If you think of big-time touring as a form of road roulette - a gamble in which the cost of a crew, a stage, a lighting rig and a fleet of buses and trucks is wagered against the profit potential of a band's fan base - then the sort of stadium tour Genesis is about to mount is the ultimate high-stakes game.
It isn't just the band's reputation that's at risk here, though anything less than a sell-out tends to be seen as a sign of weakness in today's anxiety-racked concert market. No, the bottom line here, as ever, is money. "I can't give you a number, but they are spending millions of dollars, out of their own pockets, prior to the first show," says Mike Farrell, the band's booking agent since the beginning. "We've had advance people on salary for eight months already. This project costs millions and millions of dollars before they even hit the road."
Nor is it difficult to see where the money went. In addition to the cost of the stage and the sound towers - all of which has to be built from scratch to the band's specifications - there are the lights and the $5 million Sony Jumbotron video system to deal with. Not to mention crew salaries, rehearsal space and rent on the 39 semis production manager Morris Lyda estimates he'll need to get this show on the road.
Considering how much is at stake here, you might think that Genesis would be ecstatic over news that the first American shows sold out almost as soon as they were put on sale. But as the touring version of the band - in which full-timers Tony Banks, Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford are augmented by guitarist Daryl Stuermer and drummer Chester Thompson - begins its rehearsals in the tiny town of Chiddingfold, Surrey, there are greater worries to be dealt with.
Like how to deal with the oldies.
With more than two decades of recordings to draw from, there's no way Genesis can represent every album in its catalog. Nor does it particularly want to; as each of the three makes clear, what they're most interested in playing are the songs from the current album, WE CAN'T DANCE.
"We made a list a few months ago, with some songs from the new album, some from the last couple of albums we're keen to play and some very old material in a kind of medley form," says Rutherford. "It's a starting poin, and eventually we move some of the things to a sort of a B-list. You rehearse much more material than you need, and the process now is to keep working on them, and see which songs fall by the wayside."
"What's strange with our audience," adds Collins, "is there are people that will read that we're not doing 'In the Cage,' and literally sort of go into mourning."
"But, I mean, 'In the Cage' - we've played it every tour since 1978 or something," interjects Banks. "There's a time when you stop playing something. You've got to feel comfortable with what you're doing. What's the point if you're just going through the motions?"
None, really, except to placate the older fans. And though Rutherford points out that such listeners will constitute "no more than five or 10 percent" of the audience at the band's American shows, it's obvious that the band is loath to offend them.
Why? "They make themselves heard more," answers Collins. "The old fans will stand in the rain an queue forever to get tickets. And though we do get letters saying how great they thought the tour was, we tend to get more letters from people complaining that we didn't play enough older material."
"But it is a problem is you do the whole of 'Supper's Ready,' for example," says Banks. "It's half an hour of a set, you know. The new album is 70 minutes long, and we wanted to play a large section of that, at least an hour of music. So that's an hour-and-a-half taken up already, and then you're left half an hour to fit all the other albums in. This is why you end up doing a medley, really, so you can at least do something from all those eras. You're never going to please everybody."
Stadium shows, by their very nature, are built on a foundation of compromise and advance planning, and the Genesis tour is no exception. >From the songs in the set list to the dates on the itinerary, virtually every decision made by the band and its team demands that the group balance art and commerce, convenience and feasibility.
"We're doing this tour of stadiums because we don't want to be on the road forever, like a lot of other bands are," admits Collins. "I don't think we can sit here and justify it and say, 'Well, we love stadiums,' because I don't think any of us do. But we just take on that challenge and see if we can try and make it work better than other people, really."
Making it work isn't easy, though. "It's been about a year since I started working on availability of the stadiums," reports Farrell. "When you take a tour of this magnitude, the routing has to be such that you can only make a jump of approximately 250 miles, so you have to get these stadiums in order. You can be faced with everything going great through the eighth one, and then the ninth one you can't get when you need it, and it screws the whole rest of it up. It's quite a puzzle to put together."
