Mama Home By The Sea Genesis

Mama
Home by the Sea
Genesis

I had an odd old friend growing up named Tommy. His family owned Ace Camera Shop across the street from my dad's old law office on West Evans Street in Flotown. I believe Tommy's grandad had owned it but it fell to his youngest brother, who was completely insane.

Tommy's dad supposedly fell out of an airplane with a defective parachute. That being said, Tommy's dad was Intelligence... either military CIA or both. So jumped or was pushed... you decide. It was weird because my father loved Tommy, yet disliked my more studious and successful friends. Anyway... my dad's a lawyer and I'm a kid with a camera and I was used by the school district in that capacity (yearbook and newspaper...yea). It was a two way street as I didn't get paid, but I got copies of all prints and free developing. So I met many friends through photography. Tommy was one. Mama was Tommy's favorite song. He had a drunken whole entire dance routine. He would do a dance we called "The Crab Man Caravan" while singing along with the song... it was as insane as his uncle... who in his day was able to obtain the most excellent LSD. I can tell y'all this because like most individuals in my narrative, they (all of 'em) are dead...

I was always suspicious of Tommy. I'd trust him, but all the drugs he did fried a bunch of stuff up there. I passed out once in Rhett Tandy's car and Tommy was driving us around the slums of the outer rings of Myrtle Beach. As I am told two days later... Rhett was mad I was passed out in the front seat... so on Ocean Boulevard in North Myrtle Beach, they decide to move me to the back seat... but in pulling me out of the car they dropped me and the local cops saw this and said that I was public drunk and they loaded me in their back seat... I woke up the next day in the drunk tank and recognized 3 of the twenty or so lock ups being from my high school... 90 miles away. 90 miles of nothing but swamp.

Tommy ended up as an overdose and I ran into him about a year before he passed away while I was working at Duke Energy and living up toward Lenoir NC. I tried to help him out, but he was already too far gone. The thing about Tommy was that he was with Trina when she supposedly died by suicide using a handgun playing Russian Roulette. I knew Tommy and Trina and I never believed this story. Anyway, this was Tommy's favorite song... He graduated a year ahead of me in '83 and was thrown out of the Marines as a demolition expert... which tied a bit to many other shenanigans.

Genesis is the twelfth studio album by English rock band Genesis, released on 3 October 1983 by Charisma and Virgin Records in the UK and by Atlantic Records in the US and Canada. Following the band's tour in support of their 1982 live album Three Sides Live, Genesis took an eight-month break before they regrouped in the spring of 1983 to record a new album. It is their first written and recorded in its entirety at their studio named The Farm in Chiddingfold, Surrey, and the songs were developed through jam sessions in the studio with nothing written beforehand. Hugh Padgham returned as their engineer.

Genesis was the group's greatest commercial success at the time of release, becoming the band's third straight album to reach No. 1 on the UK Albums Chart. It also reached No. 9 on the US Billboard 200, where it sold over 4 million copies.

This song is about a young man obsessed with a prostitute who is not interested in him. He has an Oedipal fixation on her, and insists on calling her "Mama." It is based on a book Phil Collins read called The Moon's A Balloon, by David Niven. In the book, a young man falls in love with an older prostitute who does not return his affections.

After their 1980 album Duke, Genesis changed the way they wrote songs. Instead of the individual members bringing in musical bits and song ideas to work on, the band would show up in the studio and come up with ideas collectively. According to Phil Collins, it was Mike Rutherford who came up with this song after getting the idea from his drum machine. Their keyboard player Tony Banks added some chords, and Collins began improvising lyrics while they listened to playbacks, at one point uttering the word "Mama," which became the title for the song.

In a press conference following the release of the album, Collins said that when they wrote the song, it "had a lot of steam, a lot of heat," and they pictured Cuban brothels. The band didn't think much of the song when they wrote it, and were surprised when it caught on.

The chorus consists of maniacal laughter performed by Phil Collins. When questioned about getting into the sinister mood to perform the song, Collins said that it wasn't a problem. After all, he was an accomplished actor long before he joined Genesis.

Mike Rutherford created the unusual percussion with a drum machine set to distort the beats. Drum machines were typically the domain of Phil Collins, but Genesis didn't adhere to roles when it came to songwriting, as all three members could contribute on many levels.

In a Songfacts interview with Rutherford, he said, "Every song was different. For example, in the past when we wrote, Phil would do a little drum machine loop, program it, and he'd sing to it. We'd play the chords, he'd sing to it. Then a song called 'Mama' comes along and the entire drum program, the stilted drum machine, is me. So, you can swap hats. I think that's half the skill, really."

Phil Collins got the idea for the crazy laugh from the 1982 Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five song "The Message," where lead vocalist Melle Mel does a similar breathy laugh.

This was the first single from the album. They had now completely departed from their Peter Gabriel era sound and were getting a lot of radio play as a result.

Many groups title their first album the name of the band, but not counting live albums, this was Genesis' 12th release and 6th without Gabriel.

The processing on the drums is a gated reverb that Collins and Hugh Padgham helped create for Peter Gabriel's 1980 track "Intruder." Collins, who became the lead singer of Genesis when Gabriel left in 1975, did a lot of the drumming on Gabriel's third solo album, which leads off with "Intruder." He was taking a break from the band and sorting out his marital problems at the time. Padgham was the engineer on that album, and produced the Genesis album. Both credit Gabriel with encouraging them to use different processing devices.

The video featured uncomfortably close shots of Phil Collins' face, where he looked particularly demonic. The image left a lasting impression on viewers and gained a lot of buzz for the video, which did well on the burgeoning MTV network.

The clip was helmed by the British director "Stuart Orme," who did several other Genesis videos ("No Reply At All," "Misunderstanding") and worked on many popular TV series in England, including Al Fresco and Inspector Morse.

Home by the Sea is a group composition, Phil Collins came up with the title, which to Tony Banks conjured up an image of a haunted house on top of a cliff. "I had the idea of this burglar going into this house and suddenly finding out it was haunted, which I thought was quite funny," he said in the Way We Walk DVD. "I took that idea further and made it one of those songs about looking back over people's lives who are trapped in the past, but there's nothing they can do about it."

This song was particularly popular in Eastern Asia, because of its use of the pentatonic scale, which contains five notes per octave and is the basic scale of Chinese music.

Phil Collins in an 1986 interview: "What we did on a song like 'Home by the Sea' was to record with a programmed drum machine. Tony (Banks) would play a guide keyboard part, Mike (Rutherford) would play a guide guitar part, and I'd sing a guide vocal. These 'guide parts' enabled us to settle on the format for the songs. If we liked what we got, we would then go in and record. Tony would go in and record his keyboard parts, Mike would record his guitar and bass parts, I'd replace the Linn drums with my drums, and after all of that I'd go in and rerecord my vocal."

Talking about the composition of this song, Tony Banks said, "Lyrically it's one of my songs. The second half of that was a real experiment in terms of band writing - we just improvised. Phil had this drum rhythm and Mike and I just played. We got two or three hours worth of jamming on tape. A lot of it sounded quite good but we couldn't tie it down, so we listened to it, selected good moments of the jam, then Mike and I re-learned exactly what we played. I think it produced a great result. It's one of my favorites."

This was the first part of a two-song suite. The second part, the nearly all instrumental "Second Home by the Sea," ends with the main theme of "Home By The Sea."