Mike Rutherford of Genesis

Over the past few months I have done a number of entries on members of some of my favorite long-lasting bands as well as one or two individual artists. Thus far I have published my entries on the birthdays of the musicians in question, but I'm going to have to make an exception in this case, as both Mike Rutherford of Genesis and Sting have the same birthday (only a year apart too). So I'm doing my entry on Rutherford a few days early, and I hope to finish one on Sting in time for his birthday (especially since an even more important artist has a birthday a week later, namely John Lennon of the Beatles).

Mike Rutherford of Genesis

Mike Rutherford (full name Michael John Cleote Crawford Rutherford, born October 2, 1950) was one of the founding members of Genesis, and, other than Tony Banks, the only member to remain with the group throughout its history. While in my article on Tony Banks I argued that he was probably the single most important member of Genesis in that he more than anyone else was responsible for the group’s overall sound, Mike Rutherford played nearly as important a role over the years. At the time the group formed in 1967, his closest friend and chief collaborator was Anthony Phillips, just as Tony Banks and Peter Gabriel were friends and songwriting collaborators. In the very early years, Rutherford was perhaps somewhat less important in musical terms, as he was probably the least proficient on his instrument (the bass) and the other three did a slightly larger share of the songwriting, but he was vital to the group chemistry, and fairly soon he and Phillips developed a distinctive way of playing 12-string guitars in tandem that was a key element in the group’s sound. By the time Phillips left in 1970, Rutherford was able to step into his role as one of Genesis’s main songwriters along with Banks and Gabriel, and as a performer his bass and 12-string guitar was, along with Phil Collins’s drums, the backbone to the band’s sound in concert. Even in the Gabriel years, Rutherford, Banks and Collins in particular developed a good chemistry in the studio, writing sections of “Supper’s Ready” and “The Cinema Show” as a trio. On his own, Rutherford wrote a few pieces like the opening section of “The Cinema Show”. Rutherford also came up with guitar riffs that various songs were built on, a notable example being “Back in N.Y.C”, which was unusually hard and edgy for a Genesis song, almost proto-punk.

In the years immediately after Gabriel left, Banks and Rutherford were the band’s primary songwriters, though lead guitarist Steve Hackett also wrote some key tracks and Collins contributed to a lot of the group-written tracks (“Dance on a Volcano”, for instance, began with a jam by the Banks-Collins-Rutherford trio, with Rutherford writing the lyrics). While he wrote a little less than Banks, he was the main writer of tracks like “Ripples” (aside from the lyrics, it seems he also wrote all the music with the exception of the instrumental section written by Banks) and “Squonk” (for which he wrote the lyrics and co-wrote the music with Banks). He also wrote “Your Own Special Way”, the first Genesis song to chart in the US. After Hackett left, Rutherford took over all guitar duties in the studio in addition to his role as bassist, and he and Banks at first handled nearly all the songwriting, though Collins soon began to take on a more of a hand in the latter. While Rutherford never became a guitar virtuoso, he soon adapted to using the guitar in a way that combined very well with Banks’s keyboards and Collins’s drums and vocals. A number of songs he wrote entirely on his own appeared on the first three post-Hackett albums, And Then There Were Three, Duke, and Abacab (plus an EP from the same period), but even at this point some of his most important songwriting contributions were on group compositions, such as the hits “Follow You Follow Me” and “Turn It On Again”, both of which were based on riffs that Rutherford came up with and both which he wrote the lyrics for. After Genesis started writing all their songs as a group, there were still many songs that came more from Rutherford than the others (just as there were songs that were more Banks or more Collins), including heavier tracks like “Just a Job to Do”, “Land of Confusion”, and “Dreaming While You Sleep” and ballads like “Taking It All Too Hard” and “Throwing It All Away”, all of which were based mainly on Rutherford’s guitar as well as featuring his lyrics. He also made contributions that are less readily apparent from the instruments used: for instance, the drum machine riff that “Mama” was built on came from Rutherford, not Collins. After Collins finally left the group, it was apparently Rutherford who was most keen to try to keep the group going, though after the relative failure of Calling All Stations, he was also the one who didn’t want to make another attempt (the initially hesitant Banks was more willing to record another album with the new lineup).

