"Gawd," said Tony Banks: "This is a big car!" There docked in front of the HBO offices near Grammercy Park in Manhatten, waiting to sail majestically uptown to the new WNEW studios, was the mother of all limos. It didn't have its own pool, like the one in the back of Phil COllins' car in the "Take Me Home" video, but it would do. So, with the Keyboard cassette recorder firmly in our grip-an earlier tape machine had been lost a few nights before in Soho, but that's another story- we followed Banks, Collins, and Mike Rutherford into the megamobile, praying all the while for a traffic jam.
Though our interview time had been cut short due to the usual scheduling chaos, we wound up getting nearly everything we needed by the time we reached the radio station. Banks, Collins, and Rutherford-a.k.a. Genesis-are pros in the interview department. After some 20 years in the pop music whirl, the last 13 of them a trio, they've learned how to speak both very clearly and very quickly when time is short. A nice trick, especially sine few comparible huge showbiz phenoms try so hard to really answer the questions they're asked.
With We Can't Dance just released and the debut single, "No Son Of Mine," already shooting toward the top of the Billboard charts in its first week, Genesis is about as big-time as you can get. So of course, they deserve that big car, especially since there are three of them. In an era when pop icons tend to be singular-Madonna, Paula Abdul, name your Jackson-these guys are a bona fide band. They have the same sense of interplay, the same preference for collective creativity, that any other band has. Though each has his own solo career and side interests, when they come together as Genesis they are just as much an all-for-one king of outfit as they were back in the '60s, when they founded the group specifically as a "song-writing collective."
The cars were smaller then, but music was in some respects bigger. By the early 70s, working as a fivesome with guitarist Steve Hackett, and singer Peter Gabriel, they were honing a style based on extended pieces whose marathon structures were tempered by a disclination to indulge in the kinds of flashy, wanking-off display some of their collegues in the progressive rock movement embraced. Where ELP, for example, sometimes created the impression of three guys duking it out in a Battle of the Virtuosos-"This band ain't big enough for the three of us, stranger! Take that drum solo!" "Oh yeah? Well, watch this arpeggio, hombre!"-Genesis always came across as the product of a unified artistic vision.
Further, their flair for drama, their interest in sound, and their pursuit of simple central ideas even in the most distended arrangements, anticipated those qualities that guide pop music in the '80s and '90s. After whitling down to trio size, they pared their sound as well. But even on their new bite-sized singles-"That's All" from 1983, "Invisible Touch" from '86, and the current hit-their old prog sensibilities add a feeling of dimension rarely heard in mainstream radio today. What other band, for instance, risks the kinds of titanic climaxes heard in "Tonight, Tonight, Tonight," from Invisible Touch or, more recently, "Driving the Last Spike" from We Can't Dance?
When we met Genesis at HBO, they were just staggering out of several hours' worth of banter with a sequence of interrogators who, in their own remarkable display of inadvertent collectivism, seemed to ask the same questions over and over again. This left us with an obvious opening gambit.
[B: Banks ; C: Collins ; R: Rutherford]
So what haven't you been asked yet today?
R: Nobody's asked about keyboards.
Okay. So, Tony, what kind of rig did you use on We Can't Dance?
T: A lot of the stuff has changed in the five years since we did Invisible Touch. I was using the [Emu] Emulator II a lot on that. On this record, I used the Korg Wavestation a lot; that's really the most important one. I also used the Ensoniq VFX, the Roland JD-800, and the EIII.
So you've moved up from your old Emulator.
B: Yeah, although in some ways the Emulator II is much easier to handle. The main advantage with the EIII is the fact that it's stereo. It's great to be able to do stereo sampling; you end up with a much better sound. The fact that you can manipulate that sound to a greater degree is good too. But by the same token, I quite like sampled sounds that are very imperfect; sometimes that gives them a strong character. Rather than fiddle around too much with the samples I've taken, I tend to use whatever I end up with. If I can make it sound good in a piece of music, I'm happy.
Would that noisy sample that you play in "No Son Of Mine" as a minor third be an example?
B: Certainly, although I cheated a bit because on the video it looks like I'm playing a descending minor third, but in fact the sample was [hums the figure]. I t was a bit of guitar noise from Mike, slowed down. It sounds like this fabulous thing, but it wasn't.
R: Thank you very much [laughs]!
B: What I mean was, it was very ambient, very distant. It wasn't set up like, "Okay, Mike, I'm gonna start sampling now." I've often got a mike set up on the Emulator, and every now and then I switch it on without telling anyone what I'm doing. I'll just sample around 18 seconds in the room and see what happens. In this case, that was what I did, and that sound, which is like an elephant trumpeting, is what sets that whole song in motion. Sounds like that don't necessarily end up on the track, byt they can set you off on an idea and change the mood.
