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What should we call ourselves?

In its infancy in the ’50s, rock music was played by bands and artists with simple, straightforward names that tended to fall into two general categories:

Somebody and The Somethings: Many dozens of bands used this linguistic structure, from Bill Haley and His Comets to Little Anthony and The Imperials, from Freddie and the Dreamers to Paul Revere and The Raiders. Among other things, this allowed the record companies to eventually spin off the leader as a solo act, like Tommy James (without The Shondells) and Diana Ross (without The Supremes).

The Numbers: The charts were full of groups whose names identified the number of members: The Four Seasons, The Four Freshmen, The Kingston Trio, The Dave Clark Five, Sir Douglas Quintet.

Beginning in the mid-’60s, bands started branching out by inventing more and more outlandish, quirky names. California bands in particular popularized this trend, using sometimes unrelated words picked seemingly at random: Ultimate Spinach, Iron Butterfly, Moby Grape, Strawberry Alarm Clock, the Flying Burrito Brothers. Conversely, some groups chose to use all their names as the band’s name: Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Hall and Oates; Beck, Bogert and Appice. Or they took the last name of one or two band members: Santana, Van Halen, Fleetwood Mac.

By the ’80s and beyond, the rock music world was awash in creative names — some clever, some nonsensical, some silly, some blatantly offensive: Men Without Hats. Death Cab For Cutie. Bare Naked Ladies. Tears for Fears. Garbage. Hootie and the Blowfish. Nine Inch Nails. 10,000 Maniacs. Toad the Wet Sprocket. The Psychedelic Furs. Right Said Fred. The Dead Kennedys. Jimmy Eat World. A Flock of Seagulls. The Jesus and Mary Chain. My Chemical Romance. Alice in Chains. The Butthole Surfers. The Goo Goo Dolls. Rage Against the Machine. Dashboard Confessional. Today, there are even websites that use algorithms to help aspiring artists come up with memorable names.

So where do these monikers come from? Sometimes it’s obvious — Cream was comprised of three superb musicians generally regarded as the best (the “cream”) of British instrumentalists of their day. Dire Straits was in bleak financial condition at the time they started out. But many are more cryptic in nature, conceived as a startling label that would attract attention.

I’ve picked 30 classic rock bands with intriguing names that have some pretty interesting back stories behind them.

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The Who

Pete Townshend and his band had called themselves The Detours and The High Numbers for a spell in their early days. At the time, Townshend’s hard-of-hearing grandmother was living in the Townshend household, and Pete recalls that whenever he was heading out the door to attend a concert, he’d mention the name of the band. His grandmother would sometimes reply, “You’re going to see the who??” It didn’t take long for Townshend to decide that The Who would be a great name.

Lynyrd Skynyrd

Three founding members of this Southern rock band attended the same high school in Jacksonville, Florida, where the hard-nosed gym teacher, a man who strictly enforced the rules regarding hair length, was a guy named Leonard Skinner. The fledging group had called themselves The Noble Five and then One Percent but, in a sort of mock tribute to the teacher they despised, they eventually chose to rename themselves Lynyrd Skynyrd, changing the spelling in case he objected. To the band’s surprise, Skinner was flattered by the gesture, and ultimately, he even appeared on stage to introduce the band at a Jacksonville concert appearance years later.

The Beatles

John Lennon’s first group was known as the Quarrymen (they went to Quarry Bank School) and then Johnny and the Moondogs, but once Paul McCartney joined, he suggested they emulate his idol Buddy Holly, whose band was called The Crickets. They picked beetles as their insect, but then changed the spelling to reflect the “beat music” they favored, and Beatles they stayed. (A side note: When they stopped touring and became a studio band in 1966-67, McCartney thought it would be fun if The Beatles pretended to be someone else with a long silly name, like the bands coming out of San Francisco at the time, like Quicksilver Messenger Service, Big Brother and The Holding Company, and The Peanut Butter Conspiracy. The result? Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.)

Grateful Dead

Rising from the ashes of two groups — Mother McCree’s Jug Champions and The Warlocks — came San Francisco’s most celebrated band, The Grateful Dead. There are conflicting stories about the derivation of the name. Bass player Phil Lesh says leader Jerry Garcia randomly opened a book and saw the word “grateful” in the text of the left-hand page, and the word “dead” lined up next to it in the text of the right-hand page. Others maintain it was a phrase from 19th Century literature, referring to “the soul of a deceased person showing gratitude to someone who, in an act of charity, arranged their funeral.”

