music-related, you have been warned, #132

i try to avoid writing about music, because while i have strong opinions about it and it’s important to me, i’m singularly unable to articulate why this is so. nevertheless, here we are.

i saw genesis last night at the td banknorth fleet shawmut center garden, which was really cool. they were totally my favorite from, oh, 1986 to 1993. in middle school, the usual assortment of bullies liked to interrogate me while i awaited whatever indignity they had planned, and i probably should have lied about my favorite band, in retrospect. this, among other egregious transgressions, such as being very smart, and rather fat at the time, was grounds for further punishment still.

as a result, i couldn’t help but think how odd it was to see a huge arena, more or less full of people, some of whom even looked like the 30-year-old, out-of-shape, considerably-less-intimidating version of the same guy who beat me upside the head with a no doubt underutilized math book seventeen years earlier.

it was actually a really good show, and while they left out plenty of my favorites, phil collins kept his more regrettable tendencies towards sappy ballads and ruining his own best songs in check. better still, he played the drums quite a lot (usually the people playing the plastic buckets outside of fenway or the garden sound pretty good, but surely their tips were down last night), and they played the full versions of most of their songs, complete with the lengthy interludes that probably had some people scratching their head, but were my favorite part, usually.

i had such a good time that i stuffed some poor guy with a dashboard confessional shirt into a newspaper box on my walk to the t. he was asking for it, i swear.