‘I fell in love’: The musician Phil Collins said influenced every prog-rock band
Phil Collins has done so much for rock and roll that people tend to forget his skills as a drummer.
Although many people just remember all of the massive radio hits or even the soundtrack to Tarzan when talking about his legacy, it’s hard to really talk about his greatest moments without bringing up every single complicated drum fill that he ever played when working with Genesis. He singlehandedly reshaped what prog-rock drumming could sound like, but he felt that some of the greatest musicians in the world needed to bow down to the true greats of musical history.
Because when looking at prog, none of it was created in a vacuum. No one might have heard what a band like King Crimson were doing whenever they made one of their records, but it was all about refining the listener’s palette whenever they started making their classics. This was a new art form, but what made it sound so different was that it was a hodgepodge of all that had come before.
Take Emerson, Lake and Palmer, for instance. The power trio created some of the most forward-looking progressive music of all time, but when looking beyond their status as one of the finest players in the world, there are more than a few pieces of their work that are note-for-note recreations of what classical musicians did back in the day. Even Jethro Tull reinterpreted Bach on their records, but Collins wasn’t exactly looking that far back for inspiration.
Being a drummer, the groove was where everything started for him, and a lot of that came down to listening to some of the greatest swing bands that ever lived. Jazz was the main vocabulary that Collins studied alongside Genesis, and when looking at the biggest names in jazz, it didn’t get much better than what Buddy Rich could do whenever he started working with the greatest musicians he could find.
Rich wasn’t necessarily looking to make the catchiest music of all time, but it was all about getting the band to swing in just the right way. He was pulling out some of the most complicated drum fills that anyone had ever heard, but there was a lot more structure to it than most jazz players who try to play a million notes per second and try to outplay everyone next to them on the bandstand.
So when prog started becoming more prominent on the charts, Collins said that everyone had Buddy Rich to thank for breaking down that door, saying, “I was exposed to the Buddy Rich big band, his first band after a long layoff for financial reasons. And he did this new album, a live album in Las Vegas. And it had this West Side Story medley on it. And I just heard it and fell in love with it. It influenced the arrangements of Genesis and it changed the arrangements of Yes. All those bands in the ’70s that were kind of doing that stuff were influenced by some of the jazz big bands.”
Prog was the more prominent genre at the time, but if you wanted a more authentic look at where jazz music could be going, it was in the fusion world. Collins had already tried his hand working with groups like Brand X, but everyone from the UK to Weather Report was throwing their pop hits out the window and trying their best to make the greatest technical workouts that the world had ever heard.
But even if the songs themselves are fairly complicated to work through if you’re new to the instrument, it wasn’t a case of everyone trying to overplay. The best way to make Rich proud was to know the intricacies of any song they played, and even if the drummer didn’t get the most love in any rock band, the jazz legend was out there to prove that it was an art form all its own.
