The drummer Peter Gabriel compared to Jimi Hendrix: “Unacknowledged genius”
As the furore of the 1960s came to a close, a peculiar entity arrived with a record called From Genesis to Revelation. Legend has it that the reason only 600 copies were sold was that the album found itself in the religious section of record stores, but Mike Rutherford can’t remember seeing it anywhere in any section, so perhaps that stark lack of circulation is was what hamstrung the launch of Genesis more so than erroneous categorisation.
Truth be told, in 1969, where would you place Genesis? They didn’t have the paisley to be primed for psychedelia; they weren’t heavy enough to clobbered in with the emerging racket Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin were making, but they were far from good old rock ‘n’ roll, too. They were, in fact, harbingers of this weird new world called prog. While on paper, Jimi Hendrix has nothing to do with this emergence, the fact he brought a profound level of virtuosity to bands was pivotal to their development.
Suddenly, classical chops were hip, and if the dream of peace and love was slowly dying, then perhaps intellectualism should find out why. So, prog steadily came to the fore even if Genesis initially faltered. However, even new experiments have their heroes, so who inspired Rutherford, Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, and Steve Hackett?
Well, the song ‘The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway’ was perceived as a hint when it was released in 1974. It had long been established that every virtuoso was fond of Hendrix, so he was already a given when it comes to prog influences, but the protagonist’s name in this song, Rael, rang a bell with fans of The Who after the mod group owing to the band’s 1967 The Who Sell Out song cycle, ‘Rael (1 and 2)’.
In 2010, Mojo asked Gabriel if this nod was a tribute, and he took the opportunity to heap praise upon Keith Moon. “It was a subconscious tribute because I certainly wasn’t aware of it at the time. I spent a long time thinking of that name, like Ra the Sun God. But I was a big Who fan, so it may have got in there,” the songwriter explained.
“Obviously, Townshend created much of the musical environment and delivered the angst with an intelligence and passion and extraordinary musicality. But to this day, as a drummer, I think Keith Moon was the unacknowledged genius. He was like Jimi Hendrix: when he was on – and he wasn’t always – it flowed out of him in a free way that was inspiring, driving, magnificent.”
Indeed, his raucous ways carried a similar unencumbered energy that Hendrix was able to achieve in full flow. Townshend himself reflected a similar sentiment when it came to Hendrix. “What Jimi was doing was sublime,” the guitarist recalled. “It was an epiphany in the actual dictionary definition of the word. You felt pained because in his presence and in the presence of that music, you felt small. And you realised how far you had to go.”
And there is a definite kinship to the way he discussed Moon, too. “Keith Moon is a legend in many ways, one of the areas in which Roger and I have come to appreciate Keith since he has gone is that theres no drummer who is quite so orchestral,” he told Ultimate Classic Rock. “He was an embellisher, a decorator, he was a percussionist in the truest sense.
Continuing: “He could keep a beat, but that wasn’t what he aimed at. He aimed at decoration, augmentation, at supporting the music, at generating uplift. That was his passion when he played. And it’s where his personality expressed itself most acutely. He just exploded in a continual stream of machine-gun spurts of energy.”
Perhaps the pivotal words in both cases for Genesis were “orchestral” and “epiphany”. While the band might have been wrongly categorised as religious when they first emerged, there was a religiosity to the level of profundity they were trying to ply into the re-arrangements of simple rock.
