When did you get to know Genesis - and how?

WhenI was twelve, We can't Dance ha just been released. I got to know them by their songs on the radio and their fantastic clips on tv (allthough I've never liked Hold on my Heart).

my history of buying Genesis stuff:
I bought the cassette and barely listened to something else during the summer holiday of '92 - it was my soundtrack for long car journeys throughout France, where Dreaming while you sleep soon became one of my favourite songs. Through a televised concert late 1992, I believe recorded somwehere in Surrey during the We can't Dance tour, i got to know their other trademark songs of the PC era and of course the "Old Medley" which was a great introduction to their older stuff. After I bought the cds or cassettes of th The way we walk albums, i bought Invisible Touch and Genesis (Mama) and then i jumped back in time with Foxtrot and Duke on cd, and the further into the seventies with Genesis Live and Nursery Cryme. Then came Seconds Out, And then there were Three & A Trik of the Tail (conventional records I bought at a great second hand store) and Trespass for a bargain somewhere in a Techno muic store in Köln during a school trip (instead of going to yet another museum).

By the time i bought The Lamb on vinyl, our record player broke down so I had a friend convert it to cassette. This resulted in a warped version of the Lamb as he changed the order of the record sides - maybe that is why i had some trouble getting into it ;-) Strangely enough, Selling England was one of the last albums i got to lay my hands on! Oh well, save the best for last.

Quoth lineinthesand:
So that's all I own by Genesis at that time, and I think they're the essentials - I don't know if there are any albums worth buying ...
O oohh, you shouldn't have said that. There are of course many albums worth buying. On each of the ones you don't have is at least one song which is mind blowing, and that's already worth spending the money. "Calling All Stations" may be the only exception to this rule, but there still the others might disagree...

Genesis was my first venture into progressive rock, and really my first venture into good music at all- I'd previously been an MTV kid, NSYNC fan and all. Around when I was 11 or 12, my brother started getting into later Genesis. He'd enjoyed the Tarzan soundtrack and realized that Phil Collins had had a band. He started playing Genesis nonstop in his car when we went to and from school (usually more than an hour every day) and eventually I stopped hating and started loving it. A few months after my brother discovered later Genesis, he discovered the Gabriel era. He lent me The Lamb, and it changed how I listened to all music. (Also how I became the lone prog fan in my school for far too long!)

Genesis also helped me get into a ton of other bands, as well. They were my favorite band for quite a while, though my brother occasionally hinted of this "terrible Genesis ripoff" now and again, and played a few songs, one of which sounded so much like Apocalypse in 9/8, and another which I swear was going to go into Dancing With The Moonlit Knight. And then we realized they had another singer, and my music world was changed once again! After that it took me so long to get into Fish era Marillion.

So now, Genesis is still super high on my list of musical loves (2nd place, really). If they reunited, on the other hand... :D

My story:
In October 2004(or so), a friend of mine lent me the Angra cd "Hunters And Prey"( for those who don't know Angra, it's a Brazilian metal band).
In this cd, Angra covers Mama(I have just posted in the topic about covers...I forgot to put Angra's there... :( ), and the result is good.
I got to know that Mama was a Genesis song, so I decided to go look for more Genesis songs.For coincidence, in the day I decided to do that, a Brazilian TV showed the Invisible Touch Live Show, and I fell in love with the band.I then bought the "Turn It On Again-The Hits" here in my city(Feira de Santana, Brazil), in a supermarket.
Once browsing Orkut's Radiohead community, I got to know about ProgArchives website,which I liked and still like very much. There I found more information about Genesis, and downloaded "Watcher Of The Skies", which introduced me to the Gabriel Era.
The mania caught on, and from that time to now, I have already downloaded the entire discography of the band, and videos, etc.

You've come on the right track, but there's still a lot to discover! What a considerate aunt you have! But maybe she is also a PG fan?

I only got to know them last summer, when on holiday in London... I bought the Q Classic entitled Pink Floyd & The Story Of Prog Rock (I'm a big PF fan as well).

Genesis' Foxtrot album was 2nd in the Top 40 of best progrock albums, after Dark Side Of The Moon. Curious by this I bought Foxtrot and was pleasantly surprised! I only knew some songs from listening to the radio, and I always found (and still find) them rather bad...

Now I've got all Genesis albums from From Genesis To Revelations to Seconds Out and heard some of their later work, but wasn't impressed (at all).

That's my Genesis story up to the present. My current musical addiction however, is Peter Hammill...

Quoth DrMartinus:
Do you mean you are not impressed by the later music (after the Peter Gabriel era), or by any of the albums you bought?

I wasn't (and am still) not impressed by their later albums (I've only heard We Can't Dance, Abacab and Calling All Stations). I'm very impressed by early Genesis and especially the Gabriel era (except for From Genesis To Revelations, which I don't particularly like). The post-Gabriel albums A Trick Of The Tail, Wind & Wuthering and Seconds Out are also brilliant.

But that's where my Genesis collection currently ends. One day, if I have the necessary funds, I'll delve deeper into Genesis. But I'm happy with my current collection...

Hope this lightens things up for you.

