Genesis

1 – Introduzione: from Genesis to The Lamb

"The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" (1974) is the second concept album by the Genesis and their first double LP. It's the work of a band that had by then reached full maturity, and with it they set a fundamental milestone in that particular crossover genre known as the rock opera - a landmark above all for the live staging of such a work, something that probably only this band could pull off at the time, thanks to their singular approach to performance.

Genesis arrived at this point after a string of albums that had shown exponential growth both in compositional skill and individual musicianship. It's worth briefly recalling the stages of this journey. "From Genesis To Revelation" (1969) was their naive, overreaching debut, a concept album based on Genesis and the Old Testament.

"Trespass" (1970), their second album, was described by Genesis themselves as "the most important step in our career" and already contains classics like the ferocious "The Knife", which remained a live staple until the departure of Peter Gabriel.

Right after "Trespass", founding guitarist Anthony Phillips and drummer John Mayhew leave the group, which then settles into what would long remain its definitive line-up with the arrival of Steve Hackett (guitar) and Phil Collins (drums). With this line-up, Genesis record "Nursery Cryme" (1971), where their sound comes into sharper focus, with compositions growing more complex, unfolding through shifting movements of contrasting tone within a single track, and lyrics that, thanks to Gabriel's expressive power, project into a fairy-tale world thick with metaphor and symbolism. The album will soon reach No. 4 in Italy, lifting the group out of a dangerous slump.

Next comes the band's masterpiece "Foxtrot" (1972), where all the pieces finally fall into place and the five-piece is definitively catapulted, after years of hardship including financial struggles, into the front rank of progressive rock acts. "Supper's Ready", the sprawling suite that takes up almost the entire second side, stands as one of the finest examples of the genre for its ideas, complexity and freshness, and as one of the high points of the whole of the 1970s.

At this point, the band's live shows undergo a fundamental transformation as Peter Gabriel begins wearing a whole array of costumes and masks, sometimes tied to the lyrics or the spirit of the songs, sometimes, it must be said, rather an end in themselves and dictated more by a taste for spectacle (the fox costume, for instance) — but always utterly captivating for audiences. The stage sets and light shows also grow more elaborate, and the band's fame starts to spread at home too, following their early breakthroughs in Italy and Belgium.

Genesis, partly under pressure from their record label, release their first live album, simply titled "Genesis Live" (1973), to cement their reputation as a band that truly comes into its own on stage. It turns out to be a brilliant record, not a "fake" live album like so many of its kind — probably one of the finest live albums ever released.

By now in a purple patch, the band returns to the studio without any significant break for "Selling England By The Pound" (1973), which, while a step back in terms of production, is undoubtedly a further step forward in the complexity of the compositions and in the search for new solutions in terms of sound, structure and interplay between instruments. "Classic" tracks, or at least significant ones, are now plentiful, and in terms of live performance the band is probably at its very peak. That doesn't stop the first frictions between singer and band from surfacing, which also has a certain bearing on some compositions that could have been developed further. It's at this point that Peter Gabriel begins conceiving the ambitious project of a concept album built around a story, and among the various pitches put forward, his is the one chosen: "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway".

2 – The plot

Rael is a street tough from the slums of New York who, one morning, coming home from one of his nighttime escapades, is struck by the sight of a lamb — a plain but utterly incongruous lamb — lying almost as if to block his path on the sidewalk of Broadway, amid the steam rising from the grates of the heating system. As Rael stares at the animal, a kind of solid screen displaying images of New York life descends from the sky and advances toward him. Frozen with terror, he cannot flee before the screen strikes him, and at the moment of impact he blacks out. He comes to in a strange underground world where he will live through a dense series of adventures, part mystical, part symbolic, coming to know himself in the process.

At first he is inside a comfortable cocoon that makes him feel calm and happy, so much so that he drifts peacefully off to sleep. He wakes up in pain in a vast cavern, where he must fight against a cage of rock that moves rapidly, closing in until it nearly suffocates him. Outside the prison he glimpses his brother John who, despite his cries for help, abandons him, and just when he's convinced he's about to die, the cage vanishes and Rael is free.

