Phil and Johnny

    I had the good fortune not long ago, to catch up with a dear friend that I had not talked to in a long, long time. As with a lot of enduring friendships, we picked up right where we left off. After the initial pleasantries and family questions, we dove right into what started our friendship all those years ago...Music. We both play instruments and music has always been a huge part of our lives. We've played in bands together and we've argued with each other. We both have varied tastes; some of which are similar (Pop, Rock, even Classical), and some, well, not so similar. He still refuses to acknowledge my abiding affection for Barry Manilow; and I am dumbfounded by his love affair with British Punk and New Wave. Which brings us to our story; the story of Phil and Johnny.

    At some point (don't ask me how) our conversation turned to one of my favorite bands...Genesis. Matt is also a fan, but he prefers the early, Peter Gabriel, years. This, in turn, led to talking about Phil Collins who took over as lead singer in 1975 when Gabriel left the band to pursue a solo career. Now, this led to Matt going off about the so-called war between between punk and progressive rock. The British Punk scene was represented by The Clash and The Sex Pistols; the Prog Rock bands included Yes, Pink Floyd, and Genesis. For our purposes, Matt and I focused on The Sex Pistols and Genesis. Matt talked about how The Sex Pistols were at war with progressive rock. The Sex Pistols were angry young men who hated the dreamy Jung men with their Hipgnosis album art (Get it? Jung Men and HipGNOSIS? Pretty good, huh?), their endless concept albums, and Peter Gabriel dressing up in costumes so crazy that he couldn't get a microphone anywhere near him. The progs were pretentious and effete and disdained, not only for being able to READ music (the heavens forfend), but for packing their lyrics with symbols from the collective unconscious. You know, songs like Roundabout by Yes, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway by Genesis, and Pink Floyd's The Wall. The progs were the decadent ancient regime to punk's snotty lower class French Revolutionaries. 

    Matt said The Pistols drew much of their energy from the desire to make overfed dinosaurs like Genesis extinct. They just despised the whole prog rock scene. They would have pogoed jubilantly on the wreckage of shattered Melotrons and twin-necked Gibsons and their long-overdue graves. Their hour, 1977, had come. That summer, which was the Silver Jubilee year for Queen Elizabeth II, The Sex Pistols released a single titled God Save The Queen. It was, at least for the Royals and much of England, embarrassing. It also created all kinds of embarrassment for the BBC. On the other hand, Matt said that many youngsters cackled with delight at the song, as well as Rotten's snarling intro to Anarchy in the UK. 

    But it seems that Genesis remained a guilty pleasure. Six months later, The Sex Pistols had imploded, their last sour date played out in San Francisco. Only a decade earlier, the city had been home to the Summer of Love, but now it was hosting a small, private winter of fathomless discontent.

    In March 1978, Genesis released ...And Then There Were Three..., the band’s first album since lead guitarist Steve Hackett announced that actually, he couldn’t anymore, and followed the band's former vocalist Peter Gabriel through the emergency exit. The new record was a commercial and critical success, especially in the States, and despite anticipating Twitter by a full 30 years, “Follow You Follow Me” gave them a top 10 single, and allowed the band to tour profitably in the States for the first time.

    The new, shorter, punchier pop songs, trimmed of the excesses of the Gabriel years, established a template for the next 20 years. As a three-piece, Genesis were regenerated, and ultimately grew to exceed their fans’ expectations—and their detractors’ worst fears—to become one of the biggest bands on the planet. An uncanny knack for hitting the sweet spot between album-oriented rock and chart pop elevated Phil Collins, in particular, to earn the epithet “ubiquitous.” Originally enlisted as the band’s drummer, Collins became, by several important metrics, the single most successful recording artist of the '80s—the decade of Madonna, Prince, and Michael Jackson. Johnny Rotten, meanwhile, discarded his punk moniker, and as John Lydon, had only the bitterest pill to follow, with a band named PiL (Public Image Limited) attaining critical acclaim with discordant post-punk, but only a little commercial success.

    It's now been forty-plus years and Genesis has finished their, we hope, final tour; and by a conservative calculation, they took home about $3,000,000 a NIGHT. Lydon was also on tour around the same time, but he wasn't singing (or indeed “singing” as my mother would still have it). Instead, he spent his “tour" giving an account of himself in spoken word, and settling a few scores for good measure. The former Mr. Rotten was doing small theaters with capacities of about 450.

    So, is this, then, the final vindication of Genesis? Is popularity the final triumph? I mean, money talks, even if it can't dance. The triumph of patience, musicianship, and ambition over simplicity and attitude? Should Lydon lie down on Broadway and accept defeat? I mean, whether or not there was an actual war between punk and prog-rock, Matt made it clear that the “punkers” would have delighted in the demise of prog-rock. 

    Let no man be called truly happy, while he yet lives. Lydon may be playing to a lower gallery, but he gives every impression of having fire in his belly and grit to spare. Genesis, meanwhile, judging not only from the publicity but also from the almost palpable physical discomfort of their lead singer, will almost certainly be making this their last lap of the Jurassic Park. Lydon might still get to pogo on their collective, corporate grave.

    Phil has made no secret of his health challenges, which is just a sad euphemism for a degree of disability and chronic pain which I suspect he would describe as “crocked” (I think that's the British term), if not something stronger. Basically, his spine is shot. That spine, which was once his brass neck, seems to have succumbed to the physiological punishment of over sixty-years of banging things with sticks. Operations, which may have made things worse, on three damaged vertebrae have left him unable to drum and barely able to walk. The Swiss air to which he exiled himself for a time didn't make a damn bit of difference. 

