As this book opened with an account of one Lamb performance, so it closes with another. The event is ProgFest 1994, held at the Variety Arts Centre in Los Angeles, and a band named Giraffe is about to perform The Lamb live. Gabriel’s Rael role is reprised by Kevin Gilbert, a songwriter who was perhaps best known for his work with Sheryl Crow on her Tuesday Night Music Club CD. The audience, of course, exemplifies what Edward Macan has called the progressive rock “taste public” (1997, pp. 200–201); they are fervently devoted to this music and they know it well. The introduction to the performance, preserved on the bootleg recording The Lamb Lies Down at ProgFest, is a telling illustration of The Lamb’s longevity and prestige as a touchstone recording of the progressive rock era. The show began with a recorded collage of radio excerpts, as if someone were changing stations, eventually settling on the voice of American Top 40 DJ Casey Kasem and one of his famous “long distance dedications.” “We’re going to go back in time and dust off all the old records, and pull out a real classic,” Kasem’s voice informs the audience. “The band: Genesis. And the song—a golden oldie—‘Invisible Touch.’” The audience responds with boos, which turn to ecstatic cheers as soon as the familiar piano to The Lamb begins.
The two recordings—and the sharply differing responses accorded to them—illustrate opposite poles in Genesis’s career. “Invisible Touch” represents Genesis at its most commercial, and, as such, is regarded by the loyal progressive-rock aficionado as a betrayal. The Lamb, on the other hand, is—along with the 26-minute epic “Supper’s Ready”— regarded as the apex of Genesis’s progressive ambitions. To perform The Lamb is to re-enact an almost sacred ritual. Certainly the ProgFest audience seems to be very familiar with the performing rituals associated with The Lamb. When Gilbert, during his spoken interlude after “Lilywhite Lilith,” tells his audience, “it is at this point in our story … that Rael skips the next three songs for time considerations,” the response is one of knowing amusement. The narration is itself part of the performance ritual of The Lamb, coming at a point in the performance when Gabriel would usually introduce the events of “The Lamia” and “The Colony of Slippermen.” Gilbert’s story—complete with references to the “slipperman” condition afflicting percussionist Nicholas DiVirgilio—is patterned after similar stories that Gabriel shared with his audiences (pointing out Collins, or occasionally Rutherford) on the Lamb tour (one such story is detailed later in this chapter).
If, during the long tour presenting The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway live, Gabriel’s bandmates came to resent the attention lavished on Gabriel as the perceived “front man,” so one of the factors in Gabriel’s departure was in fact his similar “strong desire to prove that behind the flamboyant front man was a talented quartet of musicians who could—and did—succeed by themselves” (Gallo, 1986, p. 5). Indeed, Genesis without Gabriel was far more commercially successful than they were with him; under the apparent musical leadership of Phil Collins, the group at last succeeded in cracking the American market, aided by shorter, simple pop songs and even adding such “American” touches as the Earth, Wind and Fire horns (on “No Reply at All”). Unlike many other bands who suffer acrimonious partings with members, Gabriel and the members of Genesis kept in friendly contact with one another; the band even agreed to reunite for a one-off reunion concert to benefit Gabriel’s financially troubled world-music organization, WOMAD (World of Music and Dance), in 1982.1 Gabriel also recorded a new version of “The Carpet Crawlers,” entitled “The Carpet Crawlers 1999,” released on the Genesis compilation CD Turn It On Again—The Hits. Reuniting the 1971–75 line-up and featuring lead vocals shared by both Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel, the recording was completed in May 1999. The remake was slammed by the New Musical Express, which surprisingly made the retrospective concession that the original Lamb album was “quite splendid in parts actually” (Platts, 2001, p. 156).