Wandering on, he arrives at a strange factory where human beings are assembled, each stamped with his own bright future like a brand, and among the "finished products" ready for shipping, alongside other figures who have played a part in his life, he catches sight of his brother once again. This vision of familiar faces sets Rael reflecting on his past and on the everyday events of his life.

Moving on in what seems like the only direction open to him, the young man reaches a long corridor where many people are crawling slowly toward a large, heavy wooden door at the far end from where he entered. He is the only one able to move freely and to question these strange beings condemned to crawl. Reaching the door, he opens it and finds behind it a table laid with every kind of delicacy, but far more important to him, a spiral staircase vanishing upward, which he immediately begins to climb.

At the top of the staircase he finds an enormous circular cavern where a motley crowd is arguing heatedly over which of the 32 doors ringing the walls leads to freedom, since only one leads outside while the rest lead inexorably back in. Among the crowd Rael meets Lilith, a blind old woman who promises to lead him to safety by following the faint breeze coming from the right door, which she alone can detect thanks to senses sharpened by a lifetime spent in darkness. Rael decides to trust her and lets himself be led to a room where Lilith leaves him, promising that someone will come to fetch him; but he fears he has fallen into a trap when two glowing orbs float in and seem intent on attacking him. Terrified, he gathers stones and smashes the orbs to pieces, but as soon as they shatter the ceiling collapses, and it seems like the end for our hero. He manages, however, to find a gap between the rocks and once again escapes with his life.

He thus arrives in a wondrous hall with a large pool of warm water and thinks he has finally found a moment's rest, but instead sees three incredible figures swimming toward him. They are the marvelous Lamia, creatures half serpent and half stunning woman, with whom he has an ecstatic sexual encounter. But the moment they bite into his flesh, the Lamia die, and Rael, devastated by the loss, feeds on their bodies.

Leaving the tragedy behind him, our hero comes upon a strange colony of grotesque, deformed beings, the Slippermen, who welcome him as one of their own. They tell him they have all been through the very same experience with the very same Lamia, who regenerate each time, and that they are condemned as a result to spend their lives in a frenzied, unending round of sexual activity. The tragic truth is thus revealed to him: he too is exactly like the others, enslaved to the same fate, but he can at least be reunited with his brother, likewise reduced to a shapeless mass of flesh. Rael is devastated, but after a while a Slipperman reveals to him that, for those with the courage, there is a solution: it's called castration. It is performed by a mad doctor, whom the two brothers, after talking it over, decide to face.

Doctor Dyper, having operated on them, hands them a pendant containing the "fruit of sin" to be used in case of need, thanks to his intervention — though he warns them of this well in advance. As the two are discussing their new situation, an enormous crow swoops down from above and snatches the precious container from Rael's hands.

Rael asks John for help, but John, unwilling to risk his own cargo, abandons him once again to his fate. Rael takes off in pursuit of the fleeing crow, only to watch it drop his treasure into the raging waters of an underground river. As Rael climbs down a steep rock face to reach the river, determined to reclaim what is his, he hears cries for help and sees his brother struggling in the current. At the same moment, he spots an opening in the rock wall leading back outside, to his old life — but it is rapidly closing. He must therefore choose whether to flee and save himself or to save John, and, though in despair, he turns his back on the opening and dives in to save his brother.

The struggle with the current is exhausting, but when the two finally reach the shore, Rael notices something incredible: John has his own face! And as he stares at him in astonishment, as if looking in a mirror, a violet mist envelops them both, and within it the brothers dissolve.

