By early 1974, progressive rock was big business in the US. ELP’s tour supporting Brain Salad Surgery set new box office records and new standards for arena-sized spectacle (“You’ve got to see the show … it’s rock and roll,” Lake appropriately sang on “Karn Evil 9, 1st Impression”). Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon, released the previous year, was comfortably set atop the US album charts. Yes managed to recapture some of its momentum that had been lost with Tales from Topographic Oceans with the harder-edged Relayer, their star keyboardist Rick Wakeman replaced by the relatively unknown Patrick Moraz. Wakeman, meanwhile, was enjoying his own high-profile solo career.
Following the critical enthusiasm for their Selling England By The Pound tour, and with their first British hit in the song “I Know What I Like (In Your Wardrobe),” Genesis seemed at last poised to make a lasting imprint in the sizable US market. They had built an image as an eccentric and theatrical band, a group whose somewhat arcane song lyrics were set to suitably intricate musical arrangements. Gabriel ruefully noted that in Atlanta they were billed as “the hottest thing to come out of England’s new Intellectual Rock movement” (Bell, 1975, p. 14). Writing in Creem magazine, journalist Barbara Charone described Genesis’s image for American audiences as “so hazy, so off the wall, that it gets confusing. People come to shows expecting to see a half-assed circus act; they wait at the stage door to glimpse robed occultists” (1974, p. 37). Musically, she wrote, “they rip off their predecessors far more than Yes or Alice Cooper ever did. People murmur about theater rock, fantasy world, bloody faggots, and brilliant—all in the same breath” (pp. 36–37). Genesis was not (yet) a radio-friendly band, yet the considerable commercial momentum that progressive rock built in the US since 1972 seemed to virtually ascertain that Genesis could ride the coat-tails of the “big three” bands into the big time. The long-awaited payoff—both for the hardworking band and the investment made by their record label—appeared to be just around the corner.
The point at which Genesis found itself poised was thus a delicate one to negotiate. The group was seriously in debt to Charisma, who had invested heavily in the band’s artistic promise and commercial potential. Given the recent economic setbacks caused by the energy crisis of the winter of 1973, there were no guarantees that such support would go on indefinitely. There was a great deal riding on the next album, the next tour. All Genesis had to do, it seemed, was nurture the cult following they had and give the fans what they had come to expect: quirky, literate, very “English” songs.
Instead of “staying the course,” however, the next Genesis project would be an abrupt departure in several respects. First, it was a concept album; although the concept album was a beloved format for progressive rock groups, Genesis had not made a concept album before, though Selling England By The Pound—in its “Englishness” of subject matter throughout—may be regarded as a step in the concept album direction. By 1974, however, concept albums were losing much of their allure. Additionally, the philosophical preoccupations of The Lamb—its episodes in the after-life—was suspiciously similar to Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play, which had been mercilessly maligned by critics and audiences alike. According to Gabriel, The Lamb was “an adventure through which one gets a better understanding of self—the transformation theme” (Bright, 1988, p. 61). In some ways, he says, it was “sort of a moral fable in a sense” (Gallo, 1980, p. 155); it was “a type of Pilgrim’s Progress but with this street character in leather jacket and jeans” (Fielder, 1984, p. 90).
This use of a “street character” brings up the album’s second departure from “typical” Genesis fare—its “American” protagonist and setting. Genesis’s lyrics had always tended toward a “British” tone. The most extensive example of this, of course, is Selling England By The Pound, with its references to Labour Party slogans, Wimpy hamburger chains, “Father Thames,” and London neighborhoods such as Epping Forest. Earlier examples include much of “Willow Farm” (“Winston Churchill dressed in drag / He used to be a British flag”) and “For Absent Friends” (with its reference to a “pram” rather than a baby carriage). The subject matter of “The Return of the Giant Hogweed,” an imported agricultural pest that was thoroughly familiar to British listeners, was misread by many American listeners as a science-fiction horror scenario, like Day of the Triffids. The pastoral theme—long familiar to readers of English romantic poets such as Keats and Wordsworth—was also a recurring element in Genesis’s songs (Hoppe, 1988).
