Genesis for a Thursday Lunch – recorded at The Hartford Civic Center in Hartford Connecticut on December 1, 1983.
It occurred to me that I haven’t run any post-Peter Gabriel Genesis on this site; ever.
Truths to tell, I always felt Genesis was Peter Gabriel and his was the guiding light of the band. And with him gone and pursuing a solo career, Genesis lost their appeal – at least for me.
The audience however, felt a bit different, and the transformation from progressive to more Pop with certain elements of Prog left alone proved to be the magic ingredient for the later enormous popularity of Genesis.
The transformation produced a string of worldwide hits which created more of an indelible impression, at least from a Pop Culture standpoint than anything they’d done before.
So who was I to continue being the wet blanket, turning my nose up at a band’s decision to pursue a more commercial route than staying with a hardcore audience, certainly during a time when Popular Music in general was going through serious changes and the original Genesis could have been relegated to the heap of “oh, them” bands that didn’t weather transitions?
My memories of the countless times I saw Genesis during the Peter Gabriel period are imbedded in my psyche and aren’t going anywhere. And in keeping with my (and Past Daily’s) policy of keeping an open mind – and since even the post-Peter Gabriel Genesis have called it a day, there’s no point in continuing being an old fart about it.
The remarkable thing about the transformed Genesis is how much like Peter Gabriel Phil Collins’s vocals sounded – and how the core atmosphere pretty much stayed the same, but the shift in genre was noticeable. The aura of surrealism was gone in place of the heartfelt spirit of songs about the day-to-day. And with the absence of cerebral time signatures in favor of danceable beats, it translated to an easier access to a much wider audience. You couldn’t really dance to Genesis before – in the 80s you could; it was almost obligatory.
So this concert comes during the period of the Mama Tour of 1983 – the heyday of MTV and the birth of The Music Video and the gradual fade in popularity of Top-40 radio. In a scant three years CD’s would dominate the contemporary market and that was the start of another whole batch of changes. Genesis managed to weather those changes nicely and maybe that was supposed to happen, in the grand scheme of things.
In any event – grab lunch, relax, hit Play and take yourself out of the present for the next two hours.
Couldn’t hurt.