Rutherford, like Banks, started his solo career after the release of And Then There Were Three in 1978, though previously he had also contributed heavily to Anthony Phillips’s first solo album (originally intended as a Phillips/Rutherford joint album, though Rutherford’s Genesis commitments scuttled that plan) and co-wrote a song on Steve Hackett's first solo album, released in 1977. On his first solo album, Smallcreep’s Day (1980), he worked with a guest vocalist, and on his second, Acting Very Strange (1982), he handled the vocals himself. He disliked the results and also concluded that he worked best in collaboration with other songwriters, so he formed the group Mike & the Mechanics featuring vocalists Paul Carrack and Paul Young and co-writers B.A. Robertson and Christopher Neil. This group unexpectedly achieved commercial success not far short of Genesis and Phil Collins as a solo artist, leaving Tony Banks, the central figure in Genesis, as the only member not have commercial success as a solo artist (though their manager once asserted that Genesis was Tony Banks’s solo career). Even with the seeming demise of Genesis (unless Collins decides to come back out of retirement and join forces again with Banks and Rutherford as he did in their 2007 reunion tour), Mike and the Mechanics remains active, Rutherford having reformed the group recently – the first incarnation split after the death of Paul Young, and a second incarnation with Paul Carrack in a more prominent role released one album in 2004.

Rutherford’s songwriting tends to be slightly simpler than that of his longtime collaborator Tony Banks, as a comparison of their work both in and outside Genesis shows. In fact, a few fans of the earlier incarnations of Genesis “blame” Rutherford rather than Phil Collins, the usual target, for Genesis becoming more commercial, pointing to songs like “Your Own Special Way”, “Follow You Follow Me”, “Alone Tonight” and “Throwing It All Away” as evidence (of course this assumes that the later version of Genesis is inferior, a view I don’t agree with). While Rutherford’s songs are certainly more direct than those of Banks, there is more to his writing than these ballads, such as the harder-edged songs cited earlier, which give the music of Genesis much needed variety. Lyrically, he is perhaps a bit more consistent than Banks – though he occasionally wrote fairly banal lyrics, he also wrote exceptional ones like “Ripples” and “Land of Confusion”. In the interviews accompanying the remixes of Genesis's albums, he also showed that he is quite perceptive concerning flaws in the band's earlier work, such as their lyrics sometimes being overly "busy" or the music and lyrics clashing due to the way they worked at the time. Judging from his career as a whole, I would have to agree with his own assessment that he works best in collaboration with others. Though one or two songs that he wrote entirely or almost entirely on his own are classics, such as “Ripples”, the vast majority of his best work was co-written with others, even when he was the main writer. Most of the Genesis songs he wrote alone are decent, but on the whole they are not as strong as most of Banks’s solo compositions for the group. As for his solo albums, some parts of Smallcreep’s Day do sound very much like Genesis and much of the music is quite pleasant to listen to, but as a whole the album seems to be lacking something. The same holds true for Acting Very Strange, though I’ll admit I haven’t listened to either album many times and it’s possible that I would discover their virtues through repeated listening. While Mike and the Mechanics is certainly more MOR than his earlier work, and the group has plenty of songs that are simple mediocre (certainly Genesis albums are far more consistent), they also have some that are great, such as “Silent Running”. I generally find Banks’s solo efforts more interesting overall, but the best work of Mike and the Mechanics is quite good as well. In general, what I know of his non-Genesis work supports my impression that while Rutherford often has had great musical ideas, he usually – though not always – needs a collaborator (or two) to help him bring them to completion.

On the list below, for the Gabriel era, I have restricted myself to the few songs that Rutherford is known to have been chiefly responsible for. I have left out songs from the first two Genesis albums that he co-wrote with Phillips, as well as songs that there is no reliable information about (it’s quite possible, for instance, that he was the main composer of songs other than “Back in N.Y.C.” on The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway, but no interviews have confirmed this). For the albums where individual songwriting credits are given (from the first post-Gabriel album, A Trick of the Tail, to Abacab), I have generally excluded co-written songs, even where Rutherford wrote the lyrics (such as on “Dance on a Volcano” and “Eleventh Earl of Mar”), with the exception of particularly notable tracks like “Squonk”, “Follow You Follow Me” and “Turn It On Again” [Update: I recently came across an interview in which Rutherford said he wrote the lyrics for "Abacab", so that song probably should be added to those below, as it's one of the band's best tracks from the album of the same name]. For the later years, I have included important songs that Rutherford wrote the lyrics for and for which he seems to have been the driving force compositionally. While with slightly stricter criteria (such as excluding co-written songs like “Squonk” that are not known for certain to be composed mainly by Rutherford and including fewer of the later group compositions), some extra effort (such as editing out the last half of “The Cinema Show” and the instrumental section of “Ripples”, as these were mostly written by others) and dropping a few other less great tracks, it would be possible to make a single CD of Rutherford’s best work with Genesis, I decided to expand it to two CDs as I did with Banks, though in this case it was easy to fit everything with some room to spare. For his solo career, I picked a few highlights and representative tracks, but since I don’t have all of the albums he did (such as the last several Mike and the Mechanics CDs) and those I do have I’m not thoroughly familiar with, I no doubt missed a few worthwhile songs.