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, on the other hand, was thoroughly urban and “American,” or at least its protagonist was Gabriel’s conception of an American. Gabriel told Melody Maker journalist Chris Welch that the album’s protagonist, Rael, is “half Puerto Rican and lives in New York, and he’d be the last person to like Genesis!” He then admitted, “I’ve yet to talk to the genuine article, but that’s not important” (Welch, 1975). In creating the character of Rael, Gabriel looked towards West Side Story “as a starting point” (Fielder, 1984, p. 90). New Musical Express writer Max Bell finds in Rael “roots in the most obvious territory: a mixture of James Dean, Sal Mineo and Warren Beattie [sic] with a fair measure of Rod Steiger thrown in on top. A Lee Strasberg wet dream” (Bell, 1975, p. 14).
As often happened in the collective negotiations that ensued during rehearsal sessions, Gabriel had to strong-arm his idea across to the rest of the band. Michael Rutherford had suggested a concept-album adaptation of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, which Gabriel rejected as “too twee” (Fielder, 1984, p. 90). Instead, Gabriel wanted a story with a “street slant”; well before the emergence of punk, Gabriel now claims to have “felt an energy in that direction” (Bright, 1988, p. 61). Consequently, Gabriel said, “it seemed that prancing around in fairyland was rapidly becoming obsolete” (Bright, 1988, p. 61). Gabriel wanted to avoid “dressing it up in white-coated-hippy-flower-power ideals” and instead create a story for “the guy who has never seen this, the guy who is the most alienated city-oriented person you could find” (Gallo, 1980, p. 155). Rael is thus a kind of antihero, a “Puerto Rican that everybody abuses in New York,” who “goes through a series of events from which he learns. I was basically trying to develop impressions of different emotional states” (Gallo, 1980, p. 155).
Although Pete Townshend of The Who had already created a “mini-opera” entitled “Rael” for the album The Who Sell Out (1967), Rael was Gabriel’s made-up name. Spencer Bright explains that the name was “similar enough to the popular Spanish name Raoul to fit in with the character, but English enough to suggest both reality and fantasy” (p. 61); the name is also clearly a pun on the last part of Gabriel’s own surname. At the same time, Michael Rutherford recalls that creating Rael as a central protagonist was a way of unifying and controlling Gabriel’s wildly wayward imagination: “Rael wasn’t the beginning at all. It was getting so obscure we needed a central character” (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 88).
The third significant departure for The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was that it represented a change from Genesis’s usual means of collective songwriting. Previously, all songs were credited to the group as a whole, a more communal version of, for example, Lennon and McCartney’s practice of joint songwriting credit regardless of who wrote a particular song. Just as Lennon or McCartney would sometimes contribute a section or a lyric to complete the other’s song idea, so the members of Genesis were accustomed to contributing collectively to the final product. For The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, however, Gabriel broke with this practice by insisting on writing all of the lyrics himself.
“My argument was that there aren’t many novels which are written by a committee,” Gabriel said. “I said, ‘I think this is something that only I’m going to be able to get into, in terms of understanding the characters and the situations’. I wrote indirectly about lots of my emotional experiences in ‘The Lamb’ and so I didn’t want other people colouring it” (Fielder, 1984, p. 90). Although he later conceded that the story line “had a lot of faults,” he still defended his decision to write it alone: “I think you need leadership in a lot of artistic work because committees spend a lot of time not being bold and going for compromise solutions. You need singular vision” (Bright, 1988, p. 60). Besides, Gabriel did not believe the others’ lyrics were “real enough so far as shifting Genesis out of the sixties and into the seventies” (Gallo, 1980, p. 155).
