Ames, Iowa, 6/18/92
Genesis article #1 from The Des Moines Register Date Book, Special Ames Edition dtd. June 18, 1992. (reprinted without permission.)
Front Cover:
Current picture of Phil belting out a song. His image is on the Jumbotron screen behind him. Caption reads, "Phil Collins and the other two members of Genesis bring a stage extravaganza to Ames.
GENESIS
Maybe they can't dance, but they sure can sell records.
Page 2-D -- On Tap by Bart Haynes [this guy writes short info pieces on a number of different subjects every week -- half the time he has the info wrong, so take it with a grain of salt]
"Going to the stadium? Here are the details"
Even if you can't dance, like me, you'll want to catch the Genesis concert Tuesday at Cyclone Stadium in Ames. Word is that the sound quality of this show is unbelievable for an outdoor concert.
Here's some stuff that you'll want to know to make your concert adventure as painless as possible. First, plenty of tickets are left, so go for it now if you've been putting off the expense. It will set you back about $28. Not cheap, but reasonable for a stadium concert.
The show starts at 8 p.m. [really 8:30]. There is no opening act. Parking lots open at 1 p.m. and the stadium gates open at 6 p.m. Smart dudes and dudettes [geeeeze, this guy's writing style- or lack of it really gets me sometimes] will get there early and party or whatever until it's show time. Don't try to take that 12-pack into the stadium because it will be confiscated. Same goes for cameras and tape players. There is, however, beer for sale inside.
Parking in the stadium lots will cost $5. Personally, I think there is no excuse but greed to charge this outrageous amount. It's a !#*H rip- off, but don't let it spoil your fun. Enjoy the concert, stay cool during the inevitable traffic jam, and part on the street if you can.
End of Article.
Amused, perhaps confused, by success
(picture of Banks, Collins, Rutherford smiling. All with dark jackets on. Banks and Rutherford have light colored shirts and Collins has a dark shirt. Caption reads, "The three members of Genesis, Tony Banks, Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford, make music together on a part-time basis. Each has a solo career.
Article by Patrick Beach
Register Staff Writer
[PLEASE NOTE: The DSM Register and Beach are known around this area for misspellings, misinformation and basically getting facts wrong. While this is a good article and will probably help ticket sales and will get the general public informed, those of you that are Genesis experts will probably be able to spot the errors. Typos are mine -- errors in facts are not mine.]
Large type at beginning of article: Being a member of Genesis is a part-time gig for these guys. They like it that way.
Beg. of article.
Mike Rutherford, one-third of the world's most nonchalant and improbable supergroups doesn't attend stadium concerts--except stadium concerts where it's he and the other two-thirds of Genesis on the bill. Then he HAS to go.
That's just one of many nuggets of incongruity that surrounds Genesis, a one-time British conceptual band with art-rock pretentions that grew up, shed a few members and more than a few hairs, and found itself selling millions of albums and filling stadiums with MTV-age fans and their parents.
They're amused by their success, but you get the sense they don't really understand it.
Genesis is in the midst of one of the summer's bigger tours, an operation rumbling across America with the approximate size and subtlety of Desert Storm. The operation will invade Ames Tuesday for a show at Cyclone Stadium-Jack Trice Field.
It's a huge undertaking. Something like 43 trucks and a crew of more than 100 is required to move the show from city to city and set it up, and Rutherford is a little bemused that he has people on his payroll upon whom he'll never set eyes.
"Those guys I never see," that guitarist said from New York recently. "They're never in the same city I am."
Soon the weather will turn cooler and this madness will subside. The tour will end and the swollen payroll will return to the normal four or five positions back at the home office in Britain.
Genesis, that profit-making perennial side project for three guys whose lives are filled with side projects, will go into another dormancy period--which is precisely the way all three like it.
Rutherford, keyboard player Tony Banks and frontman Phil Collins have full lives aside from the band that has been cutting wax since Richard Nixon's first term. Collins' is the most successful and high- profile. Banks also does solo work. Rutherford has Mike + the Mechanics. Other projects may pop up, but always there will be Genesis as there always has been, it seems.
Banks, Rutherford and Peter Gabriel came together as a songwriting collective in England while still teen-agers. Collins and guitarist Steve Hackett were enlisted in 1970 and a series of demanding, slightly portentous albums followed until 1975, when Gabriel make good on threats to leave the band.
Confounding conventional wisdom, Collins came out from behind the trap set and became a more or less full-time frontman.
The band kept a low profile during the punk food fight in '77, when it wasn't popular to be a big, successful supergroup. "It shook the establishment," Rutherford now says of the punk movement, "and if you weren't still happening, you didn't survive."
In '78 the appropriately titled "And Then There Were Three" marked Hackett's departure, and Genesis began mining a new vein rich with compact pop-tinged singles--no less adventurous than the previous material, but increasingly more popular with a mass audience outside the art-rock scene.
Then they just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. "Duke," "Abacab," "Genesis," "Invisible Touch," and the (also appropriately titled) "We Can't Dance" followed.
The singles weren't always the cheeriest stuff either. "No Son of Mine," for example, from the new album, it a bitter tale of a father spurning his conciliatory son.
Not the stuff of typical pop songs, to be sure, but "compared to opera we're a bundle of laughs," Rutherford joked.