The Best of Mike Rutherford with Genesis

The Cinema Show (opening section) (Music: Rutherford[opening section], Banks/Rutherford/Collins[instrumental section]; Lyrics: Rutherford/Banks)
More Fool Me (Rutherford/Collins)
Back in N.Y.C. (Music: Rutherford[main riff]/Banks/Collins/Hackett)
Ripples (Music: Rutherford/Banks; Lyrics: Rutherford)
Squonk (Music: Rutherford/Banks; Lyrics: Rutherford)
Your Own Special Way (Rutherford)
Snowbound (Rutherford)
Deep in the Motherlode (Rutherford)
Say It’s Alright Joe (Rutherford)
Follow You Follow Me (Music: Rutherford/Banks/Collins; Lyrics: Rutherford)

Turn It On Again (Music: Rutherford/Banks/Collins; Lyrics: Rutherford)
Man of Our Times (Rutherford)
Alone Tonight (Rutherford)
Open Door (Rutherford)
Like It Or Not (Rutherford)
Taking It All Too Hard (Music: Rutherford/Banks/Collins; Lyrics: Rutherford)
Just a Job to Do (Music: Rutherford/Banks/Collins; Lyrics: Rutherford)
Land of Confusion (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Rutherford)
Throwing It All Away (Music: Rutherford/Banks/Collins; Lyrics: Rutherford)
Dreaming While You Sleep (Music: Banks/Collins/Rutherford; Lyrics: Rutherford)
Calling All Stations (Music: Banks/Rutherford; Lyrics: Rutherford)
The Dividing Line (Music: Banks/Rutherford; Lyrics: Rutherford)


Mike Rutherford Solo and with Mike and the Mechanics
(Tracks 1 to 4 performed by Mike Rutherford; Tracks 5-11 performed by Mike and the Mechanics)

Moonshine (Rutherford)
At the End of the Day (Rutherford)
Halfway There (Palmer/Rutherford)
Hideaway (Rutherford)
Silent Running (Rutherford/Robertson)
All I Need Is a Miracle (Rutherford/Neil)
The Living Years (Rutherford/Robertson)
Word of Mouth (Rutherford/Neil)
Over My Shoulder (Rutherford/Carrack)
Another Cup of Coffee (Rutherford/Neil)
Now That You've Gone (Rutherford/Carrack)

Honorable Mentions: Time and Time Again, Acting Very Strange, Couldn't Get Arrested, Taken In, Beggar on a Beach of Gold

Farrokh Bulsara, aka Freddie Mercury of Queen

Farrokh Bulsara, better known as Freddie Mercury, was born on September 5, 1946 on the island of Zanzibar, a British territory in East Africa. His parents were Indians of Parsi descent; the Parsis were Zoroastrians originating in Iran, though from photos of the Bulsaras, including the young Farrokh, I think it is safe to say they also had some non-Iranian Indian ancestry as well, as they look at least as much like typical Indians as Iranians. In any event, Bulsara went to school in his parents’ ancestral home in Gujarat, India, where his grandmother and aunt lived, and absorbed local music as typified by Bollywood film music in addition to Western rock and roll. At school he learned piano and joined his first band, the Hectics, a rock and roll cover band which he formed with several of his classmates (he was the band’s pianist, not its vocalist, as apparently he did not at the time have the self-confidence necessary to be out in front). It was also at school that he acquired the nickname Freddie, which he would use for the rest of his life.

When Bulsara was 17 his family moved to England in the wake of the Zanzibar Revolution. As an art student in London, he joined several bands as vocalist, including Ibex (later called Wreckage) and Sour Milk Sea. He also met Tim Staffell, the vocalist of Smile, and through him the group’s guitarist and drummer, Brian May and Roger Taylor. When Staffell quit, Bulsara persuaded May and Taylor to form a new band with him, which he named Queen. He himself started to use the surname Mercury, and it was as Freddie Mercury that he went on to become one of the best known rock vocalists in history.

