The Rocker’s Founder Shares His Experience At Genesis Concert

We all have bucket lists, things we want to do, experience, see. WRKR's founder, Ed Sackley has seen his share of concerts. He grew up in the Chicago suburbs and saw many shows. He can tell you stories about The Who taking up residence at a Chicago nightclub for about a year in the late 1960's.

His passion and his persistence put The Rocker on the air, against many obstacles. And he knew his station would play rock and roll.

More recently, the Sackleys (Ed and wife Jan) have been able to travel and hook up with some of his favorite bands growing up, like The Moody Blues.

Thursday night was a chance to see one of his favorite bands from his youth. The Genesis lineup now is, of course, not the pioneering "progressive rock" band led Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett. From the late 80's, the band has been fronted by Phil Collins and has been essentially a trio, with Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks.

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Sackley joined WRKR's Benson & Bobby Friday morning, from an airplane, to talk about the show Thursday night (September 30th) in Newcastle, England, a city a little larger than Kalamazoo. Of course, a question on many minds was the state of Collins' health. Sackley says Collins does look very frail. And the show started out slow. The second song the band did was "Turn It On Again", and Collins wasn't doing so well, but about 10 minutes into the show, he did "Mama" and that song got him going and from that point on, the band was Genesis again. They went through most of everyone's favorites, and then for the encore, they actually went deep into the early Genesis catalog, starting with "I Can't Dance, but then from the Gabriel era, the first verse of Dancing With the Moonlit Knight and finally, The Carpet Crawlers. There's no setlist up yet for the show Thursday night, but here's one from earlier this week.

Of course, Sackley took pictures and he graciously shared them with us.