3 – The Lamb, This Unknown

As can already be gathered from the convoluted plot, "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" is a monumental work. It seems to proceed by addition, so numerous are the instrumental and narrative complexities packed into it — it's no coincidence that at the time much of the criticism focused precisely on the work's excessive bulk. Indeed, it should be said straight away that in a work of such scale there are inevitably some "flat" or redundant moments that occasionally make for a slow listen, something we'll return to in the final part of this review, but these are still temporary lapses within a work of extremely high overall quality — in some ways unique, certainly different from anything heard before and from anything that would come after.

Anyone who has followed the band's "historic" trajectory immediately notices that the sound here is different, much harder and heavier than what had by then become their established standard. The production, in any case, marks a decisive leap in quality, especially compared to the previous record which, as mentioned, didn't do the band justice — this is in fact the best-produced Genesis album up to that point. The sound quite probably aims to reflect the "raw grain" of the protagonist, that is, his materiality or lack of spirituality.

Hackett and Rutherford's work in particular is far more aggressive than in the past. The guitarist unleashes solos as sharp and searing as lightning bolts, always marked by his own distinctive good taste and the product of a technique that's never an end in itself, even though he would later always claim to be dissatisfied with his work here. The drums are constantly at the forefront and indeed grow in importance as the album progresses, whereas on previous records they had sometimes been shortchanged, likely by sound engineers unprepared to handle one of the greatest drummers of all time. Phil Collins delivers decidedly one of the best performances of his career, if not the best outright. He reinforces the personal traits of his already excellent style while hinting at its future developments, moving from moments of powerful rhythmic drive ("The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway", "Back in N.Y.C.") to passages of near-delirious flight (the instrumental "The Waiting Room").

Tony Banks, for his part, weaves fascinating textures especially on piano, as in the opening title track or in "Cockoo Cocoon", and for the first time works with what were then the earliest synthesizers. Perhaps this is precisely where his weak point occasionally lies, since he ends up showing a certain naivety, perhaps due to too much faith in the new equipment. Together, the musicians nonetheless bring to life extremely complex sonic textures, always vibrant like an impressionist painting. The best example of this is "The Carpet Crawlers", which, starting quietly with an ethereal twelve-string and voice and introducing one instrument at a time, builds through an extremely slow crescendo to a climax where everything merges and intertwines in a great choral harmony. Probably the best song on the album, and always a cornerstone for Genesis fans.

The average length and structural complexity of the compositions is lower than on previous albums; the songs are more compact and the rhythms often tighter. The aggression is greater from this point of view too — just listen to "Back in N.Y.C.", one of the "hardest" Genesis songs and one of the best on the album, where rage takes over completely.

There's no shortage of gentler, more soothing moments, such as the "Anyway" – "The Supernatural Anesthetist" sequence, featuring two blistering Hackett solos, the first short and forceful, the second more complex and Spanish-tinged, with one of his rare displays of virtuosity toward the end. "Anyway" also contains Gabriel's finest vocal performance on the whole record. Also worth noting is the closing charge of "IT", where the guitarist again produces a great riff while Banks takes off in a constant keyboard flight. As has been said, the overall level of the work remains extremely high given its length, which makes the presence of filler all the more curious, since it was usually absent from previous records, where every single song had a very precise place and was studied, honed and arranged with care each time, as if it had a value of its own, and there was never more material than necessary. But, as mentioned, we'll come back to this.

I've deliberately left Peter Gabriel for last so I could dwell on him properly. The idea of creating a concept album was his, as were the plot and almost all of the lyrics. If his singing and lyric-writing had already reached extremely high levels, with this double album he attains a further step, or perhaps simply a different one, in his mastery of his own means. Gabriel's lyrics and delivery had always been marked by a great capacity for playing with the English language, hence wordplay, double meanings, metaphors, vocal distortions, whispers and screams alternating within the same song. In "The Lamb" we find all of this raised to the nth degree, and more besides. For the first time, buried under tons of rhetorical devices, literary quotations and mythological references, real life peeks through, or at least we find themes different from Gabriel's traditional ones: violence, the struggle to rise above the crowd, family relationships, education, money, sex, death, cynicism and anger. The many experiences Rael goes through in the absurd underground world into which he's been thrust are the metaphorical representation of the journey every adolescent takes to become a man. If the theme doesn't seem particularly original, given that the coming-of-age novel has been a constant of modern Western literature, and would later be revisited many times in rock too (Hüsker Dü), it is nonetheless developed here with a surreal vision and an imaginative power that has no equal.