As a vocalist, Freddie Mercury was widely recognized as one of the best in rock music, due to both the range and the power of his voice. Unlike many other singers, his falsetto was not overly thin, and so sounded better than average. But while a lot of rock fans tend to equate good singing with singing high notes, something that Mercury certainly did well, his ability to sing low and with great power was if anything more outstanding. In concert, due to worries about damaging his throat, he would usually not sing the high notes that he sang on record, but his live vocal performances remained very impressive regardless, certainly more so than the vast majority of other singers in rock, and when combined with his powerful stage presence, it is no surprise that few others could match him as a live performer. As for his instrumental abilities, in Queen’s early years, he was the group’s primary keyboardist. Though he himself was supposedly dismissive of his skill on the piano, his playing on tracks like “The March of the Black Queen”, “Love of My Life”, "The Millionaire Waltz" and “My Melancholy Blues” is, at least to my admittedly untrained ear, excellent. He only played guitar on record on one song, “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” (on this song, he also played guitar in concert), but he wrote one or two others on guitar, including “Ogre Battle”, and he wrote many guitar lines on piano.

In Queen’s first decade, Freddie Mercury was the band’s most prolific songwriter, writing slightly more than Brian May and far more than Roger Taylor or bassist John Deacon in terms of total number of songs, as well as composing more of the group’s hits than all the others put together. He was also the group’s most eclectic writer, composing in a wide variety of styles. The group’s biggest hit in the UK, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, a mix of ballad, opera and hard rock that is still considered their magnum opus and is often voted best song of all time in UK music polls, was entirely Mercury’s work. Among the group’s other big hits from their first eight albums, he also wrote the sports stadium favorite “We Are the Champions” (originally paired on record with Queen’s other big sports anthem, Brian May’s “We Will Rock You”), the gospel-style “Somebody to Love”, the rockabilly “Crazy Little Thing Called Love” (Queen’s first American chart-topper), the vaudeville-tinged “Killer Queen” and “Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy”, and the playful “Bicycle Race” and “Don’t Stop Me Now”. As for album tracks, he wrote the highly complex “The March of the Black Queen”, centerpiece to the second side of Queen II, all of which was written by Mercury; ballads like “Love of My Life”, “Nevermore” and “Lily of the Valley”; the music hall/vaudeville songs like “Seaside Rendezvous”, rockers like “Ogre Battle”, “Death on Two Legs” and “Flick of the Wrist”, the classical-style track “The Millionaire Waltz”, the lounge jazz-style song “My Melancholy Blues” and the Middle Eastern-flavored “Mustapha”, along with many other songs.

In the 1980s, Mercury’s share of the songwriting for Queen shrank considerably, with the other members writing as much or more than he did. He still wrote a number of excellent tracks such as “It’s a Hard Life” and “I’m Going Slightly Mad” (the latter, like all tracks on the albums The Miracle and Innuendo, was credited to the group as a whole) and was according to various sources the main writer on collaborations like “Friends Will Be Friends”, “Was It All Worth It” and “Innuendo”. He also made key contributions to songs written primarily by others in the group. In addition, in1985 he released a solo album called Mr. Bad Guy (two of the best tracks on this album, “Made in Heaven” and “I Was Born to Love You”, were later reworked by the other members of Queen for the posthumous album Made in Heaven), in 1987 he released an excellent cover of “The Great Pretender” (his biggest solo hit in his lifetime), and in 1988 he released Barcelona, an album he recorded with opera singer Montserrat Caballé (this album, featuring some of his best solo songs, was largely co-written with keyboardist Mike Moran). He also sang songs on a couple of soundtracks and produced or sang on some tracks by other artists. Unbeknownst to the public, by the time of the release of Queen’s 1989 album The Miracle, Mercury was already ill with AIDS, and by the time of the release of Innuendo in early 1991 his condition was already quite serious, as is apparent from the videos featuring new footage of the band made for that album. He continued to record in the following months, until it became impossible for him to do so. On November 23 he issued a statement confirming that he had AIDS, and the next day he died. Several years after his death, in 1995, the rest of the band released a final album called Made in Heaven, which included Mercury’s last composition “A Winter’s Tale” and his last recording “Mother Love” (written by May with help from Mercury) in addition to several reworked older recordings, such as the Mercury solo tracks mentioned above. Since then, a number of demos and incomplete recordings by Mercury have been released, and it is reported that May and Taylor are polishing up some of Mercury’s demos (whether ones that have been released or others is not clear) for release on a new album in the near future.

