I came of age as a music fan right around 1980, thanks in part to some of those old K-Tel pop hits collections (on vinyl!) that my parents bought me as gifts, one of which included Genesis’ hit “Abacab.” I loved the song right away, despite having no idea what it was about (still don’t), and it made me a quick fan of Genesis, and, by extension, Phil Collins’ solo material, which at that point already included “In the Air Tonight.” I’d say I continued as a fan of both until the early 1990s, when Genesis released their self-immolating We Can’t Dance (an atrocious, boring pop record) and Collins’ own solo work became similarly formulaic and dull. It was only well after the fact that I heard any of the first phase of Genesis, where Peter Gabriel was still in the band and their music was progressive art rock that featured adventurous writing and technical proficiency.
Collins’ memoir, Not Dead Yet, details the history of the band through his eyes as well as a look at his solo career and his tangled personal life, some of which made tabloid headlines, leading up to his inadvertent effort at drinking himself to death just a few years ago. The book seems open about many aspects of Collins’ life, including mistreatment of his three wives and his children (mostly by choosing work over his familial duties) and his refusal to accept that he had a substance-abuse problem, but there’s also a strain of self-justification for much of his behavior that I found offputting.
From a narrative sense, the book’s high point is too close to the beginning: When Collins was just starting out in the English music scene, his path intersected with numerous musicians who’d later become superstars and some of whom would be his friends and/or writing partners later in life, including Eric Clapton, Robert Plant, and George Harrison. The Sing Street-ish feel to those chapters is so charming I wondered how much was really accurate, but Collins does at least depict himself as a star struck kid encountering some of his heroes while he’s still learning his craft as a drummer. I also didn’t know Collins was a child actor, even taking a few significant stage roles in London, before his voice broke and he switched to music as a full-time vocation.
It’s also hard to reconcile Collins’ comments on his own songwriting, both on solo records and in later word for Disney films and Broadway shows, with the inferior quality of most of his lyrics. Collins’ strengths were his voice, his sense of melody, and of course his work on the drums. His lyrics often left a lot to be desired, and their quality, never high, merely declined as he became more popular. Even his last #1 song in the U.S., “Another Day in Paradise,” is a mawkish take on the same subject covered more sensitively in “The Way It Is” and a dozen other songs on visible poverty in a developed, wealthy economy.
Since that’s all I have to say on the book, I’ll tell one random Collins-related story. When I was in high school, MTV briefly had an afternoon show called the Heavy Metal Half-Hour, which they later retitled the Hard 30. It was hair metal, so not really very heavy by an objective standard, but harder rock than what they played the rest of the time. One day during the Hard 30 run, they played … Phil Collins’ cover of “You Can’t Hurry Love.” I’m convinced this wasn’t an accident, but a test to see if anyone was watching. The show was cancelled a few weeks later.
Next up: I’m about halfway through Peter Carey’s Booker Prize-winning novel Oscar and Lucinda, later turned into a movie with a very young Voldemort and Queen Elizabeth.