I was 19, living in an internate-scool... 1983 I knew Genesis Shotly frome before, but was not hookced.. Another student introduced me mostly too the mid-era, with early Collins... And I was Hooked. We stayed up all night playing these records, and it was magic...Spesially I felt in lowe with And Then There Where Three.. Later I have developed my taste, and discovered Gabriel era...But For me there are no one over Genesis ALSO much of the after-Gabriel stuff. GENESIS came out this year 84? , and I was Thrilled by MAMA and HOME BY THE SEA

For me it all started with "Invisible Touch". At this time I was only 14 and my interest for "Rock" had just begun: Stuff like Dire Straits, Springsteen..80'ies stuff..
I then discovered the prog side of live with Pink Floyd's The Wall and became a huge Floyd Fan. And then it happened. A friend borrowed me his Nursery Cryme LP (what great LP-Cover !!). I started listening to this LP with headphones in a darkened room for hours ! I subsequently bought all of their early records on CD (those early CDs with the bad, bad cover art work). From the Gabriel-Era I like most: Nursery Cryme, Selling England and Tresspass (I still think it's grossly underrated) and of course Foxtrott. "The lamb", I find a bit too "pretentious" and sometimes even a bit boring, I must confess. From the Collins era I liked most of the albums ok, but I still really love "Duke" (I have to add, that I *hate* Phil Collins' solo stuff. I *like* Peter Gabriel-Solo, especially the first LP, but I am not really a PG-fan) I also listened to some other prog stuff (King Crimson, Yes, Gentle Giant, Marillion) for a while but moved on to 70'ies Hard Rock (Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath and stuff) and 60'ies Psychadelic (the Doors etc.) and some Punk (especially: The Clash). In the 90'ies I discovered all sorts of "alternative" and independent music (from Nick Cave to the Pixies and all the Grundge bands). But over all these "moves" I didn't abandon my "old" favourites. Now I listen to relatively new stuff (90'ies Indie like Built to spill and Pavement, great new Rock Bands like Queens of the Stone Age and The White Stripes etc.) and other great new bands like The Arctic Monkeys, The Zutons, Grandaddy, The Raconteurs). I also like some "neo-prog" bands like Tool, Porcupine Tree and of course Muse and - maybe you could call them a progressive: The great weirdoes of The Flaming Lips (on the new CD there's a song called "Pompeii at Götterdämmerung", a truly strange song, reminding of early Pink Floyd (hence the title, I guess). At the moment I listen to "Wind and wuthering", tough ;)
Wow, the story of my musical discoveries in one post...
What's left to say: I really like the idea of last.fm and I really, really think it's great to have a group about Genesis, especially the early Genesis. I don't know too many people who like or even know the early Genesis albums.

I heard A Trick Of The Tail at a friends house, I was prolly 13 or 14 at the time, and I just thought "That's what a record player is for!"

So I rushed out and bought a copy, then I worked my way backwards thru' the catalogue, and kept up ever since, with the exception of Three Sides Live, and Calling All Stations.

It's great to see all these younger people discovering Genesis within the last decade. Comforting to know that this wonderful music isn't just sitting on the shelf getting dusty.

The dates are not entirely clear in my cobwebby old brain, but judging from the album release dates, it must have been December 1973, when I was 12, that my older brother and I journeyed to a distant "cool" record store/head shop to buy the newly-released Selling England by the Pound, which my brother's music-literate buddy had told him was cool. We both loved the album immediately, so much in fact that, when Christmas came a few weeks later, my brother and I were both surprised to find that we had each bought more Genesis albums for the other as gifts! My sisters had been worried that we had bought the same albums for each other but it worked out okay. Our local record store was not big enough to stock multiple copies of non-mainstream artists like Genesis, so when he had visited the store first, he bought Trespass, Nursery Cryme, and Live for me; when I went to the same store shortly after his visit, all that was left for me to buy was their remaining catalog to date: From Genesis to Revelation and Foxtrot.

At the time, my bedroom was in a finished basement room, and I listened to those albums on headphones while falling asleep, night after night. Also mixed in were other prog albums like Floyd's Meddle and Yes' Close to the Edge. All that great music playing in my headphones after I'd fallen asleep inspired many wild dreams, some I still remember vividly. Like the time I woke in terror during the slow section in Meddle's track "Echoes," the part with the slow wailing ghost synths and screeching gulls. It was pitch black in that basement, the light switch was across the room, and I was too frightened to get out of bed to shut off the record player. :)

I eventually stopped buying Genesis albums after Gabriel left; it wasn't the same anymore, although I loved Trick of the Tail and would probably call it the band's musically best album. (Entangled is probably my all-time favorite song; toss-up between that and LZ's Black Dog -- 2 sides of a coin, eh?) I find the Invisible Touch album annoying, and everything after that boring, a pale reflection of their glory days of the 70s and early 80s. But we all have our own taste.

Finally saw Peter Gabriel live in Indianapolis at the end of the 2003 tour, and have the official release cd of the show. I wouldn't give two cents to see Phil Collins live, sorry. Unless he was playing drums behind PG...

DrMartinus said:
PC on drums behind PG - that would be cool... ;-)


Wasn't PC on drums in the later stages of the PG era? I thougt that Chester Tompson became A drummer in Genesis when PC took over from PG, and that CT just filled the gaps when PC wasnt drumming, execpt Drum Duet from the Way We Walk Concert 1982....... when both PC and CT were drumming at the same time......