One major piece is the weather. Genesis begins its tour in May in large part because, as Banks points out, "it was the earliest we could do open-air venues. Weatherwise in the Northern Hemisphere, May is about as early as you can trust. That's also why we're doing America before Europe. The weather in Europe's rarely trustworthy in May."
Then there's the need to tailor the show to the stadium circuit. Quiet songs are usually the first to go. "The two songs we've not bothered to rehearse on this album, "says Banks, "are both acoustic songs or soft songs: 'Since I Lost You' and 'Never a Time.'"
"That's actually less to do with acoustics than pure numbers," adds Rutherford. "We've leared from experience that as the crowd gets larger - to go from a 10- or 20,000-seater to a 40- or 60,000-seater - their attention span is just not as good. You just can't ask quite as much."
On the other hand, the band has no intention of letting the show's visual content detract from the music. "We were in Toronto on a promotional tour before Christmas, and happened to see the Stones' IMAX thing," says Rutherford. "It was quite a good indicator of what not to do. That was about as big as you can get - it was like a circus, with everything everyhwere, all the time. So when we sat down with [production designer] Mark Brickman, he had an idea about making the whole thing much more focused on the band. We're just a five-piece. We don't have any extra singers or horn players. In a funny way, it's a scaling down, although it's still very powerful.
Part of that process involves pulling away from the traditional band-in-a-box approach to staging stadium show. "You've probably been to enough outdoor shows to know that there's usually two big P.A. stacks separated by a roof at the top and a stage at the bottom," explains production manager Morris Lyda. "Which, for all intents and purposes, just forms a great big black box. The Stones did a lot toward trying to modify the look of that box, but our goal was to totally get away from that look. So we moved the P.A. wings apart further that they've ever been moved before - there's 140 feet between the P.A. stacks."
Not only does that provide an unheard-of degree of stereo separation, says Lyda, but it allows Genesis to take an entirely different approach to stage lighting and video. "In the past," he says, "Genesis has used lighting very dramatically to emphasize the mood of their music by using an enormous number of Vari-lights, enormous amounts of color. They've succeeded at it very well. But we're not trying to do a lighting show. What we're trying to do is light the band and be able to change the mood, the look of the show to suit the mood of the music. We're doing theatrical lighting, as opposed to trying to come up with tricks."
"It's like a good theater production," agrees Banks. "We've been going through ideas in great detail with the people who are doing things for the show. And when we get to the stage where we actually see the whole thing, we will sit down with the operators and go through the songs. If we could, we'd be out there operating the controls." (Banks, Collins and Rutherford do actually get to "see" the show during rehearsals, by the way, watching from the lighting desk as a rehearsal tape plays and mannequins - "Naked, limbless women," laughs Collins - take their place onstage.)
An additional complication this time is the Sony Jumbotron video screen," says Lyda. "The screen in Times Square is very similar to the one we'll have on the road." Unlike most concert video, which is useless in the daylight, the Sony system works just as well in full sun as it does in the dark. Moreover, instead of the usual concert approach, in which the screens flank the stage, the Genesis Jumbotron will be positioned squarely behind the band. "So that when you're looking at the screen, you're also looking at the band," Lyda says. "You're seeing the band and the video support simultaneously."
"What we're spending most of our time thinking about is what goes on that screen," adds Banks. "It's not just us, that's the point. So we're still working on that."
There are basically two realities in the concert business. One is the booking-and-production end, where time and money are major considerations, and results are the bottom line; the other is the creative end, where combining sound and image is as much a matter of instinct as anything else. And though some pop performers seem constantly aware of both, the members of Genesis insist on separating one from the other.
"We don't even think about any aspect of that when we're recording," says Banks. "We don't think about live performace, we don't think about videos, we don't even really think about an audience, actually. I know it sounds absurd. But if you start, you can get very confused by that, and I think you can start to let it affect you. We had a documentary team while we were doing this album. Every time they were around, we did no creative work at all. Because you just can't. It's just not the way we work. As soon as they were there, we shut off."