The fact that “The Carpet Crawlers” (as opposed to, say, “Watcher of the Skies” or “I Know What I Like”) was selected for re-recording as a “special bonus track” is indicative of the enduring affection that Genesis fans continue to have for The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Nonetheless, it is clear that The Lamb was a source of tension within the band, nearly breaking it up, and so most numbers from the album—with the exception of the title track and “In The Cage”— were quickly dropped from set lists after Gabriel’s departure. For Gabriel’s part, he kept the title track and “Back in N.Y.C.” in his live performances, but after the change of musical direction that occurred with his third solo album (informally called “Melt” because of the “melting face” cover)—including its pioneering use of the Fairlight Computer Musical Instrument (one of the first keyboards to employ digital sampling) and the introduction of world-music elements (the African chorus in “Biko”)—he too seemed to leave The Lamb behind.
This does not mean that The Lamb was altogether dead, however. Writing in December 1979, Armando Gallo revealed that during the next year Peter Gabriel would be “totally absorbed by the film production of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” (Gallo, 1980, p. 156). The news appeared to be a surprise to many fans, yet not unexpected given Gabriel’s previous interest in film-making. Reportedly the director for the project was to be the Mexican filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, best known for the film El Topo (The Mole), a surreal Zen Western allegory that was a midnight movie cult favorite in the early 1970s.
Jodorowsky certainly seems to share Gabriel’s singularity of vision when it comes to art. In the same way that Gabriel conceived, wrote the story and most of the lyrics to, and played the central character in The Lamb, so Jodorowsky not only directed, wrote, and starred in El Topo, but he also wrote the musical score. Jodorowsky plays the gunfighter El Topo (“The Mole”) who with his young son Brontis (played by the director’s real-life son of the same name) encounters a desert village whose inhabitants have been massacred. The bandits responsible have holed up at a nearby Franciscan mission, torturing and mocking the monks. El Topo finds and kills the bandits, rescuing a woman, Mara, whom they had taken captive; she leads him on a mission to find and defeat the “four master gunmen of the desert” in order to prove his love. Leaving his son with the monks, El Topo and Mara complete their mission, accompanied by a mysterious woman in black who has joined them. The woman in black shoots El Topo in the desert, leaving wounds in his hands, feet and side (reminiscent of the wounds of Christ) and rides off with Mara. El Topo awakens years later to find that he has been cared for by a clan of deformed people in a remote cavern deep within a mountain. He learns that they were imprisoned there years ago by the residents of a nearby town; the town is run by a cruel sheriff and home to a bizarre religious cult. El Topo’s son, now an adult, is a monk in the town. El Topo promises to dig a tunnel through which they can escape; he finances this project by performing as a street entertainer in the town with a dwarf woman from the cave colony. Upon completion of the tunnel, the cave dwellers escape into the town before El Topo can stop them; they are quickly massacred by the townspeople. El Topo rides into town after them and exacts a bloody revenge on the town’s inhabitants before immolating himself, an action reminiscent of the Buddhist monks who protested the Vietnam War. Although the film’s combination of the styles of Sergio Leone, Luis Buñuel and Sam Peckinpah hasn’t dated well—and its impact over the years has also been blunted by a decades-long feud between Jodorowsky and producer Allen Klein that hamstrung its availability until 2007—in its day El Topo enjoyed a countercultural cachet on the order of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings books, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and the Don Juan books of Carlos Castaneda. The success of El Topo led to a contract with Apple Films’ Allen Klein, who financed Jodorowsky’s even more ambitious and bizarre follow-up The Holy Mountain, released in 1973.
When Gabriel saw El Topo it gave him the idea that The Lamb could be adapted into a screenplay; “I knew that [Jodorowsky] was the right man to film The Lamb” (Gallo, 1980, p. 157). (Interestingly, the “Colony of Slippermen” has parallels with the cave colony in which El Topo awakens, and The Holy Mountain contains a scene of castration, with the sex organ placed in a container, much like Rael’s castration at the office of Doktor Dyper.) Gabriel sought out and contacted Jodorowsky in Paris in early 1979 (Bright, 1988, p. 124), later telling Gallo that the director “liked The Lamb story very much, and we got on very well …. He cleaned up the storyline to make it more viable for a movie, and unfortunately some parts had to go, but the story is still very much the same” (Gallo, 1980, p. 157). They worked on the project together, developing the script, for about four to six weeks during the summer of 1979 (Bright, 1988, p. 124).
