High Fidelity

Prog-rockin' the mic: Musical Box singer Denis Gagné evokes Peter Gabriel. Photo courtesy the Musical Box.

It took Denis Gagné two months to build his “Slipperman” suit, a knobby green costume with inflatable genitals that the singer slips into for the climax of his band’s recent concerts. He put “at least eight hours a day” into it, he explains, “sculpting and making sure all the details were in the right place.”

“Now,” says Gagné, a lissome figure with melancholy eyes, “I look at some pictures of our Slipperman and sometimes I don’t even know if it’s us or Genesis.”

Yes — that Genesis. Gagné’s group, the Musical Box, recreates the English rock band’s stage theatrics from the 1970s. Named for a 1971 Genesis song about an old man reclaiming his youth, the Montreal outfit has become one of rock music’s least likely success stories: a French-Canadian cover band playing progressive-rock epics to rapturous crowds worldwide.

The members of the Musical Box have been practising their mimicry since November 1993. They’re now in their 30s, a decade older than Genesis members in their heyday. The resemblance, however, is uncanny.

“I studied the man a lot,” says Musical Box drummer and Phil Collins doppelgänger Martin Levac. “That’s what I told him — because he was quite impressed when he came [to our show] in Geneva. He told me, ‘Wow, man. You move, you look, you sing, you drum… just like me. It’s incredible.’”

The act was only meant to last a weekend — just a group of Montreal musicians performing Genesis’s Selling England by the Pound (1973) for the album’s 20th anniversary at the Montreal Spectrum. Instead, it’s become a vocation. The Musical Box has played to more than 250,000 people around the world. It had 110 shows last year alone. When the band returned to Montreal this November, it sold out the Bell Centre. The top ticket price was $49.50.

“Us French-speaking people really get into that English music. It’s the Latin roots,” says Serge Morissette, who serves as the band’s artistic director when he’s not at his day job with the Montreal Transit Society.

Many musicians earn their keep impersonating famous bands. Some groups, like Beatles tribute Rain, which tours its elaborate multimedia show across North America, offer earnest re-enactments. Others, less so. A New York band called Minikiss stages Kiss concerts with “little people” donning the famous makeup and platform boots. Reggae rockers Dread Zeppelin have been refashioning Led Zeppelin’s metal scorchers as Elvis Presley numbers with a Jamaican backbeat since 1989. The replication of fading or vanished bands is a thriving industry, fed by unyielding nostalgia for familiar tunes from an era before Behind the Music and DVD commentaries corrupted many bands’ mystique. Modern acts, too, have their clones, like Shania’s Twin and Practically Hip, who sate the faithful until the real thing rolls back into town.

In the case of Genesis, however, the real thing may never return. The band has been on hiatus since its 1997 album (Calling All Stations) and a tour with new singer Ray Wilson flopped. Should one of the frequent reunion rumours prove true, it’s unlikely the original musicians, who are all approaching their 60s, could recapture the vigour and virtuosity of their 20-year-old selves — as the Musical Box does.

A Musical Box show is no mere tribute; it is a revival. The band evokes the experience of a Genesis concert from the misty past. The lighting, the sets, even the musicians’ gestures are choreographed from painstaking study of archival footage. Though its lineup has varied through the years, the Musical Box has guarded its fidelity with care.

Weren't the '70s trippy?: The Musical Box experience. Photo courtesy the Musical Box.

After their first singer left in 1994, they auditioned Peter Gabriel prospects long and hard. “That was an experience,” Morissette remembers. “I guess it’s how people see themselves. Sometimes the voice was horrible or a guy was small and fat. [And we’d think] how can you expect to be Peter Gabriel in our show? One guy said, ‘I’m your new Peter Gabriel,’ and he looked like my father!”

The singer they chose, Denis Gagné, has absorbed all of Gabriel’s ticks — his jerky movements and studied intensity. Even Gagné’s speaking voice has something of the dry Gabriel monotone. “I think I can actually separate the two [personalities],” Gagné says, “but then again, I’ve been doing this for 10 years, so I may [imitate him] without noticing now.”

Martin Levac was one of the singers who failed the audition. “They were looking for a Gabriel figure,” he says. “I have the look and the swing and the voice of Collins.” So when the band’s original drummer quit, he got the call. “When I get on stage,” Levac explains, “I have to be like a comedian taking his role. And I play Phil Collins.” Like many of the musicians who have passed through the Musical Box, Levac is a session man. “I still play weddings,” he admits. “You gotta make a living out of this… [Though] when I play other gigs, I don’t play like [Phil Collins]. I play my style. Which,” he adds, “is not far from his.”

Levac has recorded with Quebec chanteuse Isabelle Boulay and has released a solo album. So has David Myers, the band’s keyboard player. It’s an acoustic piano record called David Myers Plays Genesis.

“We keep that music alive, in a way,” says Morissette. “I’m sure we’ve sold a lot of Genesis albums. No doubt. Each time we’re in a new city, in a new arena, there’s new interest.” The group has an exclusive licence to mount its current tour, restaging Genesis’s 1974 rock opera The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway. “They’d never granted anyone that kind of licence,” says Morissette, who spent two years negotiating the rights. Like everyone on the Musical Box team (nearly two-dozen strong), Morissette is a lifelong Genesis fan. He has a collection of Genesis memorabilia that includes hundreds of photos, films and documents, material the crew uses to reconstruct the elaborate costumes and sets. The 1,120 slides in the Musical Box’s current stage show are replicas of the 31-year-old originals; the band even hired Genesis’s original slide operator to put them in order. The group was given free rein at Genesis’s recording studio in Surrey, England, to listen to the Lamb’s master tapes track by track, noting instruments — a guitar here, a glockenspiel there — too faint to decipher on a record. (With no sheet music available, the Musical Box had to learn their parts by ear.) They scoured the globe for the vintage instruments, the mellotrons and bass pedals Genesis used. What they couldn’t find they made — like Sébastien Lamothe’s double-neck Rickenbacker bass, which they rebuilt from measurements Genesis bassist Mike Rutherford gave them.

Rutherford saw the band play on its first European tour in 2002. Peter Gabriel brought his daughters to their show in Bristol. When the band played London’s Royal Albert Hall that May, Genesis guitarist Steve Hackett joined them for the encore. Phil Collins repeated the feat in Geneva last February.

“Phil was so nervous when he came to practise in the afternoon,” says Gagné. “We were like, ‘Don’t worry, man. It’s gonna be great. We’re gonna have a great time.’”

The gang kibbitzed throughout the day. “He told us road stories,” says Morissette. “Nothing I haven’t heard before.”

After the show, Collins told a Swiss radio crew, “I think these guys play [the Lamb] better than we did. But we wrote it. And that’s the difference.”

This is the fate of every impersonation, to be forever in the shadow of its subject. The recent Genesis reunion chatter — perpetuated in the press by both Collins and Gabriel — has put the Musical Box on notice. Morissette says he would love to see the original lineup reunite. “But they would have to rehearse,” he cautions. “It’s not easy music to play.”

The band’s licence to perform the Lamb expires next year, after which they may return to the Selling England tour they started with. Or they may call it quits. “The other musicians in the band and I were talking about maybe putting an end to it,” says Gagné. “I’m playing a 20-something-year-old guy on stage, so sooner or later I won’t really have any choice. Not that we don’t enjoy doing it. But after a while, you have to think about something else.”

The Musical Box plays Massey Hall in Toronto on Dec. 3.

Guy Leshinski is a Toronto writer.

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