Jethro Tull

Flautist/singer Ian Anderson and his ragged band were still learning their chops in 1968 when their manager got them booked in clubs in and around London. Sometimes the club owners didn’t like their act and refused to invite them back, so the manager simply changed their name and got them re-booked under the new name, much to the club owners’ chagrin when the same musicians showed up. One week, the manager’s assistant, a history buff, suggested they call themselves Jethro Tull, who was an 18th Century British agriculturalist and inventor of the seed drill, a device which vastly improved efficiency in farming. This time, as it happened, the club owners liked the act and gave them a regular gig, and the name stuck. Through the years, many fans were under the mistaken impression that leader Anderson’s name WAS Jethro Tull…

Led Zeppelin

In 1966, a recording session took place involving drummer Keith Moon of The Who, keyboard session man John Paul Jones, and Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page, then sharing guitar duties in The Yardbirds. They recorded “Beck’s Bolero,” among other blues tracks, and someone suggested they ought to form a band. Moon dismissed the idea, saying he thought they wouldn’t be well received. “We’d go over like a lead balloon,” he said. “Hey, we could call ourselves Lead Balloon.” Two years later, when Page had formed a new group from the ashes of The Yardbirds, he remembered Moon’s comment and decided on Lead Zeppelin, “the perfect combination of heavy and light, combustibility and grace.” Manager Peter Grant encouraged Page to make it “Led” instead of “Lead” so people wouldn’t mispronounce it (as in “I’ll lead the way”).

Buffalo Springfield

One of the leading manufacturers of heavy equipment — earth movers, steamrollers, back hoes — was a company called Buffalo Springfield, named after the two cities where their manufacturing plants were located. Guitarists Stephen Stills and Neil Young had just formed a group and happened to walk by a construction site in Los Angeles, where several Buffalo Springfield vehicles were in use. They loved the sound of the two words and instantly settled on it as their new band’s name.

The Doors

Jim Morrison was a film student at UCLA who loved esoteric poetry and challenging literary works. He and his band members were denizens of Venice Beach, where psychedelic drug use was rampant, so it’s not surprising Morrison became obsessed with a book by celebrated British author Aldous Huxley called “The Doors of Perception.” It explores how users of psychotropic substances describe their trips as moving from one consciousness to another, passing through doorways like Alice in Wonderland stepping through the looking glass. The band loved that image and chose the book title as their name after shortening it to simply The Doors.

Pink Floyd

Two Piedmont bluesmen from the Carolinas — Floyd Council and Pinkney “Pink” Anderson — were among the blues artists in Syd Barrett’s record collection. He and his Cambridge-based band had been known as The Tea Set for a year or two, but when they tried to book a gig in London and learned that another band called Tea Set regularly played there, they had to come up with a new name in a hurry. Barrett combined the first names of the two blues musicians he admired, and the band became Pink Floyd.

Steely Dan

In 1959, counterculture author William Burroughs wrote a bizarre book called “Naked Lunch,” which included a reference to a Japanese sex toy which went by the brand name “The Steely Dan II.” Donald Fagen and Walter Becker, songwriters whose lyrics touched on the macabre and deviant, were looking to form a band, since no one else wanted to record their songs. They had read Burroughs’ book and decided the name Steely Dan would fit them perfectly, and they often chuckled subversively that they went on to become hugely popular despite the fact they were named after an Asian dildo.

The Rolling Stones

Originally steeped in the blues, the band featuring Mick Jagger, Brian Jones and Keith Richards was first called The Blue Boys. When they signed a record deal with Decca Records, the management didn’t care for their name and, in a phone call with Jones, asked them to change it. Jones looked around his flat and his eyes fell on an old Muddy Waters album that included a favorite blues track called “Rollin’ Stone.” He immediately said, “Right, then, we’ll be The Rollin’ Stones.” They put the “g” back on “rollin’” and have gathered no moss ever since. (According to publisher Jann Wenner, Rolling Stone magazine was named after both the song and the band.)

Duran Duran

Fans of the late ’60s science fiction cult film “Barbarella” will instantly recognize Duran Duran as a derivation of the film’s character Dr. Durand-Durand, who invented the positronic ray, which could supposedly end humanity if it fell into the wrong hands. When John Taylor and Nick Rhodes were first forming a group, they used to play in a popular London club called Barbarella’s. Once they watched the movie, they agreed they should name their band after the key figure in the film.

Earth Wind & Fire

I don’t follow astrology much, but Chess Records session drummer Maurice White was a big devotee. His first band, a Chicago-based group called The Salty Peppers, broke up in 1970, and he moved to L.A. to start over. White’s astrological sign was Sagittarius, which apparently has the “primary element” of Earth and the “seasonal elements” of Air and Fire. So when he established his new group, he settled on Earth, Wind (Air) & Fire, and the lyrics of many of the songs in EW&F’s catalog reflect his interest in the environment and world peace.

