anyone see The Musical Box Trick of the Tail?

[f***@hotmail.com]

please post a review or cut & paste a review

[MartinC]

Post by f***@hotmail.com
please post a review or cut & paste a review

This is what I wrote for the UK board halfway through the European tour. The
first few shows until Frankfurt were cursed by various technical problems.
Well, after all, it was the world premiere and the very first full concerts.
However, it did get fixed pretty fast (and pretty well) and from the second
week it was just unbelievable fun. If you have a chance to see them in
USA/Canada then go for it... ;-)

***************************************************************************

Hi there...

I saw that you already found the Frankfurt pictures, but (just in case) here
it is again:
http://www.wiventertainment.de/trick/int/pictures.html

I can give some information about the early shows that may explain a couple
of the problems... apparently the equipment arrived broken and in pieces and
half of the stuff needed major repair up until minutes before the premiere
in Oslo. Then, according to TMB "the other half broke down during the
show"... Bearing this in mind, the Scandinavian shows worked relatively good
and the audiences seemed to love it.

Hamburg was cursed by sound problems of the venue, so Frankfurt on October
2nd was the first show that got most of the concert working properly (just
the films were still missing because the projector couldn't be fitted within
time). And on October 3rd we got the PERFECT show both visually and
musically. And the day after in Stuttgart the film projector broke down at
"Entangled"... Aaarghgh! Cross your fingers that this is it then... now we
can guess how Genesis felt during the "Lamb" tour when nothing was working.

You heard some reviews here already, but I'd like to tell my personal
thoughts as well. First of all (and the most important thing to bear in mind
before you go): It is perfectly obvious that Denis Gagne does not act as a
Phil Collins clone the way that Martin Levac or Ron Belgard could have been.
He is a great actor and perfectly impersonates Collins with his body
language, looks and moves, but his voice is not suited to create the
identical timbre and "colour" of voice that Collins got back then.

This is a pity, because (of course) a perfect "Collins" would have added a
lot more emotional value to the production, but after losing Ron Belgard few
weeks before the tour, this was just the only way to save the tour and the
production. So the one thing that you should *not* do is to spend the entire
evening comparing Gagne to 1976 Collins and track down every sound
difference - because you do yourself a huge favour if you just decide to
accept and live with this one single aspect and then rather enjoy the
*entire* rest of the show...

Having said that, the show is a complete killer. When TMB first did the
Gabriel shows in Europe, a lot of discussions with fans after the shows
started with "I never knew that Genesis did...". Well, this is exactly what
now happened last week in Germany.

Many younger fans just assumed that Gabriel-less Genesis immediately turned
into an "ordinary" rock show. Wrong!... The "Trick" show has a very intense
visual aspect that reminds me of both "Lamb" and "Selling". Technically it
is close to "Lamb" (with the three slide spots), but visually it is much
lighter, more "colourful" and closer to the "White Selling".

The first surprise is the overwhelming number of "new" slides - just few
were re-cycled from "Lamb" by Genesis, but the majority is entirely new. And
it was very skilfully collected, creating a real stream of iconic imagery in
the same mood and artistic quality as the best and most impressing "Selling"
scenes.

"White Mountain" is the *absolute* highlight of this approach and one of the
best visual/musical sequences that I've ever seen. Another fine example is
"Squonk" with its "wood/tree" images. If you click on "The Show" on the WIV
website you can see a nice pair of photos (Gallo 1976 and TMB 2008) of the
same scene. Shame on Denis that he didn't wave the tambourine in this
second...

The laser was the 1976 "update" to the legendary 1974 "strand projector"
during "Apocalypse" and must have been a visual shock back then to the
audiences that never saw one before. On the German boards an eye witness
from 1976 told us that he felt like "the hell got sun of its own" when he
saw it for the first time. And although we all got used to lasers today, the
reconstructed TMB laser still looks breathtaking and majestic 30 years on.

By the way - the new laser was built by exactly the same technician who
constructed the original - and the "head" of the laser indeed is the
original item provided by Genesis (just the enclosure and the laser beam
unit was re-done).

