As I enter my 24th year of life on this planet, I must once again come to terms with my inner old man. Becoming the dude with the cargo khakis and grey ponytail seems inevitable. This post is the first of a mini-series I’ve been working on. It’s not going to be about a popular artist, or something remotely trendy. This is me indulging my inner Classic Rock guy.
A few years ago, my friend Nate and I decided to listen through the entirety of Bob Dylan’s discography and rate each album. Our objectives were to become more deeply acquainted with Dylan’s music, revisit old favorites, discover hidden gems, and find new ways to appreciate one of our favorite artists. It was a fun exercise, and it worked well with Bob Dylan because he’s such a prolific artist.
Today I will begin doing the same with a band that I like, but one I’m admittedly not very familiar with: Genesis.
If you don’t know who Genesis is, you’re probably at least familiar with Peter Gabriel or Phil Collins, both of which were lead singers of the band at certain points. They were a Prog Rock (Progressive Rock) Band in the 70s, and a very successful Pop Band in the 80s and early 90s. Genesis wrapped up their last tour ever in 2022. The conclusion of the band had a lot to do with Phil Collins’s poor health. He performed from his chair for the entirety of the final tour.
I like Peter Gabriel. I’ve seen a couple of great documentaries about his solo career, and I’m a genuine fan of some of his music. Phil Collins is a very important musician for people my age who grew up watching the Tarzan movie and hearing his songs on the soundtrack. Those connections are partly why I want to explore this music, but there are other reasons. They meet a lot of the criteria for a fun deep dive! They’ve got a lot of records, covered many genres and styles, and brought things to the table that you don’t get from many Rock bands, now or ever. They’re a rich and exciting band, and I invite you to come on this Genesis journey with me!
To begin, let’s start with my experience listening to the first album From Genesis to Revelation.
Chapter One: From Genesis to Revelation (1969)
1969 was an unparalleled year for Rock music. You had classic releases like Abbey Road and Led Zeppelin II, Bob Dylan was kicking it with Johnny Cash in Nashville, The Stooges and The Velvet Underground were inventing an early form of Punk, and artists like Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart were changing the game by incorporating Jazz-Fusion and Avant-Garde elements. 1969 also brought what is widely recognized as the first proper Prog-Rock album, King Crimson’s In The Court of the Crimson King.
There were a lot of innovations happening in rock music at the time, but the story of Genesis’s debut wasn’t one of them.
Genesis formed as a group of musically inclined students attending Charterhouse public school in Godalming, Surrey, a small town south of London. They started recording demos in 1967 and soon caught the attention of songwriter and record producer Jonathon King. King also gave the band their name, because something as important as naming the group wasn’t necessarily on their minds. Their main interest was in writing songs together. Performing them was more of an afterthought.
The band consisted of lead guitarist Anthony Phillips, keyboardist Tony Banks, bassist/guitarist Mike Rutherford, John Silver, who later replaced Chris Stewart, on drums, and lead singer and flautist Peter Gabriel. The album also features orchestral arrangements from a film composer named Arthur Greenslade. With his comparatively abundant experience in the music-making game and his genuine admiration for the group, Jonathon King handled the production for the debut.
Debut records can be tricky. Especially for groups that still aren’t sure what they want to do, or who they want to be. We’ve seen it before with the debut albums from The Cure and David Bowie. Initially, Genesis saw themselves as a collective of songwriters, not necessarily performers. King clearly felt they showed promise as a full-fledged band, and you can feel that in the record. The album is thoughtful, even philosophical. There is a concept behind it as well, and ideas that the band invites you to grapple with. There are genuinely great uses of imagery in the lyrics, like in this line from “Window’, “Horizons come to sip wine there”. But even so, there’s a palpable incongruence in the music. Despite good intentions, the stars don’t exactly seem to align.
Tensions between some members of the band and King arose during the album’s recording. Tensions which originated in some members wanting to bring out their instruments more, add more solos and complexity to the songs. This didn’t quite fit in with King’s vision of the group, however, which wasn’t ‘Genesis’ so much as it was ‘Peter Gabriel and Genesis’.
The record is a Folky blend of Orchestral Pop with marginal Psychedelic Rock influence. It’s nothing revolutionary by any means, but it sounds quite pretty. You can hear a lot of inspiration from The Doors, especially with the prominence of Banks’s organ and the lack of exciting electric guitar passages, (no shade to The Doors).
The orchestral arrangements are a dominating presence on the album, swallowing the band like a fog. Peter Gabriel’s voice is ornately complimented as a result, but the other parts of the band become wallpapered. It’s just as well. It’s hard to deny the compelling nature of Peter Gabriel’s singing. His voice communicates a beautiful humanity and a profound hopefulness. I’ve heard people say they don’t like his voice, but I love it. It’s so distinct, so sweet, and so evocative. King saw Gabriel’s talent and wanted to focus on that as much as possible. Who wouldn’t? But Genesis is a band! Not a solo project.
Upon release, From Genesis to Revelation was a commercial flop, failing to chart. If you ask me, the main reason for that is because Genesis didn’t produce a Genesis record. Rather than making a record that suited them, they made a record that suited King’s idea of them, and what he wanted them to become. Sometimes these are the sorts of sacrifices we must make to get our feet in the door. That was very likely the case for From Genesis to Revelation. This is the product of a group of inexperienced songwriters being thrown into the fray and letting the current carry them off. King wasn’t seeing the impending emergence of Prog-Rock. He couldn’t have understood Genesis’s potential to become one of the great Mount Rushmore figures of the scene either. It happened! But not right away…
Overall, From Genesis to Revelation is a promising album. It is the image of a band yearning for complexity but squandered by shortsighted production. It comes off as more of a Peter Gabriel solo record than a true band record. My hope is, as we move forward to the next record, that we get to hear more musical input from our guitar players. I also hope to feel a more adventurous record, an album that capitalizes on the band’s propensity for storytelling in song.
Rating: C
For want of a tambourine on the hip, a player on the Hammond organ, and a flute solo coming up in six measures—the way God intended—
Lewis