"No Son of Mine," where you brighten your pad sound as you go into the chorus, is also a good example of how you often use changing texture as a dramatic device.
B: In the old days I used to do that a lot on the filter with Polymoogs and stuff like that, but on this song I used a simpler method, which was to play one pad and, through MIDI, fade a second one in. I had an ooo-ey sort of sound on the Wavestation, then I faded up a brassy VFX sound. It's more controllable than opening up the filter, which I was always desperately trying to do not too fast. Also, it's easier to do in the rehearsal room. The idea came out of the improvisation while we were writing the song. All the soundson the record are pretty much what I played when we were first working out the ideas.
C: On the overdub stage, we all chip in a bit on the sounds...
B: ...because every overdub we do is an extra thing that wasn't part of the original song and can therefore change the character of a song. You want to be careful about what you add, so at that stage we do confer.
The electric piano sound on the title cut certainly seems to have been a fundamental ingredient in the concept of the song.
B: That song actually went through lots of changes. Whan we started playing it, we did a much heavier thing. Mike had a basic riff, and I was playing the same part on synth at that stage. Then we extended it and did a few little turns to make it into a 16-bar pattern. We defined the song that way, but it wasn't very exciting.
R: It was getting to sound a bit older fashioned, like something >from "Squonk" [from A Trick of the Tail, 1976], with more layers. But the minute Tony hit that pattern on the drum machine, it made it a little bit ...
C: ...more modern.
B: It changed the whole character. One thing about playing the drum part on the JD-800, as I did on that, is that is stopped me from playing any keyboards at the beginning of the song. That's not a bad thing necessarily, but as soon as you put a keyboard on that kind of song, you change it's character. Without the keyboard it sounds a bit Stoneish; with the synth playing the riff it sounds a bit more slick.
When you do come in on "We Can't Dance," your part is very minimal. In some places, you're just playing two quarter notes.
B: The piano part on that one is one of the most minimal things I've ever done. I was thinking of early Traffic. "Feelin' Alright" was a great song, but very simple.
Was that an actual electric piano?
B: It's the Roland VK-1000, set on a very middle-y kind of sound.
Why did you do the drum part on the JD-800?
B: It was quite fun to use the special drum setting, which I didn't even know was there when I bought the instrument. I got the JD-800 because I like the idea of fiddling with the knobs. I hate multi-function buttons. They're the bane of modern keyboard playing. Even here you're got a degree of multi-functioning; otherwise there would be too many buttons. But I didn't realize it was doind to be such a good preset instrument as well. The sounds on the JD-800 are really good. They've got great clarity.
Do you use the onboard effects on the JD-800 and the Wavestation, or do you add your effects in the studio?
B: I've started using the effects in these instruments more and more because that makes it easier to change instantly from one sound to another without having to set up everything again in the rack. I've never been very good at doing MIDI control of multi-effects manually, so it's nice to be able to go from a radically ambient sound to a very dry one just by flicking a button. The effects in the Wavestation are particularly easy to access. It's got a great variety of fuzzbox-type stuff, which I love. The best thing about it, though, is its lovely sustained sounds. I also use a couple of the Wavestation's lead sounds quite extensively.
How do you decide whether to use live drums or a drum machine on any Genesis song?
C: If the part is more percussive than usual, and not just a simulation of real drums, we usually end up keeping the drum machine part and overdubbing drums to the percussion part, which is really important to the mood of the song. But when the drum sounds are regular snare and regular bass drums, you usually need real drums. It also depends on how intrinsic the drum sound is to the mood of the song. On something like "Fading Lights," the atmosphere is set up by the drum machine.
You seem to have a trademark drum machine sound-basically the sound of the pattern on "Take Me Home."
C: The Roland drum machine definitely have got the edge on anything else when it comes to those kinds of sounds. They're all percussion sounds-not timbales, triangles, and claves, but odd percussion sounds that you can't identify.
There were several cuts on We Can't Dance where those types of sounds played a major role. Are these drum sequences typically the starting point when you write these songs?
C: Quite often. Sometimes there are patterns which have been floating around in the machine from my home use. They can be a good basis to start something, then you can just take them out at the end. At other times, I'll just turn the machine on in rehearsal and start mucking about. It's like bait: You wait to see if anybody picks it up [laughs].
On "Living Forever" the live drums come in midway through the song to supplement the drum machine pattern.