But the biggest and most sensational aspect of the "Trick" show are the
films. Many people, including me, believed them to be some nice gimmicks
rather than artistic tools. Wrong again!... and how wrong...

Searching the original films turned out to be a nightmare. A copy was
thought to be at The Farm but didn't surface. Tony Banks was sure to have a
personal copy at home, but couldn't find it. And finally, the laboratory
that kept the masters (Genesis carried copies of the films on tour) was
owned by a single person who sadly died a couple of years ago, and all of
his belongings and company possessions vanished without a trace.

At the end of the day TMB needed to re-create the entire films - and
thankfully the people who did it in the first place in 1976 were still
available as well as the scripts and written details. And so they went out
and did it again one more time.

The films are shown in the centre "slot", usually accompanied by two slides
left and right and the imagery is absolutely impressive. During "Carpet
Crawlers" we see spooky folks crawling along a floor creating a very strange
mood that is *very* different to the soft and gentle mood of the "audio
only" recording that we all know. Once again, seeing the show will change
the song/recording for you forever...

But the highlight of the show is "Entangled". It features a strong film
creating a very unusual and disturbing mood. There is nothing explicitly
"shocking" in it - quite the opposite, just some peaceful and harmless
scenes of a nun and a little child. But it strangely suggests and creates
rather sinister feelings. Do you remember the slides during "The Musical
Box" in "Selling", showing the blurred visions of little children playing in
the park? Exactly that kind of feeling crawls back during "Entangled" and
sends you shivers down the spine - this is an amazing piece of work.

The quality of the live music is outstanding as usual, with Sebastien
Lamothe, David Myers and Francois Gagnon performing the perfect
Rutherford/Banks/Hackett, while Gregg Bendian (the Collins replacement on
the final "Black Selling" tour) now performs a great Bruford. Finally, the
"drum double" Marc Laflamme of Phil/Denis is nothing less than brilliant and
perfectly re-lives the various drum duets with "Bruford" (not just the
legendary "Los Endos", there was a lot more during "Trick"). By the way - if
you sit in the front row you will notice the different faces, but I spoke to
many folks from the middle/rear of the venues afterwards who didn't notice
at all that they did swap... ;-)

So, from my point of view, if you have a chance to see this show then kill
for a ticket. Just "White Mountain" and "Entangled" would already justify
the price of the ticket on their own, and the entire 2 hour show was a
milestone of visual art in 1976, perfectly resurrected and recreated by TMB.

[b***@gmail.com]

So far the Philly shows are not sold out for tomorrow and Saturday
unless they get some walk up business. I wish the band would of
planned this tour better because so far Pittsburgh has not been listed
yet and from what we hear they have no plans to play here. If you look
at their tour page there is a spread of close to month between shows
(Feb/March). I like to see them play the Bynum theatre in downtown
Pittsburgh it seats around 1,000 and the stage can accomodate the
band. If anyone from the band reads this board please consider
Pitsburgh for this tour.

On a side note someone posted a song on Youtube from the April 1976
Genesis tour when they played at the Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh. This
show is widely known to be one of the best of that US tour. The full
boot of that show can be had if you know the right people.

[Sal Video]

Post by b***@gmail.com
So far the Philly shows are not sold out for tomorrow and Saturday
unless they get some walk up business. I wish the band would of
planned this tour better because so far Pittsburgh has not been listed
yet and from what we hear they have no plans to play here. If you look
at their tour page there is a spread of close to month between shows
(Feb/March). I like to see them play the Bynum theatre in downtown
Pittsburgh it seats around 1,000 and the stage can accomodate the
band. If anyone from the band reads this board please consider
Pitsburgh for this tour.
On a side note someone posted a song on Youtube from the April 1976
Genesis tour when they played at the Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh. This
show is widely known to be one of the best of that US tour. The full
boot of that show can be had if you know the right people.

They played a mosque?

