In my pre and early teens I spent a month of each summer at a sleepaway camp in cottage country. As camps are, this one was idyllic. I loved being there less for the activities than for the twigs crunching underfoot on its trails, the smell of blossom and bark, the deafening cicadas and the absence of parents and any real authority. They were, and remain, the happiest days of my life.
The ‘Main Camp’ area was a mess hall with a wide open field in front of it. Atop the mess hall roof was a single horn speaker that blasted at least 20 service messages a day, and then music in the not-long-enough intervals inbetween. There were at least a half-dozen such speakers capitalizing other structures throughout the camp, but this one was the loudest and had the widest reach.
Needless to say, the sound quality was awful. Indeed, it was hard enough to undertand the announcements, and the music that blasted forth was distorted with an EQ range you couldn’t swipe a credit card through. Still, I loved that music filled the camp all day long.
Then this one day, a single song stopped me dead in my tracks. This wasn’t Loggins & Messina or Cat Stevens or Neil Young or an ascendant Bruce Springsteen. I didn’t know what it was. But it was the most beautiful sound I’d ever heard. A light, pure, lyrical voice soared over a mass of plucked, ticklish instruments. The melody was impossible: now stepwise, now leaping, always high and sweet; the chords were friendly, but unfamiliar, and followed one another in bold progressions. It was long: a musical interlude featuring a dialogue between two completely unidentifiable instruments led back to a euphoric reprise of the song’s chorus. I thought my ears (or the horn speaker) were playing tricks on me. How on earth could sounds like this actually be made? Never, not ever, not for a second, neither now nor in the future, will I ever forget that moment. If you’ve ever walked around completely naked outdoors, that wouldn’t even begin to describe the nirvana I felt in that moment.
[I have to be honest, I can’t swear by this 16 August date. It might have been the 15th or the 18th. If I’m off, it’s only by a day or two either side. I know this because I do remember clearly that this seminal moment happened at the beginning of ‘Colour War’, a type of camp Olympics that took place in the third week of the four-week session. After all, it may very well have been the 16th, and like any good writer in 2022, I’m not going to let the facts get in the way of a good story. So there. It was certainly 16 August, 1976, one full year after my first concert and the fateful Melody Maker issue. And that’s the story I’m filing.]
I made a beeline for the camp office, from where the ‘thin on-air talent’ made his announcements and spun his disks. It was about an eight-minute walk, so this magical opus had ended three songs ago. It was like listening to my local FM station all over again to get the artist and title. Evan (I believe that was his name) sat behind a spartan wood desk with his ballcap on backward and his boots up.
“What song was that, three songs back? Who was that?”
“How did it go?”, asked Evan.
“I don’t know, it was long, and soft and high-pitched, with a lot of, I dunno, harps and stuff”.
Evan started singing the song’s soaring refrain.
“Yes! Yes!! Yes!!! That one!!!,” I panted, wait, no, squealed.
“It’s the new Genesis album. The song is called Ripples“. He pointed to the sepia-coloured album cover beside his boot.
“New album? I heard they broke up,” I said, trying to sound like I knew anything at all about this myth of a band.
Evan – three years my senior and a core fan – then walked me through the group’s history. They never broke up, he explained, only their frontman quit, which certainly looked like the end since this was the equivalent of Paul McCartney leaving Wings. The group’s drummer took over as the singer, and this was their first album with him at the mic.
The drummer?, I thought to myself. How is that even possible? Ignorant too of the Eagles‘ configuration, it seemed inconceivable to me that the same guy who was hitting things could also be singing things. Now by this point the only two songs I’d heard from Genesis were The Carpet Crawlers and Ripples, neither having drum parts high on the glass. I just supposed that they were able to do this because the drummer was playing some kind of magical, um, air-drums or something. I mean, what the hell kind of band was this, anyway?
For the week-plus remainder of that camp session, I kept an ear out for Evan over the horn speaker. And whenever I heard his underqualified-DJ voice, I ran like the wind to the camp office to make a certain song request. And each time my request was granted, I raced back to main camp and sailed away for at least eight, and maybe a hundred, minutes. God, I so loved being at camp. But now I needed to get home.
