By Chuck Darrow
These days, anyone who keeps tabs on casino entertainment bookings knows you can’t swing a bass guitar without hitting a tribute band: Hardly a week goes by when there isn’t at least one such outfit playing a local casino. But The Musical Box stands apart from the pack, and not only because it’s among the oldest of musical mimics.
The Musical Box, which performs Saturday at Caesars Atlantic City, is arguably the greatest tribute band of all, thanks to its painstakingly clone-like recreations of concert tours performed by Genesis in the days when Peter Gabriel was the group’s lead singer, and its sonic stock-in-trade was not the radio-friendly pop confections of the version fronted by Phil Collins, but musically and lyrically dense and complex pieces that fell squarely under the “progressive rock” banner.
A performance by the Montreal-based quintet doesn’t merely feature faithful sonic recreations of material that Genesis recorded in the first half of the 1970s. Instead, it is a spectacularly precise—some might say near-supernatural—conjuring of a Gabriel-era concert down to the authentic visual elements originally used by Genesis, lead singer Denis Gagne’s surreal costumes (which were worn by Gabriel on the band’s early-’70s tours) and even Gagne’s verbatim recitations of Gabriel’s between-song spiels (not to mention his double-take-inducing physical resemblance to the British singer-composer during that time period).
And this isn’t just a random opinion: No less an authority than Collins—whose primary role was that of drummer until Gabriel quit the band in 1975—has proclaimed that, in his eyes and ears, The Musical Box “play it better than we did.”
Currently, the 31-year-old unit is on an extensive, worldwide tour celebrating the 1973-’74 road trip that Genesis mounted in support of the group’s fifth (and many would say best) studio album, “Selling England by the Pound”, which was released in September, 1973. To hear Gagne tell it, it doesn’t get any better for him.
“To be honest, it’s my favorite Genesis album and I believe it’s one of the greatest albums of all time,” offered Gagne in a light French- Canadian accent during a recent phone chat.
“It’s an amazing album. I can still remember the first time I put the album on my record player, and I hear [Gabriel] singing the opening lines of [“Dancing with the Moonlit Knight” the LP’s lead track]. And I’m already sold. I’m like, ‘Oh my God, what’s going on? What’s this?’ I didn’t expect that for one bit; I had no idea what I was about to listen to.”
Gagne noted while he was already a fan of the group, “Selling England” took things to a different level. “It became my favorite album. It’s still my favorite Genesis album. And, since Genesis is my favorite band, I guess you could say it is probably my favorite album of all time.
“It’s just the way [“Moonlit Knight”] builds up through the whole song: It’s very quiet and then it’s coming, it’s coming, and then it explodes and then it goes back down. I mean I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is a masterpiece!’
“I don’t need to convince anybody that ‘Firth of Fifth’ is just an amazing track,” he continued. “And so is ‘Cinema Show.’ And while I know that it’s not one of the fans’ favorites, I’ve always been a big fan of ‘The Battle of Epping Forest,’” he noted, referring to the side-two track that tells the somewhat whimsical tale of a rumble between two groups of London gangsters.
TMB’s standard Selling England program also includes other Gabriel-era signatures including the song “The Musical Box” (from 1971’s Nursery Cryme) and two classics from the 1972 album Foxtrot, “Watcher Of the Skies” and “Supper’s Ready.” The latter is the side-two epic that, at 22 minutes and 58 seconds, was recently calculated to be the fifth-longest song in history by the largest.org website (in case you’re wondering, the top spot in the survey was Jethro Tull’s 1972 opus, “Thick As A Brick,” which was a single song encompassing both sides of the album).
It seems a little surprising that The Musical Box could sustain an internationally acclaimed career for three decades given that its repertoire does not include such beloved post-Gabriel Genesis tracks as “Invisible Touch,” “Throwing It All Away” and “That’s All.” But Gagne–who joined the group after it had played, by his count, 30 concerts (he estimated he currently has some 1,400 gigs under his belt)—is not at all puzzled by that.
“After Genesis became huge and played stadiums and all that, I think that all those people who saw Genesis with Peter at the time were nostalgic for that era, and they wanted to see it again,” he reasoned.
“And I think also that all the people who saw Genesis later on were intrigued: ‘What were they like when Peter was fronting the band?’ Every Genesis fan in the world knows that they all wish that Peter would come back in the band; I’ve known forever that it’s never gonna happen because he’s not interested.
“So I guess that’s, that’s what it is, like all these fans are like, ‘We want to see Peter with the band.’ And [Gabriel] himself will say, ‘Well, if you want to see what I did with Genesis, go and watch The Musical Box.’”
In turn, such success has provided Gagne a life he couldn’t have imagined in the early ’90s.
“I never expected to be doing this for so long,” he said. “But as our drummer once said to me: ‘You know, we grew up dreaming that we were these guys. And well, now we kind of are these guys two hours a night.”
For tickets, go to ticketmaster.com.
Sounds of the Season
at Borgata
This year’s only original casino holiday production show kicks off Saturday at Borgata Hotel Casino & Spa.
Produced by local impresario Allen Valentine, Christmas in Concert will be presented 18 times through Christmas Eve. It’s a revusical expected to include a sleigh-full of Yuletide favorites–secular and religious–as well as plenty of slick choreography and eye-catching costumes.
For tickets, go to ticketmaster.com.
Chuck Darrow has spent more than 40 years writing about Atlantic City casinos.