Despite a few linguistic and narrative naiveties — for instance, one has never seen a Puerto Rican street tough who, in order to approach his first girlfriend, goes out and buys a manual on the subject — the almost dreamlike imagination Gabriel displays in depicting Rael's story truly grabs the attention, and if one is able to see through the veil of wordplay he constantly places between the listener and the essence of the story, if one manages to grasp the mechanics of the narrative, one enters a world that holds many surprises and will provide food for thought and ever new discoveries for years to come.

The anagram Rael – real (though why overlook a nod to King Lear's madness too?) is only the first step in a constant game of hide-and-seek with the meanings behind the words. Thus the "carpet crawlers" are those who make the thirst for wealth and the desire to be "in" the sole guiding light of their lives ("We gotta get in to get out" — meaning both "we have to get in in order to get out" and "we have to be 'in' in order to rise above"); the gorgeous Lamia are a metaphor for sex and the sensual pleasure in which it's lovely to lose oneself, but they're counterbalanced by the hideous Slippermen, who tell us this can also become a form of slavery when it's purely about satisfying one's own selfish instincts, preventing us from truly loving another; the final IT, in which Rael and John dissolve, represents the maturity finally reached by the boy now become a man, who at last recognizes his rational side as his own and thus becomes whole. Sticking to broader meanings, one might mention that the entire underground world in which the story unfolds, besides recalling the inferno of the "Divine Comedy", seems above all to represent the protagonist's subconscious, the hidden "inner self" he finds himself dealing with for the first time, reflecting rather than acting.

However, it's best not to reveal too much of what are, after all, personal interpretations — everyone can have fun on their own finding the hidden meanings in the lyrics or giving them their own, especially since Gabriel has never offered "official" interpretations and has always been rather vague when discussing the meaning of this record's lyrics.

4 – The Tour and Peter Gabriel's Farewell

It's a common belief that Gabriel wrote all the lyrics on the double album, but it should be remembered that those on the fourth side were actually written in part by Rutherford and Banks, because otherwise the deadlines agreed with Charisma for delivering the work would not have been met. At the time many even thought he had written all the music, whereas this was almost exclusively the work of the others, since Gabriel and the band had divided up the tasks at the start of the sessions. These mistaken attributions obviously heightened the internal tensions already present between the singer and the rest of the band, which had become especially acute during the long process of making "The Lamb". Gabriel's desire to create a highly elaborate stage show also played a part in the friction, to the point of even affecting the making of the album itself. Indeed the band, Collins in particular, has testified in later interviews that after the group compositions, while the other four had essentially finished recording the musical backing tracks within two weeks, a month later they were still waiting for the lyrics. When pressed, Gabriel began saying he needed more music, both to use lyrics that lacked "backing" and to have further connections between songs. This was clearly, even if never stated outright, aimed at giving him time to change costume or make other moves on stage. This was not at all welcomed by the others, who already resented his "selfish" way of working. It's therefore extremely important to address this aspect, because it can be said that some parts of the double album are the result of the perspective of its full staging live. This is probably the case with certain instrumental passages that sound very much like connective material, the famous "filler" mentioned earlier — take the instrumental "Silent Sorrow In Empty Boats", which sits between "The Lamia", during which Gabriel wore onstage an incredible "costume" consisting of a semi-transparent painted cone over two metres tall inside which he sang, and "The Colony Of Slippermen", in which he wore a cumbersome, now-famous lumpy monster suit. All this, however, didn't only produce filler: indeed, as Banks states, the magnificent "The Carpet Crawlers" is a song written and added at a later stage at Gabriel's request, based, among other things, on one of his melodic themes.

