Let's start the last January blasts with back-to-back Phils.
We'll kick it off with one of those figures that gets a bad rap sometimes, but for all the wrong reasons.
There was a time when this guy was everywhere. You'd tune the radio, and every song would be him, whether on his own or as part of Genesis. You'd put on the TV and there he would be, on Miami Vice.
I think that ubiquity is what drove the antipathy towards him. But -- latter day pop radio saturation notwithstanding -- don't let popularity deter you from the mark of obvious and lasting quality.
It wasn't always that way. In a way he's the Karen Carpenter of Prog Rock, and might have rather been left to the security and comfort of the drums.
Like her, they had to pry him out from the backline, originally. No less than 400 singers were auditioned when Peter Gabriel bailed on the (just beginning to break through to big success) band for his then-prematurely-newborn twins, and fully zero made sense.
He had no inkling of where the move out front would lead; he was just trying to save the group he was in, whom the music press had pronounced all but dead.
Poor guy keeps getting hurt too, had to retire from drumming a decade plus ago. Then he fell in the bathroom and almost broke his face.
At age 20, he lounged in Gabriel's parents' pool like a tiger waiting to strike, memorizing the whole record they wanted him to play to whilst letting all the other auditioners flail their way off the gig.
Now, 50 years later, he's 70 and still one of the most recognizable faces in the world.
But for me, what sets Phil Collins -- born this very day in 1951 -- apart is what he did behind the kit.
His drumming in Genesis is what made them anything at all. Those early records would have had no drive, no funk, and no chance without his wildcard, Big Band-on-psychedelia percussion factor.
Then there's those Brian Eno albums.
Originally sent to the studio for Eno to play with as payment for dude semi-producing several tracks on The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, what ended up getting to tape for those LPs is now considered some of the greatest music ever made, and that's in no small part due to what our b'day boy is putting down.
Here's probably the greatest unissued concert of him, from the first tour he was on his own. All the great divorce songs, played by a motherfucker band and broadcast on King Biscuit.
Phil Collins
Perkins Palace
Pasadena, California USA
12.19.1982
CD1:
01 I Don't Care Anymore
02 I Cannot Believe It's True
03 This Must Be Love
04 Through These Walls
05 I Missed Again
06 Behind the Lines
07 You Know What I Mean
08 The Roof Is Leaking
09 Don't Let Him Steal Your Heart Away
CD2:
01 band introductions
02 The West Side
03 In the Air Tonight
04 Like China
05 You Can't Hurry Love
06 It Don't Matter to Me
07 Hand In Hand
08 ...And So to F...
09 People Get Ready
Total Time: 1:35:31
Phil Collins – vocals, electric piano, drums & percussion
Daryl Stuermer – guitar & banjo
Mo Foster – bass
Peter Robinson – keyboards & vocoder
Chester Thompson – drums & percussion
The Phenix Horns:
Rahmlee Michael Davis – trumpet, percussion & vocals
Michael Harris – trumpet, percussion & vocals
Don Myrick – saxophones, percussion & vocals
Louis Satterfield – trombone, percussion & vocals
the spectral analysis goes way above 20 kHz, and it's totally devoid of vinyl surface noise
this could be a CD of a complete pre-broadcast source of this DIR "Supergroups In Concert" program, minus the FM DJ chatter
first broadcast 4.16.1983, although there might have been a live FM broadcast as this show happened
microgaps at start and end of tracks removed by EN, January 2021
645 MB FLAC/January 2021 archive link
...and Manzanera and Collins met in the studio while those Eno albums were being laid down, and Eno later did some work with Glass...
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