Badfinger

When the Beatles were writing and first recording “With a Little Help From My Friends,” its working title was “Bad Finger Boogie,” because Lennon had injured his hand and was playing piano with only one finger at the time. When the time came to rename The Iveys, one of the first groups signed to The Beatles’ Apple Records label, Badfinger was suggested, based on that previous working song title. (George Harrison later said he thought the band had been named after a stripper they had admired in Hamburg named Helga Fabdinger…)

The Kinks

The London-based group that started as the Bo-Weevils and the Ravens eventually became The Kinks, but there are conflicting views about that. One version says the band liked the idea of a name that brought them “fame though outrage, something newsy and naughty, on the borderline of acceptability.” Others said, “The way you look, the clothes you wear, you ought be called The Kinks.” Either way, singer/leader Ray Davies has said he never really liked the name much but went along with it.

In 1978, Steve Averill, a punk rocker with The Radiators and a friend of bass player Adam Clayton, offered up six suggestions for the name of the new group Clayton had formed with drummer Larry Mullen Jr., guitarist David “The Edge” Evans and Paul “Bono” Hewson. The band members settled on U2 “because we disliked it the least of the six names offered,” said Clayton. “It’s ambiguous and wide open to interpretation, which appealed to us.”

Grand Funk Railroad

Mark Farmer and Don Brewer spent time with a ’60s Michigan regional band called Terry Knight & the Pack, and Pack ended up managing Farner, Brewer and Mel Schacher in a new power trio in early 1969. The Grand TRUNK Railroad Line, a subsidiary of a Canadian railroad that had been a crucial link since the late 1800s between Ontario and Chicago, ran right through Flint, where the group was based. Pack thought, “Hey, how about you call yourselves Grand FUNK Railroad?” They loved it, and eventually shortened it to just Grand Funk.

Supertramp

“The Autobiography of a Supertramp” was a well-regarded book by Welsh poet/writer W. H. Davies, who had lived a vagabond existence in England, Canada and the U.S. in the late 1800s and wrote about his curious life. Some fifty years later, a British progressive rock band that had been known as Daddy needed to make a change because of a similarly named group, Daddy Longlegs. Composers Roger Hodgson and Rick Davies both liked the tattered but noble image of a “supertramp” from the book, and Supertramp they became.

Talking Heads

When TV news producers edit together the various clips they need to tell their on-air stories, they have a term they use to refer to ‘head-and-shoulders” shots of people talking but not doing anything: “talking heads.” Bass player Tina Weymouth recalls sitting around skimming through an article in TV Guide in 1976 that explored the TV producer’s job. “I saw that ‘talking head’ basically means, ‘all content, no action,’ and we thought that described us perfectly. It just fit, so we went with that.”

Simply Red

Lead singer and front man Mick Hucknall sported a head of long, unkempt red hair, which made him the undisputed visual focal point of his group. Originally a Manchester punk band known as The Frantic Elevators, they disbanded in 1984, and Hucknall started anew with a fresh lineup, performing British soul music. They adopted the name Red (Hucknall’s nickname, of course), but one night, when a club promoter asked them their name, Hucknall responded, “Red. Simply Red.” They were then promoted and announced on stage as “Simply Red.” They liked the error and kept it.

KISS

In 1972, Gene Simmons and Paul Stanley were in a New York City-based band called Wicked Lester which was going nowhere. They heard a club band called Lips whose drummer, Peter Criss, was also a pretty decent singer, so they recruited him for their as-yet-unnamed group, focusing on a harder rock sound. Once lead guitarist Ace Frehley joined, they started experimenting with costumes and makeup for their stage act. Criss said, “Hey, Lips was a pretty good name, but how about Kiss instead?” They chose to use all capital letters, which prompted some to speculate that it was an acronym for devil worship (perhaps for Kids In Satan’s Service)…

Foreigner

In 1976 in New York City, three British musicians — guitarist/songwriter Mick Jones, multi-instrumentalist Ian McDonald and drummer Dennis Elliott — combined forces with three Americans — singer Lou Gramm, keyboardist Al Greenwood and bassist Ed Gagliardi. They called themselves Trigger until they discovered another band with the same name. Eventually, Jones came to the realization that “no matter what country we play in, we’re foreigners,” so the band adopted the name Foreigner.

R.E.M.

Four struggling musicians met in 1980 in Athens, Georgia, home to the University of Georgia. Singer Michael Stipe met guitarist Peter Buck in a record store and discovered they shared an interest in punk and proto-punk artists like Patti Smith and The Velvet Underground. They formed a band with two other UGA students but remained nameless until after their first gig, after which they kicked around repugnant names like “Cans of Piss” and “Negro Wives” before settling on R.E.M. (which stands for Rapid Eye Movement), a random phrase Stipe saw in the newspaper that particular day.

Three Dog Night

One day in 1968, singer Danny Hutton’s girlfriend was reading an article about the Australian outback, and how aborigines there would hunker down in a hole in the ground on cold nights, cuddling up with their dogs for warmth. Most times, one dog, or maybe two, would be sufficient, but on rare occasions, they would suffer through a brutally cold evening, which was referred to as a “three-dog night.” The pop group, which featured three lead vocalists, decided it was a great name for their lineup.

