[Rock band] Status Quo are just as cultural as Wagner’s Ring Cycle. As to the pleasure people derive from the two I don’t know, but in terms of entertainment they are the same.
—Peter Gabriel1
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was released in the UK on November 18, 1974 and reached number 10 in the UK charts the following month, a few spots lower than Selling England By The Pound’s peak position. In America the album only reached number 41 in the charts, but still this was their highest charting entry yet in the US (Platts, 2001, p. 79). The first leg of the world tour to promote the album—three weeks of British dates—had to be cancelled when Steve Hackett severed a tendon and a nerve in his thumb by crushing a wine glass in his hand at a reception following an Alex Harvey concert, a mishap attributed to “an involuntary surge of adrenalin due to stress” (Bright, 1988, p. 62). The delay turned out to be fortuitously timed; canceling the first three weeks bought the band extra time to rehearse. As Hackett had already completed all his overdubs, the release of the album itself was not affected (Bright, 1988, p. 62).
The Lamb received decidedly mixed reviews. While critics such as Barbara Charone wrote in the November 23, 1974 issue of Sounds that the Lamb “sticks out of the present vinyl rubble like a polished diamond” (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 94), other critics asserted that Genesis had simply overreached this time. Chris Welch, normally an enthusiast of the band, wrote in Melody Maker that the band needed to “take heed of the adage that ‘small is beautiful’”; amid this “vast amount of music to wade through” there were only a few songs “worthy of such interminable development” (1974).
As much as the album remains beloved by fans and is an acknowledged touchstone of the progressive rock genre, Welch’s opinion is the one that has persisted among critics, even among those inclined to appreciate progressive rock. Paul Stump, for example, asserts that much of the album consisted of “ramshackle and discrete songs constructed unpretentiously but originally around hastily arranged melodic fragments… to tell, or (to put it more succinctly and accurately) intimate a story” (Stump, 1997, p. 179). Even aficionados of the album concede that the album’s obscure story line hinders full appreciation of the group’s efforts; for example, Genesis biographers Bowler and Dray write that “any weakness that the album showed was in its storyline. Peter’s tale of Rael had to fail simply because of the immense wealth of detail that he tried to get across” (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 95). Tony Banks, discussing the idea of turning the album into a film (to which we will return in Chapter 6), “pointed out that there was enough going on in the story to make ten films: ‘There was too much information—some of the lyrics were too cumbersome’” (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 95).2 Mike Rutherford concurred, somewhat more diplomatically, with Banks’s opinion; The Lamb was “a perfect example of conflict between the music and the lyrics. Pete’s lyrics and melody are great, brilliant, and the music is brilliant, but put the two together, disaster! The backing track by itself sounded so strong; there was a clash really” (Gallo, 1980, p. 56). Perhaps in recognition of the dense wordplay and obscurity of his finished narrative, Gabriel saw to it that his story was also included in the inner gatefold sleeve of the album, “because it was too encompassing for all the songs to contain the action”; the story became “a clothesline on which you can hang up the songs” (Bowler and Dray, 1993, pp. 95–96). For hardcore fans, however, the obscurity of the story and accompanying songs is part of its enduring appeal; its arcane symbolism imparts a gnostic quality to the package, entirely in keeping with Paul Willis’s observations of the cultural values of the hippie culture and the progressive rock aesthetic that sprang from it. As Andy Bennett (2004) has shown in his study of the “virtual scene” centered on the Canterbury subgenre of progressive rock, the Internet has dramatically facilitated bringing together disparate progressive rock taste publics around the world. In the case of the ongoing discussion concerning The Lamb, Scott McMahan, Jason Finegan and the editors and contributors of the Genesis online fanzine Paperlate went so far as to compile an “Annotated Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” (Finegan, McMahan et al., 1994; see also McMahan 1998). This document is essentially a line-by-line parallel exegesis combining the lyrics, the corresponding passages in Gabriel’s inner-sleeve story, and interpretations by various fans, many of whom appear to be as well educated and eclectic as Gabriel (certainly, catching the obscure references to Jung, Keats and Babylonian mythology, among other things, refutes the conventional stereotype of rock fans being uneducated!). Other writers, of course, have in turn offered their own interpretations on various fan sites across the Web. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, in fact, has joined a select pantheon of rock recordings—from the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band to Radiohead’s OK Computer—that have been analyzed, line by line, in often excruciating detail. (This book, of course, serves as further evidence of that status.)
Gabriel’s story, then, clearly seemed to be too obscure for mass consumption. At the precise point in the band’s career when success in the US at least seemed within its grasp, Gabriel’s bizarre story seemed to militate against such mass appeal. Certainly Tony Banks, in several interviews, has not seemed completely supportive of Gabriel’s lyric-writing style:
one criticism I do have is that the lyrics have a kind of sameness to them, they are all of one kind, because Pete tends to do a certain things [sic] with words … he is always playing with them, playing with the actual construction. While Mike and I tend to be more specifically into the language, and the meaning of the words. It is just a different sort of approach, and you get a different quality. Also, I tend to write lyrics much faster than Peter does, which gives a different kind of flow to them, and I just felt that it was a shame on that album because there were some ideas I really could have got inside. (Gallo, 1980, p. 68)
As noted in Chapter 3, Mike and Tony did, in the end, contribute lyrics—for “The Light Dies Down on Broadway.” Bowler and Dray observe that their lyrics for that one song are “more linear,” giving the song “a more approachable, understandable slant which could have greatly benefited the album” (1993, p. 95). Additional input from the rest of the band could have given the album more variety, making it less obtuse in the process; it also, perhaps, could have saved the “vintage” Gabriel-era lineup.
