Doing the Pandora shuffle, 7th edition

"OK, Google. Shuffle my Pandora."

"Red Rain," Peter Gabriel (So, 1986): The lead track on Gabriel's breakthrough album was released in the US as a fairly successful followup single to "Sledgehammer." I remember "Red Rain" being featured in an episode of "Miami Vice" and getting a lot of airplay on FM radio. It's never been among my favorite Peter Gabriel tracks -- it's too heavy on gloomy synth-and-drums atmospherics for my tastes. I've never really understood what the song is all about. I get this apocalyptic sense of blood drops falling from the sky. "Red Rain" aside, I have had a love-hate relationship with So since the day it was released. I was a Peter Gabriel megafan for more than a decade when So landed, but it fell flat for me. It was far too conventional to satisfy my appetite for new Peter Gabriel material. I understand So much better in hindsight than I did then, and I find it brilliant. But it was such a drastic pivot both artistically and commercially that it took me a long, long time to get over the shock.

Doing the Pandora shuffle, 2nd edition

It's 11:20 a.m. Let's see what Pandora has in store for us. "OK, Google, shuffle my Pandora."

"Big Time," Peter Gabriel (So, 1986): Gabriel's second big hit single, after "Sledgehammer." "Big Time" reached No. 8 on the Billboard Top 100. The video employed the same stop-motion claymation that we saw in the "Sledgehammer" video. Subsequently, many folks see this as a followup to "Sledgehammer," but "Big Time" actually was written and recorded earlier. "Big Time" is where bassist Tony Levin's "funk fingers" style originated. Drummer Jerry Marotta used a drumstick to pound Levin's strings with his sticks in time with Levin's playing, creating that heavy bottom in the song. Levin loved the sound and began taping pieces of drumsticks to his fingers to play bass in concert.

Doing the Pandora shuffle, 1st edition

Pandora, the grandaddy of music streaming services, has a pretty cool feature for its paid subscribers.

You know how Pandora works. It calls itself a music recommendation service, though in reality it doesn't recommend as much as it drops stuff take-it-or-leave-it. More precisely, I would call it an algorithmic automatic service.

If you're a paid subscriber, specifically a Pandora Plus customer, you have tweaking control of your library of stations -- which you can listen to for hours ad-free. But what I find invaluable, and the only way I use Pandora any more, is the option to shuffle your stations. With that, Pandora delivers its automatic, on-the-fly queue through random polling of your entire library.

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.