Back in 2023, I was moved as much by a clip of live music as I was by a story posted in the YouTube comments. In fact, I was so moved that I wrote the following piece, "The Unknown Eyes See All: Genesis' Watcher of the Skies." The commenter in question posted using the name "xenussister" and had alluded to going through some health issues. When I finished this piece, I had found out that she had built this fantastic website dedicated to the great and very underrated cult musician, Happy Rhodes. (Side note, my late friend Bob Browning was the first person to ever tell me about Rhodes, since we had bonded over being huge Kate Bush fans. Turns out Kate has been the gateway drug for many a Happy Rhodes fan. I miss Bob.) Finding this site meant I also found a contact email for xenussister, and on a lark, I sent her a copy of my piece.
I never received a reply, which, hey, when you cold call…or email someone who doesn't know you, the odds of you not hearing back are pretty decent to great. Which is more than fair. Yet, this week of November 4th, of all weeks for some reason, I felt this pull to research just to see if xenussister was still active. Unfortunately, my worst fears were confirmed and saw that she had passed away December of last year from cancer.
So, I want to publicly share this piece as both a tribute to Vickie Mapes Williams aka xenussister, as well as to the vitality of art. Music, writing, cinema, painting…the whole damned thing is the connective tissue that heals, moves, and inspires us. I never got to know Vickie but I will never forget her.
Let's all take care of each other and never stop loving, listening, watching, and creating.
Recently, I posted on social media about having no faith in religion but instead, in the connective tissues of art, expression, and nature. Talking about spirituality publicly is usually something that puts me in “screaming hives” territory, but I was so moved by a piece of music, its attached visual, and an unlikely story, that the pull was too strong to resist. Of course, it does help that I still didn’t really reveal too much about my own beliefs, especially since my being anti-organized religion should absolutely not shock anyone who knows me even a little. I’m like a little marsupial that when threatened, emits a heathen-scented musk.
Fittingly, this all started on a Sunday. A day of rest, except for the wicked like myself! Chuck, my continually better half, was in the living room, sitting on our half-broken couch, all the while looking slightly transfixed in his semi-sage way, as he gazed at a live performance playing on the television. The voice was instantly familiar and unmistakably Peter Gabriel. Looking at the TV, I saw that this was a young Peter in dayglo eye makeup and sporting a kabuki haircut. The band with him featured the quick glimpse of bearded Phil Collins on the drums, so it was obvious that it was prime-prog era Genesis. Years before being MTV darlings and MOR stalwarts, Genesis once had teeth, sweep, and balls. (Having Gabriel and guitarist Steve Hackett in the fold helped a lot with that, though it’s folly to discount the others, especially Collins.)
Gabriel-era Genesis is something I have liked for a long time, dating back to buying Nursery Cryme on vinyl at the Salvation Army in Springdale. (Boy, I miss those prices, since buying records in the mid-late 90s when I was a teen was a rare quirk aka them shits were usually cheap.) But my knowledge has been mostly limited to that album and bits of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The song playing that recent Sunday afternoon was wholly new to me.
Maybe part of the reason I bristle when others reduce art as “dated,” is that it usually has an implication that the vintage weakens any strong potential for connection aka that frisson you feel when that beacon in the distance glimmers and glows. While this particular performance was taped and originally aired via the American TV program, The Midnight Special, back on January 25th, 1974, the power of it did better than land a punch or a hit. It pulled me IN.
This song, “Watcher of the Skies,” the first track off of the band’s 1972 album, Foxtrot, is sung from the perspective of an outsider, the titular “watcher,” who visits Earth post-humanity. Evidence of our existence litters the landscape, but we are gone by our own childish hands.
Creatures shaped this planet’s soil
Now their reign has come to end
Has life again destroyed life?
Do they play elsewhere?
Do they know more than their childhood games?
This is heady stuff, especially when factoring in that humanity is continually on a loop of never learning from the past. This is obviously a bit of a blanket statement since there are so many individuals, like you, who mercifully have an open mind and don’t clique with the herd. But the true enemy of progress and life itself is the wilfully blind that rule and foul it all up, like a spoiled, thick-skulled child with a snot-crusted face and grabby, impulsive little fists. The ability to reason with such pigheadedness is a loss before the game can even begin.
The lyrics hit upon such sadness and while giving its warning poetic phrasing that is clean enough to be far away from pompous preaching. Then, there is that voice. Peter Gabriel, whether in Genesis or solo, is such a powerhouse creative whose charisma, fire, and heart glide with everything he graces. He just IS and that’s why we are the lucky ones anytime we get to hear him. He also has an innate bit of cheek to him, which has protected him from ever becoming a full cartoon. During his time in Genesis, Peter’s other characters included an old man (“Musical Box”), Brittania (“Dancing with the Moonlit Knight”), something called Slipperman, an actual Lamia, a Fox Lady, and a literal Flower (the last two both often incorporated during “Supper’s Ready”), so if he didn’t have a sense of humor, this could have put the band easily in some Rick Wakeman’s King Arthur on Ice territory.
The music itself is equally majestic. The sound is big when it needs to be, with every note deftly swerving before it can approach a fully safe and expected road. “Watcher of the Skies” is an incredible piece and having access to this particular performance is sheer gratitude fuel.
Yet, the gratitude does not quite end there.
Looking through the YouTube comments on this video, I read one in particular that hit me even harder than the video. (Unbelievable but yes, true!) A commenter with the username of “xenussister” did more than just leave a little post, but instead told a story of connection and the power of art. Imagine being this 17-year-old who is already married and pregnant, sitting in a trailer out in the Midwest, and being completely upturned and transformed by the happenstance of prog-era Genesis appearing on The Midnight Special. Xenussister speaks of this very event. The way she describes this fateful night is more than just sweet, because it touches upon the kind of alchemical creative ritual that those of us who are born into this dance of truth and color via expression, instantly and intimately know.
She went from loving bands like motherfucking Black Oak Arkansas, the band of skin-tight spandex sporting, nasal-grunting-horned-up-hillbilly-humping and a‘bellering Jim Dandy himself, to becoming, in the blink of a handful of minutes, magnetically pulled to the musical worlds of Genesis and Peter Gabriel.
From there, she describes how this would go on to help her to discover artists like Happy Rhodes and Kate Bush, with the latter serendipitously connecting her to her 2nd and still current husband way back in the early 1980s via a small ad in a local paper. For so many of us who don’t have easy physical access to diverse cultural hubs, especially in the pre-internet era, finding others who not only know about the artists that are even just a hair towards the left of the dial, but are also as equally passionate and driven as we, was and still is, an adventure in trying to find hen teeth. Sure, Genesis, even then, were not obscure by any stretch, but for many yanks back in the early-mid 1970s, it was still a tangible alternative to far bigger and more widely acceptable bands.
Everything Xenussister wrote about is evidence of divinity.
All of this is divinity.
Divinity has zero to do with religion. True divinity is not forced and should not ever be wielded for such beastly human actions as guilt, violence, intolerance, and fear. It is that deceptively thin web that gleams with dew as rays of light fight and fade that ties us to magic and vision and heart and, perhaps most vitally, to each other. Therefore, art is divinity, and as long as we do not give in to the aforementioned beastly reduction, so are we.