That attitude has its advantages, of course. For one thing, says Rutherford, it allows the band to focus on the important creative elements of the production. "We spend our time on the music and the production, and make sure we've got it right," he says. "The logistical side, you just haven't got time of day to actually worry about that. And we've got people who, if they say it's going to be done, then it'll get done. They don't make decisions that are not possible."
That doesn't mean the band isn't worried about the task ahead. "The difficult thing on this tour is the fact that we've said we're only going out for so long," Rutherford admits. "So our manager's cramming it all in. And they're going to have some pretty difficult drives; how they're going to get the equipment up and down each day, I have no idea."
It's Lyda's job to find out. "since we're building so much of the stuff, we take into consideration how the equipment's packaged, how many people it will require," he says. "It's probably aobut the most ambitious outdoor schedule that anyone's ever contemplated with a single system. To achieve this, you have to have timing that is accurate down to the minute, nearly. The amount of drill work and practice that will go into the assembling and disassembling of the shows in tantamount to military precision."
That's not to say Lyda and crew will be the only ones feeling pressure once this show hits the road. "If I get a cold on this tour, we're losing shows straightaway," says Collins. "I don't, fortunately, get colds usually. But there is that kind of added thing where you spend the whole day worrying about it. You wake up in the morning and go, [sings high notes] 'Ooh, ooh - I'll be all right today.' Because if you have falsetto, chances are you've got everything else."
Collins does have one advantage on this tour, though: the IRPEQ Ear Monitor system. "Obviously all those years, I've been trying to fight against the band, just to be heard, and therefore wasting the voice. Now I'm singing so much more in tune and so much more effortlessly that I'm actually looking forward to the tour. 'Cause before, when we first started talking about it, I thought, 'This is going to be another four months of my life where I'm going to be worried every day whether I can sing.' I was starting to wonder whether the aggravation's really worth it."
On the other hand, there are also moments when Collins has no doubts whatsoever that the road is the right place to be. For instance, there was a show a Wembley on the last tour that found the band performing before a crowd of 82,000. During "Home by the Sea," Collins says, there was a bit where the band would turn the lights on the audience while the fans waved their arms. "That was fantastic," he says. "Looking out there and seeing everybody, even the people as far away as you could see, doing that, meant you were communicating. The fact that all around this arena, they were there to get involved - I think that shows that it can work."
TONY BANKS can't abide clutter. "I always resented players with stacks of keyboards," he says. "I think, 'If you've got 12 keyboards onstage, in a two-hour set that means 10 minutes per, even if you're playing all the time.' And it's probably a hell of a lot less in actual fact." So Banks will only carry four keyboards with him for this tour - but, thanks to a well-stocked rack and the miricle of MIDI, will have "a far wider range of sound probably on this tour than ever before." To his left, he'll have a Korg Wavestation and an Ensoniq SD-1; to his right, a Roland JD800 and a Roland Rhodes piano. Banks prefers the Rhodes to his old Yamaha piano; "I like the touch," he says, "and the basic piano sound is not bad, particularly if you combine it with samples." He also enjoys the analog portion of the JD800, but admits that "it's quite difficult to make it as fat as, say, an old Moog, Arp or Prophet. The difficult sounds, you can sample."
Sampling is not as easy as it looks. "It's a question of how many time you sample," he says. "With the more synthetic sounds, you can get away with once an octave. Modulations are a problem, so you have to leave off modulations while you're sampling and put them back on the sampler if you can. On something like the Synclavier, a lot of the tones use four different vibratos, and then chorus the whole lot at the end. What was nice about those sounds was that they never repeated, but you've got to be careful with that as soon as you start looping these things."
