My final word on Genesis: Completing my album rankings

1977: Rutherford, Collins, Banks, Hackett

One more piece before I put Genesis to bed.

I spent a bit of bandwidth discussing the band's Peter Gabriel years and ranking the albums from that period. But Gabriel's departure was not the end of my time with Genesis. I did remain a fan for a little while longer, through their first two post-Gabriel albums, with Phil Collins as the lead singer and continuing with guitarist Steve Hackett on board. I fell off the Genesis train, though, with their first post-Hackett album, when the band became the three-piece that took the 1980s pop charts by storm.

Ranking the early Genesis albums

2014 documentary interview: Gabriel, Hackett, Rutherford, Collins, Banks

Genesis released six studio albums in 5 1/2 years with original lead singer Peter Gabriel. It is remarkably easy to delineate this band's growth in that period just by listening to those records in consecutive order. They get their feet wet with From Genesis to Revelation. They plant their flag with Trespass. They fill in the missing pieces with Nursery Cryme. They hit their stride with Foxtrot. They polish their sound to create a classic with Selling England by the Pound. And they shake their audience to its core with the epic The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.

Most of these albums I've known by heart for decades. I've spent a bit of time over the past couple or three weeks listening to and studying the first two so as to give an honest evaluation of them in context.

Genesis: An era comes to an end

1974: Rutherford, Hackett, Collins, Banks, Gabriel

The cover of Genesis' fourth album, Foxtrot, gave Peter Gabriel an idea for spicing up the band's stage show (Genesis: The classic lineup settles in). A booking agent for Charisma Records suggested to Gabriel that the band should have someone in a red dress and fox's head in the street in front of their concert venues to draw attention. But Gabriel took it a step further. His wife had a red dress that looked like the one on the album cover, and he found a big furry fox head in a costume shop.

Genesis: The classic lineup settles in

1971: Collins, Rutherford, Tony Banks, Gabriel, Hackett

Genesis nearly disbanded in summer 1970. They had just finished recording their second album, Trespass, and were about to hit the road for another tour of their native England when guitarist Anthony Phillips quit. (Genesis: In the beginning)

The three other founders discussed calling it a day. But in the end, they decided to regroup and give this band thing another shot before going their own adult ways. They fired their third drummer, John Mayhew, and the group of 20-year-olds gathered at Peter Gabriel's parents' house to audition candidates. Gabriel says they knew 19-year-old Phil Collins was their guy the second he sat down at the drumkit. Collins came with the added benefits of being a burgeoning songwriter with a smooth singing voice that perfectly complemented Gabriel's raw delivery.

Genesis: In the beginning

Portrait of a teen-age band: Phillips, Rutherford, Banks, Gabriel, Stewart

One of the more shocking realizations I've had recently is that it's been close to a half-century since Peter Gabriel recorded an album with Genesis -- I've been listening to those records fairly regularly going on 50 years. As I recall, there has never been a long gap since my first encounter in late 1974 when I haven't listened to any of those albums.

The last one, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, was my entry into this catalog. I caught up to the six previous albums (five studio, one live) in something less than a year, as I recall. Most all of them have been in rotation on all my devices ever since.

'It's only knock and know all, but I like it'

One day in the fall of 1974, co-worker and regular concert pal Marty Bauer told me we should go to the Ambassador Theater the Sunday before Thanksgiving to see Genesis. Marty and I had become fast friends working side-by-side in that machine shop in Ballwin, MO, where I was biding my time between high school and college. We spent most of our workdays sharing our growing musical knowledge, taking a break in our discussion every now and then to focus on fire-testing those freshly made acetylene-torch heads soon to be shipped out the factory door.