Frank Zappa's Roxy & Elsewhere: Troubling Fills in the Air

Discussion on Frank Zappa’s 1974 album Roxy & Elsewhere, as well as some speculation on its influence.

The Enduring Catharsis of Genesis' "Duke"

For a dedicated, if critical, progressive rock fan like myself to have maintained a music blog for nearly ten years and not once dedicated a post to Genesis is a pretty glaring omission. Predictably, I have opinions about the unique arc of their oeuvre, but I have waffled for years now on the best way to do justice to their unique transformation from 70s symphonic surrealists to 80s radio staples.

Now the recent Facebook “game,” in which the participants post the cover art from a personally enduring album once a day for ten days, has forced my hand. For a pathological music listener like me, choosing only ten albums to represent all of the most enduring music in my collection was nothing short of tortuous.  After much deliberation, however, I came up with a list that I could mostly live with.

Until one of my nominees posted Duke.

I considered this 1980 release from Genesis when I made my list, but gave it a pass in lieu of other subjectively important progressive rock milestones.  Duke is very personal for me, though, and seeing it posted by someone else felt as if I had failed miserably. I can think of very few albums in my collection that have been more enduring and that I have come back to more often than this unique and sadly overlooked gem. In an act that was equal parts penance and anticipation, Duke found its way back into rotation this Spring.  Now, months later, it would be a contender for album of the year if it had not already earned the title at least four times already.

Duke was in no way my introduction to Genesis, and for a very long time I probably would not have even counted it among my favorites. Initially, I appreciated the album as a unique axis upon which Genesis’ past as progressive rock innovators and their future as a pop outfit rotated.



Throughout the past three decades since I added this album to my library, Duke has retained its initial prog-pop fluency.  The album has revealed layers of depth, however, as my life experiences have unfolded.  Like most, I experienced breakup and heartache as a teenager and a young adult, but it took going through a divorce and, later, having children to really grasp Duke’s narratives.

Duke is, arguably, a concept album about fame and failed relationships,  The themes that hold Duke together were inspired by the toll that the band’s extensive touring schedule exacted on Phil Collins’ disintegrating marriage. Fueled by the ordeals of his private life, Collins finally shed the vestiges of Gabriel’s surreal storytelling and revealed a uniquely personal iteration of Genesis. That his expressions are genuine are, I think, beyond question. I can think of few songs more gut-wrenchingly vivid than Please Don’t Ask, which captures the emotional arc of a grieving man’s internal dialogue as he struggles to keep his composure in the face of deep loss.



Despite being so personal, Duke is not a solo album.  Genesis was made up of three distinctive songwriters, and its a feat of collaboration that they were able to trace the outlines of Collins’ ordeals so clearly. In fact, the perspectives of Collins’ bandmates contribute greatly to Duke’s success. Of particular note is keyboardist Tony Banks, who wrote a multi-movement composition describing an artist’s relationship with the public eye. To distance themselves from their earlier work and perhaps generate a single or two, the band elected to edit the movements of this long-form piece throughout the album. Weaving this narrative in this way imparts Duke with the sense of an objective storyline that frames Collins’ more personal and subjective insights.



This narrative structure suggests that Duke might veer into "rock opera" territory, but a close look at the libretto shows that any story that revolves around a character named "Duke" is more a suggestion than plot.  In fact, such a character is never named in the entire album, and his counterpart "Duchess" only exists as a song title.  Rather like the character "Billy Shears" did for  Sgt. Pepper's,  the idea of "Duke" is set up so vividly in the opening tracks of the album that he frames the listening for all the songs that follow, whether he is intended as an actual character or not.

Looking at the emotional facets of ending a relationship from both inside and out, the band unified their work around Collins' struggle, resulting in a focus that is unique in the Genesis catalog. As a vocalist, Collins called on emotions in ways that he never had before, harnessing an edgy screaming range that would become his signature for years to come. The band’s instrumental aspects, which were always top-notch, rose to meet the challenge of backing his cathartic delivery, and aside from a missed opportunity for a humming low end, the production captures these performances with convincing clarity. I have a hard time imagining any album with better drum sounds than those on Duke.



Revisiting Duke over these past few months, I keep thinking about how it's a shame that the album isn’t considered more highly than it is in the prog-rock pantheon. To be blunt, however, it was too pop to be prog and prog to be pop. Like 90125 and Moving Pictures, it stood at the crossroads of these two genres and was able to inhabit them both with distinctive ease. What makes Duke so enduring, however, its its brutal honesty in describing an experience, both musically and conceptually, that I could only relate to after going through my own trials.

Sound of Contact and the Approval of the Faceless

The progeny of past musical icons often find themselves in artistically perplexing and complex positions. For example, I’d love to be able to say that I could listen to Dimensionaut free of the temptation to compare Simon Collins to his father Phil, and by extension, Sound of Contact to Genesis. It seems, however, that I am not that big.

In my defense, though, Collins Jr. does not make it easy. There are definitely musical similarities, some of which might even be the result of his genes, and he capitalizes on them. Within his comfort zone, his vocal tone is immediately reminiscent of Collins Sr, but he doesn’t cut loose in the timbral extremes that his father played with. Collins Jr. also has a drumming style that is also clearly influenced by his father, and the drum sounds on Dimensionaut plainly reveal the way in which he intends to follow in his father’s footsteps.