As songwriting royalties are counted as distinctively different from “mechanical” recording royalties, there is an obvious economic incentive to having one’s songs heartily represented on a group’s recording; this issue had led to the breakup of bands in the past. (In the latter years of the Beatles, for example, George Harrison came to resent his lack of representation on Beatles records-most of his first solo album All Things Must Pass was made up of songs the Beatles had passed up.) Genesis had solved this problem by giving all songs group compositional credit, musically as well as lyrically. Prior to The Lamb, lyrics were often group efforts, or at least contributions from various band members (usually Gabriel, Banks, and Rutherford) were given equal consideration. This communal approach to song writing helped to mitigate the attention lavished on Gabriel as the group’s flamboyant front man, at least from Foxtrot onward (when Gabriel began adding costumes, unusual make-up and hair, and elaborate stories to the group’s performances). With The Lamb, however, not only had Gabriel insisted on writing all of the lyrics himself, but he had also copyrighted the inner-sleeve story in his name alone. Lacking equality in lyrical contributions to The Lamb, Gabriel’s band mates became increasingly resentful of the inordinate attention lavished on Gabriel as the group’s front man during the Lamb tour. In interviews, Gabriel appeared to be designated as the sole member capable of commenting on the story, the other band members often relegated to responding to questions about what it was like “playing behind” Gabriel’s story. Some of their responses are telling; Steve Hackett told Max Bell that “it’s true—we choose to make ourselves anonymous” on stage. “But it annoys me when people think Peter did everything right down to writing all the songs and designing the stage.” On The Lamb, Hackett said, Gabriel “wrote less of the music than us” (Bell, 1975, p. 14). On the other hand, it should be pointed out that Gabriel feels he was never properly credited for his contributions to the music (Bright, 1988, p. 61).
The tour in support of The Lamb consisted of 102 shows in the US, Canada and Europe (Gallo, 1980, p. 68); 41 of these shows were in the US, compared with 14 shows in their native UK. The UK was saved for nearly five months into the tour, after the road show had been thoroughly tested (Welch, 1975).
Analysis of the tour itinerary—provided in the appendix to this volume—reveals some interesting patterns of market demographics as well as the still-occasionally-haphazard aspects of tour management in the early 1970s. Macan (2006, p. 770) points out that the US accounted for some 50 per cent of world album sales during progressive rock’s heyday; accordingly, US shows account for about 40 per cent of the tour locations. The cities on the American itinerary, moreover, reflect the prevailing regional market patterns for progressive rock; Macan (1997, p. 154) observes that the genre’s strongest markets were in the Midwest, Northeast and Mid-Atlantic regions, and to a lesser extent the West coast. Cities in these regions, not surprisingly, formed the bulk of the US tour, which began at the Auditorium Theatre in Chicago on November 20, 1974. Of the 41 US shows, 15 shows (approximately 37 per cent) were in the Midwest; aside from this concentration, the remaining shows were fairly evenly distributed by region, with eight shows (approximately 20 per cent) in the Mid-Atlantic region and six shows (15 per cent) each in the Northeast, South, and West. The tour included two shows in Canada, one each in Montreal and Toronto; a planned performance in Vancouver was cancelled.
Closer study of the tour itinerary reveals some unusual detours. For example, the group performed at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis on November 22, only to return to Indianapolis to play at the Market Square Arena on December 14, just three weeks later. In light of progressive rock’s early roots in the university and college circuit, it is telling that throughout the entire US Lamb tour there were only two performances in university venues. The European leg of the tour shows some changes of priorities as well. For example, while there were 14 shows in the UK, there were 17 in Germany and 12 in France. It is unclear whether Germany and France had substantial contingents of Genesis fans at the time, especially compared to the group’s homeland, or whether these represented new markets on which the band was concentrating its efforts. A more baffling and unfortunate statistic concerns the Italian portion of the itinerary. Even though the Italian audience was pivotal in establishing Genesis’s live reputation in 1970–71 while they were a struggling outfit—a fact repeatedly acknowledged by biographers of the group as well as the band members themselves—Italy was graced with only one appearance during the Lamb tour, a Turin show on March 24 that was fortunately preserved for posterity on the bootleg The Real Last Time (Stonehenge STCD 2004/2005).
In spite of Banks’s recollections that a number of shows on the tour were cancelled, there were only four cancellations—Dallas and Berkeley in the US, Vancouver in Canada, and Toulouse in France. Some of these can be readily explained, even as they also highlight some of the haphazard conditions of tour planning. The Vancouver show was apparently double-booked with a show in Kansas City, or perhaps the Kansas City appearance was arranged to replace the Vancouver cancellation. If the latter reason is correct, then the Vancouver show would have been an inconvenient and ill-advised detour between shows in San Diego, California and Grand Rapids, Michigan. The January 26 Berkeley show was probably cancelled because of a lack of ticket sales, perhaps not surprising as there had been a Berkeley performance (in the same venue) just four days before. Some sources indicate a final show in Toulouse, France had also been cancelled because of a lack of ticket sales; Banks remembers there was such a cancellation (Russell, 2004, p. 208).
When the tour began in Chicago, Hackett’s hand had still not fully healed from its tendon injury; he later recalled, “I went to a hospital and had electric shock treatment on my hand, to set it working. I swear the guy who was giving me the so-called physical therapy was a sado-masochist, who was turning the juice up much too high and getting off on it” (Platts, 2001, p. 78). It was a rather inauspicious beginning. The album was not released in America until several dates into the tour, which meant that, for the first few shows at least, fans were presented with virtually an entire show of songs they had never heard before (Platts, 2001, p. 77). “You had an audience who were coming along to listen to old favorites,” Hackett recalled about the Chicago show, “who were not exactly thrilled to see this English band playing a concept album based on the idea of a New Yorker who hails from Puerto Rico. It was one of those days when life throws everything at you” (Platts, 2001, p. 79).
Recognizing that the American audience would likely need a “refresher” introduction to the band and its history as well as to the new conceptual theatre piece they were about to witness, Genesis’s management saw to it that the Lamb tour program booklet contained extensive notes:
Back in the late 60’s progressive music seemed all but dead, barely kept alive by the faint spark of a lingering mellotron. Rock audiences had overdosed on loud psychedelic riffs and gentle acoustic flower-power tunes, wondering all the time if there was anything more to progressive music than strobe lights, incense and the odd synthesizer. Just when adventurous rock seemed forever moving backwards, Genesis began flirting with multi-media concepts….
