{"id":6619,"date":"2018-05-11T08:29:01","date_gmt":"2018-05-11T12:29:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=6619"},"modified":"2018-05-11T08:29:01","modified_gmt":"2018-05-11T12:29:01","slug":"not-dead-yet","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/11\/not-dead-yet\/","title":{"rendered":"Not Dead Yet."},"content":{"rendered":"

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\u2019 hit \u201cAbacab.\u201d I loved the song right away, despite having no idea what it was about (still don\u2019t), and it made me a quick fan of Genesis, and, by extension, Phil Collins\u2019 solo material, which at that point already included \u201cIn the Air Tonight.\u201d I\u2019d say I continued as a fan of both until the early 1990s, when Genesis released their self-immolating We Can\u2019t Dance<\/em> (an atrocious, boring pop record) and Collins\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Collins\u2019 memoir, Not Dead Yet<\/a><\/em>, 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\u2019 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\u2019s also a strain of self-justification for much of his behavior that I found offputting.<\/p>\n

From a narrative sense, the book\u2019s 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\u2019d 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<\/em>-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\u2019s still learning his craft as a drummer. I also didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

<\/a>The Genesis chapters feel a little Behind the Music<\/em>, but they\u2019re fairly cordial overall – Collins doesn\u2019t dish on his ex-mates and if anything seems at pains to depict Gabriel as a good bandmate and friend whose vision happened to grow beyond what the band was willing or able to achieve. It\u2019s the stuff on Collins\u2019 personal life that really starts to grate: He talks about being a terrible husband and father, but there\u2019s enough equivocation in his writing (often quite erudite, even though he didn\u2019t finish high school) to suggest that he isn\u2019t taking full responsibility for his actions. He cheated on two wives, he ignored their wishes that he devote more time to his family, and he seems to have harassed the woman half his age (he was 44, she 22) who became his third wife and mother of the last two of his five kids.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also hard to reconcile Collins\u2019 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\u2019 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., \u201cAnother Day in Paradise,\u201d is a mawkish take on the same subject covered more sensitively in \u201cThe Way It Is\u201d and a dozen other songs on visible poverty in a developed, wealthy economy. <\/p>\n

Since that\u2019s all I have to say on the book, I\u2019ll 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\u2019 cover of \u201cYou Can\u2019t Hurry Love.\u201d I\u2019m convinced this wasn\u2019t an accident, but a test to see if anyone was watching. The show was cancelled a few weeks later.<\/p>\n

Next up: I\u2019m about halfway through Peter Carey\u2019s Booker Prize-winning novel Oscar and Lucinda<\/a><\/em>, later turned into a movie with a very young Voldemort and Queen Elizabeth.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019 hit \u201cAbacab.\u201d I loved the song right away, despite having no idea what it was about (still don\u2019t), […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[748,343,852,225],"class_list":["post-6619","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-british-music","tag-memoirs","tag-music","tag-non-fiction","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6619"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6622,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6619\/revisions\/6622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}