As noted above, Mercury was the most eclectic songwriter in Queen, covering a wide variety of genres. He was particularly strong as a composer, with a good gift for melody and harmonics. Lyrics were not his strong point, as most of the songs he wrote were by his own admission fairly disposable and not very deep, though few of his lyrics were truly awkward and some were quite good. Even when his lyrics were relatively weak, the music often overcame this deficiency, a case in point being “The March of the Black Queen”, which has pretty nonsensical lyrics but great music. In any case, Mercury’s voice was such that he could almost have sung the phone book, as they say, and gotten away with it. That might be a slight exaggeration, but he could usually make an average song sound good and a good song sound great. Still, like the other members of Queen, he did his best work with the band. Mr. Bad Guy has some good songs but also quite a few that are at best mediocre. Barcelona is much better, but is less of a pure solo effort, as he was collaborating with others in both the songwriting and the performing. In any case, it is for the songs he produced with May, Taylor and Deacon, particularly those from the 1970s when his songwriting was at its peak, that he will be remembered.

The following is a list of 30 of Mercury’s best compositions. It is drawn from songs that are credited solely to Mercury or, for later songs that were credited to Queen, are known to have been written nearly entirely by him. In addition to a short list of honorable mentions, I have appended a short list of some of the best songs that Mercury co-wrote with others. I should emphasize that if a song doesn’t appear here, this doesn’t mean I dislike it, just that I think the other songs are better (in some cases only slightly so). For that matter, I might feel differently if I were to do the list again another time (in particular, I like several of the "honorable mentions" just as much as some of the songs that made the main list, but I had narrow it down somehow).

The Best of Freddie Mercury
(All songs written by Freddie Mercury and performed by Queen except where otherwise noted)
My Fairy King
Ogre Battle
The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke
Nevermore
The March of the Black Queen
Seven Seas of Rhye (credited to Mercury, but May helped with the music)
Killer Queen
Flick of the Wrist
Lily of the Valley
In the Lap of the Gods (Revisited)
Death on Two Legs
Seaside Rendezvous
Love of My Life
Bohemian Rhapsody
The Millionaire Waltz
Somebody to Love
Good Old Fashioned Lover Boy
We Are the Champions
My Melancholy Blues
Mustapha
Bicycle Race
Let Me Entertain You
Don’t Stop Me Now
Crazy Little Thing Called Love
Life Is Real
It’s a Hard Life
Princes of the Universe
I’m Going Slightly Mad (Credited to Queen)
Made in Heaven (First recorded by Mercury, later re-recorded by Queen)
I Was Born to Love You (First recorded by Mercury, later re-recorded by Queen)

Honorable Mentions: Great King Rat, Funny How Love Is, In the Lap of the Gods, Big Bad Leroy Brown, Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon, Get Down Make Love, Jealousy, Play the Game, Staying Power, Man on the Prowl, Keep Passing the Open Windows, There Must Be More to Life Than This (Freddie Mercury solo), Living On My Own (Freddie Mercury solo), Delilah (Credited to Queen), A Winter’s Tale (Credited to Queen)

Notable Collaborations
(All songs performed by Queen except where otherwise noted)
Is This the World We Created (Music mostly by May, lyrics mostly by Mercury)
Friends Will Be Friends (Mercury/John Deacon)
The Miracle (Mercury with Deacon, May and Taylor)
Was It All Worth It (Music: Mercury with May, lyrics: Mercury/Taylor/May/Deacon)
Innuendo (Music: Mercury [melody and middle section] and May/Deacon/Taylor [basic backing track], lyrics: Taylor/Mercury)
Bijou (Mercury/May)
Barcelona (Mercury/Mike Moran; recorded by Mercury and Montserrat Caballé)
Exercises in Free Love (Mercury/Mike Moran; recorded by Mercury and Montserrat Caballé)
The Golden Boy (Mercury/Moran/Tim Rice; recorded by Mercury and Montserrat Caballé)
How Can I Go On (Mercury/Moran; recorded by Mercury and Montserrat Caballé)