Some of the special effects technicians who had worked on Star Wars and Alien reportedly showed an interest in the project (Gallo, 1980, p. 157); Gabriel even told Gallo that plans had been made for Gabriel to screen-test for the role of Rael in the spring of 1980, with Gabriel auditioning for the part of Rael. “He wants me to lose some weight and go to dance classes,” Gabriel told Gallo, “so I started to jog the two miles to Solsbury Hill every morning, and go to dance classes a couple of times a week” (Gallo, 1980, p. 157). Ultimately, however, it appears that Jodorowsky convinced Gabriel not to play Rael but stay on as co-writer for the project, a decision the director later regretted: “At the time I only knew his songs, I had never seen him on stage. I said he should not play Rael, but now I would say yes because I know how he performs” (Bright, 1988, p. 124). For his part, Gabriel enthused that Jodorowsky was “an incredible character” who “has been a breath of fresh air in helping me re-evaluate my own career …. He’s the master and I am the apprentice” (Bright, 1988, p. 124). Gabriel later summed up his time developing the screenplay with Jodorowsky as “great … a very exciting time” (Bright, 1988, p. 124).
Gabriel had hoped that filming could begin in the summer of 1981 (Bright, 1988, p. 125). Unfortunately, the film was never made. Over the years, conflicting accounts have been given as to the reasons for abandoning the project. He told his biographer Spencer Bright, “I had an original story, it wasn’t very long, about twelve pages or something. Alejandro then did his own version of that. I don’t think my thing was very strong in the first place, I certainly didn’t like it, where it had gone, so I sort of killed it off” (1988, p. 124). A couple of years before, however, he related a different story to Armando Gallo: “Charisma Films, with whom we were dealing, were unable to raise the necessary finance. I was very disappointed at the time but it could have been complicated in that some of Genesis were reluctant to have it resurrected” (Gallo, 1986, p. 13). Even if Bright’s account differs from Gallo’s, Bright does expand upon the financing details: Gabriel had been dropped by Atlantic Records (the US distributor for his recordings, which were issued by Charisma in the UK) in 1980, because having heard the advance tapes for his third release they found it too commercially risky. (The third album was eventually released by Mercury, giving Gabriel the distinction of having each of his first three solo albums released on a different label in the US—Atco, Atlantic, and Mercury. His fourth release, Security, was released on still another label—Geffen Records. This kind of track record hardly inspired confidence from American investors.) As a result, Charisma Films had difficulty finding American backers to commit to the film project. Gabriel kept faith in the project for several years, but the project withered because of his former bandmates’ reluctance to involve themselves in the soundtrack.
Genesis’s resistance to getting involved in a re-recording of The Lamb indicates the long-term psychic wounds that had yet to heal over the project. These wounds were certainly exacerbated by Gabriel’s possessive nature toward the story. Since Gabriel had been responsible for the story and nearly all of the lyrics, he had copyrighted the story without consulting the rest of the band. That caused another rift because the group had always operated on “democratic” creative principles. Genesis, however, still collectively “owned” the songwriting credits to the music; consequently, Gabriel had to ask his former bandmates to re-record the soundtrack for the film (Bright, 1988, p. 123). When they turned down the opportunity, Gabriel considered re-creating the musical soundtrack himself: “I think I could have legally recorded my own version …. But that would have been a somewhat dumb thing to do” (Bright, 1988, p. 123).
The Lamb was not Gabriel’s last film-related project. He also created a story, during his self-imposed “sabbatical” from the music industry in 1975–76, involving a “mercurial stranger” named Mozo. “He was partly based on Moses, but he was a fictional character who came from nowhere, disrupting people’s lives and causing changes and then disappearing” (Bright, 1988, p. 126).2 In retrospect, even if none of these projects had secured funding, they nonetheless provided Gabriel with important experience in creating music for film that would ultimately reach fruition in the 1980s and beyond with his acclaimed soundtracks for Birdy (1984), The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), and Rabbit Proof Fence (2002), among others.