C: The original working title for that song was "Hip-Hop Brushes." I had gotten some new disks for my [E-mu] SP-1200. One of them was a jazz kit, and while the regular drum sounds didn't interest me, the brush concept did seem original. So I wrote a pattern with them that happened to be a hip-hop kind of thing. I tried to make it sound like what a drummer would actually play. Then we started playing off of that.
Do you play brushes yourself?
C: Not for quite a while. On a Clapton tour I played with brushes on "Can't Find My Way Home."
It would seem harder to get the subtleties of brush work into a drum machine pattern than to do a convincing stick pattern.
C: That's true, but to be honest, the brush pattern on "Living Forever" took me ten minutes to write. Normally at a writing session, in the moments of silence between one idea and the next idea, I'll very quickly program something at random. That's how this pattern happened. All our drum machine parts happen quickly. You have to get something going before everybody pust his instrument down and goes for a cup of tea [laughs].
Your drum sounds are a hot item on the sample market. How do you feel about that?
C: Well, I do think that the sound is only 50 percent of it. It's how you use the sound that really matters. You can sample Eric Clapton's guitar and get that sound, but you still nees the personality to really get his sound.
B: And the sound is never the same twice, in actual fact. This is the illusion: A sound can seem the same on two different records, but in fact a different sound was used to produce the same effect on the second song. So if you take what may be a Phil Collins snare and put it in another song, it soesn't always sound right at all.
C: People are always saying that I have a big ambient sound. But with [previous Genesis producer] Hugh Padgham, and even with [We Can't Dance producer] Nick Davis, even if we kept the mikes up between songs, we always stripped everything down in the sound and started with a clean sketch each time.
B: Sometimes people think there's more magic in it than there actually is. It's quite easy to produce these sounds yourself. Whether it's drum sounds, keyboard sounds, or anything else, you don't have to think, "If I steal this, I'll have something really great." You can recreate those sounds yourself.
C: The other thing is, of course, that the two most widely sampled [drum] sounds are "Sussudio" and "Don't Lose My Number," and coth of those are drum machines. I actually bougth an [E-mu] SP-12 with those sounds on it. But "Don't Lose My Number" is a Linn, although tom-tom filees occasionally crop up. And the backbeat and bass drum on "Sussudio" is a Roland, with a mixture of Oberheim DMX. I didn't even do that one; David Frank did.
Still, when you're actually playing, is there a consistent approach that you folow in order to attain some sort of continuity in sound?
C: I always mike my drums in a regular fashion, pretty much the way everybody mikes drums. But the environment is interesting. The room at the Farm, where we do our stuff, is loosely based on the room where we did peter Gabriel's third album and my first three solo albums, When you clap your hands in it, it seems dead but it's incredibly live. Even with the carpet on the floor and padding on the walls, it's surprising how live it is. That's why my drums always sound so ambient. We put mikes in the left and right top corners of the room to get that ambience, and they're compressed as hell, squezzed almost to the point of distortion. If I'm not using cymbals, we often put gates on the drums to make them sound more interesting. Of course, if I'm using cymbals, we can't use gates, becauses that would screw up the decay.
Is it a problem to reproduce that effect live?
C: Yes it is. That's why on my tours and on the last Genesis tour we ended up triggering sounds. When you're onstage, you've got no confined space to work with. If you put compressors on overheads above the kit, all you get is the audience noise coming up when you're not playing. Unless you put the drummer in a soundproof box, which obviously alienates him from the audience, you can't do it. I wish we had more sophisticated triggering at this stage. There's always the problem with double triggering when you're dealing with an acoustic instrument like drums.
What role did the drum machine play in composing "Driving the Last Spike?"
C: That was basically written on the 1200. The same drum machine pattern worked at various stages of loudness throughout the whole song. Bit by bit, we took each section as it came once we put real drums on it, then started working on what to keep from the original drum machine. We replaced the machine cabasa with two live cabasas. It's nice to have certain elements of the drum machine in there but at the same time to make it human.
B: There's an old drum machine pattern of Mike's, actually, that all the bits were originally written on. We had three of four different jam sessions on it, and different ideas emerged on different days. All the bits worked, so we thought it would be nice to find some way to stick them all together. So Phil wrote a rather more subtle part than what we originally had...
R: Guys! Guys! [Laughs.]
Phil's entrance on snare marks the peak of a crescendo that seems to rise throughout the entire song up to that point, and it seems that you have to rearrange everything to accommodate that sound. {the song is DTLS}
B: it's the other way around. The arrangement was almost there when the drums were put on. The real basis of the end section is the guitar riff. I just did this chord sequence that took it somewhere slightly different. All we try to do is to make the drums fit with what's already there. Let's be honest: Sometimes you know that you're going to have to add more to bits, to build up to the chorus and all that.