Gabriel wrote a story to provide a backdrop for the rather allusive narrative contained in the songs; the story was contained inside the original gatefold album, whereas the songs’ lyrics were printed onto the album sleeves. Gabriel felt proud enough of the story to have it copyrighted for himself (Bright, 1988, p. 123).1
For all of its obscure and mystic symbolism, The Lamb shares with contemporary 1970s styles such as glam rock and disco an avoidance of preachy didacticism, instead focusing on entertainment and escapism. Gabriel told Armando Gallo that “it was really supposed to be an adventure story, and I wanted to get away from all that writing about death, sex or God type of preaching approach, because that alienates people. I wanted it to be entertainment first, and to write what I think and feel through the entertainment, rather than be a politician and try and be entertaining” (Gallo, 1980, p. 155).
The story also had personal relevance for Gabriel, who projected some of his discomfort with stardom into the story. “I am sure that my own doubts and searches were built into the story I wrote for Rael,” Gabriel told Armando Gallo, “although I didn’t really understand the connection until I was performing ‘The Lamb’ live” (1986, p. 12). Genesis biographers Dave Bowler and Bryan Dray describe the Lamb album as a “form of therapy and an effective expression of [Gabriel’s] erotic/neurotic fantasies” (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 96).
Rael’s story is that of a split-personality, a characteristic often attributed to Peter—the shy, retiring, inarticulate figure off-stage and the charismatic attention-seeker onstage. Similarly Peter professed to disliking the star machinery that was being created around him and yet there were many times when he courted that machine shamelessly, and his enthusiasm for the wonders of collaboration contrasted with his disdain for the committee. Rael is a character that, according to Peter, felt “as if he was a waste of material, part of the machinery. He doesn’t even think about his position in society—all he can do is escape or give up.” (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 96)
Nevertheless, both Rutherford and Banks felt they could have made important lyrical contributions to Gabriel’s story. There was concern that Gabriel would not be able to come up with the required amount of material in the allotted time (Bowler and Dray, pp. 88–89). In the end, Rutherford and Banks did write the lyrics for “The Light Dies Down on Broadway,” the opening song’s reprise found on Side Four of the double album. The lyrical style is notably different from the other songs, and there is also a confusion of timelines in its reference to Rael’s New York home as being in “yesteryear” rather than in simultaneous “real time,” as implied in the last paragraph of Gabriel’s story: “All this takes place without a single sunset, without a single bell ringing and without a single blossom falling from the sky” (Gabriel, 1974).
Writing and rehearsals for the new album began in June 1974 (Platts, p. 74). The group spent June and July at Headley Grange, a manor house in Hampshire that had been previously used by Led Zeppelin. The house was in considerable disrepair; perhaps due to the house’s “occult” reputation from its association with Led Zeppelin, Gabriel was disturbed by rumors that the house was haunted (Bright, 1988, p. 60). Steve Hackett concurs that the place had “a haunted house vibe. I used to hear weird scratching sounds at night,” in all likelihood the rats that shared the house with their rock-star guests (Platts, 2001, p. 75).
Not long after the band settled in at Headley Grange, Gabriel received a phone call from film director William Friedkin, who was interested in securing Gabriel’s involvement as a writer on his next film project. Friedkin was, at the time, a major director, responsible for commercial blockbusters such as The French Connection and The Exorcist; the offer must have been both enticing and flattering for Gabriel. The commonly accepted story is that Friedkin had seen Gabriel’s story from the back of the Genesis Live album and that he thought it “indicated a weird, visual mind” (Fielder, 1984, p. 91). Spencer Bright offers as an alternative explanation that Friedkin had apparently seen Genesis at one of the group’s December 1973 Roxy concerts in Los Angeles (Bright, 1988, p. 59). Perhaps both stories are true, but at any rate Friedkin was interested in working with “a writer who’d never been involved with Hollywood before” (Fielder, 1984, p. 91). Other artists to be involved with the project reportedly included Philippe Druillet (the co-founder of Heavy Metal magazine) and electronic musicians Tangerine Dream. Gabriel was to be the “ideas man” for the script (Bright, 1988, p. 59).
