Genesis & Giving Form to Uncertainty

My first concert was a conversion experience

“What’s your first concert?” is often a good conversation starter as the answers range from surprising to embarrassing to unremarkable. Like most of my memories from my adolescence, my own story is wrapped up with a bit of bereavement. And hope.

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On Thursday May 21, 1992 during the second year of my dad having cancer he was still kind of coasting, but it was becoming more difficult to believe he would recover. The cancer had spread from his liver into his lungs. He had a titanium pump surgically implanted in his abdomen. The pump released medication directly into his liver.

“I’m not sure if I can do it, Bec,” my dad told my mom.

“It’s just for tonight and it might be the last time the band tours for a while,” she said.

My parents had purchased tickets to go see Genesis, the pop/rock group then comprised of drummer and singer Phil Collins, keyboardist Tony Banks, and bassist and guitarist Mike Rutherford (with touring musicians Chester Thompson and Daryl Stuermer). With soaring melodies, gated toms and pumping synth arpeggios the members of Genesis (and producer Hugh Padgham) had helped to define what the 1980’s sounded like, and the We Can’t Dance tour of 1992 would be something of a belated bookend to the decade.

“If it was in Cincinnati or Dayton I would go. But I just don’t think I am feeling well enough to go all the way to Indianapolis and back tonight.”

“Alright,” my mom said. It was a familiar situation by then: my parents would make plans with each other or other couples or sometimes with us kids, but when the day arrived my dad might not be able to overcome the fatigue and general weirdness brought on by the chemotherapy and various medications he was on.

“What if Joe takes your ticket?” My mom suggested.

“Don’t you think he’s a little too young to go to a big stadium concert like that?” My dad said. I was eleven years old. I had been in the kitchen perched up on the counter during their entire conversation.

“What do you think, Joe? Would you like to go to the concert?” my dad finally asked.

“Yeah. It sounds fun.” I said with characteristic nonchalance.

I would often listen to Genesis albums on cassette with headphones o. I knew the Genesis self-titled record from ’83, their album Invisible Touch from ’86, as well as Phil Collins’ solo albums Face Value and No Jacket Required. And some of Mike Rutherford’s impressive solo project Mike + the Mechanics that delivered the hit "The Living Years” from the album of the same name.

My parents agreed that my mom would take me to the concert instead of my dad. The Hoosier Dome in Indianapolis had been a special place for my dad. My parents had lived in Indianapolis for a short time before I was born, and dad regretted that he would not be able to make the trip out to Indy there from Trenton, OH to watch the English band. So that night as I squeezed into the car with my mom and my friend Katie’s parents Chuck and Sandy Fields, I felt lucky to be able to go. I felt as if I had an almost moral responsibility to enjoy the show for my father. Initially, this was challenging.

Soon after we filed into the crowded stadium we found our folded seats right in the center (if we had been watching the Indianapolis Colts play we would have been on the fifty yard line). The house lights went off, the band took the stage, and Phil Collins began singing “Land of Confusion,” the plodding dystopian rock hit. Within the first few seconds of the song Collins sang “been haunted by a million screams” and a woman behind me started throwing up. I was shocked by the amount of people there, the chaos and the ear-splitting loudness. The bass filled my lungs.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked my mom, pointing to the women who had just thrown up. My mom cupped my ear like a funnel and told me over the screams of the crowd and the loudness of the music: “She’s okay. She just had too much to drink!”

As I settled into the show my initial shock gave way to a strange excitement. It was like church, I thought — the weird dancing, the sense of loss and grasping and reflection and rebirth in the lyrics and the dissolving barrier between personal and communal experience — except with the stench of beer and vomit and an intensity of human emotion that felt more truthful and accessible than anything I’d ever experienced. That night, (and for only a few other dates on that tour according to the internet) they performed “Mama”. Tthe song was both terrifying and moving, beginning with an industrial mechanical groove and a halloween-esque synth solo before moving into comical evil laughing and then a long impassioned melodic plea.

So stay, don't leave me, mama
'Cause it's getting so hard, oh

Much of the set seemed to speak to what I had been feeling as a child. I was staring down the impending death of my dad and the uncertainty of life ahead. Everything felt precarious and impossible. I was changing, my life was going to change. But music and the arts helped so much; by giving form to those feelings of uncertainty, by defining those emotions with sounds and words it was as if they could be pinned down and controlled, however momentarily.

During the following weeks and months I could not stop thinking about Phil Collins. Yes, that Phil Collins. The very uncool Phil Collins. I’d close my eyes and there he would be on stage in Indianapolis singing, and inviting the crowd to sing with him. I took my cassette player to school and I told my friends P.J. and Sam and John all about it. I was so proud and excited that I had been to a big concert, my very first concert in fact.

I didn’t know if Phil Collins was a nice guy (my mom told me he’d had the audacity to fax his wife when he asked her for a divorce—rather then calling her) or if he was particularly smart or anything. He had a receding hairline like my dad and he was my dad’s age. I doubted he was as funny as my dad. Phil Collins just seemed like some guy, and maybe that was part of the appeal.

Phil Collins was a damn good drummer who fell into the role of lead singer kind of out of necessity to keep the band going in the mid 70’s. He was never particularly poetic. Most of the more abstract lyrics were written by the other members of Genesis. He was not particularly good looking, implied by the humorous hit single “I Can’t Dance”. But he was a good singer and seemed self-aware in a way that gave him just enough charm and charisma. The song and the We Can’t Dance tour seemed to get at something that I realized was important. That the three of them—Phil and Mike and that other guy—had just somehow ended up there in the stage lights projecting their innermost desires and fears out to an audience of fifty thousand strangers in Indianapolis, it all seemed so magical and improbable and weird. That they had been making music together for so many decades seemed incredible, too.

In the following days, when I came back to the Genesis records and Phil Collins records with headphones on, the albums then seemed smaller and more intimate as if I could now see right into the brains of the middle-aged lyricists and musicians. I knew just enough about music from piano lessons to begin to appreciate some of the melodic decisions, but the production of the records felt mysterious and alchemical. Then after seeing the concert, I seemed to start to hear the decisions they made in the studio: the guitar comes in there. The snare hits right there and again on the and of four. After having seen real people playing their actual instruments, and then listening to recordings of those people, everything about listening to music started to change. Recorded music seemed intuitive and yet brimming with alternative possibilities. I began to feel a draw towards songwriting and music and creative expression that would grow and grow, and would ultimately change the course of my life.

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Recently, my own son told me “Dad, when I am watching TV I feel free.” I laughed because it seemed so absurd. After all, he spends most of his allotted screen-time watching computer generated videos of monster trucks crashing into each other (and, perhaps for counterbalance some David Attenborough-narrated nature documentaries). But I know what he means: media and the arts transport us and invite us into other worlds. Worlds where we can be ourselves and perhaps some other version of ourselves, a version that feels seen or known or unburdened in a way that we can’t feel during the mundanity of daily life as we are putting on our shoes, brushing our teeth. His favorite album is the Tarzan soundtrack by Phil Collins, of course.