The Velvet Underground

Lou Reed and John Cale met in New York in 1964 and formed The Primitives, which evolved into The Warlocks, and then The Falling Spikes. Around that time, Reed read the controversial counterculture classic “The Velvet Underground,” by Michael Leigh, about the secret sexual subculture of the Sixties, and concluded it was exactly the name they needed for their fledgling band of societal misfits.

The Doobie Brothers

Nothing mysterious here: This bar band from San Jose, California, played to some rough biker crowds who were partial to marijuana, and the band enjoyed it as well, so why not name themselves after the slang term for a cannabis cigarette? It’s amusing to note that many otherwise conservative folks who enjoyed The Doobies’ music over the years probably didn’t realize what “doobie” meant.

Electric Light Orchestra

A “light orchestra,” popular in classical music circles in England in the ’60s, was a scaled down symphony orchestra, limited to as few as 10-12 instruments (mostly violins, cellos and woodwinds). Roy Wood, leader of The Move, wanted to merge classical instruments with rock and roll, “picking up where The Beatles left off.” New recruit Jeff Lynne, who shared Wood’s interest in the potential of a classical/rock merger, helped create an electrified “light orchestra” sound, ultimately realizing that that was the most appropriate name for the group (although it was often abbreviated as ELO).

Blondie

Guitarist Chris Stein and blonde-haired singer Debbie Harry formed a band in 1974 with drummer Billy O’Connor and bassist Fred Smith, at first known as Angel and The Snake. When Harry was walking by a construction site in Manhattan one afternoon, several hardhats taunted her with whistles and catcalls, and one guy yelled out, “Hey Blondie!” When a passing truck driver yelled the same thing a few days later, the group decided it was the right name for their band.

The E Street Band

Bruce Springsteen had played with several groups during his formative years in New Jersey clubs: Earth, Steel Mill, Dr. Zoom and the Sonic Boom. When he was signed in 1972 to a recording deal with Columbia, Springsteen was expected to make an acoustic album, but instead he brought some of his musician friends with him to the sessions: Garry Tallent on bass, Danny Federici on organ, Clarence Clemons on sax, David Sancious on piano, and Vini Lopez on drums. This motley crew often practiced in the garage at Sancious’s mother’s house, located on E Street in Belmar, NJ. Springsteen’s second LP and leadoff single were entitled “The E Street Shuffle,” thus immortalizing the name for decades to come, even as membership in the E Street Band changed along the way.

Creedence Clearwater Revival

The Blue Velvets were a Bay Area band playing rock ‘n roll covers in 1964-65. Once they signed to Fantasy Records, the owner insisted they call themselves The Golliwogs, after a controversial fictional character with unfortunate racial overtones. Draft notices issued to John Fogerty and Stu Cook put the band’s dreams on hiatus for a year or so, and when they reunited in 1968, the label’s new owner wanted another name change. Everyone came up with multiple ideas but settled on Fogerty’s suggestion that combined three words: Creedence (from Tom Fogerty’s friend Credence Newball), Clearwater (from the slogan for Olympia Beer, whose promotion proclaimed “It’s the water”), and Revival (for the band’s renewed commitment after the dormant period). “It was a weirder name than Jefferson Airplane or Buffalo Springfield, that’s for sure,” said Cook.

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The Spotify playlist I’ve compiled to accompany this blog entry focuses on the very earliest songs each band recorded, which is when they were still deciding what to call themselves…

I will follow you, will you follow me?

Posted on September 4 by brucehhackett

This year’s eight inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame have been announced. There’s Oasis, the ’90s Britpop band dominated by Noel and Liam Gallagher, and I invited my British son-in-law to write about them in a blog entry two weeks ago. There’s Sade, the British soul/jazz group fronted by Nigerian-born singer-songwriter Sade Adu, who I’ll be featuring next week.

And then there’s the multitalented British drummer/singer/songwriter Phil Collins, who has sold a gazillion records as a member of Genesis, as a solo artist and a featured collaborator with other artists, who I’m writing about this week.

The rest — Billy Idol, Iron Maiden, New Order, Luther Vandross and Wu-Tang Clan — barely register in my wheelhouse, or not at all. Still, they’ve all sold a boatload of records and concert tickets over the years, and if they’re worthy enough for the Hall Of Fame committee to select them for induction, I reckon they each deserve at least a few paragraphs in a round-up blog post I’ll be writing two weeks from now.

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Over the past 70-plus years, there have been quite a few popular music artists who were what you might call “overly prolific.” They released two or even three albums a year and five or six hit singles annually, and seemed to be playing on the radio in a continuous tape loop. I could mention Elvis in the ’50s, The Beatles in the ’60s, Elton John in the ’70s, Michael Jackson in the ’80s, and those are just the ones that come immediately to mind. We were oversaturated in their music, to the point where even if we loved their stuff, we sometimes grew tired of it through overexposure.