[b***@gmail.com]

Post by Sal Video

Post by b***@gmail.com
So far the Philly shows are not sold out for tomorrow and Saturday
unless they get some walk up business. I wish the band would of
planned this tour better because so far Pittsburgh has not been listed
yet and from what we hear they have no plans to play here. If you look
at their tour page there is a spread of close to month between shows
(Feb/March). I like to see them play the Bynum theatre in downtown
Pittsburgh it seats around 1,000 and the stage can accomodate the
band. If anyone from the band reads this board please consider
Pitsburgh for this tour.
On a side note someone posted a song on Youtube from the April 1976
Genesis tour when they played at the Syria Mosque in Pittsburgh. This
show is widely known to be one of the best of that US tour. The full
boot of that show can be had if you know the right people.

They played a mosque?

The Syria Mosque was located on the campus of Pitt. It was used as a
concert hall for many years, I dont belive it was used as a mosque as
far back as the early 1970's.

[emergency stopping only]

Post by f***@hotmail.com
please post a review or cut & paste a review

Interesting. I just now saw this and as a matter of fact, last friday
I did happen to write a review of my experience for my personal blog.
So I will cut and paste for you and add a few xtra comments..


here it is:

Against my common sense, I decided to do the 5 hour trip to Glenside
to see "The Musical Box" one last time. I figured since I'm seeing so
many of these tribute Genesis concerts, I might as well see as many of
the tour years as possible even though the lead singer doesn't sound
like Phil Collins.

Speaking of that, he really didn't work out well, but there were a few
times he really did a great job. There were times he really did sound
like Phil or at least gave a great performance. Otherwise it didn't
really sound "right". And I don't know if this was because the audio
board guy was being stupid or if this was on purpose, but Gagne's mic
was riding low in relation to the rest of the band so you couldn't
hear him as well. Interestingly, this made the concert better because
you couldn't hear how far off he was of Phil Collins in certain areas.

Overall the band just didn't perform as well as they did with Selling
England, but in the end it was surprising how good it was and I
certainly don't regret seeing it (I was expecting the worst). In fact
I was particularly moved by plenty of the concert and there was many a
time where after a song had played, I thought Gagne had done
fantastic.

They came up with a simple, obvious, but ingenious way of having Denis
and the drummer switch out whenever Phil Collins stopped singing and
started drumming. He would simply run behind the big speaker (and
crouch behind the raised stage I assume) and up would jump the
similarly dressed drummer from the other side. From my angle it
looked seamless, although I have no clue what this might look like had
I been sitting at an angle facing Phil's drumset from the left side of
the auditorium.

At least, if what they say is true, they studied the tour bootlegs and
films and once again got some original tour crew together to get the
show to perform and look as faithful to the original 1976 tour. If
that's the case, a few things struck me:

-Bill Bruford of Yes was drumming on this tour, and unlike later
Genesis tours with Chester Thompson, Bill doesn't do a whole lot of
drumming duets with Phil Collins. About 60% of the time, if Phil gets
on the drums, Bill stops playing and just hits a tamborine. But there
were some good double drumming areas.

-Phil taking over Genesis didn't suddenly change the group
drastically, as I sometimes like to think. After seeing the older
recreation concerts, this one "felt" the same as the Peter Gabriel
ones. They still had that strong progressive sound and they still
played entire songs (instead of medly mashups, there were only 2 short
ones). Visually it was very similar also. It wasn't "high concept"
like Peter Gabriel concerts, more like the same stuff but without so
much weirdness. Unlike the later concerts, Phil was a lot more low-key
on this tour show, and the other band members were even introducing
songs themselves. The problem with this for the Musical Box is that
these guys *really* were far off their real-life counterparts
(Rutherford and Hackett) ... definitely couldn't hide their non-
British accents much at all.