Gabriel’s desire to prepare a movie version of The Lamb could be interpreted as an attempt to redress an earlier oversight. Given that The Lamb was Genesis’s most theatrically ambitious tour, it is unfortunate that no one in the band’s entourage made arrangements to have a performance properly filmed. The lack of visual documentation is especially curious given that earlier concerts in promotion of Foxtrot and Selling England by the Pound were professionally filmed, either by the BBC or an analogous television network elsewhere in Europe.3 It may be that Gabriel was too consumed with the necessary theatrical logistics at each venue—ensuring completely black stage sets and so forth—whereas his band mates, lacking his enthusiasm, were merely endeavoring to get through another performance on the itinerary. One tantalizing snippet of professionally filmed footage with sound—an excerpt from “In the Cage”— was inadvertently preserved as part of a German television feature about American promoter Bill Graham. Other than that, what has survived—aside from a good deal of still photos—has been fragmentary silent 35mm footage filmed surreptitiously by fans from the audience in Chicago and Grand Rapids (US), Hamburg (Germany), and Liverpool (UK). These scraps of footage have something of a home-movie quality about them, and they serve as a reminder of the important function that bootleggers—whatever their financial motivations—serve in preserving rock history.
The music industry conveniently and inaccurately considers bootlegs synonymous with pirate recordings. A pirate recording is a counterfeit of a commercially available product, usually much cheaper than the real thing. The packaging of a pirate recording is usually substandard, frequently employing low-resolution scans of the original cover art. Pirate DVDs are also common, especially of films not yet released for the home video market. Pirate CDs and DVDs are a particularly severe problem in Southeast Asia and China. Bootleg recordings, on the other hand, are generally defined as recordings that have not been commercially released. Sometimes these are recordings of concert performances, taped by a fan from the audience or occasionally directly from the soundboard. Sometimes bootlegs are radio broadcasts. Some bootlegs are also demo recordings or rough mixes of songs that eventually saw release in a more polished form. This last category of bootlegs is especially important, because such recordings—not intended for public perusal—often reveal fascinating details about a song’s creation, in the same way that Beethoven’s sketchbooks contain valuable forensic information for musicologists.4 It is generally accepted that the first rock bootleg was Bob Dylan’s Great White Wonder, consisting of some of the “basement tapes” Dylan made with The Band in 1966–67 and surfacing in underground record stores around 1969. The album’s name came from the fact that it was packaged in a plain white sleeve.
Occasionally, the widespread availability of certain bootlegs leads to their legitimate commercial release—Dylan’s The Basement Tapes, for example, released by Columbia in 1975, may never have seen release were it not for The Great White Wonder. A number of the recordings featured in the Beatles’ Anthology recordings, also, had been widely available in bootleg form, most notably in the Ultra Rare Trax series. The Anthology recordings, however, are typical of many “official bootleg” recordings in that they were doctored after the fact; certain tracks are often the composite of several takes. Bootleg recordings, by contrast, are often as unaltered as possible; later bootlegs are even “pitch corrected” to undo the effect of multiple tape dubs on improperly calibrated tape recorders. Thus, some bootleg recordings provide a documentation of the recording process that is as pure as possible without having direct access to the original master tapes.
