The Final Frontier

After studying music in Liverpool for almost 16 years I have found the whole experience enlightening, disheartening, exhilarating, humorous, hard going and altogether a great experience. On completion of my Degree in popular music I have submitted a small number of assignments from the early days at College to my final year at University and I wanted to share a glimpse of it all with rest of the world. So here for posterity I am laying down what is my last essay of my Degree in popular music, which is all about a big love of my life, the early days of the band Genesis.

Over the Garden Wall

The Flower from Suppers Ready

The period of music from 1968 to 1978 saw the emergence of a new type of rock music named Progressive rock or simply prog. One influential band of this period who could been seen as influencing a great many others was the band King Crimson with their med evil imagery in the likes of the album In The Court of the Crimson King. One band that was influenced by Crimson a great deal was the Progressive rock band Genesis, who formed at the public school Charter House in England in the late 1960’s. Crimsons Court album was an album cover which Genesis pinned to their dorm room door at school as a thing to aspire to. Genesis started out as two separate bands, (Anon and Garden Wall), at school that came together and released their first album From Genesis to Revelation with the help of Charter House Old Boy Jonathan King, who gave them their unusual name. The first album was not much of a hit and was usually placed in the religious section of most record shops because of the bands and album names.

Genesis’s later albums would place them firmly as one of the pioneers of the prog rock genre, a genre which sprang from the Psychedelic and Folk movements of the late 1960’s. With influences like Crimson and the Beatles Sgt Peppers album, listening to Genesis’s later albums such as Trespass became a staple for some rockers and classical fans, indeed their music has been described as symphonic and likened to that of art or classical music, with long complicated passages of Hammond organ, eccentric electric guitar, folky acoustic guitar, Peter Gabriel’s flute playing, driving bass lines and complex drum patterns and fills. As Genesis progressed in the making of music the bands ideas began taking on a concept identity with some tracks being based on mythology such as The Fountain of Salmacis which came from the Greek tale of Hermaphrodite and tracks like the epic 20 minute piece Suppers Ready from the Foxtrot album.

Suppers ready takes the listener on a journey with a couple of lovers who enter a world of mysticism and surrealness and eventually return to the real world in time for the biblical apocalypse. Suppers ready is a great example of Genesis reaching their pinnacle in song writing and was a brief glimpse into what the Peter Gabriel line up would eventually reach by the time of their final album before Gabriel’s departure.

Middle Earth

A lot of Genesis early performances were in student halls and at venues that were aptly titled after the works of J.R.R Tolkien such as Middle Earth and Gandalf’s Garden. A majority of the early audiences were either students or psychedelic regulars, which could be seen as the standard audience for a lot of progressive rock acts such as Genesis and the likes of early Pink Floyd. Although with the departure of Gabriel and Collins taking over as front man, Genesis’s audience may have changed a lot by the time of the album Invisible Touch, either that or the same audience changed their listening habits to keep in with the band.

The Story Teller

Rael from The Lamb, and The Slipper-man

Genesis lengthy tracks and storytelling put them firmly in the genre with the likes of Jethro Tull and their epic tracks such as Thick as a Brick, the bands Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, Van Der Graf generator and the Canadian power trio Rush with their progressive pieces such as Natural Science and Tom Sawyer were other bands placed firmly in the genre. For the Genesis live audience what made them stand out was Gabriel’s antics on stage as he began wearing outlandish costumes and masks and make up to portray the characters in the story’s the band had set to verse. Gabriel’s mobility on stage as a non-large instrument player meant he could move around the stage, as in one instance dressed in an old man’s mask as he plays the character from the track the Musical Box. These performances by Gabriel heightened the audience’s reception of the music and gave them some idea of what the lyrics held and the meaning to the story’s being played out for them at the performances. Some of the first instances of this were a shock to the other band members as it was something Gabriel had not informed them he was planning when he appeared on stage wearing a red dress and a foxes head.

Another aspect of the live performance was the time it took the band members to tune their various instruments. Gabriel would take this opportunity to tell short stories he had written which served to introduce the following track. One story that introduced Suppers Ready is about a man who would travel daily to the park and proceed to remove his clothes and rub his flesh into the ground, an act which got the worms very excited and told the local bird populace that supper was ready. This story involved a whistling rendition of Jerusalem from Gabriel accompanied by Phil Collins on the drums. Gabriel even goes into character voices in some tracks such as Get em’ Out by Friday from Foxtrot and The Battle of Epping Forest from Selling England by the Pound.

For the listener and live audience itself, the Genesis concepts would grow more elaborate with each album right up to the final Gabriel album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The Lamb is a concept story which was written in story form in the gate fold of the album and then rewritten in lyrical form and put to music. It is one long double album story about a New York gang member named Rael, who is sucked into a surreal underground world where he is put through a number of tests and comes out the other side redeeming himself and losing his violent selfish ways. The concerts were performed in New York and Gabriel acted out the lead character role throughout the whole performance in costume. The initial turnout was poor but the band began to gain more fans in the US and eventually the concerts began to sell out. One of the most elaborate of Gabriel’s costumes in the show had to be the Slipper-man. A grotesque creature of lumps, stumpy arms and lips that slide across his chin.

