Okay then, time to wrap this up, and as I mentioned before, I'm left to bookend the discography with the debut and their final album. Here's the debut. If you've not heard it before, prepare to be....
disappointed.
From Genesis to Revelation (1969)
As I've said many times before, I do not consider the debut Genesis album anywhere near progressive rock. Whether it was the youth of the guys (all nineteen bar Anthony Phillips, who was eighteen; is there any significance to the fact that every member of the original Genesis lineup, bar Phillips, was born in 1950?) which led to a lack of confidence in themselves, or the rigid control exerted by Jonathan King, or even indeed the fact that they were yet maturing as songwriters,
From Genesis to Revelation has more in common with a folk record than a prog rock one. It's not even that good: I can pick out a handful of decent tracks, but most of the rest is pretty dire, and there was at that point no real indication of the heights these guys (well, three of them anyway, with a fourth to join later) would scale and the mark they would make on music in general, and progressive rock music in particular.
Genesis believe they owe a great debt to King, who did after all discover them and, though losing interest as they refused to conform to his idea of what the band should be (ie one that would make him money with hit singles) and leaving them to hook up with Tony Stratton-Smith at Charisma Records, it has to be admitted and accepted that without King's patronage and yes, money, Genesis as we know them today would probably never have existed. Stop cheering there, Frownland! Mike Rutherford has pointed out on record that back in those days, just getting into the studio to record was a huge deal, and actually landing a recording contract, especially at their young age and with no background or body of work to look to, was little short of a miracle. However, Genesis would only begin to come into their own the next year, when they released what I, and most fans, see as their first real album.
But back to this one. It opens on a very hippy guitar and keyboard line, with Peter Gabriel's soft, cultured and very English voice exhorting people to
”Come and join us now.” Choral vocals (which I have to assume, back then when synthesisers were really only in their infancy, are made by the boys themselves singing) clash somewhat with an almost Latin kind of rhythm before Tony Banks's piano takes the tune, and though this is 1969 there's still a lot of the hippy flower power ideal in the lyric here, lots of getting back to nature, living with the animals, love and peace, man and so on. Finger-clicking now as the song heads into its conclusion, fading out on a nice bassy piano from Banks, but it's hardly the first salvo in a barrage that looked destined to take on the world!
The Wiki entry mentions that King wanted this album to be a concept one based on the Bible, but other than a title or two here, I really don't see it, and never have. To me, it's just a loose collection of songs with the odd theme running through them, such as nature, innocence, peace and love. Very simple, very dated, very formulaic, even for the time. All that said, “In the Beginning” has quite a dark little bass line and skips along on a nice organ line from Banks, Peter's voice stronger and starting to betray the Hammillisms that it would develop on the next album, the kind of harsh, angry, almost sneering quality he could turn on and off at will. This song has at least got some teeth, whereas the other was just so weak and annoying. We get to see what Rutherford can do on the guitar as he actually rocks out a little, and there's much more energy about this. Nice little bass solo, short but effective, and the song itself is clearly based on the likes of The Beatles and Herman's Hermits, that sort of thing. Maybe the Animals.
One of the standouts comes in the form of “Fireside Song”, which opens on a soft piano line that would later become inextricably linked with Tony Banks and would run such songs as “One for the Vine” and “Please Don't Ask”, but that fades out and acoustic guitar is married to rather lovely strings (arranged by King, and in fairness he knew what he was doing, as they really make the song) as Gabriel reverts to his soft, almost apologetic vocal style, with some really nice vocal harmonies coming in on the chorus. I always find it amusing how English singers are so careful to pronounce every word properly: whereas an American or other singer might sing “Once upon a time there was confusion, disappointment, fear and disillusion”, Gabriel uses proper diction, singing “Once up-on a time there was con-fus-ion, dis-ap-point-ment, fear and (never an) dis-ee-loo-see-on.”Oh yes: every “t” and “d” is perfectly pronounced, not a usage of “while” once it can be “whilst”. Those crazy English, huh? Be that as it may, it's a lovely song and it's well titled, the first time when I initially listened to the album that I felt there might actually be something here. Mind you, then the longest track is “The Serpent”, and it's kind of like listening to someone trying to copy Jim Morrison, but working in entirely the wrong medium. The song even has a
faux start with a kind of guitar/bass opening that then just completely fades away and plays no part in the song that follows. And yes, I get the Biblical reference again. I didn't say there weren't Biblical songs on the album, just that I don't see it as a concept based on the Good Book.