    It is said that all mammals have roughly the same number of heartbeats in a lifetime—whether small, fast, and short-lived, like a shrew’s or, huge, slow and venerable like an elephant’s. Perhaps the same goes for drummers. Collins’s career saw him drum for 40 years with one of the world’s biggest bands, and then on his own solo records and tours … and then take session work, too, just to keep his hand in. No wonder he's screwed up! And it's one thing to hear about this, but it's a whole other thing, dear reader, to see it. I have to be honest with you, if Phil had been healthy, or at least healthy enough, I might have shelled out the money to see them on their farewell tour. But when I saw early videos of the tour in Europe, there was no way. I didn't want to remember him like that. I mean, his enormous face—sunken-cheeked, belligerent, unshaven, etched with pain—seemed to be unaware of his command of the stage at times as it chewed and resettled its dentures. It was a vision of unvarnished truth, more suited to Shakespeare's King Lear than the expected glamour and allure of the world-conquering rock star. The spectacle was deeply unsettling, as though we had been invited to observe an oblivious patient on a monitor, before discussing treatment options. And then he would flick his eyes up to meet ours—and we would realize that he knew, after all. 

    Collins may have issues with his actual spine, but watching his endurance onstage, I don’t think anyone could question his metaphorical one, or his guts. There was sinew in this rejection of dignity, of polish. He resembled that aging, embattled Lear, determined to prove to a devoted court that, despite all his trappings of wealth and prestige, he remains unable to turn back the only tide that really matters. It was tough to watch. For those of us who loved the sheer romance of early Genesis, it felt almost like a rebuke. Father Time is, indeed, undefeated.

    There was a time when listening to a great Genesis song—compositions like “The Musical Box” and the band’s sprawling 23-minute 1972 masterpiece, “Supper’s Ready,” or their later classic, “Tonight, Tonight, Tonight”—was like exploring a sumptuous garden, with fountains and sundials, caught in unexpected shafts of sunlight that you had forgotten since last you wandered in. Gorgeous melodies and labyrinthine musical arrangements were complemented by Peter Gabriel’s, breathtaking lyrical originality, bursting with ideas, imaginative flights of fancy, and allusions to English literature, myth, and the King James Bible. Those songs left you with the sense that you had been gone for much longer than their allotted time on the disc would seem to allow. A great Genesis song was an opium dream, the musical equivalent of a Thomas Pynchon novel, and as the needle settled finally into the run out groove you would blink to find yourself back in the room, as the jungle growth withdrew into the wallpaper.

    I remember reading an interview with Bruce Springsteen saying that his saxophonist Clarence Clemons—a huge bear of a black man who offset Springsteen’s scrawny white kid—allowed him to tell a bigger story than he was able to tell alone. There was something of this in what Collins brought to Genesis, too. The band formed at the ancient and venerable Charterhouse School in Surrey, England when its members were just 15 years old, and it was full of conservatory-standard talent. Collins arrived later, replacing John Mayhew on drums in time to record the band’s 1971 album, Nursery Cryme, and while he was by no means a street-kid, he was something more like an everyman who had not been born with a silver spoon in his mouth. For many years, this helped broaden the band’s appeal and allowed them to stuff their bank balances like weekly PowerBall winners.

    Seeing Collins contorted in a wheel-chair, like Grandfather Smallweed in Dickens' Bleak House, while his two bandmates, Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks, swayed on either side of him, painlessly upright in elegant, soft grey fashions, bordered on the grotesque. It was like a Far Side cartoon on the ineradicable nature of privilege and class, rather than evidence of the dynamic tension every band needs to achieve creative synthesis. It was everything that punk disdained. But I can’t imagine John Lydon taking any pleasure in this at all.

    Again, based on my conversation with Matt, to say that Lydon has mellowed would be a huge over-simplification, not only of who he is now but of who he was then, both of which were media distortions if not inventions. And, frankly, I'm not qualified to offer much insight into either, as the Punk rock scene was not really my thing. But I suspect that Johnny Rotten is at least more willing to let us see his human side now. His wife of over 40 years, Nora Forster, had been suffering from Alzheimer’s for some time and died in 2023. He had devoted himself to her full-time care for some time. In 2010, Forster’s daughter Ariane—better known as Ari Up, lead singer of the female post-punk outfit The Slits—died of breast cancer at the much too young age of 48. Lydon knows something about human frailty, mortality, and loss.

    I have the sense that after many years, not on the field of combat but behind the bare timber of the cheapest proscenium arch, the paint has mostly worn off both these aging front men. Both were iconic and pugnacious in their day, but human, all too human, as well. Today, it is not prog, let alone Genesis, that attracts Lydon's ire, but what he perceives to be the betrayal of his ex-bandmates, who have sold out the Pistols’ musical legacy to a TV show—people that do indeed, as he sneered in an interview, see it as nothing more than product.

    According to Matt, Lydon was years ahead of his time, on everything from the Savile Row (a street in London famous for fine men's tailoring and the street where the Beatles played their final rooftop concert) to the shark-infested waters in which he was swimming, but I doubt he took much pleasure in seeing a fellow icon—and émigré—working through pain to give his fans a chance to say one last farewell, to him and to each other. I'd like to think he felt a twinge of grudging kinship. They may not have reached the churchyard cemetery quite yet, but their paths are beginning to converge, as all must in the end. 

write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com