The rapid rise of the Internet in the 1990s led to a new era in bootlegging. Copies of bootleg recordings could now be traded on file-sharing forums and blogs. This has led to a greater distribution of bootlegs, many of which have been cleaned up by digital technology so that certain recordings now sound much better than their vinyl counterparts of 30 years ago. In addition, digitized copies of videos are also bootlegged, providing a unique glimpse into a band’s history. In the case of Genesis, no complete-concert video footage from the Gabriel era has as of this writing (2007) been released by the band,5 yet videos of full performances from the Foxtrot and Selling England by the Pound tours are freely, if illegally, circulated on the Internet, facilitated by such file-hosting services as http://www.Rapidshare.com. In 1993, the six-CD collection In the Beginning (Extremely Rare EXR 005, 006, 013, 014, 018, 022) was released, a treasure trove of demos and outtakes, including demos and rough mixes from the Selling England and Lamb sessions, that were apparently at some point stolen from archives at Island Studios (McMahan, 1998, p. 87). Another bootleg of Lamb demos, The Demo Mix Down on Broadway (Highland 199/200, 1998), followed. Comparing the sessions of the Selling England and Lamb albums is instructive; most of the Lamb demos seem to focus on nuances of mixing rather than experimenting with arrangements or rehearsing sections, whereas the sessions for Selling England were much more sectionalized (for example, “The Battle of Epping Forest” was arduously pieced together over some 28 takes). Such recordings and videos offer a glimpse into a band’s work that is unmediated by after-the-fact sanitizing, and as such they are historically important and valuable for fans and scholars alike. With few exceptions (such as Frank Zappa’s “Beat the Boots” series), it would seem that some artists cannot resist the opportunity to give such recordings some post-production polish (the Beatles’ Anthology series comes to mind).
The continuing allure of The Lamb—and the fact that, aside from the rather poorly recorded Genesis Live (1973), there were no legitimately available live recordings of Gabriel-era Genesis—led to the release of Genesis Archive 1967–75 in 1998. This four-disc boxed set—the first of two—had been in the planning stages since 1994; Virgin Records had initially planned for a November 1995 release, but it was delayed because of licensing issues (Platts, 2001, p. 154). Significantly, the historical survey covered by the boxed set was presented in reverse chronological order, so that the first two discs were given over to the complete live performance of The Lamb from the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, then working backward to end rather anticlimactically with a couple of home-recorded demos from the Charterhouse years. The intent of the boxed set was, at least in part, to counteract the effect of bootlegs on Genesis’s profits; included in the set was most of a widely bootlegged 1973 performance from London’s Rainbow Theatre.
Because The Lamb was evidently, from the beginning, the commercial focal point of the boxed set, the original concert recording was subjected to a number of post-production “enhancements.” For example, “Gabriel was often out of breath from running around the stage, or had to sing from inside a mask” (Platts, 2001, p. 155), and these theatrical elements often compromised the original vocals, a fact readily verifiable from bootleg recordings of Lamb performances. As a remedy, Gabriel re-recorded all of The Lamb vocals at his Real World Studio in Bath in 1995; these were then inserted where necessary in place of the original vocals (Platts, 2001, p. 155). Steve Hackett also re-recorded several guitar solos, including those on “The Lamia” and “Anyway,” because he felt his hand injury still hadn’t completely healed by the time of the Shrine performance. The last track, “It,” was completely re-recorded, as the original tape machine had apparently run out during the last song of the performance; a new version was assembled from a remix of the studio version backing track and a newly recorded vocal by Gabriel (Platts, 2001, p. 155). The official reason provided for the wholesale substitution of “It” has never been satisfactory to Genesis bootleg collectors; a recording of the Shrine Auditorium “It” does exist in bootleg form (for example, it is included in the Rare Tapes bootleg set [MIL Productions 616, 1999]), and the timbre of the aged Gabriel voice is noticeably different from that of the younger one, making the re-recorded passages easy to pick out.
Track-by-track comparison of the original Shrine Auditorium tapes and the Genesis Archive 1967–75 version reveals that in fact most of Gabriel’s vocals are re-recorded. Occasionally this was because of balance problems; for example, on the Shrine tapes, the vocals are rather persistently buried in the mix during “Fly on a Windshield” and “Cuckoo Cocoon,” as well as sporadically throughout the first half of the show (the balance does improve as the show progresses, further illustrating how much of a “work in progress” live sound production was even in the mid-1970s). At other times, the mix is faulty as a consequence of Gabriel’s very much in-the-moment characterization of Rael, which caused him to weave off- and on-mike, bringing his voice in and out of the sound field. An example of this can be heard on the Shrine tapes during the first verse of the opening title track, as well as the first two verses of “Back in N.Y.C.” The only track on the boxed-set release that appears to leave Gabriel’s vocals in their original state without any substitutions is “The Chamber of 32 Doors,” a wise choice as it is one of Gabriel’s most affecting performances (Hackett’s guitar solo was re-recorded, however—an audible splice can be heard at the end of the climactic high note at [0:30]).