From their earliest concerts and records, the group stubbornly insisted on doing everything their own way, an individuality that today separates them from other “progressive” groups. Genesis were the naive rockers who brought tea and toast to sleazy backstage concerts as Gabriel began miming to some of the more story-book lyrics in a last ditch attempt to reach the audience. Record companies demanded traditional single releases that they refused to create. Genesis headlined before they reached headlining status as a problem quickly evolved, what kind of band could they possibly open for? The same problem was to plague them during their first few American visits, where a relatively unknown group found themselves in the unique position of headlining concerts. Whether there were 400 or 4000 people in the audience, Genesis worked hard, hypnotically pulling the listener into their own formless world. As the lyrics began to take on a more animated form, as the music became a soundtrack for a film that was happening onstage, a clear direction evolved for the group, merging theatrical stage visuals with the music. 70’s rock was at last moving forward. After Trespass, drummer John Mayhew and guitarist/songwriter Anthony Phillips left the group.
Phil Collins arrived at a time when Genesis badly needed a healthy injection of fresh blood and revitalized energy. His musical adeptness and percussive proficiency on drums made it that much easier for Genesis to create the time changes so integral to their world. Enter also Steve Hackett, a guitarist capable of colouring various passages and textures instead of only being able to play the archetypal guitar solo. With Rutherford on bass and acoustic guitars, Banks on keyboards, mellotrons and synthesizers and Gabriel onstage an occasional flute, Genesis had gone through a necessary transformation, emerging unscarred as one of the few 70’s bands moving towards tomorrow instead of being merely content to recall what was once yesterday. From this transitional 1971 period, Genesis began moving closer to bridging the gap between theatre and music both onstage and record. Yet the band’s visual attempts at clearing up lyrical discrepancies created some dire misconceptions which followed the group like the plague, and begged for clarification…. And it came to pass that people wrongly assumed that Genesis bore a strong resemblance to bands like Yes, ELP musically and people like Alice Cooper and David Bowie visually. Musically all that bound those groups together was the keyboard based instruments used to colour different sounds. Time changes, chord structures, song construction, vocals and lyrics differ between them so much so that no obvious similarities exist. Visually Genesis share no bonds with other popular rock posers of our time.
Unlike his contemporaries, Gabriel’s stage movements bear a direct one to one relationship to the lyrics. From the start Genesis have operated on the basic principle that the visuals, while often entertaining are merely a vehicle to make the songs themselves more easily understood and accessible. To this day the band insist that they are primarily songwriters who play at being musicians and then only later play at being presenters. The songs are most important, the visuals only an aid in emphasizing the songs themselves…. “We’re closer to cartoons than the conventional rock band”, Gabriel once said. “As far as other bands go, I think we’re in a little puddle all by ourselves”. Genesis are working towards something closer to the Red Buddha Theatre than the rock bands they are so often compared with…. Both lyrics and music began to take on unique qualities; the stories were slightly vague and subtly weird while the music added to the uneasy eerieness of the tune. The group was progressing both as songwriters and musicians.
Not content to remain stationary, the Foxtrot album made fanatics out of fans and friends out of disbelievers…. The band’s following quickly spread to the Continent and across the Atlantic where Americans were particularly fascinated with their peculiar English surrealism. A transitional period followed, allowing the group to catch their breath and further develop the technical side of production and musical adeptness. Albums were months in the making, as they were a product of not one mind but five, and group equality was always stressed. Selling England By The Pound confirmed suspicions that Genesis were becoming a self-contained unit, capable of creating and sustaining musical imagery both visually onstage and lyrically on record with the musical accompaniment integrated into the proceedings so that the whole equaled a solid, animated fantasy…. With the release of the album and the subsequent stage show that followed, lighting and sound systems took a giant leap forward and one excitedly wondered what futuristic delights lay ahead….
Which brings us presently up to autumn 1974 and a new Genesis stage show based around their new double album “Lamb lies down on Broadway”. Not a terribly wealthy band, Genesis continually feed profits back into the stage show. To convey the complex story line of the new album, visual aids will be used on three backdrop screens, hinting at three dimensional illusions, slowed down slides will also add to an animated feel. As always, these new technical improvements will serve as painted landscapes adding to the fantasy and clarifying the story line. While the emphasis remains on the music and players the show will be theatrical and exciting, the music and imagery will not be separate, but whole, working together to pull the listener into the Genesis fantasy and out of everyday street realities. What Genesis are working towards is the future and their present flirtation with multi-media concepts is only the beginning of a whole new world. Welcome. (McMahan, 1998, pp. 396–399)
The uncredited notes are interesting for their aggressively modernist tone, seeking to distance Genesis from their progressive- and glam-rock contemporaries both musically and theatrically. Concert program notes often hyperbolically trumpet the accomplishments of their subject; even so, it is intriguing to read how “progressive” music “seemed all but dead” by the end of the 60s, when King Crimson’s In the Court of the Crimson King—widely regarded as the first true “progressive rock” album and a key influence on the emerging Genesis—was released in 1969. Similarly, the phrase “70’s rock was at last moving forward” seems premature given the vantage point in the decade, and in Genesis’s history (1971!). It is as if Genesis was responsible not only for “saving” progressive rock from its end-of-the-60s demise (over before it had even begun, as it were), but for rescuing 70s music in general. At the same time, the program notes also reveal how the group, and sympathetic journalists, proactively defended the value of their theatrical enterprise. Gabriel’s remark that a Status Quo show was “just as cultural” as a Wagner opera, in this chapter’s epigraph, is one instance of this; Max Bell similarly declared to his readers that Genesis’s variety of rock theater was “mostly as legit as any other breed of rock being toted for the public’s edification” (Bell, 1975, p. 14). A feature on the tour for the American rock magazine Circus in March 1975 offered further insights on Gabriel’s theatrical goals for the production:
I like to keep visuals in mind at the same time as lyrics and music. In the near future, I expect to see groups and artists work more closely together. I think the time is nearly ripe for the first visual artist to become a pop star. There will be situations in which the band itself becomes much less important, and there will be less of an ego thing. If one can build the visual image stronger, one can make the fantasy situation more real and involve an audience more deeply. (Ross, 1975, p. 68)
Because the storyline and the music for The Lamb, as new as it was (and, early in the tour, as-yet-unreleased), were likely to be completely unfamiliar for the American audiences, Gabriel, of course, had to introduce the performance with one of his stories to set the mise-en-scène. Early in the tour, the introductions were brief, as this transcript from the third performance of the tour, at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis on November 22, 1974, shows:
The thing is a story concerning a guy off the streets of New York by the name of Rael. A large wall is lowered into Times Square and sinks across 47th Street until it eventually wipes off the entire Manhattan Island, the wall hits our hero and knocks him unconscious. He regains consciousness in a cocoon-like situation, which in turn becomes a rock-like cave which causes a claustrophobic fear.
He removes himself from this at the sight of his brother John, and is taken into a place called The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging which is an inanimate building filled with motionless bodies.
We have divided it up roughly as we have on the record, which is four sides and this is the first section of the story of Rael, thank you. (Russell, 2004, p. 102)
As the tour continued and Gabriel became more self-assured, the introductions became more elaborate, as this story introducing the second section, taken from the February 4, 1975 show at the Arie Crown Theatre in Chicago, indicates:
And at this point our hero is moving into an almost perfect reconstruction of the streets of New York, and he begins to recollect his childhood adventures particularly his romantic adventures. He purchased a discount book entitled “Erogenous Zones and Overcoming the Difficulties in Finding Them” [applause]. I understand there are a few fanatics of the book in here tonight.
He spent many months studying this miraculous piece of literary accomplishment, until he mastered his sexual motions by numbers. The day of judgment arrived, and complete performance from initial arousal to completion, he came to the end, was a mere 78 seconds. This miraculous feat of masculine achievement failed to even remotely titillate his opposite partner.
He was left cuddling a rather large prickly porcupine, which he took onto a soft carpeted corridor with thousands of other people, small people, little people crawling obsessively towards a large wooden door, which in turn led them up a spiral staircase into a chamber with 32 other doors, only one of which was capable of getting any of them out. (Russell, 2004, p. 103)
The last and most elaborate story below comes from the April 27, 1975 performance at the Manchester Palace Theatre in the UK. Note the change of person in the narrative, as Gabriel is now recounting the events of the narrative as Rael:
This chamber with hundreds of doors and a woman who was as pink and pale as all the little beetles and creatures that I had seen crawling around the floor of the caves, approached me and she said, “Can you help me?” How could I resist a proposition like that? So we held sweaty hands and she led me through one of the doors down a passageway that I hadn’t seen before, into a series of tunnels entering a large dark cave, and she left me on a cold wet stone throne.
This wasn’t comfortable and being on my own I began to hear funny things and there was this strange noise on my left, a whirring sound and these two golden globes hovered in filling the cave with this amazingly bright, white, light. [high- pitched matronly voice] “I was amazed at the whiteness,” Mrs. J.H. of Bournemouth. [laughter and applause] “It was the whitest I’ve ever seen,” Mrs. P.W. of Bognor Regis. [applause]
I know this is getting boring but I too was astonished at the whiteness so I picked up this little pebble, hurtled it at the centre of it and smashed it, I hit it right in the middle in fact, and the whole ceiling collapsed on my head. This was a little painful, I escaped like all good heroes and went into the small rescue area, where the delightful shattering, shimmering, spectre, [game-show announcer voice] your friend and mine better known to all of us here tonight as Death that’s D-E-A-T-H! [applause]
Mmm this lovely man is wearing one of his delightful costumes he designed so painfully himself, this particular number is his snuff puff outfit, one little puff and you snuff it, mm love it, get it. I escaped again, like all good heroes, only to be sensually and erotically assaulted by three half-woman, half-snake creatures with very long tongues beginning to coil on my body, licking the strange blue liquid that was emanating from my pores. This had the effect of giving these creatures indigestion.
All of a sudden I heard a huge roar to my right [gestures for cheers from a section of the crowd], thank you. Shall we try it again? A roar! [louder cheers] A huge express rain hurtled in carrying a packet of R-E-N-N-I-E-S3 but alas it was too late as they had shriveled up and died. I ate all that was left of their horrible bodies, lovely bodies and this turned me, changed me, into a ugly, lumpy, humpy—wait for it—bumpy species of humanity not totally dissimilar to Mr. Philip Collins on my left [more applause, cheers].
The only way of getting rid of all these horrible lumps and bumps was the severing of the sexual organs [cheers]. Rael—that’s me—and John’s organs were placed in a fully sterilized yellow plastic tubes [sic], by Doktor Dyper notorious sniper, who for a very small fee is guaranteed to cut off very neatly our very own windscreen wipers. The tubes, the yellow plastic tubes. But all of a sudden a huge black bird called Raven zoomed out of the air—zoom zoom zoom—grabbed the yellow plastic tube with my deceased sexual organ in it and flew off. [very high voice] “Christ,” I said. [applause, cheers] So I hurtled off in hot pursuit, and just as I was about to catch the tail of this Raven, it dropped it in a huge area of gushing water with R-A-V-I-N-E in blue watery letters. “A ravine,” I thought.
I watched the yellow tube disappearing, bobbing away, bob bob bob, and I saw my drowning brother John also in the water. Oh dear. (Russell, 2004, pp. 103–104)
The full-length presentation of The Lamb, then, made up the entire show. Afterward, there was a rotating pool of three other songs used for encores: “The Musical Box,” “Watcher of the Skies,” and—toward the end of the European leg of the tour—“The Knife” (Russell, 2004, pp. 105–180). (It is interesting that the band’s immediately previous album, Selling England By The Pound, was not at all represented on the tour.) Banks, in particular, came to resent this emphasis on all new material at the expense of the old: “I think the audiences would take anything we chose to give them, but I think we overdid it with The Lamb Lies Down. It taught us that you could ditch a favorite and get away with it” (Russell, 2004, p. 205).
Brian Harrigan, covering the set-up of Genesis’s “triumphant return” to the UK at the Empire Pool Wembley in London, described the Lamb show as “probably one of the most ambitious shows on the road today.” Transporting the equipment-weighing somewhere between 14 and 16 tons—required two articulated trucks (one 40 feet long and the other 33 feet long) as well as a smaller rigid truck (Harrigan, 1975). While this figure is nowhere near the excess of gear used by, say, ELP on their “Welcome Back My Friends” tour of 1973–74 (for a full breakdown of that band’s equipment see Macan, 2006, pp. 259–264), it was certainly an ambitious undertaking for Genesis. Gabriel listed a cast of collaborators in his interview with Chris Welch: “Geoffrey Shaw and Theo Botschuyver prepared the slides for back projection, Jane Highfield worked on the costumes [mainly for “The Lamia” and “The Colony of Slippermen”], Nick Blythe and Peter Hart did the stage production, and Ian Knight designed the stage settings and rostrums” (Welch, 1975). Botschuyver’s previous rock concert staging experience included special effects for Rick Wakeman’s elaborate Crystal Palace performances of Journey to the Center of the Earth (Harrigan, 1975).
The stage design included four different shaped risers, one for each musician; Gabriel had two risers to sing from, as well as a small percussion set to the rear, stage right (“The Musical Box: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway—A Few Facts,” n.d.). Every piece of the set, including scaffolding and speaker horns, was painted black in order to achieve maximum darkness (Harrigan, 1975). Gabriel told Chris Welch, “The hardest thing for us at the moment is to ensure complete darkness in a hall, or else people can see me moving around during the changes. The worst thing is to get people to turn off a Coca-Cola sign. It really is important to have complete darkness” (Welch, 1975). In a kind of 1970s antecedent to the kind of multimedia counterpoint provided by the video screens in U2’s Zooropa tour, 1,450 slides in 18 different cassettes were projected by seven Carousel projectors behind the band (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 100). This intricately balanced slide show was operated by Dave Lawrence, using a control board capable of fades and dissolves allowing for gradual transitions among images (Harrigan, 1975). A synopsis “cue sheet,” running some three pages, was prepared with instructions for everyone in the crew (Welch, 1975). Three breaks in the performance, at which points Gabriel would provide additional narrative between certain songs, provided moments for Lawrence to change the cassettes, yet the timing was crucial. “If he doesn’t talk for long enough then I’m in trouble,” Lawrence told Melody Maker (Harrigan, 1975). “There were an awful lot of props,” Tony Banks recalls. “It was a very theatrical show. But a lot of things went wrong. For instance, the slides were never right. I don’t think there was a single show when all the slides worked perfectly” (Fielder, 1984, p. 94).
The dramatic effect was immediate, beginning with the shock of Gabriel’s “new look.” As Banks began his intro to “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” and slides of early morning Manhattan were projected onto the screen behind the stage, “Gabriel soon appeared, almost unrecognizable at first, in his Rael gear: short hair, make-up, leather jacket and jeans” (Platts, 2001, p. 79). Gabriel noted that the leather jacket “has given us a more raunchy appearance, and we can sense a change in the audiences” (Welch, 1975). It was indeed “a far cry from his Britannia and Narcissus guises, just as the music contrasted sharply with Genesis’ earlier work” (Platts, 2001, p. 79). Gabriel’s skin was even darkened to resemble a Puerto Rican punk (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 100). Further clues to the visual impact of the show can be found in a profile of the group that appeared in the American rock magazine Circus in March 1975:
While Genesis play through their most extended built-in jam ever on “Fly On A Windscreen [sic],” Shaw’s slides super-realistically smash a greatly magnified and grotesque insect against a stolid fifties Ford. The plot, the music, and the visuals become even more disturbingly surreal once Rael is sucked body and soul into Genesis’ harrowing halfworld. As the band plays “The Hairless Heart” Shaw’s slides show a snowy white feathered heart nestled in crimson satin drapery. A rubber-gloved hand begins to shave the heart with cruel precision; the combined impact of the music and the visuals makes for one of the show’s strongest emotional moments. (Ross, 1975, p. 70)
During “The Lamia,” Gabriel would become “engulfed by a cone which revolved around him” (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 101); the cone represented the tourbillon, “the wheel that catapaults beings into the mystical world” (Bright, 1988, p. 62). Upon entering the colony of Slippermen, Gabriel emerged wearing a “grotesque yellow body stocking, covered, in Peter’s words, with ‘lumps and bumps and slimy humps’ coupled with one vital extra for all aspiring rock stars, inflatable genitalia” (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 101). Although Bowler and Dray call this outfit “probably the most extraordinary costume of his entire tenure as lead singer” (1993, p. 101), the design presented difficulties with Gabriel’s vocals, muffling them and making them more difficult to hear. As Tony Banks later reflected, “That’s when we thought that the balance had gone the other way. I mean we were all involved with the slides and that was great fun, although the technology at that time was very limited so we couldn’t always realize what we wanted to do” (Russell, 2004, p. 208).
One final dramatic effect was saved for “In the Rapids,” at the climactic moment when Rael recognizes himself as two selves. A life-size dummy of Gabriel’s Rael character was made, revealed under a spotlight at the end of the song, so that for a moment two Raels appeared on stage facing each other. Gabriel even underwent the experience of having a life mask made for the dummy to provide even more realism to the mannequin, telling Chris Welch:
I had pipes up my nostrils to breathe and was totally encased in plaster. A lot of people hallucinate in that state…. It feels like you are trapped, and I had a strong urge to breathe through my mouth. Very claustrophobic. The plaster gets very hot, and as it changes from liquid to solid, that adds to the delight.
Now I have to take the dummy with me to the hairdressers to match up my hair to the dummy’s. It caused a few scenes in San Francisco when I took the top of the torso into an elevator. A lady screamed in fear when she saw the legs were missing. (Welch, 1975)
The dummy was the object of occasional mischief on the road. On one gig roadies stuck a banana out of the zipper in the dummy’s pants, and on the last show of the tour the dummy was replaced by a naked roadie (Bright, 1988, p. 62). The lighting cues for the final song, “it,” reveal the need for precise timing. The dummy had to be taken off stage while Gabriel had to “make a blind jump in the darkness from the rostrum to get back to the centre of the set before the lights go up” (Welch, 1975). As Gabriel told Chris Welch: “If the spotlight goes on too soon, then the audience sees me sprawling on the floor” (Welch, 1975).
Gabriel was justifiably proud of how his story translated to live performance. “We’ve been really lucky to be able to put on the album as a show, in its entirety,” he said, perhaps recalling Yes’s earlier unsuccessful attempt to keep their audiences’ full attention during their complete renditions of Tales From Topographic Oceans, “because it makes huge demands on audiences with so much entirely new material” (Welch, 1975). His band mates, however, apparently did not share his enthusiasm. Phil Collins said that playing the entire album was “pretty grueling, especially in America, because the album wasn’t out there when we started touring. We played two hours of completely new music and a couple of tunes which they knew at the end but by then it was too late” (Fielder, 1984, p. 93). Mike Rutherford had an even more direct opinion: “It was a big mistake. We tired of ‘The Lamb’ tour much earlier than the others because we were tied down to playing the whole album—we were stuck with some sections that weren’t great live, just because they were part of the story” (Fielder, 1984, p. 93). He said in another interview that playing entire album night after night was “a bit of an effort” (Russell, 2004, p. 207).
Perhaps the most persistently negative remarks about The Lamb tour have come from Tony Banks, who called it “the least enjoyable of all the shows we’ve ever had to play. It was a very rigid show. You couldn’t change the set…. The first half of the show was better which meant you had the weaker half to finish with” (Fielder, 1984, p. 94). Even the group’s road manager, Nick Blythe, told Melody Maker’s Brian Harrigan, “all the roadies are bored with it! I mix the monitors when they’re playing and if they threw in a new song tonight it’d probably be about half an hour before I woke up enough to notice it” (Harrigan, 1975). Because of the fixed set list from show to show, Banks, Rutherford, and Collins looked forward each night to the total improvisation on “The Waiting Room,” the only time the group was freed from strict constraints on their playing. For them, it was the highlight of the show. Banks told Melody Maker, “some nights it’s great, some nights it’s awful, which is nice, really, because it means there’s a challenge to it” (Platts, 2001, p. 77).
In fact, a comparative analysis of different performances of “The Waiting Room” shows how the group adjusted to the challenges of live group improvisation, keeping ideas that worked and reusing them in future performances. Unlike a King Crimson improvisation of 1972–74, which was often spontaneously creating improvisations ex nihilo, a performance of “The Waiting Room” relied on certain gestures and cues as “landmarks” in the group composition. Comparing performances4 reveals a consistency of order in which new gestures were introduced, often with a time variance of as little as five to ten seconds between performances recorded weeks apart from one another. A performance of “The Waiting Room” would usually begin with high-frequency sounds—bell tree, wind chimes, high-pitched synthesizer sequences—against which Hackett would play a series of descending gestures using a whole-tone scale,5 fading in each note quickly with his volume pedal to enhance the amorphous effect. He would usually conclude this series of guitar patterns with a few augmented triads,6 also faded in. Around 30 to 40 seconds into the improvisation, Banks would initiate his series of “cat” sounds on synthesizer that are heard so prominently on the studio version, the first usually somewhere within the octave above middle C and each subsequent “meow” at a lower pitch. Often Rutherford would continue these gestures with faded-in and bent fuzz bass notes. Next, at around 38–55 seconds into the performance, Hackett would begin a series of fast, angular bursts of notes from his guitar, often answered by similarly fast percussive outbursts from Collins; Banks often entered atop these bursts of sound with wobbly Mellotron chords, the pitch manipulated with the tuning knob. Beginning at around [1:10–1:20] into the improvisation Banks would suddenly break into what I call the “tonal moment,” a baldly conventional chord sequence of I – ii6 – V – I (the keys varying from night to night) on Mellotron (usually in the choir setting). The last chord in the progression, however, was invariably “distorted” in pitch, either by wobbling “out of control” or abruptly gliding upward, again manipulated with the tuning knob. (By early 1975, the “tonal” moment was frequently given a decidedly pastoral mood with bird call noises contributed by Collins.) The distorted last chord was often met with frenzied bursts of drums or drums and guitar; by late in the tour this had evolved into a kind of clichéd high-speed boogie (often with stop-on-a-dime endings). Early in the tour Gabriel would also contribute oboe at this point in the improvisation, the oboe generally adding to the din with increasingly shrill squeaks; frequently he would follow this with a brief bit of flute as well to bring things down. Later in the tour, Hackett and others would store bits of sound in their analog echo boxes by setting the regeneration settings high, then manipulate the speed of the delay to create whooshing, cascading waves of feedback—an effect pioneered earlier by Pink Floyd. In some mid- and late-tour performances there would also be a brief, solo-like moment of fast vibraphone playing from Collins. In some later performances (such as Birmingham, UK, at [1:02]), Hackett can also be heard quoting his riff from “Dancing with the Moonlit Knight”; Russell (2004) traces the earliest instance of this quotation to the January 28, 1975 show in Phoenix, pointing out that he had hinted at quoting this figure in some earlier improvisations (p. 133).
At some point, the chaos needed to be led into a conventional “jam” pattern. The studio recording achieved this by a simple cross-fade of the improvised disorder into a 6/8 jam, with a skipping octave riff contributed by Rutherford, that was already well under way at the point at which it was faded in. In live performance, the riff portion of the improvisation would be gradually introduced by either Collins (who would simply start a groove at his kit) or, more commonly, by Rutherford. Usually Rutherford would quietly begin his octave riff and fade in the volume, with Collins acknowledging the introduction of the riff and reinforcing the tempo—with cymbals or high hats—a few seconds later. Full drum-kit playing would soon follow. In the Los Angeles performance, however, Rutherford can be heard tentatively introducing fragments of the riff to come, with plenty of space in between fragments, starting at about [1:59] in, completing the riff at last about 15 seconds later. The Turin performance of this moment is amusing in that Gabriel contributes some very lyrical flute over the 6/8 jam, making it sound like a jig. Invariably, Banks would be the last band member to concede to the structure of the jam, often sustaining dissonant organ chords well after the others had joined into the riff. Once Banks changed to a consonant chord, it seemed that was the signal that the “chaos” had at last passed.
Sometimes the “song” that would emerge from the jam would be entirely different from the 6/8 jam heard on the studio recording. In some UK performances late in the tour (Wembley, Manchester, Birmingham), the jam that emerged from the chaos would be in the key of E minor and in 4/4 time. (The Manchester version, in fact, is prescient of the sinister jam that led to Genesis’s hit “Mama” in the early 1980s; Gabriel also adds to the edge of this moment by improvising some unhinged scat singing with plenty of delay feedback.) Russell (2004) notes that the March 30, 1975 show in Saarbrucken, Germany, marked the first time the group chose to come out of the chaotic section with a jam altogether different from the studio version, as Hackett began a different riff that Collins picked up on and the rest of the group followed suit (p. 154).
The different performances of “The Waiting Room” reveal how much the Genesis group members were willing to experiment in improvisations, but also how many constraints they maintained, probably to rein in the duration of the performance. The performances of “The Waiting Room” are remarkably consistent in length, most lasting around five and a half minutes and only occasionally approaching six minutes in length, although the Wembley performance—in which the group seems to have stumbled upon its “new” groove coming out of the improvisation—is over nine minutes in length.
Summarizing the tour experience in an interview with Paul Russell in 2004, Banks and Rutherford made the following observations:
BANKS: It was ambitious and it didn’t really work in lots of ways. People remember it being this glorious show, but for a start, technically, we were trying to be too adventurous and most of the time all the slides we had didn’t work and that used to depress us. And we knew Pete was leaving and it was pretty awful.
RUTHERFORD: I’m sure the punters enjoyed it.
BANKS: It was my least enjoyable period in the group, some of the songs are great— some good writing. The Evil Jam (The Waiting Room) was the best thing, “Carpet Crawl” had a sought [sic] of feel about it. A few good things, but a bit laboured.
(Russell, 2004, p. 207)
As a result of the set-list constraints, Genesis’s “homecoming” concerts at the Empire Pool Wembley on April 14 and 15, 1975, trimmed some of The Lamb (for example, only the “arrival” section of “The Colony of Slippermen” was played) in favor of including a few additional older songs. Gabriel told Chris Welch, “We will try and play more old numbers in England and we want to do something special there” (Welch, 1975). The Wembley shows received a review in the London Times, not known for its coverage of “pop” events. Michael Wale noted that “the screen could have been tauter, as at times it gave the images a scratched effect. Often, I found Gabriel’s words indistinct because I was too near the amplifiers.” Overall, though, Wale concluded that Genesis’s success was proof that “British youth is ready to grapple with music much more complicated than that provided by the Bay City Rollers” (Platts, 2001, p. 82).
Genesis seemed to have made a triumphant arrival. Most fans did not know, however, that the group was barely holding together. Gabriel, in particular, was experiencing severe professional and personal stress concerning his future options with the group. “I was saying to myself, ‘OK, we get successful in America. We get rich. What then? Do we become like the other bands who’ve made it?’ There were things about those groups that I didn’t like, and I didn’t want to become part of a supergroup. I was beginning to dislike myself for doing what I was doing” (Fielder, 1984, p. 94).
The tour had barely begun, it seemed, when, while in Cleveland for a two-concert engagement at the Allen Theatre on November 25 and 26, 1974, Gabriel made his decision to leave Genesis. Characteristically, he told the band’s manager, Tony Smith, before telling his band mates (Platts, 2001, p. 80); this may be indicative of his overall shyness, or it could be an indicator of strained communications within the band at the time. Smith persuaded Gabriel to stay long enough to complete the tour because “there was a good chance the band could pay off their debts to Charisma, which had become considerable in the preceding three years” (Bright, 1988, pp. 63–64). Even so, the group was still about £160,000 in debt when Gabriel did finally leave (Bright, 1988, p. 64).
The decision to stay with the group to finish the tour, when it had only just begun (Genesis had just completed the first week of shows in a tour that ultimately would last another six months), took its toll on Gabriel. His wife Jill noticed the change:
He was angry, and it was a very powerful performance. He totally opened himself and put himself on the line to the world, but he wasn’t in his relationship with me. I would say to him, “Why can’t you be like that for me?” I remember sitting in the audience and feeling completely turned on by this guy who I was married to. But he was not able to be that person outside the stage. And that is what has slowly broken down over the years, being able to take that part of himself into his everyday life. (Bright, 1988, p. 63)
Gabriel later shared the immense professional and personal pressures leading up to his decision to go solo:
I wanted a career where I had the opportunity to take on other projects but the band had this army-like attitude. There was no room to be flexible—if you were in the band, you were in it 100 percent, or you were out.
A lot of the friction towards the end arose because I wanted to follow up those opportunities and also, I was the first one to have kids. My first child spent three weeks in an incubator, and the doctors didn’t think she was going to live.
Although there was sympathy, it held up recording schedules. The band didn’t understand that. For me there was absolutely no question of priorities in a situation like that.
Now [that] the others have kids they understand. This was one of the factors which helped me think, “This is not a lifestyle that I wish to continue.”
I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I knew I was sick of rock, the business, and everything about it. I just wanted to get out. (Fielder, 1984, p. 94)
Perhaps because Gabriel had decided months before to leave the group, his peace at having arrived at this decision led to Melody Maker’s Chris Welch’s observation that Gabriel seemed to possess “a marked degree of confidence,” being “a much more relaxed and communicative weaver of fantasies than he was in the early days of this most extraordinary group” (Welch, 1975). The Wembley shows aside, however, the European leg of the tour could hardly be described as triumphant. The March 25, 1975 show at the Turin Sports Palace in Italy was marred by an altercation between police and fans outside the venue (Platts, 2001, p. 82), and according to some accounts (including Banks’s own recollections), more than one show had been cancelled because of a lack of ticket sales (Russell, 2004, p. 208). The last Lamb performance took place at the Palais des Sports in Besancon, St. Etienne, France, on May 27, 1975 (Russell, 2004, p. 221).
News of Gabriel’s departure was eventually leaked to the New Musical Express in July 1975. Charisma Records at first denied the rumors, but six weeks later Genesis finally admitted that Gabriel had left. The next week Gabriel issued his own press statement, with the stipulation that the press should publish it in full or not at all (Bright, 1988, pp. 64–65). Gabriel’s statement read as follows:
I had a dream, eye’s dream. Then I had another dream with the body and soul of a rock star. When it didn’t feel good I packed it in. Looking back for the musical and non-musical reasons, this is what I came up with:
OUT, ANGELS OUT—an investigation.
The vehicle we had built as a co-op to serve our songwriting became our master and had cooped us up inside the success we had wanted. It affected the attitudes and the spirit of the whole band. The music had not dried up and I still respect the other musicians, but our roles had set in hard. To get an idea through “Genesis the Big” meant shifting a lot more concrete than before. For any band, transferring the heart from idealistic enthusiasm to professionalism is a difficult operation.
I believe the use of sound and visual images can be developed to do much more than we have done. But on a large scale it needs one clear and coherent direction, which our pseudo-democratic committee system could not provide.
As an artist, I need to absorb a wide variety of experiences. It is difficult to respond to intuition and impulse within the long-term planning that the band needed. I felt I should look at/learn about/develop myself, my creative bits and pieces and pick up on a lot of work going on outside music. Even the hidden delights of vegetable growing and community living are beginning to reveal their secrets. I could not expect the band to tie in their schedules with my bondage to cabbages. The increase in money and power, if I had stayed, would have anchored me to the spotlights. It was important to me to give space to my family, which I wanted to hold together, and to liberate the daddy in me.
Although I have seen and learnt a great deal in the last seven years, I found I had begun to look at things as the famous Gabriel, despite hiding my occupation whenever possible, hitching lifts, etc. I had begun to think in business terms; very useful for an often bitten once shy musician, but treating records and audiences as money was taking me away from them. When performing, there were less shivers up and down the spine.
I believe the world has soon to go through a difficult period of changes. I’m excited by some of the areas coming through to the surface which seem to have been hidden away in people’s minds. I want to explore and be prepared to be open and flexible enough to respond, not tied in to the old hierarchy.
Much of my psyche’s ambitions as “Gabriel archetypal rock star” have been fulfilled—a lot of the ego-gratification and the need to attract young ladies, perhaps theresult of frequent rejection as “Gabriel acne-struck public school boy”. However, I can still get off playing the star game once in a while.
My future within music, if it exists, will be in as many situations as possible. It’s good to see a growing number of artists breaking down the pigeonholes. This is the difference between the profitable, compartmentalized, battery chicken and the free-range. Why did the chicken cross the road anyway?
There is no animosity between myself and the band or management. The decision had been made some time ago and we have talked about our new direction. The reason why my leaving was not announced earlier was because I had been asked to delay until they had found a replacement to plug up the hole. It is not impossible that some of them might work with me on other projects.
The following guesswork has little in common with truth:
Gabriel left Genesis
1) To work in theatre.
2) To make more money as a solo artist.
3) To do a “Bowie”.
4) To do a “Ferry”.
5) To do a “Furry Boa round my neck and hang myself with it”.
6) To go see an institution.
7) To go senile in the sticks.
I do not express myself adequately in interviews and I felt I owed it to the people who have put a lot of love and energy supporting the band to give an accurate picture of my reasons. So I ask that you print all or none of this. (Platts, 2001, pp. 85–86)
Genesis biographers Bowler and Dray find clues to Gabriel’s unhappiness in various passages from The Lamb:
“Cuckoo Cocoon” seemed to intimate that [Gabriel] was becoming too comfortable inside the trappings of rock stardom—“I feel so secure, that I know this can’t be real”— and did the “cushioned strait-jacket” of “In The Cage” refer to his internal battle between financial security and his need for artistic freedom, a freedom he felt denied within a group structure? Was the production line indicating individual profit potential in “The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging” a symbol of his disgust for the music industry? “The Chamber of 32 Doors” his cynical view of all the business suits who claimed to have his best interests at heart while cynically protecting their own? The lyrics point to a man unhappy with the way events had gone. (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 97)
Mike Rutherford sees The Lamb as a “point of no return” for Gabriel’s songwriting. “I think that having written all the lyrics on ‘The Lamb’, he would not have found it easy to go back to our previous method of songwriting. Perhaps he felt that ‘The Lamb’ was a good, final statement on which to leave” (Fielder, 1984, p. 94). Perhaps the rest of the band would not have found it easy to go back to their previous method of songwriting either, at least as far as credits were concerned. The group’s next release, A Trick of the Tail, was their first with individual songwriting credits. The rest of the band, sans Gabriel, had already been rehearsing material for the next album for over a month when Gabriel issued the press release confirming his departure (Platts, 2001, p. 85). Tony Banks, already seen to be the most critical band mate concerning Gabriel’s artistic heavy-handedness in the making of The Lamb, later claimed, “I knew we could write good music without Peter. Any one of us could have left and the rest would still have written good music” (Fielder, 1984, p. 97).
_________________
1 Quoted in Bell, 1975, p. 14.
2 This was not the first time that Banks had harbored issues with the density of Gabriel’s lyrics. Earlier, discussing “The Battle of Epping Forest” with Armando Gallo, he said that the vocals “completely ruin the song because there’s too much happening—a complete battle between the vocals and the music all the way through” (Gallo, 1980, p. 56).
3 “Rennies” are a British brand of antacid, similar to the American “Tums.”
4 Recordings used for this comparative analysis—all bootlegs—were from performances in: Providence, Rhode Island, December 8, 1974 (Hogweed Project 14); West Palm Beach, Florida, January 10, 1975 (The Lamb Descends on Waterbury); Los Angeles, California, January 24, 1975 (BURP 019); Turin, Italy, March 24, 1975 (The Real Last Time); London, April 15, 1975 (Lamb Stew); Manchester, UK, April 27, 1975 (Hogweed Project 02); and Birmingham, UK, May 2, 1975 (Swelled and Spent). Details of these and other recordings can be found in the appendix to this volume.
5 The whole-tone scale, made famous by Impressionist composers such as Claude Debussy (1862–1918), is a scale made up entirely of whole steps rather than the mixture of whole and half steps found in the traditional major or minor scale. An example of a whole-tone scale is: C – D – E – F♯ – G♯ (A♭) – B♭ – C.
6 An augmented triad is a chord consisting of notes from the whole-tone scale, a major third apart, for example, F – A – C♯. Hackett’s concluding chordal gesture usually involved a given chord, its transposition a major third up (resulting in a reordering of the chord), and then a final chord a whole step down from the previous chord, for example: F – A – C♯ / A – C♯ – F / G – B – D♯.