I was in middle school when Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey” was a hit. I remember recording it off of the radio from Q94, the top 40 radio station in Cresson, PA. That would have been sometime around 1982 or 1983. For me Peter Gabriel was just another guy who had a song on the radio, not much different from contemporaries like Prince with “Little Red Corvette” or Thomas Dolby with “She Blinded Me with Science”. I didn’t know this was four albums into a solo career following his time with Genesis. I didn’t realize that he was already a veteran. Shut up, I was in middle school.
A few years later, Peter released So, an award winning album that transformed him from a well respected musician with cult fan status, to a world renowned legendary rock star. But when “Sledgehammer”, the massive hit song from So was in major rotation I had moved on to heavy metal, and was taking a deep dive into thrash metal, the heaviest music available to me at the time. “Sledgehammer”, a Motown influenced brit rock dance song, was being played on MTV every 15 minutes and was all over the kind of radio that played in shopping malls. It didn’t take long for me to be over it, and over any kind of interest I had in Peter Gabriel from the “Shock the Monkey” days. But…
In 1989, “In Your Eyes” was used in the movie Say Anything. It’s an iconic scene where John Cusak holds up a boombox playing the song for his ex-girlfriend. It would be hard, even today, to find a Gen-Xer who can’t remember that scene from that movie. I liked the song, so while spending the summer of 1990 living and working in Pittsburgh after my freshman year of college, I bought a vinyl copy of So at a yard sale for 50 cents. It was a post-metal time of musical exploration for me, and I then realized why that album had been such a massive success. “Red Rain”, “That Voice Again”, “Mercy Street”… all blew my mind. Even “Sledgehammer” made total sense to me in the context of the album.
It was also around that time that I heard Passion, the soundtrack he made for the Martin Scorsece film The Last Temptation of Christ. I hadn’t seen the movie, but that didn’t matter. It happened to be the summer that I was first introduced to ambient and new age music as a genre, so the timing couldn’t have been better for me to discover that record. It remains an all time favorite for me to this day. I stayed a peripheral fan of Peter Gabriel through the 1990s. I liked what I heard but in a pre-Internet era, it was difficult to research the history of musicians like Peter Gabriel without just going to a store and buying everything that was available. I was young and poor, and into a lot of different music. It wasn’t until I heard his 2002 album Us in the mid-2000s that I realized how imperative it would be for me to explore his entire catalog. Which I did as soon as I could. I had the pleasure of seeing Peter live in 2012 on the Back To Front tour celebrating the 25th anniversary of So. It was a magical night and a show I won’t soon forget. Over the years, I’ve come to respect Peter Gabriel as “the master”, a creative genius and a musician who has authentically and masterfully explored a variety of genres…seemingly whatever he feels like at the time. There’s very little music he has made that I don’t absolutely love and none that I don’t deeply respect. And every time one of his songs comes on one of my shuffled playlists, I can’t help but voice the words while shaking my head in disbelief…Peter Fucking Gabriel.