Phil Collins is another example. There was a period of about eight years in the 1980s when, no matter how hard we might try, we couldn’t avoid him. In his case, we found ourselves hearing him doing double- and triple-duty — solo tunes, songs with Genesis and duets with other artists, and film soundtracks on top of that.

But I can’t recall any artists who have found themselves on the receiving end of so much vitriol and ridicule as Collins has. In my view, it went way overboard, and was not at all fair, especially considering the quality of his musical output was (again, in my view) way above average.

Some of the harsh criticism of Collins came from the diehard fans who worshipped Genesis back in the 1970-1974 era when Peter Gabriel was their charismatic frontman. When Collins became the group’s lead vocalist in 1976 following Gabriel’s departure, those fans never accepted him in that role, and in fact grew to hate him very publicly, taking great offense as the band evolved from a progressive/art-rock band into commercial pop superstars in the 1980s, largely because of Collins’s influence.

Those fans who were biased in favor of Gabriel were never going to give Collins a fair shake…but what about everyone else? Why the “We hate Phil Collins” websites? Why did he take so much shit in the court of public opinion?

I’m not sure there’s a definitive answer for that. To some extent, he was lambasted the same way other hugely popular artists have been condemned. Critics have been notorious for seeming eager to knock stars off the pedestal once they’ve reached the pinnacle of success. (Just ask The Eagles.) Consider these comments by journalist Frank DiGiacomo in a 1999 piece entitled “The Collins Menace” in which he said, “Even when I sought to escape the sounds of Collins in my head by turning on the TV, there he would be, mugging for the cameras, intent on showing the world just how hard he would work to sell millions of records to millions of stupid people.”

Ouch.

But every pendulum eventually swings back, and eventually Collins found himself at the top of magazine lists like “Ten Much-Mocked Artists It’s Time We Forgave.” Said J.D. Considine of Rolling Stone in 2004: “For a time, Phil Collins was nearly inescapable on the radio, but we mustn’t deny the fact that he is an incisive songwriter and resourceful musician.” Dave Simpson in The Guardian in 2013: “It’s about time we recognized Collins’s vast influence as one of the godfathers of popular culture.”

So in this essay, I come to praise Collins. The period when he was being annoyingly overplayed is long behind us, and I’ve never much cared about what artists may do or not do outside of their musical contributions. I think his body of work is largely quite good indeed, not only as a singer and songwriter but also, let’s not forget, as an innovative drummer, which is how he got involved in the music business in the first place.

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Collins was born in 1951 in London and began drumming on toy kits at age five. He became an active child actor, appearing in several West End stage productions, including as the Artful Dodger in “Oliver!” But his interest in music and drumming was far greater, and by age 15, he abandoned acting and devoted all his time to playing in bands, emulating his drummer heroes like jazz great Buddy Rich and rocker Ringo Starr.

In 1970, he was only 19 when he applied for the job as drummer for Genesis, a talented progressive rock band that hadn’t yet found much commercial success. Singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel, keyboardist Tony Banks and bassist-guitarist Mike Rutherford were all musical prodigies who had attended prep school together, but they lacked a decent drummer, having burned through two already. Gabriel, who had some experience on drums, knew immediately upon hearing Collins that he was going to work out very well for them.

“I was convinced from the first moment,” he recalled in the Gabriel biography “Without Frontiers.” “I knew when Phil sat down at his drum kit that this was a guy who was fully in command of what he was doing, like a jockey on a horse. He was enthusiastic and very self-confident. I used to have a lot of fun telling the drummers how to do their drum parts. Once Phil came along, those days were over.”

*Genesis in 1974: Steve Hackett, Mike Rutherford, Peter Gabriel, Phil Collins, Tony Banks*

In his 2016 autobiography, “Not Dead Yet,” Collins remembered, “I didn’t know at the time how close they were to splitting up. (They’d lost their guitarist Anthony Phillips, who had health issues and suffered from stage fright, and they’d let drummer John Mayhew go.) I had no idea how much was riding on the auditions. Nor was I aware that Genesis’s finely balanced creative symmetry had had the legs kicked from under it.” Collins was thrilled to land the job, even though he often found himself playing the role of the jovial outside mediator, keeping peace between the tightly wound schoolboy chums.

Beginning with the 1971 Genesis LP “Nursery Cryme,” Collins proved to be a most welcome addition, showing extraordinary dexterity and inventiveness in his drum fills and rhythmic flourishes, which turned out to be crucial as Gabriel, Banks, Rutherford and new guitarist Steve Hackett combined their instrumental talents on extended, intricate pieces like “The Musical Box.” The band’s reputation as a pioneer in progressive, classically trained rock gained momentum over the next three years and four albums: 1972’s “Foxtrot,” 1973’s brilliant “Selling England By the Pound” and “Genesis Live,” and the 1974 double LP “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.” Each LP charted higher on UK charts than the previous one, and they began building a modest but devoted audience in the US as well.

