is what made the band an exciting, if somewhat frustrating, live band, both for the fans and for some of the musicians.

  “We did that for about nine months or something and at the end, I said, ‘Job done,’” said Bruford. “I didn’t have any emotional input; I was just like a hired studio gun, except I was touring with the band. So I wanted to move on. But I think it got the band over a tricky moment.”

  WIND & WUTHERING

  For its next studio album, the band again tapped producer David Hentschel.

  Unlike A Trick of the Tail, Wind & Wuthering wasn’t created in mass confusion and disarray. In fact, it was the opposite of such, becoming (arguably), what some fans consider Genesis’s most focused album.

  Genesis came totally prepared to record, and it shows. Melodic ideas and variation on those melodic ideas are developed, stated, repeated, and restated in changed form, throughout the course of Wind & Wuthering, lending the record a sense of cohesiveness from one song to the next.

  Wind & Wuthering is not a concept album, but musically, it’s the tightest Genesis had ever been in the studio. “That may have to do with the way it was recorded,” says Hentschel. “It was the first album we recorded where we went abroad. We went over to Holland in this little studio [Relight Studios] in the middle of nowhere. The idea being that we would be completely isolated from telephones, people dropping in, and distractions, basically. That was quite a novel idea in those days. We just stayed in a little hotel down the road from the studio and basically were totally immersed in the music. The whole thing was recorded in about two weeks. Then we came back to London and finished off some vocal overdubs and a few little bits and pieces, probably for a week. Then spent two weeks mixing it. So the whole thing was very focused, really.”