More dishonestly, however, the re-packaging of the Shrine performance enabled various band members to “correct” mistakes made in live performance after the fact. For example, in the Shrine performance, Hackett momentarily flubbed a difficult sequence of chords in the opening classical guitar solo on “Hairless Heart.” The offending passage has been corrected on the Genesis Archive 1967–75 version, and in fact the entire classical guitar solo was re-done, with some beautiful (though acoustically inaccurate) reverberation added. Just before Banks’s lengthy synthesizer solo on “In the Cage,” Rutherford botched the first of his two angular bass riffs that introduce the solo; that passage has also been corrected. A brief sloppy transition of chords in Banks’s arpeggio filigree supporting the introduction to “The Carpet Crawlers” has similarly been repaired. Finally, a few unwelcome moments of microphone feedback have either been covered considerably in the mix or eliminated altogether.
No one can blame the members of Genesis for wanting to present themselves at their very best to a paying consumer. Something is lost, however, when the final product is so polished—the very immediacy and rawness, ironically, that Gabriel was aiming for in his construction of Rael and his story. There is no question that several of the songs on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway are among the most vocally difficult songs that Gabriel has ever recorded. “In the Cage” and “Back in N.Y.C.,” for example, are real tests of endurance and registral extremes. Listening to the Shrine tapes, it is evident that on these songs Gabriel is pushing his considerable vocal strengths to their limits; what results, in the case of “In the Cage,” is a very believable picture of panic, while the characterization in “Back in N.Y.C.”—in particular the “porcupine / rape” sections—amounts to a sarcastic, deranged cackle. Gabriel’s re-recordings of these vocals are technically “better,” but they lose something in the immediacy of the characterizations. Similarly, Gabriel is clearly winded at the end of “The Colony of Slippermen,” which is the point in the narrative where Rael collapses in exhaustion from chasing the Raven and helplessly watches the tube containing his sexual organs floating away in the ravine. Hearing Gabriel panting so hard that he can barely force the notes out at the end, one senses that he really has been chasing the Raven, running around on the stage. Listening to the re-recorded version, there is no evidence of any physical discomfort.
Finally, from a historical point of view some other details are omitted from the Genesis Archive 1967–75 version, such as the story Gabriel tells the audience between “Anyway” and “Here Comes The Supernatural Anaesthetist.” That missing story is as follows:
Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. Phil Collins on my immediate left.
Those of you familiar with the problems of drummers—the afflictions—will know the only way the lumps and bumps can be correctly removed, is the operation, the severing of the sexual organs. This is performed in this Colony of Slippermen—mark the word, Slippermen—by notorious Doktor Dyper, reformed sniper, who for a very small fee will guarantee to remove your very own windscreen wiper.
[cheers from audience]
And the windscreen wipers of Rael and his brother John are neatly deposited into small yellow plastic—fully sterilised, don’t worry—tubes. And all of a sudden a big black bird comes out of the air, grabs Rael’s little yellow plastic tube, flies all the way down the narrow tunnel, drops it into a large area of gushing water called “Ravine,” where Rael sees his drowning brother John.
Given that Gabriel’s stories were one of the distinctive features of the vintage era of Genesis, fondly remembered by fans, it is curious that this story was omitted altogether. Another casualty of the editing process was a group improvisation of about 1:15 in length, in E minor, that preceded “The Lamia,” perhaps because of what appears to be a firecracker explosion during it. Still, it presents another rare glimpse at the kind of group improvisation the band briefly explored during the Lamb period, and its omission on the Genesis Archive 1967–75 version is regrettable.