The story that appeared on the back cover of Genesis Live, released in 1973, was transcribed from one of Gabriel’s in-concert introductions. A story of a woman who unzips herself from the inside out on a tube train, only to be interrupted by a passenger who shouts, ‘Stop this, it’s disgusting!‘, it is notable for its sense of the surreal and grotesque, as well as for its sexual overtones, all of which would also characterize parts of The Lamb. For his part, Gabriel was keenly interested in working with Friedkin, because Gabriel had long been interested in film; he had in fact received an offer to study at the London School of Film Technique after graduating from Charterhouse in the summer of 1969 (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 23). In support of his application, he wrote a screenplay based on his feelings of having run over and killed a bird while driving; ultimately he turned down going to film school to stay with Genesis (Bright, 1988, p. 125). Gabriel originally planned to work with Friedkin after finishing The Lamb, but the enormous success of The Exorcist meant that Friedkin’s creative clout in Hollywood was then at its peak, and so Gabriel felt the need to act quickly (Bright, 1988, p. 59). Headley Grange did not have a phone, so Gabriel would have to “bicycle to the phone box down the hill and dial Friedkin in California with pockets stuffed full of 10p pieces” (Fielder, 1984, p. 91).
The rest of the group, understandably, did not share Gabriel’s sudden enthusiasm for this outside project. According to Gabriel, his bandmates “thought I was going to use the group as a springboard to jump off for my own personal success and wasn’t even bringing them along with me. But Friedkin didn’t want Genesis. He only wanted me for weird ideas, not for music” (Fielder, 1984, p. 91). Forced between continuing to work with Genesis—a group in which Gabriel was beginning to feel creatively constrained—and the opportunity to realize a long-deferred dream of working in film, Gabriel left for about a week to work out screenplay ideas with Friedkin. During his temporary absence, Phil Collins suggested continuing as an instrumental group, “because we had a lot of music written”—Collins was already exploring instrumental music with his jazz-rock fusion outfit Brand X. Tony Banks, however, argued that “the song was the reason for Genesis’ existence. Everything was based on the song, everything was complimentary to that.” Collins soon acquiesced, agreeing that “Mike and Tony wrote songs that needed singing” (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 91).
When Charisma learned of Gabriel’s departure, label president Tony Stratton-Smith intervened and convinced Gabriel to return; at the same time, Friedkin cooled to the project, not wanting to be responsible for breaking up the band (Fielder, 1984, p. 91). “So Peter made a definite commitment to finish the album before he did anything else,” Banks continued. “But I think it made all of us feel that he was getting fed up and it was only a matter of time before he left” (Fielder, 1984, p. 91). Collins agrees: “Things were restored to normal but, from that moment on, I think we all felt that this could happen again at any time” (Fielder, 1984, p. 91).
The film Friedkin eventually made, Sorcerer, was released in 1977 and was a critical and commercial failure; the soundtrack was by Tangerine Dream.
Gabriel’s temporary departure to work with Friedkin, coupled with his insistence on having total creative control on the story and lyrics, caused a rift between him and the rest of the band. It affected their working method: “Generally the group would write and rehearse in one room while Peter toiled in another working and revising the lyrics and vocal melodies” (Morse, 1999). Steve Hackett remembers that there were “long periods when the band didn’t actually come together. I felt that the tension was really very, very strong” (Bright, 1988, p. 60). He told Tim Morse, “I think the band was starting to fall out of love with each other. It seemed to be disintegrating and then integrating again. I got the feeling that everything was being held together with cellophane tape. And in some instances it probably was” (Morse, 1999).