The album sold reasonably well for a double LP, even if considerably less than the two records immediately preceding it, reaching No. 10 in the UK and No. 41 in the US (still the highest position reached in the States up to that point). In any case, the real explosion came from the success of the live shows, descriptions of which spread with an almost legendary tone. The entire stage was painted completely black, whatever theatre or arena they played, to allow for total darkness during the moments when the singer moved around the stage to reappear in the most unexpected spots, and for the same reason the band demanded that all lights be switched off, including advertising signs and emergency exit lights; on three screens placed behind the group, in sync with the music, seven projectors cast 1,450 slides contained in 18 cassettes; at a certain point a mannequin-clone of Gabriel was used (its face a plastic mask cast from the singer's own face while alive) so that two Peter Gabriels appeared at opposite ends of the stage, and there were of course his famous costumes, although in fact he didn't wear any until "The Lamia", having spent the previous two-thirds of the show "simply" dressed and made up as Rael.

The internal tensions thus reached their peak precisely during the colossal tour on which the double album was performed in full for 102 nights across North America and Europe, and during which Gabriel decided to leave the band.

Gabriel had by now become a star of the first magnitude, the beacon that the audience and much of the fans and press looked to, and the others ended up in his shadow despite having written 95 percent of the music - which only added to the frustrations of the recording process. Gabriel also had family matters weighing on him: his first child was on the way, and above all he wanted to be close to his family rather than facing a future of permanent touring with a band that had by now become a rock monster. The others, meanwhile, suffered from constantly being seen as "Peter Gabriel's band", and communication among the members had hit an all-time low. The singer's departure was the almost inevitable result.

With the release of this album, its live staging, and Gabriel's definitive departure from Genesis in '75 - right at the peak of their success up to that point - we probably have a genuine breaking point in the history of rock: the last act of progressive rock's most glorious phase, and thus the end of an era. Punk was already delivering its first blows, blows that would soon sweep away established conventions, and Gabriel, who has always had a particular sensitivity for what's new, sensed that something had broken and that nothing would ever be the same again. Except for the Pink Floyd of "The Wall", who would close the circle, albeit in a different way, no one would ever again manage to express themselves with that kind of live complexity, just as no one had managed it before. To stick to well-known names, if Emerson, Lake & Palmer or Yes had created intricate music and staged pharaonic tours, they nevertheless didn't have the ambition to stage a true narrative performance. Going beyond progressive rock too, for instance Pink Floyd had created a great concept album with "The Dark Side Of The Moon", yet they hadn't built it around a plot, but rather just around an underlying "concept". Others who had indeed conceived a plot, like David Bowie - who came closest with the character of Ziggy Stardust, even if it was more cabaret-inspired - still lacked Gabriel's visual machinery and costumes needed to bring to life a genuine form of rock theatre. Or the Who, who with "Tommy" resorted to film to visually represent the story, even though they were probably the authors of the finest work of the genre.

In short, only Genesis in 1974 had all the tools necessary for an operation of that kind, one that has remained unique in the history of rock and live performance, staging what the band itself, many years before the term became common usage, called a "multimedia" performance, made up of rock music, theatre, poetry and imagery.

Unfortunately, no official filmed footage exists of that "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" tour, so today it stands as a piece of popular music heritage that has been completely lost.

Bibliographical sources: "Genesis, la loro leggenda" by Armando Gallo, D.I.Y. Books Europa 1981; "Peter Gabriel", in the Manuali Rock series edited by Riccardo Bertoncelli, Arcana Editrice 1985; "Peter Gabriel. 'Sognando un mondo reale'" by Tommaso Ridolfi, Gammalibri – Kaos Edizioni 1987; "The annotated Lamb Lies Down on Broadway" by Jason Finnegan, Scott McMahan and other members of Paperlate, online publication; "Genesis chartography" by Shane Hegarty, online publication.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

30/10/2006