About half of the 102 shows on the Lamb tour were recorded, a greater proportion than that of previous tours. Of course, given that the set list on this tour was virtually unchanged from show to show, with the exception of encores, comparing bootlegs does not reveal as much musical variety. Gabriel’s stories of Rael, however, do occasionally change from performance to performance, and of course recording circumstances result in a wide range of recording quality. One of the most widely bootlegged shows, the April 15, 1975 show at the Empire Pool, Wembley (UK), was originally taped for radio broadcast. Excerpts from the show were condensed into a one-hour radio format, and further excisions were made on 1970s bootleg albums to fit the time constraints of vinyl. Thus, that one show exists under a number of titles (including Lamb Stew, The Light Goes Down on Empire, and Awed Man Out) and with a variety of set lists, most of which do not contain the complete show. Other recordings exist which contain complete performances, such as those of the Los Angeles and Providence (US), and Manchester and Birmingham (UK) shows.
Reflecting on the importance of The Lamb soon before Genesis’s triumphant performance at the Empire Pool, Wembley, Gabriel told Melody Maker: “You can say the characters are far-fetched, the music over ornate, that we’re riding on my costumed success. There, I’ve done it for you. However, in maybe ten years a group will emerge to take what we do a lot further. I look upon us as an early, clumsy prototype” (Bell, 1975, p. 14). Certainly Gabriel’s anticipations to critical objections indicate that he was sensitive to the changes in critical opinion about progressive rock that were already stirring in Britain and beyond in 1975. More interesting, however, is his prediction that “in maybe ten years a group will emerge to take what we do a lot further.” As the 1970s continued, rock’s penchant for theatrical spectacle blossomed. Pink Floyd’s 1980 staged performances of The Wall—with crashing airplanes, monstrous floating marionettes designed by British artist Gerald Scarfe, and the construction of an enormous wall made up of approximately 420 fireproof cardboard bricks—was so elaborate that it could only be performed at four venues (for multiple nights at each location) around the world. Genesis’s staging of The Lamb may certainly be seen as “an early, clumsy prototype” of such endeavors. The multi-faceted slide projections behind the band are echoed in later, much larger concert spectacles such as U2’s Zooropa tour. Of course, the available sound and lighting technology developed at a rapid pace along with the needs of these bands; Genesis in 1975 simply did not have at their disposal, either financially or technologically, what Pink Floyd had in 1980 or U2 in 1994. But the elaborate costumes and theatrics Gabriel employed, along with the unusual move of performing an entire dramatic production as the concert’s set list (setting aside other, older material for only the encores), display a concern with rock theatre as a total spectacle—seen also in contemporary tours by artists such as David Bowie, Alice Cooper, and Funkadelic—that was not a significant factor in concert performances of just two or three years before. The Lamb was a product of its time, but it also pointed toward things to come.
Gabriel’s prediction that other bands may emerge to “take what we do a lot further” also points, musically, to the emergence of “neo-progressive” rock in the 1980s and 1990s, and to the fanatic exactitude of progressive-rock tribute bands. The sound of the Genesis era, and especially The Lamb, was the touchpoint for neo-progressive rock, the most commercially successful example being Marillion.6 At the same time, over the years there have been at least 25 Genesis tribute bands (“Overnight Job: Tribute Bands,” n.d.); while some “cover” the more commercial Phil Collins era, most seem to specialize in the material between Trespass and The Lamb—in short, the “vintage” Gabriel years.
For such bands, The Lamb remains a touchstone of musical and theatrical prowess. Partly, this is due to the album’s status as Gabriel’s “swan song” with the group, after which—progressive rock wisdom has it—the band took a sharp artistic nosedive by pursuing commercial success (this is not entirely true, of course, as A Trick of the Tail and Wind and Wuthering both have much to recommend them). The Lamb is also revered because of its mystique as a tour that was reportedly Genesis’s most visually ambitious, yet suffered from the least visual documentation; since virtually every performance had technical difficulties of some sort, the band never felt satisfied enough with the shows to have them professionally filmed. Thus, compared to re-creating concerts of the Selling England By The Pound era, for example, re-enacting The Lamb amounts to a kind of musical archaeology. For such bands as England’s ReGenesis and Canada’s The Musical Box, “covering” Genesis involves more than mastering the music’s complexities; it also requires a full re-enactment of the original concert experience and every attendant nuance therein, from lighting and costumes to vintage (often now-rare and expensive) musical instruments matching the exact models used by the original musicians (a development that has interesting parallels with the “original instruments” movement in the performance of Baroque music). Why would any band go to such lengths to re-create every nuance of a musical performance that took place more than 30 years ago? The members of ReGenesis offer some reasons:
Because we like Genesis
Because we’re mad
Because the music is a challenge to any musician, both technically and in terms of getting all the right sounds
Because Genesis don’t play it anymore …
Because a lot of people keep turning up to our gigs!
