my music collection increased tenfolds when I switched from drug-addicts to complete nutcases.
Pittsburgh is a great show. I love Phil forgetting which city he's in (apparently a common problem with touring musicians). Bill adds some interesting percussion bits during some of the songs when he's not busy playing drums, particularly on Entangled and Supper's Ready. I don't know if he's playing a glockenspiel or a bell tree on Lover's Leap but I've always thought that sounded great. I believe Chester did something similar on the 77 tour.
The Cleveland show is really good too. The thing I find amusing is hearing Phil talk of how nervous he was about having to talk to the audience between the songs, but on these two shows (which were pretty early on in the tour), he sure doesn't sound like it.
I remember seeing Phil on VH-1 back in the late 90's, I guess around the time they had released one of the best of things, and they show a few seconds of the A Trick Of The Tail video, and then they cut to Phil who says it was one of those things where he sees it now, and then looks at the others and says "Was this your lapse of taste, or mine?".Oh wow, 'Ripples' aside, the promos from Trick are so bad. Rutherford 'dying' after being shot in 'Robbery...' springs to mind as a hilarious moment.
I think in general, other than maybe Mama, Everything She Does, and Land Of Confusion, the best Genesis videos seem to have always been the ones that were more or less straight forward performance clips. As soon as they start doing anything else, as in the Keep It Dark video or especially the Illegal Alien video..., well, as Richard Hammond once said, "That's not gone well".
Funny that Rutherford and Hackett both made stage announcements in this period. Alas, Banks still didn't.I guess they felt that Peter had such a way with the audience, they initially weren't sure how they were gonna manage that aspect of live performance without him. I imagine they also may have been considering the idea putting for the identity of the other individuals in the band to the public, instead of just being four more or less faceless guys who are known collectively as Genesis.Yeah, a short-lived experiment really. Seems odd now to think about, that Phil was still so green as a front man that he didn't even do all of the announcements.
The other ting I find interesting about that tour is Steve and Mike standing during the shows. Mike sometime stood onstage when Peter was in the band, but he seems to have also frequently sat, judging from the pictures I've seen and also from the Shepperton film. Steve, however, always remained seated throughout the Peter era performances.
At least judging from Genesis In Concert and the Dallas footage from 77, Steve seems to have mostly just stood motionless, as he seems to do to this very day when he's playing live. But Mike seemed to get more into the act of being "animated" onstage. It's kind of interesting to watch the Shepperton film and Genesis In Concert, and note Mike's performance in both on something like, say, I Know What I Like. He has much more stage presence in the latter film, presumably in an effort to make for Peter's absence.
And count me among those would love to see either a live album from the 76 tour, or an expanded version of Second's Out (similar to what Frampton did with the 25th anniversary version of ...Comes Alive).
Some significant omissions from the 1977 tour. Won't hold my breath, but an 'expanded' version would be nice. As would full multi-track shows from 1976, 1977, and 1980. Boots are good, but pale compared to a well engineered multi-track.
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