Drumming teacher/scholar Rich Lackowski wrote: “Phil Collins’s grooves in early Genesis recordings paved the way for many talented drummers to come. His ability to make the drums bark with musicality and to communicate so convincingly in odd time signatures left many a drummer tossing on the headphones and playing along to Phil’s lead.”

The experience and training Collins had received in musical theater also made him the obvious choice to regularly sing backing harmonies behind Gabriel on many Genesis tracks. He even made his debut as lead singer on two short, nondescript tunes, “For Absent Friends” and “More Fool Me,” which were sometimes performed in concert. But Collins had no notion, no plan, to increase his role. “I didn’t want to not be the drummer,” he said. “This is what I did. That was my territory.”

But the band was thrown for a loop when Gabriel, one of rock’s most flamboyant, dynamic showmen, privately told the group of his intention to step down. He was about to become a father and his wife’s pregnancy was problematic, so he resigned from Genesis following its 1975 tour. The remaining band members were unsure of how to proceed. Said Collins, “My feeling was, ‘Forget the vocals, let’s carry on as an instrumental four-piece.'” Banks and Rutherford had begun writing some new material and laid down some backing tracks, but eventually they all concluded they needed a frontman vocalist.

They held auditions for Gabriel’s replacement, which lasted nearly two months and involved more than 50 candidates. Only one seemed promising enough to bring into the studio to try his hand at singing the new lyrics and vocal parts they’d written, but it turned out he wasn’t up to the task. With tour dates looming, and studio hours piling up, Genesis was getting desperate. Finally, Collins surprised his mates when he suggested, “How about I have a go?” They sighed and said, “Might as well.” So he took a shot at singing “Squonk,” a challenging track from their album-in-progress, “A Trick of the Tail.” The others looked at each other in the control room, and their eyebrows said it all: Damn, this just might work!

In his autobiography, Collins recalled that day. “Looking back, it was a defining moment for me. And yet we were still dazed and confused. The one guy we thought might manage the vocals has proved a bust, and now the drummer’s had a pop and doesn’t sound bad. But over the whole album? Is that wise? We’re caught between a rock and a soft place. Having explored every other angle, it seems like the drummer is the last-ditch, last-resort-only option. None of us can take this entirely seriously. Surely some mistake? I’m just as conflicted, because I really enjoy playing the drums. That’s where I live. Yet there’s no denying the truth: I can sing the songs.

“Finally, a compromise: I might consider this if we can find another drummer I like, because I’m not up for double duty. It just doesn’t work. The lead singer singing from behind a drum kit is alienating for an audience. There’s all these cymbals and stuff getting in the way of any connection between vocalist and crowd.”

The press, who were already convinced Genesis could never survive the loss of Gabriel, were mighty skeptical when Collins was announced as the replacement, and the group’s fan base was equally unsure. “Wait, the new singer is the drummer?” Even Collins was hesitant, but when “A Trick of the Tail” was released in early 1976, the response was largely positive and encouraging, perhaps partly because expectations were low. To many people’s ears, Collins’s vocals sometimes sounded uncannily like Gabriel’s in pitch and tone, and since the music retained much of the intricate fantasy quality of their earlier stuff, the album did well, reaching #3 in the UK, matching the peak of “Selling England By the Pound.”

Then came the acid test — how will the new Genesis come across on tour? To everyone’s relief, things went surprisingly well. With ex-Yes member Bill Bruford manning the drums on stage, Collins stepped out front tentatively, not moving much at first but singing his heart out as the group played fan favorites and a handful of new songs. “I had to learn a new set of skills,” he recalled. “I was insecure as hell about being a frontman. The thing I most had to overcome was my fear of performing with just a microphone stand. I was used to having a row of cymbals between me and the audience. It was nerve-wracking. In particular, what was I supposed to do when there’s no singing?”

Exhilarated by the acceptance of the Gabriel-less Genesis (except by the diehard “never Collins” faction), the band regrouped and worked on the follow-up, another dense, heavily prog-rock LP called “Wind and Wuthering,” which included their most popular radio-friendly tune yet, “Your Own Special Way.” On stage, Genesis was now playing major venues for the first time, and they began employing laser light shows and huge sound systems, earning a stellar reputation for big-hall sound quality, which was captured on the brilliant double live LP “Seconds Out” in 1977. Collins had recruited Chester Thompson, a jazz drummer who had played with Frank Zappa and Weather Report, who remained their touring drummer for decades to come.