The organ plays a very prominent part in this, but really only succeeds in making the Doors comparisons even stronger, while “Am I Very Wrong?” has another lovely soft piano intro and a gentle vocal from Gabriel, with what sounds like flute - I know he plays it, so I wonder is it him? The song then gets a little harder as Banks hits the piano keyboard more forcefully, but it returns to the softer style then. It's probably a good example of how versatile Gabriel's voice would get, not quite changing from soft whisper to unhinged cackle here, but you can tell he was going to be a rare talent in the future. However if there's a real glimpse of what he would become it's in “In the Wilderness”, which is about as close to a song from
Trespass as you can get, even invoking memories of the later “Visions of Angels” from that album. Definitely one of my favourites on the album, and again it has that string accompaniment which really makes such a difference. This is actually a song I would prefer to be longer, but it's quite short, with a lovely piano outro too.
This motif is then taken up briefly by Rutherford on the guitar as we head into the hippy-inspired “The Conqueror”, which does little for me. It kind of has elements of early Floyd in it, I feel, and again Gabriel's vocal is strong and powerful, but the song itself is unimaginative and quite repetitive, while “In Hiding” has a lot more of Gabriel's presence in it, even if it does have a kind of too-jangly guitar, which the strings soften well. Naive as it may be lyrically, “One Day” is another standout, and the addition of trumpets works surprisingly well on the chorus. I hear elements of later “Stagnation” here and maybe even “Harlequin”. Lots of that affinity with nature I spoke of earlier in this song, and again very effective backing vocals, something that in fact Genesis would pare back after the next album, leaving Gabriel to drive the songs in his own inimitable way.
A nice kind of jangly piano opening “Window” (hah!) with some more of that flute, though lower register this time, so I have a feeling it's part of the orchestration, maybe clarinet or oboe or something. Another gentle vocal, very hippy/mother nature in the lyric, and yes it's another standout, one of the better tracks, and yet this simplicity in their music would disappear in the face of the much longer and more complicated song structures that the band would pursue from 1970 onwards, though it would resurface in shorter tracks like “More Fool Me” and “For Absent Friends” among others. “In Limbo” is very wishy-washy though, too much of the jazz and touches of soul in it for my tastes, but then the almost classical piano on “Silent Sun” is quite nice, though that's about as much as I can say about it. It's pretty obvious that it was intended as a single. And it was. And failed. Miserably. The album ends then on the shortest track. “A Place to Call My Own” runs for three seconds short of two minutes, and it's a really nice, low-key ending to what is generally a pretty low-key album, and on the face of it, probably exists as something of an embarrassment to a band who went on to find such fame.
TRACK LISTING
Where the Sour Turns to Sweet
In the Beginning
Fireside Song
The Serpent
Am I Very Wrong?
In the Wilderness
The Conqueror
In Hiding
One Day
Window
In Limbo
Silent Sun
A Place to Call My Own
As I said, if you had been listening to Genesis prior to this album and only went backwards later, as I did, to check out the earlier stuff, you might be hard-pressed to believe this was the same band. It's quite incredible really how much and how startlingly they changed in less than a year, and by the release of their second album they had parted company with Jonathan King, cut their first proper progressive rock album, and were on their way to spearheading the first wave of progressive rock in Britain. Of course, they would not achieve fame until much later, but before that happened they would release a slew of classic albums that would make the memory of this third-rate debut a very dim and thankfully forgotten one indeed.
Rating: 5.2/10