It’s still Saturday 16 August, 1975.
The new issue of the British weekly music newspaper Melody Maker has hit the racks, and an English music public just five years removed from the breakup of the Beatles is now wiping away another cold bucket of icewater: Genesis is falling apart.
Nowhere on the cover or in any of its pages is a mention of the BTO concert happening later that day in Montreal. British snobbery hard at play.
Nor, for that matter, is one particular fan at that BTO concert aware that a keystone prog-rock outfit (who he knows in name only) is about to expire. Of Genesis, he ain’t seen nothin’ yet, and now may never.
It’s just days after my first concert, and I’m tuned to that local FM station again. I’ve been on the listen for some mention of Saturday’s gig, from which I’m still hyperventilating. Nothing yet.
I’m enjoying the musical programming, though. Those early days of FM radio were unrecognizable from today’s slick productions. On-air talent was cheap and thin, and sounded it. Unlike AM radio, there were few ads and no fast-talking intros between three-minute hits. Rather, 20-minute-long blocks of songs were queued up and run uninterrupted, and if you wanted to know the artist or song title, you had to wait ’til the end of that sequence for the DJ to tell you what he just played, in reverse order.
A song caught my ear. It was a gentle, murmuring narrative delivered by a raspy, now-whispering, now-tortured voice in repetitive turns with a queer, riddling refrain:
You gotta get in to get out…
There was a supporting musical layer underneath, but there seemed to be no real beat and no instrumental sounds that I could identify, just some opaque tapestry. Meditative the song, it had no form – only a verse, then a refrain; then a verse, then a refrain; a verse, a refrain. It just poured mysteriously, like sweet lava. It had no beginning, no end, only colour and flavour and smell. It made me dizzy.
“Genesis,” the DJ told us three songs later, as I counted back his playlist entries. I’d heard of them, somewhere, somewhen. Then, hard up against the top of the hour, the thin on-air talent delivered a minutes-long eulogy for this so-called ‘art rock’ group that had just, it seemed, announced its breakup over the weekend. He was genuinely distraught.
What a shame, I thought, I’d like to have heard some more of whatever the hell that was…