Much Like Bach and Mozart

These concept albums by Genesis and other bands works, such as Jethro Tulls Thick as a Brick and the Yes album Close to the Edge are thought of highly by prog fans and academics alike as being more than just long songs, but in fact are; as has been said close to art music. No doubt the members of Genesis would have been exposed to a lot of classical music at their private school Charter House as much as they were exposed to classical writing such as Greek Mythology, which is where the band may have taken a lot of influence for their music. Covach states in his publication Progressive Rock, “Close to the Edge,” and the Boundaries of Style, that progressive rock is very similar to art music in that the artists were trying to produce something different, although this had been done before with Herman’s Hermits fusing rock with classical music with the track Lady Godiva and the Beatles orchestration on the track Eleanor Rigby and the Harpsichord used on the Rolling Stones track Lady Jane. Covach states that prog artists tried to add a level of seriousness to rock and that some saw this as pretentious. He goes on to say that these artists were trying to create something that would not disappear off the charts in a matter of weeks and would eventually be studied by academics, much like Bach or Mozart is studied.

Virtuosity is a big thing in prog music and is something that will attract the listener to the music, such as Rush being referred to as the “musicians musician.” Moore in his publication Rock: The Primary Text, Developing a Musicology of Rock, emphasises the links between prog rock and art music when referring to the likes of Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick and the Genesis album Trespass, in particular the track the Knife as having rhythmic similarities to art music and the track being a paradigm for later progressive music. He continues with similarities in fantasy writing such as Tolkien’s works and the Genesis track Suppers Ready, Led Zeppelins the Battle of Evermore and Syd Barrett and Pink Floyds album, A Piper at the Gates of Dawn with the tracks Bike, The Scarecrow and Astronomy Domine. These fantastical ideas by Genesis again relate to the bands education in classical writing and also through Gabriel’s costumes and antics on stage.

The Symphony

The bands label Charisma who played more of a patron role with Genesis and also Jethro Tull on Crysalis, gave the band a lot of freedom when it came to writing, which enabled them to pursue their own ideas when it came to rock music and this may have helped to grow a particular audience. The music of Genesis as has been mentioned was very complex and likened to that of the symphony. The audience of Genesis’s music may have differed to that of the regular rock audience, in that it may have taken a certain kind of listening to sit through an epic 20 minute piece of music. Also performing these progressive pieces may have been a big accomplishment for the band members whose virtuosity and music could be compared to that of orchestra members performing a classical piece. The likes of Suppers Ready, is a 20 minute piece of a very complex nature and one wonders at how the band members remember such a long progressive form without sheet music.

Listen Closely

Other progressive bands have been critiqued on their likeness to high art music and some bands have even been known to perform classical and baroque pieces. Macan in his publication Rocking the Classics, English progressive Rock and the Counter Culture, States “ Yes opened their concerts with an excerpt from Stravinsky's Firebird; the first incarnation of King Crimson performed Holst's "Mars" (from The Planets) live, while the Electric Light Orchestra arranged Grieg's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" (from Peer Gynt). Jethro Tull's "Bouree" was based on a piece by J. S. Bach, as was Egg's "Fugue in D minor" (drawn from the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor for organ) and the main melodic idea of Procol Harum's "A Whiter Shade of Pale." Many progressive rock bands clearly saw themselves in the role of bringing high culture to the masses, and approached this task with an almost missionary zeal. Thus Carl Palmer of ELP remarked to an indignant Lester Bangs that "we hope if anything we're encouraging the kids to listen to music that has more quality." The liner notes of Gentle Giant's acquiring the Taste LP informs the listener that "it is our goal to expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of being very unpopular.... From the outset we have abandoned all preconceived thoughts on blatant commercialism. Instead we hope to give you something far more substantial and fulfilling." Likewise, Jethro Tull's self-written "review" of their album Thick as a Brick comments that "taken on the whole however this is a fine disc and a good example of the current pop scene attempting to break out of its vulgarisms and sometimes downright obscene derivative hogwash." (Macan , 1997, p168.)

Some as is said, see this merging of rock with high art music as pretentious and that rock music should not take its self to seriously, especially the critics of the time, but Macan feels that this hybrid music gave the kids of the time something more to aspire to musically. “To many rock critics, especially those associated with Rolling Stone and Creem, progressive rock's aesthetic stance was anathema, nothing short of heresy. First of all, the critics resented the insinuation that progressive rock's appropriation of the classical tradition somehow "expanded the frontiers of popular music," enabled the pop scene to "break out of its vulgarism," or "encouraged kids to listen to music that has more quality." They found this viewpoint elitist and a betrayal of rock's populist origins. I would not necessarily defend the viewpoint expressed by Palmer, Gentle Giant, or Jethro Tull, insomuch as I do not believe that drawing "classical" influences into pop music will necessarily make for music that "has more quality." However, I also believe that such references to high culture will not necessarily lead to pop music that is more "inauthentic" or "sterile," either. Furthermore, far too much emphasis has been put on remarks such as these in past assessments of progressive rock. As we have already seen, progressive rock musicians drew on symphonic music and the Anglican/Catholic choral tradition because it was part of their cultural heritage as middle-class Europeans, and it made perfect sense for them to do so. (Macan , 1997. p 169)

Taking all this into account, it is easy to see why the likes of Genesis and other progressive bands have been likened to art music and the audience and listener may resemble a classical audience in many respects even to the point of sitting and carefully listening as opposed to standing and even dancing. Genesis bassist Mike Rutherford is quoted as saying that “Genesis preferred their audience to sit down and listen to the music”, which supports what has already been suggested about how the listener receives the band’s music. Although Genesis came to embody the ideas of theatre rock with the stage antics of Gabriel, this was not the case when they first started out, with albums like From Genesis to Revelation and Trespass. Although the aspects of prog rock are still there with the song writing and stories, some of which have been said to be hard going to listen to and this again requires one to listen closely.