That brings to mind the big rise in level on "Dreaming While You Sleep." Why did you decide to have such a huge change in dynamics there?
B: That's what came out of the improvisation.
C: it's all based on the drum machine.
B: We had one drum machine pattern going all the way through. There were no drums added when we did it. Really, we had two very different feels going on the one rhythm. We were all playing on one sort of keyboard sound, then I started playing a few chords. At that point, Phil started singing a melody line. We had this chorus bit that sounded great; it was just a question of trying to organize the improvisations that ended up being the verse and all the other parts of the song to fit with that chorus. So the whole thing was there; it was never a decision to make the dramatic transition between the two.
C: The real drums didn't sound good on the verse. They weren't necessary, because the drum machine pattern held its own. It was one of those patterns that set up half the atmosphere of the song. Then, where the big change came in with the smooth chords at the chorus, I started playing along in drums. You then say, "Okay, that part sounds right. Now let's get a sound for it that makes it sound good." Of course, it all has to get past quality control [laughs].
Several cuts on the album have keyboard solos, a relative rarity for Genesis.
B: In more recent years, yes. The last one I did on a Genesis album was "Home By the Sea" [from Genesis, 1983], which wasn't really a bona fide keyboard solo.
Your solos have a very composed quality.
B: Yes. I think of them more as instrumentals. We have a good groove going, and I just play around on top. On "Living Forever," there were two feels in my solo. On the first bit, where there was a bit of menace, I was playing all kinds of diminished notes, and then suddenly it goes happy.
C: This is your idea of heaven, isn't it? No question about lyrics [laughs].
B: We always get questions about lyrics. Anyway, when you first get into this solo, it sounds very dramatic. But the natural feel of the bit was more light. At some point I knew I'd have to change, so I thought I'd make the change quite suddenly-a change in tone, from the VFX to the Wavestation, and a change in notes-and immediately bring in a different feel. I just wanted to keep this a lightweight solo, a breezy sort of thing, without being too intense, because I knew I had a more intense solo later on the album. {Fading Lights}
That would be {"more intense [keyboard] solo"} on "Fading Lights," on which your solo line has a rough, amost vocoderish quality.
B: That's a modification of Wavestation sound. I liked it because I could play very aggressively on it. Those sounds are great for leads; they automatically attract attention to themselves. Two or three different sounds are actually used on that lead at different times.
How often do you rely on third-party vendors for sounds?
B: Not much. I either use presets or some easily-available sounds, or else I make them myself. I nearly always edit whatever sound I've got to some extent. On the early instruments, I used to do all the programming myself. I like programming. That's half the fun of it. I would hate to have someone else trying to get sounds for me. But with the Wavestation, the VFX, and the JD-800, so many of the sounds that you get are so great that you can sometimes use them as they stand. You could just sit down and improvise on sounds that you find when you're fiddling with the machine, and that's often all you need to do. "Hold On My Heart," for example, was just a question of finding nice sounds to do the job for me. I didn't have to struggle to find a totally new sound, In fact, I wrote the chord sequence on the instrument I ended up using to record it, which was the Wavestation.
What was that light harmonica-like line that you played in that song?
B: That's another preset sound, this one on the JD-800. It sounds almost like rubbing the tops of wine glasses. the thing about that song was that at one point it looked like it wasn't going to end up on the album. Then we did a series of overdubs. We added a few vocal harmonies, and that gave the song a focus that it didn't have before. It doesn't sound like that would make all the difference in the world, but it did. Suddenly, having been something like number 13 in the rankings, it came up to number three or four. It's funny how these little things can affect the way you listen to the rest of the song.
Mike, when Tony gets a keyboard sound together, how does that affect your sound on the guitar?
R: I don't even think about that. It just happens. He'll do a soft noise, and I'll try an aggressive noise.
C: If Tony has a thick, woodgy sound, everybody goes for something a little thinner.
R: You adjust, but you don't consciously think, "He's doing a soft sound, therefore I should do a soft sound." The way we write, we usually have the sounds early on. We don't write the songs, go into the studio, and then record with different sounds. The recording process is usually quite easy because we're already halfway there.
The chord voicings are so meticulously constructed that is would completely alter the character of most of your songs if you change them even slightly.
B: That's true. Chords are my speciality. The thing that I understand best is the way chords fit together. You can't just add or subtract notes. Inversions are very important too; a particular inversion ot a triad can make a lot of difference. On a lot of songs, the bass note comes from me, since Mike is often stuck to playing guitar. Not that I end up playing the bass, but the natural tendency of any keyboard player is to put a left-hand part in. Often that will define the shape of the chord.
