A Curious Feeling

A Curious Feeling

A Curious Feeling was the first solo album by Tony Banks, the keyboardist for Genesis. Released in 1979, it is regarded by most fans as overwhelmingly his best solo work. Virtually unremembered by the public today, I regard it as one of the lost classics of a very interesting era.

I did a recent post about high school memories. My best memories of that part of my life have nothing to do with school, but they do have a lot to do with learning.

I became addicted to '70s progressive rock at age 15. Coincided perfectly with the dawning of my absolute inability to get anyone to fuck me. This shit does NOT create experts in social interaction, friends. Everyone else was into hair metal, which I despised and mostly still do, or godawful commercial music like...uh...the shit Genesis was doing at the time.

Genesis was a beacon for me. A calling. At around the same time I decided I HAD to be a preacher, I WANTED to be a rock musician.

Y'all know which one won THAT fucking contest.

I said "rock musician" and not "rock star" for a reason. I never craved fame, always regarded it as a pathetic joke solely reserved for very strange people who I didn't share values with. I've loosened up a bit on that, but only when it comes to others. *I* still don't give a shit about being a "star" and I know I never will. I am a working musician struggling to be NOTHING but a working musician, and that's all I need.

I sat alone in my room for hours trying to decode this music, find out what made it tick. And I learned a lot of bass lines off a lot of albums, mostly of the "prog" variety. One of my personal triumphs was the day I sat in front of a tape recorder for five hours teaching myself by ear the bass part to a 13-minute piece of music by Emerson, Lake & Palmer called Karn Evil 9. When my teacher worked out the line on King Crimson's Larks Tongues In Aspic, Part II for me, I went home and tried to work out all the shifting time signatures to write the thing out. Being ADD as all fuck, I think I only did the first couple sections of it. But these were seminal times for me.

Genesis provided the most emotional resonance, and was in fact my inspiration to play. I'd a;lready played piano, but not seriously. I ended up with a bass, and playing along with the albums to songs like Fountan Of Salmacis, Firth Of Fifth, The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, and No Reply At All made me in large part the bass player I am today. I've always seen the bass as having as much potential for melodic invention as for the more obvious rhythmic and harmonic-foundation roles it usually serves. Mike Rutherford's bass playing was a catalyst for my own. One of the most incredibly undervalued musicians in rock, Rutherford created vital, vibrant, endlessly cool bass parts, and did many outrageously beautiful things with 12-string acoustic guitars as well. The fact that he's primarily remembered for what he did in the 1980s is a very, very sad thing to contemplate. But even then he had his moments of invention. in a few cases on some fairly godawful songs. (If you can stand to hear the song Invisible Touch again, note Rutherford's simple but effective bass part. It's about the only thing of interest to hang onto in that piece of shit.)

I became a musician because of Phil Collins, surely one of the great ironies of my life. Once upon a time, it would have been COOL to say Phil Collins was your major inspiration as a musician. In 2007, it's like saying a McDonald's commercial shook your spiritual foundations and set you on a path to clearer and brighter days. The amount of WRETCHED SHITE this sorry little bastard has inflicted on an unsuspecting public in the years since my initial spark may very well be proven some day to parallel the need for psychoactive chemicals among so many members of this failing culture. If you can make it through any single album Collins has recorded in the past twenty years in one listen, you BETTER need some fucking Prozac, or I will have to go back to religion just to pray for your doomed ass.

But goddammit, there was a time when he was one of the most exciting drummers in his field, and was connected with scores of brilliant musicians and albums that any young musician in this foul year of Our Lord 2007 would do well to consider. The Phil Collins of 1977 and the Phil Collins thirty years hence are two very, very different bald eagles.

But enough of those guys.

Tony Banks is a personal hero, albeit a very odd one. Guilty of as much forgettable dross as he is for works of majestic glory, the scope of his catalog includes some of the very finest works of what is today known as classic progressive-rock, and some of the most dumbass bits of Spinal-Tap-esque bullshit of the years since. there once was a time when his name conjured up images of grand harmonic movement and highly individual soloing, and even some really cool keyboard sounds. (Obviously I'm not referring to the tweezed cheesesticks of the '80s.) His writing and playing on The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway is the shit Herculean legends are formed of. The towering intro of Watcher Of The Skies remains one of the most memorable moments in rock keyboard history. Various bits of piano work scattered through the period 1970 to about 1981 (when it all kinda ended in many ways, but not QUITE) are among the most sublime uses of that instrument you'll find in rock. By simply changing the bass note under a particular triad or two (hardly the most original idea, but one that he was a master of) he forged a musical personality that grabbed me by the balls as a 16-year old, and forced me to explore the wide world of harmony. My tastes in these things have gone in very different realms than Tony's over the years (I don't see Tony Banks sitting down and listening to a lot of Thelonious Monk or Edgard Varese, for example) but I can trace my interest in chord theory directly back to this man, and it is the thing I am proudest of in my own musicianship. I am also quite fond of much music with the most basic harmony imaginable, but when I start tossing off twisted chords or getting modal with my bad self, Tony is in there somewhere.

And I'll never be as good as he used to be before he lost his mind and started getting so damn erratic.

A Curious Feeling is not the best produced album ever, Tony's attempts on guitar and bass are not generally something that couldn't have been perfomed more gracefully by a studio musician, some of the arrangements aren't so hot, and the singer spends a lot of time sounding like he's about to take a really big shit, but after a while, these things seem not only secondary, but many times come to the point of feeling quite appropriate to the personality and atmosphere of the album. It has a STRONG personality and atmosphere, and I'll take that any day over a Daryl Steurmer guitar solo or a nice tidy hit single. Fuck that shit. This album sounds like TONY MOTHERFUCKING BANKS. And that's all I need sometimes.

I played a very strange (and extremely insignficant) part in the history of progressive rock music nearly nine years ago, when I travelled across the Atlantic to England to be part of a tribute concert to Tony Banks' solo music. Most of the night was the very first public peformances of Tony's work - he never did this himself. HIs work with Genesis was huge, and his bandmates attained high levels of success, but most of Tony's solo work was ignored. A Curious Feeling actually sold somewhat well in his home country at the time of release, but those days are long gone - one of his later albums never even sold a thousand copies. So he never did this stuff live. We did, and I was the bass player. We even got an album out of it, but please don't bother me about that, because I'd rather forget all but 20 minutes or so of that thing...

Listening to A Curious Feeling tonight, I remember WHY I did such a crazy fucking thing. This music changed my life. It provided solace to me during my very awkward teenage years and has continued to provide pleasures large and small even today. Even with its flaws - and perhaps even in part because of them - it makes it far easier to look past other bits of his catalog, solo and band both, because the things I value most in music - personality, soul, attention to detail, the ability to tell a story somehow - these things are all over and under and soaking through A Curious Feeling.

I'm about to sit down and begin re-learning the songs I used to know how to play on it, and learning for the first time all the others. I will talk about this again. Now is not the time.

Love,
Dougie