Meanwhile, guitarist Steve Hackett had grown frustrated by 1978 with what he felt was a declining role and decided to leave for a solo career. This turned Genesis into a trio, underscored by the next album’s title, “And Then There Were Three.” Faced with the loss of one of their songwriters, Banks and Rutherford deliberately shifted away from the sprawling, epic structures that defined their previous work, opting instead for shorter, tighter, more direct song formats. It was a transitional album I happened to like, especially tracks like “Deep in the Motherlode,” “Snowbound,” “Scenes From a Night’s Dream” and “Say It’s Alright Joe.” “Follow You, Follow Me” became the group’s first Top 40 hit, peaking at #23 in the US and #7 in the UK. When they returned to the road, it was with hired gun Daryl Stuermer on guitar, along with Thompson on drums, to beef up the core trio as they made a concerted effort to crack the US market. Collins got increasingly more comfortably as the frontman/vocalist, but he also returned to his drum kit each night for an exhilarating “drum duel” with Thompson.

The tour was a big success, but it came at a price. Collins learned that his wife, who had reached her limit with a husband who was constantly away from home, had taken their two children and moved to Canada to live with her mother. Collins was devastated and tried to save the marriage, but she’d made up her mind. He returned alone to England to nurse his wounds and discovered an effective way to work through the emotional pain: He began writing songs.

Most of the material he wrote focused on the loss of his wife and children and the overall themes of rejection, betrayal and a breakdown in communication. When the band reconvened to begin their next album, Banks and Rutherford were surprised and pleased that Collins would now be contributing songs to the sessions, and two of them — “Please Don’t Ask” and “Misunderstanding” — were included on “Duke” (1980), with “Misunderstanding” becoming the group’s first US Top Ten hit.

Hackett, Banks and Rutherford had all recorded solo albums in the late ’70s, but Collins hadn’t done so yet, instead preferring to contribute to other artists’ records as a drummer, including LPs by Brian Eno and the British jazz fusion band Brand X. But now that he had found he had a knack for writing his own songs, he made demos and started working up R&B-flavored music (something he’d enjoyed as a kid), enlisting the help of Earth, Wind & Fire’s horn section, dubbed the Phenix Horns. He also bought a then-new Roland CR-78 drum machine and became fascinated by the possibilities of electronic drums.

These influences resulted in a rather astonishing solo debut LP, “Face Value,” released in 1981. While the solo albums of his bandmates had made little impact on the charts, Collins’s LP became a commercial juggernaut, with “In the Air Tonight” and “I Missed Again” both reaching the US Top 20 as the album peaked at #7 and went triple-platinum. Suddenly, Collins on his own had become an undeniable pop sensation, even as he concurrently continued with Genesis.

I found “Face Value” to be thoroughly entertaining as a side project, with tracks like “Thunder and Lightning” and a reworking of the Genesis song “Behind the Lines” benefitting from the vibrant horn arrangements. “In the Air Tonight,” with its era-defining drum sound, took on a life of its own, and a compelling cover of The Beatles’ spacey “Tomorrow Never Knows” turned a lot of heads. I’d always been a fan of Collins’s voice, and on “Face Value” it was on full display, handling tender ballads with soft grace and charm, and just as brilliantly, belting out the upbeat tunes with impressive force and enthusiasm.

The Collins haters were ambivalent about the solo work, but when he brought this new R&B/pop sensibility to Genesis with their “Abacab” album later in 1981, many of them abandoned the group for good. It didn’t much matter, though, as a new generation of listeners embraced the new sound, which had New Wave elements that sounded more like The Police. “No Reply at All,” sounding like an outtake from “Face Value,” got tons of airplay in the US, reaching #2 on the new “Mainstream Rock” chart, as did “Paperlate,” an extra track from the “Abacab” sessions that showed up on “Three Sides Live” in 1982.

How did Collins’s heavy-handed influence go over with Banks and Rutherford? Collins thought that using the horns was a good move to “suddenly jar people and take them off automatic pilot” from the preconceived notions they had about Genesis. He said he had the idea of writing a song that someone like The Jackson 5 would have wanted to record, and directed the band in a direction that they had never gone before. This development created some initial reservations from Banks, but he said he grew to enjoy the track by the time it was complete. Moreover, “it brought us the commercial success we’d been dreaming of since the very beginning,” Banks said.

Many critics praised the new incarnation of Genesis found on “Abacab,” 1983’s “Genesis” LP and 1986’s mega-successful “Invisible Touch.” Said one. critic, “The band was right to shed the ivory-tower artistry of their early days and embrace the rich pop hooks and accessibility that have made Genesis truly modern art rock. They have traded technical complexity and ingenuity for an altogether more stunning simplicity, making great music for people who never cared for Genesis in its original version.” Rutherford agreed, saying, “We had gone as far as we could with the progressive stuff, and we were eager to write and record in a more direct, relaxed approach.”