Fortunately, Banks' racks give him sampling power to spare. In rack No. 1, the big bruisers are an Emulator EIII and a Kurzweil, rounded out by a Roland M480 mixer, three Yamaha SPX1000s, an SPX90, a Roland reverb, an Alesis MMT-88 sequencer and a PLS1 audio switcher, which redirects the percussion in "I Can't Dance" to two separate P.A. channels instead of the keyboard mix. In the No. 2 rack is another M480, and a host of tone generators, including a Yamaha TX7, two Voice DMI-64s and five E-mu Proteus 2XRs. Only one of the 2XRs is factory-standard (it's used as a backup for the Kurzweil and the TX7); the others were prepared for Banks to handle sounds he had whipped up for the EIII. There's also an A110 and four MIDIGate units. To quote the tech notes: "We feed the unit a cowbell 'click,' and then a MIDI signal, and gate the MIDI out by adding note-off commands at whatever time you set on the front panel. This is used to recreate the gating the Quadra performed on 'Mama.'" All Banks' keyboards are played in "local off" and routed by a MIDITemp PMM8. In addition, Banks has no less than nine pedals on the floor, including a Proteus volume, an EIII volume, Alesis Pattern step-up, a Sustain, a JD800 volume, a MIDITemp Program Increment pedal, VFX volume and a Drone pedal. His monitors are Yamaha 1502s, powered by P2700 amplifiers through a pair of C20 crossover/signal processor/EQs and a Y20 controller.
Apart from a Noble & Cooley piccolo snare, PHIL COLLINS' drums are by Gretsch, and include a 20" bass (with a Ludwig Speed King pedal), a 16" floor tom and four mounted toms: 15", 12", 10" and 8". All take clear Remo Ambassador heads. His cymbals are Sabian: a 22" Chinese swish, 14" hi-hats with a Slingerland pedal, 22" dry ride, 20" Chinese swish and three crashes, sized 16", 18" and 20". Natually, he uses Pro-Mark Phil Collins sticks. His vocals are via a Ramsa headset, an M88 wired mike or wireless, and he'll be using IRPEQ earphone monitors. His kit is heard through two MC740 mikes (overhead, left and right), with M420s on his floor and 15" rack toms and M201s on the others. His snare takes an SM57 on top and an AKG 414 on the bottom; hi-hats use an AKG 460, and his bass takes an M88 and a 57. There are Simmons triggers on all drums and hi-hats, which feed into an SP-1200.
MIKE RUTHERFORD admits to being "not too fussy. Any guitar I pick up I'll play for three or four weeks, and that's my favorite guitar. I've got a roadie who deals in guitars. I'm a lost cause to him, really." As such, the material plays a greater role than personal taste in determining how many he takes on the road. "We may do 'The Musical Box' in the medley, and that calls for an increadibly weird tuning, which I'll be playing for three minutes. Then there's a song where I play a different guitar which has got a different funny tuning. You've got a guitar for each bit, which is a drag." What he's dragging along, then, are four Fender Strat Plusses ("Old ones don't do much for me"), three Rickenbacker 12-strings and a Guitar Factory electro/acoustic. He wants to play more bass. To that end, he'll also be packing a pair of Fender Precisions, strung with Rotosounds. His guitar strings are by Ernie Ball, which also makes his custom "M.R." picks. His amplification includes two Groove Tube Trio preamps and a Dual 75, MESA/Boogie 295 and 500s, and a Quad preamp. A Beck 6-to-2 mixer sorts the amp channels out, feeding them into an array of four MESA/Boogie 4x12s and two Marshall 4x12s. In the loop, he has an SPX90, a Roland SDE 3000 delay, a Lexicon PCM41 delay, and a Rockman rackmount unit, as well as Roland volume pedals. His bottom line includes a pair of Trace Elliot RX500 power amps, four GP11 preamps and four 4x10 cabinets. Rutherford does like "a little power behind me," and wants to keep some amplification onstage. The Groove Tubes will be "in two boxes on the side, blasting away, so I can play quietly. They come into my mixer, so I can have it soft, but still pushing the speakers." His guitar amps relay to the P.A. via Sennheiser 441 and 421 mikes, while his bass signal will be a mixture of D.I. and signal off RE20 mikes. And yes, he says, he still relies on his trusty Moog Taurus bass pedals. "Can't beat 'em," he says. "They have real depth and power. Why they never caught on, I don't know."