The New York Times, in a review of a Genesis show recently, derided the gloomy ditties as "anthems for couch potatoes." The criticism rolls off Rutherford.
"Reviews are something we won't get down about," he said. "We've had terrible press all our career."
What's to account for this success? Rutherford thinks it has to do with a couple of things. First, making Genesis a part-time gig helps each member approach the job with enthusiasm.
Second, the group starts each recording session with a blank slate-- no demos, no half-finished songs. Three musicians walk into the studio with their wits, their instruments and little else.
"We take nothing in at all, nothing," he said. "I think it's good. You can't just knock off a few songs out...that puts the pressure on. We'll improvise for an hour in one kind of groove; after that you might have the start of one little section. After a couple of weeks, you join them together. Half the trick is have the ears to know when something is good."
Such an approach lends itself to taking an album on the road.
"I knew it was going to be an easy album to play live. The songs are all improvised, so in a way the live sound is there," Rutherford said.
About half the songs from "Dance" are showing up in the current show. There's also a 20-minute medley of stuff from the '70's and lots of familiar stuff in between.
The band spend at least as much time preparing what was going to go on the screens as what was going to come out the speakers. The bank shot a lot of film for the tour, and insiders are bussing about how this tour will raise the ante in stadium rock shows.
And when it's over?
"We're going to do a live album with this tour," Rutherford said. "Then, that's the end of Genesis this time around. I shall do some more Mike + the Mechanics; Phil will do another album, then sometime in the future there will be another Genesis album. You don't put a date on it."
Something vaguely less than 40,000 seats have been sold [stadium holds approx. 54,000]. Iowa State Center officials say good seats remain. They cost $25.25 each, plus a service charge, available through Ticketmaster outlets. The shows starts at 8 p.m.
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Another current picture of Rutherford playing. Caption reads, "Mike Rutherford performed during a recent Genesis tour stop at the Target Center in Minneapolis. [Please note that was at the Metrodome in Minneapolis]
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Beginning of final article [this is more Ames oriented but has some Genesis references]
Picture of P. McCartney concert
Caption reads,"Fans pack Cyclone Stadium for the 1990 Paul McCartney concert. Genesis comes to town Tuesday." [Interesting note from me: All three stadium concerts here in Ames have been from English groups -- Rolling Stones in 1989, McCartney in 1990 and Genesis in 1992]
Stadium Concerts: Enormous preparations for big shows.
By Lori Meek Schuldt , Register Staff Writer
If representatives of the U.S. Census Bureau were to take a head count in Ames Tuesday night, they could find the city had more than doubled in size since the 1990 tally.
That's because Tuesday is the night of the Genesis rock concert, and Cyclone Stadium could be filled with as many at 50,000 people.
"That's larger than the city of Ames, including the students," [Iowa State University is located in Ames] says Patricia Cotter, media coordinator for the Iowa State Center, which is responsible for booking the three-man British band.
Positive experiences with Paul McCartney in 1990 and the Rolling Stones in 1989 have encouraged the Iowa State Center to keep on the lookout for stadium concerts in addition to the shows it books at Hilton Coliseum.
There are differences between Hilton [14,500 seats] and the stadium.
"(In Hilton) the stage is predicated on a flat floor with overhanging lights," Cotter says. "Once you get to a stadium, there aren't that many constraints. Even if you multiply three back-to-back Hilton shows, it's still not the same in terms of magnitude."
For a stadium concert, the Iowa State Center employs a staff of more than 500 people, including security, traffic control and technical setup, Cotter says. The center contracts with a private company to remove the metal bleachers at the south end of the stadium, where the stage will go, and works with local police and university security to handle concertgoers and their vehicles.
To protect the field and the earth behind the stadium, technical workers will bring in about 1,500 sheets of plywood [my husband says that unless the plywood is multiplying like rabbits, its more like 1000 to 1200 sheets] and lay down a sort of track for the heavy trucks that haul the equipment.
A three-layer system will cover the AstroTurf on the football field for protection from both moisture and punctures. The bottom layer is polyethylene, the middle is a meshlike covering called GeoTech [not quite but close enough] and the top is vinyl. More than 13,000 seats will be place on the filed, called the "turf" section for this concert.
Although previous concerts have helped the center staff learn how to make these preparations, the Genesis concert will be unlike any other at Cyclone Stadium. Not only will it differ from the McCartney and Stones setups, it won't be the same as other stop son the Genesis tour.
"Each stadium (on the band's tour) is so different you practically start with a blank slate," Cotter says. "It has to be custom-built."
In this case, the plan calls for an open stage without walls or roof. Two 80-foot high towers of speakers, called sound wings, will be placed 140 feet apart. That's 60 feet farther than typical for outdoor performances, allowing for better stereo sound quality, Cotter explains. Thousands of computer-controlled lights will be suspended from cables, along which they will shuttle back and forth between stage and control booth.
Three giant Sony Jumbo-Tron screens will move from side to side above the stage.
"They keep raising the stakes," Cotter says. "McCartney had screens on stage to mirror the (concert) image, and now Genesis is taking that one step further to give images to help tell the story (of the songs) as well as live images on stage. It's an MTV effect."
Show time is 8 p.m. Get there on time, because there's no opening act. The concert is expected to last about 2 1/2 hours.
--rest of article is about parking, rules,etc.