Games Without Frontiers

Peter Gabriel eventually finds groove at United Center concert

From his heady masked days in Genesis through many thoughtful solo albums, Peter Gabriel always has been a man of ideas. So it’s worrying to see him succumb during the last year to first one and now two of the hoariest geezer-rock gimmicks: the covers album (last year’s “Scratch My Back,” featuring songs by Paul Simon, Neil Young and more) and the orchestral tour (the current, deceptively titled New Blood Tour).

Stepping onto the stage Monday night at Chicago’s United Center, while the house lights were still up, Gabriel tried to explain. His covers album, we knew, was supposed to be half of a larger project; the second part, “I’ll Scratch Yours,” will feature those same artists covering Gabriel’s songs in return — if it ever happens.

Gabriel admitted Monday that working with other songwriters is “like herding cats” and that the whole thing had only “sort of worked.” In the meantime, however, he said he began working up some of his interpretations for an orchestra. Then some of his own songs. Pretty soon he had enough for a concert. (More than enough: Monday’s show was three hours.)

The challenge in such an exercise is to reinvent the songs, not merely arrange them for a larger group of musicians. While Gabriel — 61, balding, plump, looking like a cross between the Buddha and Billy Joel — didn’t break much of a sweat Monday night, physically or creatively, he and his fiery New Blood Orchestra managed to breathe new life into more than 20 of his compositions, some of which were genuinely renewed and exalted by the experience.

His own songs fared better in this setting than many of the covers, though he opened the show with a wonderfully ambient reading of David Bowie’s “Heroes.” Gabriel introduced Simon’s “The Boy in the Bubble” by admitting that he’d “taken his joyous, African-filled song and drained all the Africa out of it to leave yet another miserable white man song.” Indeed, he did turn Simon’s upbeat ditty into a dirge, but this treatment was a true reinvention, focusing and enhancing the mournful, not-all-progress-is-worth-celebrating tone of the lyrics.

After an intermission, Gabriel found his groove, opening the second set with “San Jacinto,” one of the night’s most dramatic orchestral adaptations featuring a tinkling piano countermelody that transferred to the woodwinds like breezes over the natural landscapes the song describes.

DownWithTyranny!: Games Without Frontiers-- A Guest Post By ...

Nicholas Ruiz ran for Congress in central Florida as a Green in 2010. This year he's running as a Democrat and he's been endorsed by Blue America . Here's another is a series of posts he's written for DWT that paint a picture of what kind of a congressman he'd be if he wins in 2012. Try imagining fewer like Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and John Boehner and more like Nick Ruiz . I believe that we must first acknowledge that no social status is superior. No gender is superior. No race is superior. No sexual orientation is superior. No age is superior. No religion is superior. No ability, or disability, is superior. Legal equality is the foundation of democracy. Our laws must reflect such truths, and not trample upon the freedom and civil rights of our people. Our commonwealth must lift up all people. Universal healthcare-– national security starts with police, fire-– and health protection. Obamacare is not a dirty word. Let’s say Obamacare is the beginning, but certainly, not the end. It ends when everyone is comprehensively covered, universally, without exception. Just like the fire department and the police department cover everyone, without exception. We remember how to manage progressive taxation-– that’s part of the reason the boomtown 1950s were possible, there was a generous tax base from which to pay for government-– we reapply past lessons learned, and correct the mistake of Reagan’s fairy tale of ever increasing tax cuts that lead to nowhere over the rainbow. And runaway healthcare costs are controlled by regulation of the healthcare industry in the same sense that any municipality is regulated. Whether by single-payer or multi-payer, healthcare must be comprehensively and reasonably distributed, and prices must be more reflective of fundamental costs, as in the example of the healthcare systems employed by many of our international friends. Healthcare cannot be subject to rampant profiteering, any more than police or fire department services. That’s how we pay for it. The minimum wage must be a livable wage: $15 per hour. Bubble profits for a tiny fraction of society ala capital gains, dividends, mergers and acquisitions, property and royalty income and so on-- reported via quarterly statements, quarter after quarter, year after year, while wages are artificially suppressed with regulatory restrictions that do not allow wages to rise according to the cost of living is tantamount to indentured servitude for Main Street.

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