-Speaking of which, Trick of the Tail wasn't as visually striking as
the older Selling England tour. It was really really weird... like old
school Peter with the slideshow and amusing stage antics but with the
special effects of a Phil show. You'd think as a band goes on the
better the concerts get with the technology. I guess they were still
getting their feet wet with Phil or something, because even though it
was really good with some visuals, for most of the concert it wasn't
as impressive as Selling England. By that I mean it seemed uninspired.
Peter made a huge difference. Phil has his own way, he was an
energetic showman and I like that, but Peter was such a mysterious
figure that the concerts I saw with 'him' as lead singer were more
disturbing and surreal and really stuck out in your head.
That is until they got to Supper's Ready which **totally blew me
away**. The slides were cool and Phil didn't have a light saber like
Peter did at the end of Supper's Ready, he had a doggone laser that
created stormclouds in the air above the audience. Way cool. Oh my
god I thought I was gonna die, it was literally one of the coolest
things I've ever seen. Even with 70s technology you can have
something that can still wow a young audience of today.

-Seeing White Mountain performed live was really powerful, but for
some reason Bill Bruford didn't do the drums and it was almost all
acoustic guitar. Entangled live was fairly awesome as well.

Remember, in relation to plenty of other 70s Genesis fans I'm
relatively young (early 30s) so I am actually new to a lot of what
Genesis is all about and their history, even though in the early 80s I
was listening to Invisible Touch, since that's all I knew about the
band until just a year ago.

Aside from all that, the interesting story of the night was I ended up
sitting near an unusually attractive woman looking to be about mid-30s
(weird for a concert with a bunch of older dudes in the audience). She
kept touching me friendly-like and offered me tic tacs. She was there
by herself. Some dude came squeezing past me in order to talk to her
and promptly got scared away after he saw what he thought was her
boyfriend/husband. Turned out to be just another dude coming to sit
down that wasn't with her. Pwned. Anyway, the seats between us are
empty so she gets up and sits closer to me. She gets up to buy a drink
or something an hour after the show starts and two gigantic people
show up to claim the seats between us (an hour late? geez). She comes
back and says "what happened to our seats?" and I say these people
suddenly showed up and I get up to let her in the row. She strokes my
arm gently and says "um, that's ok" and finds and empty seat somewhere
else. That kind of thing reminds me of college.

[raven1]

On Wed, 7 Jan 2009 21:26:07 -0800 (PST), emergency stopping only
<***@gmail.com> wrote:

I saw them in NYC last weekend, and was mightily impressed (full
disclosure: this is my 6th or 7th time seeing TMB over the past few
years). No, Denis Gagne doesn't sound like Phil, but he does sound
like Peter, so that's certainly not a problem in my book: if I'm going
to pretend that TMB are Genesis, I can certainly pretend that Peter
stayed on as the singer! ;-)

As far as the show itself, the segues between Denis and Martin
Laflamme were executed seamlessly, the special effects (especially the
laser) were spectacular in the fairly intimate venue of the Nokia
Theater, and musically, it ranked at or near the top of their shows
I've seen, especially "Firth of Fifth" and "Supper's Ready" (one minor
sound glitch on the latter; the sound man was late in bringing up the
mic level when the vocals came back in on "six-six-six...". Overall, a
wonderful show, and while I wish they'd do "The Lamb" at least once
more time, I plan to catch every show in my area as long as they plan
on touring. And you're right, it was hysterical to hear "Mike" and
"Steve" futilely trying to hide their French-Canadian accents while
introducing songs.