Perhaps because of the simmering tensions between Gabriel and the others, and the characteristic shyness and stiff-upper-lip reticence instilled in Gabriel, Banks and Rutherford during their years at Charterhouse, the lack of communication meant that a great deal of music was created as a means of avoidance. Hackett has said he was “not quite sure why” The Lamb became a double album:
I think it was because we were all traumatized by Peter’s departure [to work on the film project with Friedkin], and no one really wanted him to leave. Reading between the lines, the subtext was that everyone felt that the longer we stretched everything out, the less likely he was to leave. (Platts, 2001, p. 75)
Meanwhile, Gabriel was sorting through some other difficult personal issues during the composing and rehearsal sessions for The Lamb. His wife Jill had an affair with the group’s road manager during the US leg of the Selling England By The Pound tour—an act she later described as “my pathetic little bid for attention” (Bright, 1988, p. 75)—while she was pregnant with the Gabriels’ first child:
I got very twisted about it all. Very bitter and then I had an affair. It was at the beginning of my first pregnancy, I was feeling really down like you do at the beginning. Every night I would go to the concert and there were always these beautiful girls hanging around ….
My affair caused all sorts of problems. He was a good friend of Peter’s and it caused a rift, obviously, between them. I think in Peter’s heart he knew what was going on; that’s why he was so patient. No one solved it except for me and Peter. It was terrible while it lasted. (Bright, 1988, pp. 75–76)
In May 1974, when Jill was seven months pregnant, she could no longer tour with the group and so she had to live alone in the Gabriels’ new home outside Bath (Bright, 1988, p. 76). Gabriel was thus torn between his duties to the band and his need to reconcile with and provide emotional support for his spouse.
By the end of her pregnancy, things had turned difficult. The Gabriels’ daughter, Anna, was born on July 26, 1974, in the midst of rehearsals for The Lamb; doctors had feared a breech birth, and during delivery she had to be turned twice, resulting in the umbilical cord being coiled around her neck. “What came out was a green lump that was carried away in silver foil like chicken bones,” Gabriel recalled. Jill was not permitted to see her daughter until the next day, when the baby had stabilized in an incubator. She had inhaled fluid during the birth, and doctors also suspected meningitis (Bright, 1988, p. 4). She spent two weeks in an incubator with doctors uncertain of her chances for survival (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 91). Gabriel describes those first two weeks of his daughter’s life as “really traumatic” and his bandmates as “incredibly unsympathetic. They were pissed off I wasn’t taking the album as seriously as my child” (Bright, 1988, pp. 4–5).
In August 1974, the group’s time at Headley Grange had run out (Platts, 2001, p. 75). With rehearsals completed, the band moved to Glosspant, on the border between Carmarthenshire and Pembrokeshire in Wales. Backing tracks for the album were recorded in about two weeks (Platts, 2001, pp. 75–76), in an old farm house with a cowshed using the Island Mobile Studio, which was equipped with two 3M 24-track recorders, a Helios 30-input mixing desk, Altec monitors and two A62 Studers for mastering (Morse, 1999).
John Burns assisted the group in production and David Hutchins was the engineer. The band remembers Burns as “not only a good engineer, producer and musician, but … having a good sense of humor and being able to diffuse potentially lethal situations by saying the right thing in a positive way” (Morse, 1999).
Burns assisted Gabriel in experimenting with different vocal effects, recording some tracks in a bathroom and in another cowshed two miles away (Bright, 1988, p. 60). Gabriel was “plagued by … perennial voice problems,” and “could frequently be found standing on his head in the studio control room in the belief that it would help”; he also tried herbal remedies to stop his voice from giving out (Bright, 1988, pp. 60–61).
Because of his slow, exacting method of writing lyrics, Gabriel was still writing and revising lyrics a month after the backing tracks had been finished (Platts, 2001, p. 76). The melodic lines also came later, often improvised over the backing tracks during Gabriel’s vocal sessions. “A lot of the melodies were written after the event—after the backing tracks had been put down,” Gabriel says (Fielder, 1984, p. 92). Occasionally, Gabriel would record vocals over passages that some band members, such as Steve Hackett, thought would be instrumental. “To me,” Hackett said, “it was like taking a painting that I had done, and somebody else painting red all over it” (Gallo, 1980, p. 148). There were also a couple of lyrics Gabriel had written that did not have designated music, and thus needed a song written for them quickly; among these were “The Carpet Crawlers” and “The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging” (Fielder, 1984, p. 90).
