The most striking thing I’ve read about Canadian band The Musical Box is that Peter Gabriel (pictured left) once took his children to see the group, so that they would understand what daddy did back when he was a lanky young man with an inverse mohawk shaved into his shaggy hair.

For some years now, the Musical Box has visited New York City every December, playing a pair of shows at the Tribeca Performing Arts Center. I wrote a brief preview piece for a recent issue of TONY. And I’d long been curious to witness the group in action; last night, accompanied by Dr. LP and my TONY prog pal Josh Rothkopf, I finally managed to do so.

Since 1993, the members of the Musical Box — both the performers and a raft of offstage designers and technicians — have devoted themselves with a single-minded fervor to recreating in exacting detail the shows that Genesis performed in support of its early albums Nursery Cryme, Foxtrot, Selling England by the Pound and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The specific show we saw last night was the one dubbed the "Black Show," employed during Genesis’s 1974 North American tour.

Setlist: Watcher of the Skies / Dancing with the Moonlit Knight / Cinema Show / I Know What I Like / Firth of Fifth / The Musical Box / Horizon / The Battle of Epping Forest / Supper’s Ready / Encore: The Knife

With the rise of prog-friendly modern acts like Radiohead, Porcupine Tree and the Mars Volta, Gabriel-era Genesis has been re-evaluated lately. And while it’s the yacht-rock Genesis of the ’80s that most people reflexively think of nowadays, it’s fair to say that between 1973 and 1975, few rock acts were as consistently innovative as Genesis.

On stage, the players ably recreated florid Baroque studio concoctions such as "The Musical Box," "Cinema Show" and the epic "Supper’s Ready." But what really set Genesis apart from the crowd during those early years was the spectacle of its stage show. With regard to lighting, sets and props, Genesis was nearly peerless; only Alice Cooper devoted as much energy to making a rock show into a true multimedia theatrical event.

Just as critical were the contributions of Gabriel himself. Anyone who came in with "Shock the Monkey" or especially "In Your Eyes" might be shocked to see just how fundamentally bizarre and unsettling Gabriel was during his Genesis days. Adorned in eerie makeup and outlandish costumes, Gabriel pranced, leaped and stalked the stage. He crammed black humor, social concern and a mysticism straight out of Blake into his lyrics, and filled the spaces between songs with chimerical monologues: bizarre, unsettling fairy tales delivered in a deadpan, and punctuated with hysterical cackles.

Courtesy of YouTube, here’s Genesis playing "Watcher of the Skies" on the Midnight Special in 1973:

The Musical Box has devoted phenomenal attention to recreating those early Genesis shows, spending untold hours not just learning the notes and studying the moves, but also building the props and sets, duplicating the costumes, procuring and reconditioning the original instruments, and even transcribing the monologues. The result is nothing like a typical cover band, where some rock-star
wanna-be prances around and pretends to be Jim Morrison, Axl Rose or
Morrissey for a while. It’s more like a cross between a repertory
theater company and a period-instrument Baroque ensemble. Same abiding
fervor, same attention to detail.

In this pursuit, the Musical Box has been aided repeatedly by Genesis itself: Tony Banks allowed the group to hear the original master tapes separated into their component tracks, so specific parts could be learned more precisely. And for several years, the Musical Box had not just an exclusive license to perform The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway live, but also the thousand-plus slides used in the original 1975 stage presentations.

That license has since expired, and rumors continue to swirl that the Gabriel-era Genesis lineup — Gabriel, Banks, Steve Hackett, Mike Rutherford and Phil Collins — will actually reunite next year to coincide with a boxed set of remastered CDs. I’ve even heard tell that the idea is for the original players to re-stage and film Lamb themselves. That might be well worth seeing, but I can’t imagine that Gabriel, Collins et al could do a better job at recreating vintage Genesis than the Musical Box currently does.

Two things prompted me to finally see the Musical Box last night. The first was news that Gregg Bendian — an estimable avant-garde composer and free-jazz drummer, founder of the Mahavishnu Project and a longtime friendly acquaintance — had taken on the role of Phil Collins. Bendian replaced Martin Levac, who
departed, ironically or not, to front Turn It On Again, an ’80s-era Genesis tribute band due to play the Tribeca Performing Arts Center in March.

The other compelling reason was that Denis Gagné (pictured left), an absolutely uncanny Peter Gabriel, will be taking next year off, as the rest of the group soldiers onward with a recreation of A Trick of the Tail, the first post-Gabriel Genesis album. (As I noted in my TONY preview, apparently those who do know history are also doomed to repeat it.)

Lead guitarist François Gagnon executed Steve Hackett’s intricate parts even more precisely than Hackett himself played them originally. Bassist-guitarist Sébastian Lamothe, founder of the Musical Box, and keyboardist David Myers filled their respective roles superbly.

In the days building up to the concert, Josh and I were all abuzz over the notion that this would be our first time hearing an actual Mellotron played live, and we were fairly awestruck with the authenticity of the sound last night. That said, the Wikipedia entry on the Mellotron states that the Musical Box actually tours with a digitally sampled version rather than the real instrument. If that’s true, all I can say is that its samples were startlingly good, and far more authentic than those used by the King Crimson alumni group 21st Century Schizoid Band.

I still don’t find the notion of tribute bands very appealing, but the Musical Box is a thing apart: a faithfully executed replication of a historical body of work, enacted with surpassing skill and infectious passion by a large cadre of talented devotees. And most of all, the group genuinely rocks: I can’t say that I ever appreciated just how hard Banks, Rutherford and Collins played back in the early ’70s until I saw Myers, Lamothe and Bendian dig in last night.

Once again from YouTube, here’s the Musical Box (with Levac, not Bendian) playing "Watcher of the Skies" in Turin, in 2004: