Chapter 5
“it”: Interpreting The Lamb
The Lamb, described by Gabriel’s biographer Spencer Bright as “a surreal tale of sex, violence and death” (Bright, 1988, p. 124), is, even today, a polarizing album. For many fans it represents the group’s zenith, as well as one of the finest recordings of the progressive rock genre. Nevertheless, some writers consider Genesis’s music during the Gabriel years to be weird and disturbing, especially when compared to the generally Utopian progressive vision of other bands such as Yes. Davin Seay, for example, credits Genesis with “some of the strangest, most viscerally unsettling music of all time” (Seay with Neely, 1986, p. 272), singling out The Lamb as an “astonishingly unpleasant” double album of “inpenetrable [sic] density” (p. 273).
Similarly, David Sinclair called The Lamb “the weightiest monument” to Genesis’s “earnest and unnecessarily convoluted formula” of progressive rock: “Depending on your viewpoint, it stands either as a masterpiece or as one of the most fatuous releases of the decade” (Sinclair, 1992, p. 129). “Listening to it now,” Sinclair writes,
it sounds as if the idea was for each of the contributors to try and cram as much of their own bits as possible into every nook and cranny of every song. In reaching for such unwieldy extremes of inventiveness, they betrayed their immaturity as much as they demonstrated their grasp of advanced musical technique. (Sinclair, 1992, p. 129)
The Lamb, however, is obviously a product of the early 1970s, during which complexity was seen as a virtue. Such complexity (which was not limited to music—in literature, for example, one could just as easily cite Thomas Pynchon’s novel Gravity’s Rainbow) is an example of what John Covach has called the “hippie aesthetic”—the notion that “the rock musician is an artist who has a responsibility to produce sophisticated music using whatever means are at his or her disposal. The music should stand up to repeated listening and the lyrics should deal with important issues or themes” (Covach, 2006, p. 306).
Viewed through a broader historical lens, however, one could also compare this tendency to complexity in early-1970s rock with the fin-de-siècle aesthetics of pre-World War I Europe. For example, the late nineteenth-century Romantic style of Gustav Mahler and early Arnold Schoenberg was characterized by the expansion of chromatic harmony until tonality itself was threatened; the neoclassicism of Igor Stravinsky and the impressionism of Claude Debussy heralded a new “simpler” direction in concert music by turning away from the chromatic complexities of late Romanticism. In the same way that the complexity of such music represented the swan song of the old European order (one is reminded of Debussy’s famous remark that Wagner’s music was “a beautiful sunset mistaken for a dawn”), the complexity of 1970s progressive rock may be seen not only as an extension of 1960s psychedelia but as expressing the demise of the counterculture that spawned it. Like neo-classicism in the years after World War I, disco and punk rock helped to usher in a stripped-down aesthetic in music that accompanied the mid-1970s implosion of the counterculture; this stylistic change was hastened by a recession-strapped industry only too eager to promote simpler and more financially efficient product.
Therefore, listening with a more historically informed ear—a 1970s ear, as it were—will better reveal The Lamb’s deep riches. For example, the nostalgia motif that is scattered through the album—in “Broadway Melody of 1974,” the musical structure of “Counting Out Time,” and the quotes from earlier pop songs in “In the Cage”—is better understood when considering Andy Warhol associate Bob Colacello’s comment that nostalgia was “all over New York in 1973 and 1974” (Killen, 2006, p. 140). Another aspect of 1970s pop culture reflected in The Lamb was its prominent “anti-hero”; examples in literature and movies of the era include Catch 22, Taxi Driver, and The Godfather. Gabriel’s protagonist Rael is, like Travis Bickle or Don Corleone, hardly noble or even very likeable as the story begins; he is a social “outsider.” Gabriel describes Rael as “an outcast in a totally alien situation. I identify with him to a certain extent” (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 96). Compounding the alienation of Rael’s social status as a street delinquent is his uncertain racial status as half-Puerto Rican (the other “half” of Rael’s racial lineage is not specified). Rael’s “outsider” racial status is in fact ironically confirmed by the racial stereotyping found in Chris Welch’s review of the album:
”Rael,” a Puerto Rican resident of New York searching for freedom … [attempts] to establish his identity by spraying his name on walls with an aerosol. He would probably achieve greater satisfaction by forming a voluntary association of citizens devoted to wiping clean the city walls from graffiti, thus rendering them pleasant to behold, and removing some of the oppressive characteristics of big city life.
The Puerto Rican could also form a close harmony vocal group, and cut some top selling albums thus making him popular, and rich. (Welch, 1974)
Welch’s review—the above racial essentialism notwithstanding—was typical of the muted critical response to The Lamb; as Sinclair put it, “the fans loved it while the critics gave it a panning” (p. 129). For many critics—if not the fans—the rococo excesses of progressive rock were largely played out by 1975, thanks to such leaden leviathans as Yes’s Tales from Topographic Oceans and Jethro Tull’s A Passion Play (1973 and 1974, respectively). Although punk rock would not be seen as a viable corrective for another year, certainly many critics thought that progressive rock had worn out its welcome and that some sort of change was overdue. In comparing recordings of The Lamb tour (such as the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium show on January 24, 1975 released in the Genesis Archive 1967–75 box set) with the bootleg recording made of their famous appearance at the Roxy in Los Angeles in 1973, it is evident that their American audience had grown considerably in the intervening year or so, largely through word of mouth. (The Roxy recordings are interesting to hear, if only because the epic sound of “Watcher of the Skies,” “Firth of Fifth,” and “Supper’s Ready” seems almost wasted on a small club crowd. By 1975, however, the group was at last playing venues appropriate to the larger-than-life scale of their music—the sound is more reverberant, the audience larger and more vocally appreciative.)
If, even now, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway remains one of Genesis’s most beloved albums, fans are by no means united in their interpretation of the album. What, exactly, does The Lamb mean? Is it merely a weird flight of fancy for Gabriel’s imagination, a vessel for his gifted wordplay? Is it an allegory of some sort? Is it autobiographical? In this book I make no claim to having “solved” The Lamb—for any interpretations I offer, there will certainly be disagreement among the album’s legions of devoted listeners. Therefore, I merely offer a summary of various interpretations of The Lamb that have been given by fans over the years, along with some interpretations of my own. It is by no means exhaustive or comprehensive; in fact, it is precisely because so many alternate readings can be posited that The Lamb emerges as one of the richest creative works of the 1970s. Nevertheless, one way of grasping The Lamb’s complexity is to parse its various elements according to three thematic threads. I begin with an overview of psychological aspects of The Lamb; certainly much of its imagery may be traced to Gabriel’s reading of Carl Gustav Jung, and the entire album can be read as a kind of psychological allegory, tracing a path from psychotic break to individuation. The very title of the album, on the other hand, as well as its overall trajectory of death, tests of moral character, and implied resurrection (or satori?), suggests that one can also interpret The Lamb as a religious fable, a kind of prog-rock Pilgrim’s Progress. Thus, the second thread of interpretation considers the religious symbolism in The Lamb, which draws upon both Christianity and eastern religions (especially Buddhism).1 Finally, I examine The Lamb’s musical references. Before The Lamb, Genesis was unusual among the major progressive rock bands in that they avoided overt musical quotations (their prog-rock contemporaries ELP, in contrast, not only “adapted” entire classical pieces verbatim but keyboardist Keith Emerson also incorporated quotations in his solos from musical sources as diverse as jazz pianist Bill Evans and the American folk tune “Turkey in the Straw”). The Lamb is unique among Genesis’s albums in that it contains several strategically placed quotations from other songs—not only pop songs of the early 1960s, but also of their own music. Some fans cite this self-referential content as evidence that parts of The Lamb may be autobiographical.
Psychological aspects of The Lamb
Historian Andreas Killen observes that the “generational and oedipal conflicts” of the 1960s “were, for the most part, politically stillborn” in the 1970s; but the 1960s’ “cultural revolutions” in “music, film, sensibilities, and lifestyles” continued to play itself out through the decade (Killen, 2006, p. 4). In spite of the “passing of sixties utopianism” that was widely observed, even by contemporary writers, Killen notes that “the seventies revolution of everyday life … was not without its own genuinely visionary aspects” (2006, p. 4). As Paul Stump observes, by the 1960s and early 1970s, given the hippie counterculture’s interest in other states of consciousness and so-called “non-ordinary reality,” it was not surprising that elements of soul and psyche became “viable artistic [and commercial] commodities” in the popular culture of the 1960s and early 1970s (Stump, 1997, p. 42).
If The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway must be regarded as one of the most “visionary” products of the 1970s, it also fits squarely within the Romantic-era narrative paradigm in which “the individual passes through introspection, dream and reflection and emerges transformed” (Rothstein, 1995, p. 222). This pattern, in turn, has its counterparts in the universal structural patterns of the world’s mythologies, as outlined by the comparative mythology and religion scholar Joseph Campbell. Campbell was in turn influenced by the psychological theory of C. G. Jung concerning humanity’s “collective unconscious,” the contents of which Jung called archetypes.
Jung’s theory was influenced by the work of the early twentieth-century psychologist William James, especially by James’s groundbreaking work The Varieties of Religious Experience, first published in 1902. James wrote that “our normal waking consciousness, rational consciousness as we call it, is but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different” (James, 1925, p. 388).
We may go through life without suspecting their existence; but apply the requisite stimulus, and at a touch they are there in all their completeness, definite types of mentality which probably somewhere have their application and adaptation. No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded. (James, 1925, p. 388)
Jung, elaborating upon James’s ideas, posited a collective unconscious that is innately biological, as he described it in his 1927 essay “The Structure of the Psyche”:
The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind’s evolution, born anew in the brain structure of every individual. His conscious mind is an ephemeral phenomenon that accomplishes all provisional adaptations and orientations, for which reason one can best compare its function to orientation in space. The unconscious, on the other hand, is the source of the instinctual forces of the psyche and of the forms or categories that regulate them, namely the archetypes. All the most powerful ideas in history go back to archetypes. (Jung, 1971, p. 45)
Jung carefully distinguished the archetypes from their specific forms as they appeared in myths and fairytales, which he called “forms that have received a specific stamp and have been handed down through long periods of time.” By contrast, the archetypes themselves refer to “only those psychic contents which have not yet been submitted to conscious elaboration and therefore an immediate datum of psychic experience” (Jung, 1969, p. 5). The archetype is “essentially an unconscious content that is altered by becoming conscious and by being perceived, and it takes its colour from the individual consciousness in which it happens to appear” (Jung, 1969, p. 5). As a result, the “immediate manifestation” of the archetype, as encountered in dreams, is “much more individual” and thus less understandable (Jung, 1969, p. 5).
In a conversation with longtime Genesis photographer Armando Gallo, Gabriel called dreams “a very rich source of inspiration for me. Not only are they a means of handling and storing information gained during waking hours but they are also a means of observing patterns in what has gone on and what is about to happen …. In one sense dreams are real experiences, requiring the activity of the brain even if they only appear to be experiences of other experiences …. We should be careful what we dream” (Gallo, 1986, p. 36). Joseph Campbell calls dreams “the personalized myth” (Campbell, 1968, p. 19); breaking through to “the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation” of the archetypal images is, according to Campbell, “the first work of the hero” (Campbell, 1968, pp. 17–18). Jung notes that dreams are the primary source for archetypes, having the advantage of being “involuntary, spontaneous products of nature not falsified by any conscious purpose” (Jung, 1971, p. 67).
This perhaps accounts for the obscurity of The Lamb’s narrative, a frequent target for criticism; it also perhaps accounts for Gabriel’s reluctance to give a precise explanation of its lyrics (Bright, 1988, p. 62). Bright contends that “there would be no point because much of it did not have a direct meaning other than the interplay, feel and sound of words. The understanding was largely in the feeling of the performance rather than the literal examination of the words” (1988, p. 62). Such an open interpretation is certainly consistent with the overriding aesthetics of the hippie counterculture, which “wanted conventional meaning to be undercut” in its music (Willis, 1978, p. 159, emphasis in original): “It was the very lack of clarity—the multi-codedness—of their preferred music which allowed it to suggest a multitude of suggestive meanings” (Willis, 1978, p. 160).
The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, to a degree unrivalled by other narrative-structured concept albums, closely follows the “monomyth” of the hero’s adventure, which may be summarized as separation, initiation, and return (Campbell, 1968, p. 30): “a separation from the world, a penetration to some source of power, and a life-enhancing return” (1968, p. 35). The “really creative acts,” Campbell writes, “are represented as those deriving from some sort of dying to the world; and what happens in the interval of the hero’s nonentity, so that he comes back as one reborn, made great and filled with creative power, mankind is also unanimous in declaring” (Campbell, 1968, pp. 35–36).
The first stage of the hero’s journey is what Campbell calls the “call to adventure.” This may begin with “a blunder—apparently the merest chance,” which “reveals an unsuspected world, and the individual is drawn into a relationship with forces that are not rightly understood …. The blunder may amount to the opening of a destiny” (Campbell, 1968, p. 51). The apparently random appearance of the lamb, lying down on Broadway, might be seen as the “merest chance” that begins Rael’s adventure. Not infrequently, the saga begins with “the call unanswered,” or the refusal of the call. “Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative” (Campbell, 1968, p. 59). Thus, for example, Jonah refuses God’s call to go to Nineveh, resulting in God’s sending a storm upon Jonah’s vessel and a great fish to swallow him. In the same way, Rael’s defiant, self-asserting shout “Don’t look at me, I’m not your kind / I’m Rael!” sets in motion this “negative” form of the adventure’s catalyst—the solid wall that swallows up Rael from Times Square. Thus, “whether small or great … the call rings up the curtain, always, on a mystery of transfiguration … which, when complete, amounts to a dying and a birth” (Campbell, 1968, p. 51). Indeed, rebirth (or renovatio) is itself one of the Jungian archetypes (Jung, 1969, p. 114).
Within each stage of Rael’s journey, several of his experiences and the characters he encounters correspond to the archetypes in Jung’s psychological theory. For example, the Lamia is an example of Jung’s anima archetype, which often appears personified in dreams (Jung, 1969, p. 284). The anima can be “a siren, melusina (mermaid), wood-nymph, Grace, or Erlking’s daughter, or a lamia or succubus, who infatuates young men and sucks the life out of them” (Jung, 1969, p. 25):
Although it seems as if the whole of our unconscious psychic life could be ascribed to the anima, she is yet only one archetype among many …. What is not-I, not masculine, is most probably feminine, and because the not-I is felt as not belonging to me and therefore as outside me, the anima-image is usually projected upon women. Either sex is inhabited by the opposite sex up to a point, for, biologically speaking, it is simply the greater number of masculine genes that tips the scales in favor of masculinity ….
Everything the anima touches becomes numinous—unconditional, dangerous, taboo, magical. She is the serpent in the paradise …. (Jung, 1969, pp. 27–28)
Jung also notes that in instances of “anima-possession,” the patient will “want to change himself into a woman through self-castration” (Jung, 1969, p. 39); an example of this played out in The Lamb may be seen in Rael’s and John’s visit to Doktor Dyper in the Colony of Slippermen. Jung, according to Joseph Campbell:
emphasized the crises … when, in order to advance, the shining sphere must submit to descend and disappear, at last, into the night-womb of the grave. The normal symbols of our desires and fears become converted, in this afternoon of the biography, into their opposites; for it is then no longer life but death that is the challenge. What is difficult to leave, then, is not the womb but the phallus …. (Campbell, 1968, p. 12)
Rael’s psychological adventures may be seen as an example of what authors Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman (1978) have termed snapping, which Killen defines as “the sudden and complete transformation of the self” under the pressure of the teachings and coercion techniques of religious and political cults (Killen, 2006, p. 113). While there is no “cult” group in The Lamb (although the voluntary castration episode in “Slippermen” prefigures the Heaven’s Gate cult of the 1990s), Rael does undergo a “sudden personality change” as a result of the extraordinary pressures brought about by his ordeal.
“The idea of the multiple personality has always seemed correct to me,” Gabriel told Armando Gallo; “each of us is composed of many parts and in order to achieve some sort of integration they all need to be allowed through to the surface” (Gallo, 1986, p. 88). Certainly by the 1980s, Gabriel was thoroughly aware of Jungian concepts such as the shadow (or personal unconscious; “a part of their personality which might not otherwise see daylight”) and the bringing together of one’s conscious and unconscious through the process of individuation (“some sort of integration”). The Lamb was evidently Gabriel’s first application of those concepts to his songwriting.
Another archetype scattered throughout The Lamb is the symbolism of water. “Water,” Jung reminds us:
is the commonest symbol for the unconscious. The lake in the valley is the unconscious, which lies, as it were, underneath consciousness …. Water is the “valley spirit,” the water dragon of Tao, whose nature resembles water—a yang embraced in the yin. Psychologically, therefore, water means spirit that has become unconscious…. The descent into the depths always seems to precede the ascent. (Jung, 1969, pp. 18–19, emphasis added).
In The Lamb, one of Rael’s immediate sensory impressions upon awakening in the Cuckoo Cocoon is that “the only sound is water drops.” Water is later the backdrop for two critical points of the narrative—the pool where Rael has his encounter with the Lamia and the rapids where he rescues his brother John. Water is a recurrent image in Genesis’s music, both during and after the Gabriel years; notable examples include “Stagnation,” “The Fountain of Salmacis,” the “How Dare I Be So Beautiful?” section of “Supper’s Ready,” “Firth of Fifth,” “Ripples,” and “One for the Vine,” among others.
The opening sentence of Gabriel’s story—”keep your fingers out of my eye”— has been interpreted by some to refer to the placement of a picture of Rael inside the gatefold sleeve, in such a way that the listener’s fingers are over his face when holding the album (McMahan, 1998, p. 407). In fact, it would appear to be one of Gabriel’s more arcane literary allusions, a reference to the unveiling of the mysterious stranger in H. G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man:
“Why!” said Huxter, suddenly, “that’s not a man at all. It’s just empty clothes. Look! You can see down his collar and the linings of his clothes. I could put my arm—”
He extended his hand; it seemed to meet something in mid-air, and he drew it back with a sharp exclamation. “I wish you’d keep your fingers out of my eye,” said the aerial voice, in a tone of savage expostulation. “The fact is, I’m all here; head, hands, legs, and all the rest of it, but it happens I’m invisible. It’s a confounded nuisance, but I am. That’s no reason I should be poked to pieces by every stupid bumpkin in Iping, is it?” (Wells, 1897, p. 68, emphasis added)
Wells’s titular image was adapted by the African American novelist Ralph Ellison in his 1952 novel of the same name. Like Ellison’s unnamed protagonist, Rael is also “invisible” to the passers-by of Manhattan, where we find him in the opening title track. He strives to “make a name for himself” and render himself visible to the cabman, the working woman Suzanne, and the “wonder women” looking out their windows, by writing his name in graffiti (“Rael Imperial Aerosol Kid”), shouting out his name (“I’m not your kind—I’m Rael!”), and so forth. He seems to be met with indifference by society around him, however.
Like the protagonist of Ellison’s novel, Rael’s invisibility is at least in part because of his racial identity—half Puerto Rican. Gabriel does not tell us what the other half of this racial mix is; from the information we are given it is plausible that Rael’s mother was Puerto Rican, and that (as is the case in so many poor urban families) Rael grew up with an absent father. The lack of a father figure in Rael’s life is played out psychologically in Rael’s journeys throughout The Lamb. Rael does not encounter a wise father figure who can help him face the challenges of this strange parallel world, akin to Obi-Wan Kenobi in Star Wars or Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings. The major characters he counters—the saleslady in “The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging,” Lilywhite Lilith, the Lamia—are all female, or are grotesquely deformed males (the Slippermen). Only John seems to be there as a male guide in his journey—but, as Rael’s brother, John is also a fatherless character.
Religious aspects of The Lamb
Along with The Lamb’s psychological connotations, however, one should also consider its religious dimensions, for as William James reminds us, “the notion of a subconscious self certainly ought not… to be held to exclude all notion of a higher penetration. If there be higher powers able to impress us, they may get access to us only through the subliminal door” (James, 1925, p. 243, emphasis in original). James defines religion as “the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine” (James, 1925, p. 31). Such experiences are by definition solemn (James, 1925, p. 38); one is reminded of Macan’s (1997) remarks regarding the “quasi-liturgical” function of progressive rock recordings and shows, discussed in Chapter 1.
The Gabriel children were brought up in the Church of England, but their parents were not regular churchgoers. Peter’s mother Irene remembers that “prayers and Bible stories were a part of our lives, but Peter and Anne didn’t see it genuinely lived by us” (Bright, 1988, p. 17). The church music that was a part of the regular chapel services at Charterhouse was certainly a formative influence: Gabriel has said that “on the few good hymns, which were anthem-like in some ways, I think it’s the closest that the white man gets to soul music” (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 6).
Christian imagery suffuses much of Genesis’s early output. The group’s debut album From Genesis to Revelation, of course, was a loose concept album based on the Bible, although credit for the concept goes to their producer Jonathan King (Bowler and Dray, 1993, p. 19). One song that did not make the cut was Anthony Phillips’s “Visions of Angels,” which was reportedly inspired by Peter’s future wife Jill (Bright, 1988, p. 37) and later appeared on Trespass. “For Absent Friends,” which appeared on 1971’s Nursery Cryme, is a touching portrayal of an elderly couple going to church. “Supper’s Ready,” of course, culminates in a Gabrielesque vision of the battle of Armageddon and the second coming of Christ. In his post-Genesis solo career, Gabriel has continued to show an interest in Christian imagery, as in for example “Blood of Eden” and his soundtrack for Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ.
Listeners who bring their familiarity with the Christian faith to The Lamb will note its many Christian images: the Lamb lying down on Broadway, for example, could be seen as a symbol of Christ “laying down” His life to redeem humanity, and the overall narrative as a kind of Pilgrim’s Progress-style moral fable ending in resurrection. One of Gabriel’s introductory stories would seem to point to a resurrection theme as well, albeit in typically bizarre Gabriel fashion; at the Milton Keynes Reunion Concert in 1982 Peter introduced “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” with a story about an old man who:
used to collect everything that he had in his life: bus tickets, paper bags, all sorts …. So his room was full of junk, and every time he got more and more stuff, he had to build his house a little bit bigger and bigger and bigger.
Eventually, disaster struck when his dog Renaldo died. So he took Renaldo to the place where all dead dogs should go: to the taxidermist. Renaldo was back in his room within a week. He first of all sat him in his chair but he didn’t look quite right, didn’t look quite comfortable, and he tried him by the fireplace where he usually sat, and then he lifted him up in his full glory and put him on the table, and just then, the glass eyes began to wink a little. He saw a sign of life return to the dog, and his tail wagged. As that happened, the table began sprouting branches and leaves, and everything started moving backwards into life, …. and there was a strange rug in front of the fire made out of lamb’s wool, and the rug slowly returned to life, and there was a little lamb… (Hoppe, 1998)2
Other Christian references are scattered throughout The Lamb. For example, “The Carpet Crawlers” refers to “the needle’s eye … winking, closing on the poor,” a reference to Christ’s teaching that “it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God” (Luke 18:25). Here, however, Gabriel inverts the meaning of the passage; in the song not even a poor person can pass through, though it may be argued in a Christian context that the “crawlers” are attempting to earn salvation through their own human efforts (or “works”) rather than God’s grace. The pool encounter in “The Lamia” similarly inverts the Christian concepts of the Eucharist (Rael’s flesh and blood become the host for the Lamia) and baptism (rather than emerging spiritually cleansed or “dead to sin” through baptism, Rael emerges with his sinful nature repulsively visible as one of the Slippermen). In “In the Cage,” John’s “tear of blood” when he looks at Rael recalls Christ’s “sweat like great drops of blood” in Luke 22:44. John’s two-time denial of Rael—when Rael asks for help in “In the Cage” and when the Raven snatches Rael’s tube away in “The Colony of Slippermen”—is analogous to Peter’s three-fold denial of Christ. Of course, Rael at last achieves redemption when he forgoes returning through the portal to his old life in New York and instead dives into the ravine to save John from drowning after those denials—a gesture that parallels Christ “emptying Himself” and undergoing His redeeming self-sacrifice rather than simply returning to reclaim His glory in Heaven (Philippians 2:6–8). This is not to argue that Rael is a Christ figure, although that has been the conclusion of some fans of the album. Rather, as it has already been pointed out, Christian imagery in general is a recurrent theme of Genesis’s music; here is a case where such imagery is scattered rather liberally throughout the entire album as opposed to being found in one or two songs.
Of course, there is non-Christian religious imagery in Genesis’s early music as well. The song “White Mountain” (Trespass), for example, has a strongly shamanic character, and the group drew upon Classical mythology in songs such as “The Fountain of Salmacis” and “The Cinema Show.” Peter Gabriel was first introduced to other spiritual traditions through his father’s library (Bright, 1988, p. 17). Gabriel had always been a voracious reader; in the early 1970s he became close friends with a poet named Martin Hall, who later described their friendship as “like a late schoolboy relationship. One of us would say, you must see this film, or must read that book” (Bright, 1988, p. 9). In 1973–74, during which The Lamb was conceived and recorded, Gabriel’s reading included Carlos Castaneda’s Journey to Ixtlan, books on Zen Buddhism, and The Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bright, 1988, p. 9), as well as the writings of Jung. Gabriel has directly linked his reading of Jung with at least “The Lamia” (Bell, 1975, p. 14); subconsciously, The Tibetan Book of the Dead may also have influenced the overall structure of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Although a direct causal relationship cannot be established, especially in light of Gabriel’s reticence to “explain” The Lamb, the parallels are worth exploring.
The Tibetan Book of the Dead (or Bardo Thödol) is, in psychological terms, a 49-day “prolonged dream-like state, in what may be called the fourth dimension of space, filled with hallucinatory visions directly resultant from the mental-content of the percipient, happy and heaven-like if the karma be good, miserable and hell-like if the karma be bad” (Evans-Wentz, 1960, pp. 66–67). The manuscript consists of three parts. The first, Chikhai Bardo, deals with psychic events at the moment of physical death; the second, Chönyid Bardo, deals with the soul’s journey immediately after death, a series of episodes involving “karmic illusions.” Finally, the third part, Sidpa Bardo, occurs with the soul’s gravitation toward and preparation for rebirth (Evans-Wentz, 1960, p. xxxvi). The deceased is repeatedly advised that the visions are transitory and illusory, and is exhorted to “be not daunted thereby, nor terrified, nor awed” (Evans-Wentz, 1960, p. 104). The Tibetan Book of the Dead instructs that “perseverance in the reading … for forty-nine days is of the utmost importance. Even if not liberated at one setting face-to-face, one ought to be liberated at another: this is why so many different settings-face-to-face are necessary” (Evans-Wentz, 1960, p. 183). Likewise, the narrative of Rael’s journey is largely episodic and in the first-person.
The ultimate goal of the Bardo is “illumination or higher consciousness, by means of which the initial situation is overcome on a higher level” (Jung, 1969, p. 39). Broadly speaking, then, we can consider Rael’s situation at the beginning of The Lamb as one of sociopathic alienation (expressed particularly in the title track and “Back in N.Y.C.”); by the end (“it”), he has achieved oneness with the universe (individuation in psychological terms, satori or enlightenment in the language of the Bardo). Below is a possible breakdown of the album according to the three parts of the Bardo Thödol:
•Chikhai Bardo: “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway,” “Fly on a Windshield,” “Broadway Melody of 1974”
•Chönyid Bardo: “Cuckoo Cocoon,” “In the Cage,” “The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging,” “Back in N.Y.C.,” “Hairless Heart,” “Counting Out Time,” “Carpet Crawlers,” “Chamber of 32 Doors,” “Lilywhite Lilith”
•Sidpa Bardo: “The Waiting Room,” “Anyway,” “Here Comes The Supernatural Anaesthetist,” “The Lamia,” “Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats,” “The Colony of Slippermen,” “The Light Dies Down on Broadway,” “Riding the Scree,” “Ravine,” “In the Rapids,” “it”
William James writes that transitions in the religious experience may be gradual, “yet when you place the typical extremes beside each other for comparison, you feel that two discontinuous psychological universes confront you, and that in passing from one to the other a “critical point” has been overcome” (James, 1925, pp. 41–42). Accordingly, the division points in The Lamb are somewhat porous. For example, Rael’s “death” in the cave, coinciding with the arrival of the Supernatural Anaesthetist, is a major turning point in the story; accordingly, the Sidpa Bardo could begin with “The Lamia” rather than “The Waiting Room.” My own division above is based partly on the two appearances of transitional music that occur at the end of “Broadway Melody of 1974” (on electric guitar) and “Lilywhite Lilith” (on Mellotron), which henceforth will be referred to as “swoon” music (Figure 5.1). This brief theme represents the moment when Rael passes from one Bardo to the next through a kind of swoon or momentary loss of consciousness.
Figure 5.1 “Swoon music” from first appearance in “Broadway Melody of 1974”
The Bardo’s episodic structure makes it an example of a Jungian “symbolic process”; it is an “experience in images and of images” (Jung, 1969, p. 38). The specific images involved in a symbolic process, as well as the time scale involved in their experience, may vary enormously from case to case (Jung, 1969, p. 39)— 49 days for the reading of the Bardo Thödol, about 90 minutes for The Lamb. Nevertheless, the beginning of such a symbolic process “is almost invariably characterized by one’s getting stuck in a blind alley or in some impossible situation” (Jung, 1969, pp. 38–39); Rael’s envelopment by the solid cloud that descends upon Broadway, trapping him like a “fly on a windshield,” would certainly fit such a description. The Chikhai Bardo is, for the departed soul, a period of profound disorientation, the reader of the Bardo Thödol continually reminding the departed that the sights and sounds they experience are but karmic illusions. Likewise, Rael is flooded with a disconnected series of images from Broadway’s—and, indeed, America’s—past in “Broadway Melody of 1974.” Afterward, his first response to his new surroundings, in “Cuckoo Cocoon,” is one of trying to make sense of where he is. “Cuckoo Cocoon” in fact marks the beginning of the Chönyid Bardo, and his time of testing begins—the visceral fear of “In The Cage,” the nightmarish Brave New World scenario of “The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging,” and the series of regressive past-life memories that are replayed beginning with “Back in N.Y.C.”
In Campbell’s monomyth paradigm, there is often a supernatural guide, a figure of “irresistible fascination” that “appears suddenly … marking a new period, a new stage, in the biography” (Campbell, 1968, p. 55). In The Lamb, Lilywhite Lilith is one such guide. Campbell points out that “the hero to whom such a helper appears is typically one who has responded to the call …. But even to those who apparently have hardened their hearts”—as Rael apparently has—“the supernatural guardian may appear” (Campbell, 1968, pp. 73–74). She suddenly appears, precisely at the time that Rael despairs of ever leaving the Chamber of 32 Doors and penitently asks, “Take me away.” This marks the first time Rael acknowledges his dependence on someone or something outside himself—compare this moment with the defiant self-reliance expressed in the opening title track (“Don’t look at me, I’m not your kind / I’m Rael!”) or “Back in N.Y.C,” for example. It is Lilywhite Lilith—the blind seer—who leads Rael into the Sidpa Bardo.
In his introduction to Evans-Wentz’s translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Jung describes the Sidpa Bardo as the “lowest region of the Bardo,” in which “the dead man, unable to profit by the teachings of the Chikhai and Chönyid Bardo, begins to fall prey to sexual fantasies and is attracted by the vision of mating couples. Eventually he is caught by a womb and born into the earthly world again” (Evans-Wentz, 1960, p. xli). The Sidpa Bardo portion of The Lamb at least initially parallels Campbell’s description of “the Road of Trials” that begins the Initiation sequence of the monomyth. “Once having traversed the threshold,” through the assistance of the Supernatural Anaesthetist, “the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials.” (Campbell, 1968, p. 97) Among the “fluid, ambiguous forms” Rael encounters are the Lamia and the Slippermen.
The Lamia exemplify the “woman as temptress” archetype that Campbell finds in many hero narratives (Campbell, 1968, pp. 120–126). Campbell’s explanation of this archetype illuminates the “Lamia – Silent Sorrow – Slippermen” triptych of The Lamb:
every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness …. The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale ….
The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is. Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell ….
But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul. (Campbell, 1968, pp. 121–122)
The Lamia also evoke the “blood-drinking” wrathful deities referred to in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, who are “only the former Peaceful Deities in changed aspect” (Evans-Wentz, 1960, p. 131). The blood, according to Evans-Wentz:
represents sangsaric existence; the blood-drinking, the thirsting for, the drinking of, and the quenching of the thirst for, sangsaric existence. For the devotee who—even at this stage—can be made to realize that these deities are thus but the karmic personifications of his own propensities, born from having lived and drunken life, and who has, in addition, the supreme power to face them unswervingly … meeting them like old acquaintances, and then losing his personality in them, enlightenment as to the true nature of sangsaric existence dawns, and with it, the All-Perfect Illumination called Buddhahood. (Evans-Wentz, 1960, pp. 132–133, n. 3)
In “discovering his hidden personality,” Rael receives enlightenment of the true nature of sangsaric existence, manifested in his physical transformation in the colony of Slippermen; his enlightenment comes not with the severing of his sexual organ, but ultimately through discarding it, forsaking the pursuit of the flesh (literally) in favor of a moment of self-sacrifice. The moment he sees his face on brother John (“That’s not your face—it’s mine!”) is the moment of satori.
Musical References in The Lamb
Unlike some of their progressive rock contemporaries, such as ELP, Rick Wakeman, or Yes, Genesis tended to eschew direct quotations of other music, tending instead to construct songs that alluded to “classical” music by virtue of their intricate formal construction or harmonic sophistication, especially in their use of modulation. This is not to say, of course, that such quotations are entirely absent in the early music; for example, the coda of “The Return of the Giant Hogweed” contains a fairly evident reference to the Gregorian Dies Irae chant (initially in the piano ostinato beginning at [4:54] and subsequently in the organ at [6:31]), and the introduction to “The Battle of Epping Forest” is a stylistic reference to “Mars, The Bringer of War” from Gustav Holst’s orchestral suite The Planets (1914–17).
In The Lamb, however, several quotations prominently appear, and they are all from popular songs. The first three songs quoted were all hits in the US (and the UK) during the first half of the 1960s. At the end of the opening title track, Gabriel sings the opening lines of the song “On Broadway,” which was written by the prolific songwriting team of Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller and which was a hit for The Drifters in 1963. The closing line of “Broadway Melody of 1974,” with its drug-oriented reference to children playing at home “with needles—needles and pins,” closes with a melodic and lyric reference to the song “Needles and Pins,” written by Jack Nitzsche and Sonny Bono and originally recorded by Jackie DeShannon in 1963; a version by the British band The Searchers was a major hit in both the US and UK in 1964. The third early-1960s song quoted, “Runaway,” makes its appearance in “In the Cage.” “Runaway” was a 1961 hit for Del Shannon, an American singer known for his moody material and distinctive falsetto (in fact, Gabriel slips into a falsetto voice on this line). Subsequent song references slip out of the early-1960s time frame. For example, “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head,” also found in “In the Cage,” was a Burt Bacharach – Hal David song featured in the 1969 film Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid; the version in the film, by American singer B. J. Thomas, reached the top of the charts in January 1970.
It is important to note, however, that all four of these songs serve to act as reflections or commentary upon the narrative. Gabriel’s choice of songs (and lyric excerpts therein) effectively comment upon either the narrative or mise- en-scène. For example, the line on which “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” fades, “They say there’s always magic in the air,” effectively introduces the supernatural experience that will engulf Rael in the following track, “Fly on a Windshield.” Rael-Gabriel sings the Del Shannon line “my little runaway” at the point when Rael’s brother John deserts him for the first time. The quote from “Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head” is a reference to the water drops that Rael first notices in “Cuckoo Cocoon” and that turn out to be the dripping of stalactites in “In the Cage.” Thus, the quotations are not offhand references for the sake of cleverness—a charge that might be leveled against ELP, for example—but are integral amplifications of the story line.