*Phillip Bailey in the studio with Collins, 1984*

There’s no question that the inexorable rise of Collins’s solo career affected the freedom of Genesis to record and tour at will. As Gabriel would put it, “Phil was a workaholic’s workaholic.” He released five LPs between 1981 and 1993 compared to Genesis’s four, and toured as a solo artist supporting each release. His “No Jacket Required” solo album spawned four Top Ten hits in 1985 alone. Moreover, he had three #1 hits with the winning theme song to the 1984 film “Against All Odds,” a popular duet with EW&F’s Philip Bailey on the irresistible “Easy Lover” the same year, and a 1985 duet with Marilyn Martin on “Separate Lives” from the “White Knight” film soundtrack. When you follow that run with five Top Ten singles with Genesis in 1986-87, and then six more Top Five singles on his own in 1988-1990, you can see how “Phil Fatigue” became a big problem at that juncture.

Collins acknowledged in 2010 that he had been “omnipresent” for a while, conceding that his status as a figure of contempt was a consequence of his music being overplayed. “I’m at fault, I guess, for putting out too many songs in too short a period, but the fact that people got so sick of me wasn’t really my doing. I’m not going to say I’m sorry for being so successful. I honestly didn’t mean for it all to happen the way it did.”

Still, he had plenty of cheerleaders in the business; artists like Robert Plant and David Crosby, who collaborated with Collins on various projects in the ’80s and ’90s, called him “a most positive, encouraging force” and “an enormously helpful friend,” respectively. Taylor Hawkins, the late drummer for Foo Fighters, called Collins “an incredible drummer. Anyone who wants to be good on the drums should check him out – the man is a master.”

By 1990, Banks and Rutherford fully expected Collins would be leaving the band, but he stuck around for one more album and tour. Entitled “We Can’t Dance” to whimsically address the dominance of dance music on the charts at that time, the album featured seven tracks by Collins, more than any previous Genesis LP by far. This lent credence to the theory that most were outtakes from Collins solo albums; certainly the singles “No Son of Mine” and “Jesus He Knows Me” sounded like it, as did the appealing album tracks “Living Forever” and “Way of the World.” Some pieces, though, came from studio jams like the trio had done ten years earlier (“Driving the Last Spike”). When they toured behind the album, Collins sang with an in-ear monitoring system, which he said allowed him to sing more effortlessly and not “fight” with the band’s sound. It also reduced his worry about the condition of his voice on tour, the first sign that aging was beginning to take its toll on him.

He went full solo in 1993, with a punishing work schedule that cost him his second marriage as well. His “Both Sides” LP, recorded by himself with no collaborators, was a very personal collection of songs, again focusing on lost love and failed relationships (“Everyday” and “Both Sides of the Story”). In 1996, he tried something new — The Phil Collins Big Band, an 18-piece jazz instrumental group born as a tribute to his early idol Buddy Rich. They played jazz festivals in Europe and elsewhere and released one live LP, “A Hot Night in Paris,” in 1998.

His final commercial success came with the music he wrote for the film soundtrack to the Disney animated film “Tarzan,” which included “Two Worlds,” “Strangers Like Me” and the award-winning “You’ll Be in My Heart,” which grabbed an Oscar and a Golden Globe for Best Original Song in 2000.

By 2000, a litany of health issues plagued his ability to perform, either on drums or on vocals. First it was a sudden hearing loss that lasted nearly three years; then he underwent upper neck surgery to relieve pain developed while drumming on tour in 2007. That led to chronic arthritis, which caused severe depression and, later, alcoholism. An infected foot caused a fall that resulted in nerve damage and required back surgery. On the rare occasions he took to the stage, he needed a cane or a chair, and looked mighty frail for a rock star. In 2021-2022, he reunited with Banks, Rutherford, Thompson and Stuermer for “The Last Domino?Tour,” which included Collins’s son Nic helping out on drums as Genesis bid farewell to live performances.

Collins was inducted into the Rock Hall as a member of Genesis in 2010, and now he’ll be inducted again on his own this year, one of only a handful of artists to be honored two or more times.

I saw Genesis in concert only once, in 1981, and it was an incredible evening of sound and light. I never did catch a Collins solo show — part of the Phil burnout syndrome, I suppose. But I definitely count myself a fan of most of his music, and I had fun compiling two playlists (see below) to separately highlight his work with Genesis as well as his solo stuff, both arranged chronologically.

Last week I came across a 2014 quote from Diane Birch, a talented but little known 43-year-old soul singer, who summarized Collins’s career in a way I find myself mostly agreeing with: “Collins walks a really fine line between being really cheesy and being really sophisticated. He can seem appalling, but at the same time, he has awesome production values and there’s a particular richness to the sound. It’s very proficient in the instrumentation and savvy about melodies. And he’s an insanely talented drummer.”

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