Do you try to stay as close to Mike's bass sound as you can when covering the bass notes?
B: When I'm doing it, I'm just playing the bottom parts. Since most bass guitar parts are put on afterwards, it's very important that Mike doesn't disturb the chord emphasis, because it's so easy to change that with a bass. We have one chord in the song "Dreaming While You Sleep" where there was no bass note, so he doesn't play one. Any bass note would give the wrong impression to the chord. This is why the bottom note of a chord is often just part of the keyboard part.
R: During the chorus of "Dreaming While You Sleep," I tried playing a bass guitar because we wanted a low, powerful sound from the bass end where the drums are a very big part of the song.
Do you ever sequence bass parts?
B: "Land of Confusion" had a sequenced bass part. So did "Hearts on Fire," which didn't end up on the album. Those are the only sequenced bass parts we've done. Most of the time we use very little sequencing in Genesis. I mean, you often have a sequencer running the drum machine parts. And sometimes, when I'm doing solos, it's a good way of recording my ideas. But that's it.
Phil, do you have a sequencer at home for your own writing?
C: I've got this new Korg 01/W FD, and I've started mucking about with the EIII sequencer. But it's all too complicated for me.
Do you mainly compose on piano?
C: I use the Yamaha CP-70, same as Tony. The Korg Wavestation has also been oa big boon to me, along with the Roland D-50.
B: One of my favorite ways of writing at home is to play on the CP-70 and have everything MIDIed to it, each with its own volume pedal. That way, I can fade in any sound that I want at any point. If I want a nice stringy background, there it is.
Don't you have a real acoustiv piano at home?
B: I have a Steinway grand, which I bought when we did The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. We needed a piano because we did that album on location, so I bought it and I've kept it ever since. I also have a Yamaha upright, which I use a lot. But I've never liked real pianos. For me, the greatest invention in all of rock music was the Yamaha electric grand. In the time before samplers, it gave you the abililty to play piano onstage in a controllable manner, without all that terrible clunking you get when you put microphones on the piano.
That's interesting since it's become fashionable for keybaordists these days to cite the piano as their favorite instrument to play.
B: I always said that too. I was a pianist to begin with. I switched to playing organ when I joined Genesis, purely because it was the only electronic instrument there was, so you needed it to play in clubs.
Phil is there ever call for you to do a keyboard part with Genesis?
C: [Makes gagging noise] No! And I'm happy with that. If I brought things into the band, I'd want them played the way I had written them. But I didn't write the keyboard parts on this album. Tony did. So it's fine if he plays them. It's a question of interpretation. There are certain tuned percussion bits that are my sounds.. Even the [Yamaha] DX7 had some interesting marimba, woodblock, and kalimba sounds; I'd like to get involved with playing those. But I can wait and do that on my own, no problem.
Both Mike and Phil have worked with a variety of keyboard players, wo you must have some interesting observations on working with Tony as part of a rhythm section.
C: "Rhythm section?" Isn't that a contradiction in terms? [Laughs.]
Are there aspects to his approach to rhythm that affect you in a different way than the other keyboardists with whom you've played?
C: Tony tends to be more original and less technique-oriented. That's true of all of us, but since we're talking about Tony, let's say he's not interested in techinque for technique's sake, which means that he gives you some very original results. A lot of keyboard players want to make their statements mainly with technique, so that people will say, Hey, that guy's a great player!" But that doesn't seem that important to me. Obviously, you want to take technique into consideration, but it isn't the main reason for doing things.
Given Tony's restraint and his emphasis on long chorded textures, does that give you more than the usual amount of freedom for your drum parts?
C: It helps. The less busy Tony has gotten over the years, the more enjoyable it has been to play with him. But we all went through that. If you listen to our earlier efforts, we're always going hell-for-leather behind the vocalist.
Mike, would you tend to play a more active rhythmic role in Genesis than you would in Mike + the Mechanics?
R: Yeah, probably. Having worked with the Mechanics, I can say that the great thing with Genesis is that when you're using other keyboard players who you haven't been with for so long, you'll say, "Try something in this song," and they''ll head off in a direction with all kinds of chord inversions. If you tell them that one note is wrong, they'll change the whole thing and not see the difference. Then, when you point that out to them, they get cross. I had a big row with one guy that came to play with the Mechanics. he had to play a very simple part. I don't remember what it was-two chords four times, while the bass ran down. he was running the whole thing down with the bass, and he couldn't see why that was a problem. It annoys you when some keyboard players don't realize that one note makes all the difference.
B: Well, guys, that's the problem with keyboard players: They have too many fingers.
THE END
--Russell Scott