More offhand, playful references, however, may be found in the song “it,” which marks Rael’s celebration of individuation and Gabriel’s own “easing” the audience back to its everyday mundane reality. This is the one Gabriel-composed lyric wherein Gabriel steps out of his Rael persona and into the role of omniscient narrator (“The Light Dies Down on Broadway,” with lyrics by Rutherford and Banks, is another); consequently, it is at this time that Gabriel indulges in the sort of playful allusions found aplenty in his original Lamb story. As part of Gabriel’s intent in “it” is to demythologize the story just heard (Bell, 1975, p. 14)—a denouement that is also characteristic of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s 1973 film The Holy Mountain3—here Gabriel inserts a couple of more contemporary song references, in his lyrics rather than as musical quotes. We are told, for example, that “it is purple haze,” a reference to Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 hit. The entire epic ends, however, with the casual line “it’s only knock and know-all, but I like it.” This is a clear reference to the then-current (1974) hit by the Rolling Stones, “It’s Only Rock & Roll (But I Like It)”; it is also, admittedly, Gabriel’s subtle dig at all-knowing critics whom, he knew, would be dissecting and commenting upon (maybe even “knocking”) his latest creative work. In this regard, then, the closing line—in fact, the entire song—is similar to John Lennon’s “Glass Onion” (“the Walrus was Paul”) as a collection of images designed to be critical red herrings. Most intriguingly, Gabriel’s litany of obscure, teasing, potentially self-referential images is set to a chord progression strikingly evocative of “Watcher of the Skies,” with which this song was sometimes performed as a medley on the first post-Gabriel tours. Thus, this most personal of Gabriel creations closes with musical references to the band that, in fact, he was soon to leave.
Again, it should be emphasized here that the very preponderance of quotation in The Lamb sets it apart from earlier entries in the Genesis discography. This too may be the result of Gabriel’s insistence on creating something that would be a striking departure from the style and subject matter of earlier Genesis albums.
Conclusion
The Lamb is an album of paradoxes, wherein high-minded philosophical conceits co-exist with Rolling Stones references (“it”), gang violence (“Back in N.Y.C.”) segues to delicate open-hairless-heart surgery, and where there is room for references to highbrow literature and disposable pop tunes (William Wordsworth and Burt Bacharach). Uwe Hoppe writes that the album’s title itself embodies a contradiction:
between pastoral peacefulness and innocence (the lamb) and the din of modern society where it has become very difficult to even survive (Broadway).
Of course, the lamb does not belong there at all just like old Tess in “Aisle of Plenty” [Selling England By the Pound, 1973] doesn’t belong in modern society or even Harold the Barrel [Nursery Cryme, 1971] but it reminds us that after all there is much more to life than money and fame. (Hoppe, 1998)
Certainly Gabriel was grappling with this very conviction as his time with Genesis came to a close. As his band was at last poised to reach the upper-echelon status of the progressive rock “supergroups,” Gabriel was having second thoughts about the whole enterprise. The personal difficulties with Jill’s pregnancy and her later infidelity, his ambivalent feelings about being seen as the “front man” for what had always been a very democratic group, and his suspicion of the rapid growth of the music business and the “star making machinery” that accompanied it (feelings also harbored by Robert Fripp, who broke up King Crimson in the fall of 1974 for that very reason) all caused Gabriel to re-examine his personal and musical direction. Some of the songs on his first couple of solo albums are the result of this period of introspection. In “Solsbury Hill,” for example, which some interpret to be about Gabriel’s feeling of freedom after leaving Genesis, Gabriel sings, “I walked right out of the machinery.” The song “D.I.Y.” (Do-it-yourself) sums up Gabriel’s credo of the time: “When things get so big, I can’t trust them at all / You want some control, you’ve got to keep it small.”
In the next chapter, we will see what happened to The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway in the years after Gabriel left Genesis.
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Notes
1 Such eclecticism is not surprising, as the early 1970s were a time of spiritual seeking; both the “Jesus Freak” movement and the New Age movement grew rapidly during this time, and popular music and literature displayed both religious syncretism and an interest in alternative religious traditions. For example, the pop-music charts featured songs such as George Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” (with its “Hallelujah”s and “Hare Krishna”s in happy coexistence!), Norman Greenbaum’s “Spirit in the Sky,” and the “rock opera” Jesus Christ Superstar. In popular literature, one can point to examples such as Richard Bach’s spiritual allegory Jonathan Livingston Seagull, Ram Dass’s do-it-yourself manual of yoga and meditation Be Here Now, and Carlos Castaneda’s series of Don Juan books that allegedly detailed the teachings of a Yaqui Indian shaman.
2 A real audio file of this introduction can be heard at < http://www.members.aol.com/VWTiresias/sound.htm >, accessed April 11, 2006.
3 The possible influence of Jodorowsky’s style of cinema on The Lamb—and the aborted film project of The Lamb which was to be directed by Jodorowsky—is discussed in the next chapter.