Gabriel’s slow, exacting method of writing and tinkering with his lyrics resulted in the album falling behind schedule. The world tour was scheduled to begin in Newcastle, England, on October 29 (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 92; Platts, 2001, p. 77), and of course logic dictated that it would be a more successful tour if there were an album out to promote. Gabriel recalls that at one point the band considered issuing the album in two parts, about six months apart: “I think that would have been a better idea, because there was too much, and it would have also given me a little bit more time to write the lyrics” (Gallo, 1980, p. 155). Instead, the album was finished in a series of marathon mix-down sessions at Island Studios in London. Phil Collins remembers “doing the vocals and mixing the album in shifts. I’d be mixing and overdubbing all night and then Tony and Mike would come in and remix what I’d done because I’d lost all sense of normality by that point” (Fielder, 1984, p. 92).
The album took five months to complete (Bright, 1988, p. 62). “Counting Out Time” was chosen to be the first single, and it was released on November 1, backed with “Riding the Scree” (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 93). Robin Platts writes that when The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was finally released on November 18, 1974, it “baffled many listeners”:
Even coming from a long-established group of chart-toppers it would have been a risky proposition, but for Genesis, it was a huge gamble. The Lamb was difficult to fathom, and the Gabriel-penned story included in the gatefold sleeve didn’t really make it much clearer. (Platts, 2001, p. 76)
Steve Hackett describes his role on The Lamb as “an innocent bystander …. It happened despite me, not with me” (Fielder, 1984, p. 92);
The nightmarishly long sides—everything linked to everything else. I really felt it was very indulgent. I couldn’t quite get to grips with it or contribute something great in a guitar sense.
I don’t think Tony’s ever done a finer album. But I did feel the amount of stuff I was managing to put across was painfully small. (Fielder, 1984, p. 93)
On the other hand, Hackett felt much more comfortable with the tour, once it began. “Playing ‘The Lamb’ on stage was nothing compared with the emotional experience of putting the thing together. It calmed me down” (Fielder, 1984, p. 93). During the tour, Hackett sounded positively enthusiastic in an interview with Creem magazine:
With this new stage show, we’ve left a lot of things looser than we ever have before. We’re taking a chance that our spontaneous improvisations will create something we haven’t had much of as yet. I think we’re playing The Lamb even better live now than we did on record. (Platts, 2001, p. 77)
Gabriel remarked laconically during the tour, “It’s much harder work for us during the period when we’re off the road, than when we are actually touring, and that is never appreciated” (Welch, 1975). At the time, of course, fans had no idea that writing and recording The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway had been such a draining and arduous experience for all involved. They also had no idea that Gabriel had already decided to leave the band. But first, there was a tour to finish.
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1 Unfortunately, permission could not be obtained to reproduce the story in its entirety as part of this volume. The complete text may be found inside the gatefold sleeve of vinyl pressings of The Lamb, as well as in the CD booklet. On the Internet, McMahan (1998) and Finegan et al. (1994) intersperse the story text with lyrics and interpretations, each in a different font; this content is also mirrored on numerous other web sites. Other anonymous sources for the text include GenesisFan.net’s (n.d.) “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway Story” (http://genesisfan.net/content/view/14), “The Lamb Story” (n.d.) (http://members.aol.com/inthecage9/lambtext.html), “Historia en inglés de The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway—Genesis” (n.d.) (http://www.ferhiga.com/progre/notas/notas-genesis-tlldob-ingles.htm), ”Genesis on Green Pages: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” (n.d. (http://www.venco.com.pl/~piotrus/greenpages/genesis/la~a.htm), and ”The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway—Genesis—Traduçöes” (n.d.) (http://whiplash.net/materias/traducoes/052446-genesis.html); this last cited web page includes a parallel translation of the story and all of the lyrics into Portuguese.