Post by emergency stopping only

Post by f***@hotmail.com
please post a review or cut & paste a review

Interesting. I just now saw this and as a matter of fact, last friday
I did happen to write a review of my experience for my personal blog.
So I will cut and paste for you and add a few xtra comments..
Against my common sense, I decided to do the 5 hour trip to Glenside
to see "The Musical Box" one last time. I figured since I'm seeing so
many of these tribute Genesis concerts, I might as well see as many of
the tour years as possible even though the lead singer doesn't sound
like Phil Collins.
Speaking of that, he really didn't work out well, but there were a few
times he really did a great job. There were times he really did sound
like Phil or at least gave a great performance. Otherwise it didn't
really sound "right". And I don't know if this was because the audio
board guy was being stupid or if this was on purpose, but Gagne's mic
was riding low in relation to the rest of the band so you couldn't
hear him as well. Interestingly, this made the concert better because
you couldn't hear how far off he was of Phil Collins in certain areas.
Overall the band just didn't perform as well as they did with Selling
England, but in the end it was surprising how good it was and I
certainly don't regret seeing it (I was expecting the worst). In fact
I was particularly moved by plenty of the concert and there was many a
time where after a song had played, I thought Gagne had done
fantastic.
They came up with a simple, obvious, but ingenious way of having Denis
and the drummer switch out whenever Phil Collins stopped singing and
started drumming. He would simply run behind the big speaker (and
crouch behind the raised stage I assume) and up would jump the
similarly dressed drummer from the other side. From my angle it
looked seamless, although I have no clue what this might look like had
I been sitting at an angle facing Phil's drumset from the left side of
the auditorium.
At least, if what they say is true, they studied the tour bootlegs and
films and once again got some original tour crew together to get the
show to perform and look as faithful to the original 1976 tour. If
-Bill Bruford of Yes was drumming on this tour, and unlike later
Genesis tours with Chester Thompson, Bill doesn't do a whole lot of
drumming duets with Phil Collins. About 60% of the time, if Phil gets
on the drums, Bill stops playing and just hits a tamborine. But there
were some good double drumming areas.
-Phil taking over Genesis didn't suddenly change the group
drastically, as I sometimes like to think. After seeing the older
recreation concerts, this one "felt" the same as the Peter Gabriel
ones. They still had that strong progressive sound and they still
played entire songs (instead of medly mashups, there were only 2 short
ones). Visually it was very similar also. It wasn't "high concept"
like Peter Gabriel concerts, more like the same stuff but without so
much weirdness. Unlike the later concerts, Phil was a lot more low-key
on this tour show, and the other band members were even introducing
songs themselves. The problem with this for the Musical Box is that
these guys *really* were far off their real-life counterparts
(Rutherford and Hackett) ... definitely couldn't hide their non-
British accents much at all.
-Speaking of which, Trick of the Tail wasn't as visually striking as
the older Selling England tour. It was really really weird... like old
school Peter with the slideshow and amusing stage antics but with the
special effects of a Phil show. You'd think as a band goes on the
better the concerts get with the technology. I guess they were still
getting their feet wet with Phil or something, because even though it
was really good with some visuals, for most of the concert it wasn't
as impressive as Selling England. By that I mean it seemed uninspired.
Peter made a huge difference. Phil has his own way, he was an
energetic showman and I like that, but Peter was such a mysterious
figure that the concerts I saw with 'him' as lead singer were more
disturbing and surreal and really stuck out in your head.
That is until they got to Supper's Ready which **totally blew me
away**. The slides were cool and Phil didn't have a light saber like
Peter did at the end of Supper's Ready, he had a doggone laser that
created stormclouds in the air above the audience. Way cool. Oh my
god I thought I was gonna die, it was literally one of the coolest
things I've ever seen. Even with 70s technology you can have
something that can still wow a young audience of today.
-Seeing White Mountain performed live was really powerful, but for
some reason Bill Bruford didn't do the drums and it was almost all
acoustic guitar. Entangled live was fairly awesome as well.
Remember, in relation to plenty of other 70s Genesis fans I'm
relatively young (early 30s) so I am actually new to a lot of what
Genesis is all about and their history, even though in the early 80s I
was listening to Invisible Touch, since that's all I knew about the
band until just a year ago.
Aside from all that, the interesting story of the night was I ended up
sitting near an unusually attractive woman looking to be about mid-30s
(weird for a concert with a bunch of older dudes in the audience). She
kept touching me friendly-like and offered me tic tacs. She was there
by herself. Some dude came squeezing past me in order to talk to her
and promptly got scared away after he saw what he thought was her
boyfriend/husband. Turned out to be just another dude coming to sit
down that wasn't with her. Pwned. Anyway, the seats between us are
empty so she gets up and sits closer to me. She gets up to buy a drink
or something an hour after the show starts and two gigantic people
show up to claim the seats between us (an hour late? geez). She comes
back and says "what happened to our seats?" and I say these people
suddenly showed up and I get up to let her in the row. She strokes my
arm gently and says "um, that's ok" and finds and empty seat somewhere
else. That kind of thing reminds me of college.