Despite these similarities, however, Collins Jr. is not his father, yet we find him assembling a contemporary progressive rock band with the implicit expectation to step into his parent’s shoes: an expectation that forces him to decide whether he plans to speak to his own generation or gain the approval of his father’s residual audience.

A desire for approval can be an incredibly destructive trait. The times in my life that I have been the most unhappy are inevitably surrounded by a nearly obsessive need to get approval, often from someone who does not readily give approval at all. It took some serious reflection to learn to accept this about myself and let go of the opinions of others. Seeking approval in a musical situation can be similarly destructive. Basing artistic directions on the assumed opinions of a faceless audience is a slippery slope, and reciprocally, self-absorbed narcissism can wear thin in the long term.

I think, however, that Collins Jr. is genuine about bearing the torch for his father’s more progressive roots. Admittedly, there are some music traits that are passed down genetically, but the style of music that children adopt is largely the product of their environment. Collins Jr. was obviously around a lot of his father’s music growing up. With the collaborative presence of Dave Kerzner, whose pedigree has its own intersections with Genesis, Dimensionaut is actually very good. It’s great, keyboard-based approach recalls 90s neo-prog stalwarts IQ, but Sound of Contact is far more muscular and engaging, due in no small part to Collins’ drumming.



The lyrics, however, sometimes wear thin under the weight of making big ideas accessible, and occasionally border on the trite. Collins Sr. did have some success in crossing over between progressive and pop music, but historically, this kind of crossover has seen more strain than success. Most of the lyric weaknesses have started to fade for me, however, as I become more familiar with the instrumental, melodic, technical, and structural strengths of Dimensionaut as a whole.



Additionally, I am not sure that there is a place for Sound of Contact to cross over into. Traditional prog to pop cross overs feel a bit “adult contemporary” by today’s standards, and the video for this “single” does not do much to help this generalization. Still, when the Genesis-influenced bridge kicks in, Sound of Contact shines musically.

Dimensionaut leaves room for improvement, but it captures a rare combination of nostalgia, novelty, and authenticity that the current progressive rock scene needs. There is certainly enough of an indie prog audience that wants to see Collins Jr. succeed to warrant his band’s presence in the community. Point being, he is probably smart to invest in his father’s progressive fanbase, and is probably having a lot of rewarding fun doing it, too.

Theme Songs: The Foos vs. Phil Collins

I learned to read in the pages of Spider-Man comics, so it probably goes without saying that I hotly anticipate the upcoming slate of superhero movies.  A couple of weeks ago, Thor was released and I made good on my determined resolution to see it on opening weekend.   I did not specifically follow Thor as a kid, but Marvel was generally my comic company of choice and this character played a large role in that universe.  The most fundamental premise of a movie about Thor requires the filmmaker to bring Norse gods to life in an everyday world, and because of this I think a Thor movie is an incredibly ambitious undertaking.  In this case of this particular release, however, the end result was pretty successful.  The product placement was pretty shameless, though.  Especially in 3-D - I felt a little attacked by a Kashi Go Lean box at one point. 

At another point in the movie, Thor and another character were having a conversation in a bar, and I noticed that the “jukebox” in the background was playing a song that I found immediately familiar.

Walk is among the strongest offerings on the consistently strong Wasting Light, but I don't see that it has any conceptual relevance to the movie.  The song appeared as ambient background music in the aforementioned scene, and re-emerged during the ending credits, but its lyrical and musical contribution to the move was minimal at best.  I have a distinct feeling that it was not written for Thor, but was instead appropriated as a way of tying it to other arenas of commodified popular culture.    

The inclusion of Walk as a featured song in Thor felt like another instance of product placement, which has caused my perception of Wasting Light as a whole to subtly (and negatively) shift away from its artistic merits towards its potential as commodity.  Undoubtedly, viewing music as something to be bought and sold is a standard practice.  When I feel that this perspective emerges as the primary impetus for creating new music, however, it challenges the image of steadfast integrity that I admittedly (and delusionally) project onto my favorite artists.   

I think that songs can strongly set the stage for a movie’s narrative, though, especially if they were written specifically with the movie in mind.  Sometimes, songs that play this role end up being stand-out tracks in an artist’s overall oeuvre.  Some of the best work of well-established artists such as Paul McCartney, Duran Duran, Chris Cornell, and many other artists were the result of providing theme songs to James Bond movies.  This song immediately comes to mind as an example:

It's OK, Phil.  You were only playing in front of billions of people....we all make mistakes.

Arguably, Against All Odds the song was quite a bit stronger than its attendant movie.  In fact, I don’t know anyone who has actually seen it.  Regardless, although the song was written independently from a specific album, it is a landmark in Collins’ career.  It represents a turning point in his writing away from the atmospheric theatrics of In the Air Tonight towards the appropriated whiteboy soul of Sussudio a few years later – and perhaps towards Collins’ increased perception of his own music as commodity as he evolved into one of the prominent songwriters of the 80s.