(Sollow, 2001)
Both ReGenesis and The Musical Box have, in fact, made their mark as top-notch Genesis tribute bands by tackling The Lamb. At the 2001 “G2” Genesis fan convention in Guildford, UK, ReGenesis presented a staged performance of the full Lamb, recorded and released as Lamb for Supper (Mystic Records MYS CD 149, 2001). Unlike Giraffe’s performance at the 1994 ProgFest, ReGenesis performed the entire album from beginning to end. However, they took some liberties with the staging, updating certain slides and other visuals to give the performance a contemporary flavor, and thus their “tribute” stops short of historical re-enactment. Instead, such a performance might be likened to a revival of a classic Broadway show, retaining the musical content but updating the dramatic elements.
The Musical Box (“The Musical Box: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”, n.d.), on the other hand, aims for historically exact detail. Pictures on the group’s web site, showing scenes from a Musical Box Lamb performance alongside shots from the Genesis tour, show how carefully the staging, costumes, and lighting parallel the original concert spectacle. In re-creating these details, the band are assisted by their artistic director, “resident Genesis historian” Serge Morissette. Profiling the group for a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation feature, Guy Leshinski commented:
A Musical Box show is no mere tribute; it is a revival. The band evokes the experience of a Genesis concert from the misty past. The lighting, the sets, even the musicians’ gestures are choreographed from painstaking study of archival footage. Though its lineup has varied through the years, the Musical Box has guarded its fidelity with care. (Leshinski, 2005)
The personnel has changed over the years since the band’s inception in 1993 but the current line-up as of 2007 consists of vocalist Denis Gagné (who, like Gabriel, plays flute, oboe, and bass drum), guitarist François Gagnon, bassist/guitarist Sébastien Lamothe, keyboard player David Myers, and percussionist Martin Levac.
The Musical Box has been active re-enacting Genesis since November 1993, when the band performed Selling England By The Pound at the Montreal Spectrum to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of that album’s release (Leshinski, 2005). The band premiered their fully staged re-creation of The Lamb on October 11, 2000, again at the Montreal Spectrum. It was this feat that earned the band international fame; not only did the show have to be re-created from a painstaking assemblage of still photographs, bootleg audio recordings and silent film footage, but they even hired the slide operator from Genesis’s original tour to assemble the 1,120 slides (Leshinski, 2005). Gagné worked about eight hours a day for two months to recreate Gabriel’s “Slipperman” costume in exact detail, and Lamothe’s bass was custom built according to specifications provided by Mike Rutherford (Leshinski, 2005). The Musical Box was the only band to have been granted a license by Gabriel and Genesis to re-create the show (“The Musical Box: The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”); the band were also allowed to listen to the master multi-track tapes of The Lamb in Genesis’s Surrey studios, noting subtle instrumental details that were barely audible in the final mix (Leshinski, 2005). The Musical Box undertook a successful world tour of The Lamb that, while not as extensive as the original, lasted almost as long; it is estimated that the band have played for over 250,000 people around the world, with 110 shows in 2004 alone (Leshinski, 2005). After the band’s license to perform The Lamb expired in 2006, they went on to mount similar recreations of the Foxtrot and Selling England By The Pound tours in 2006 and 2007, with similar painstaking historical detail and again to great success. Members of Genesis have seen Musical Box shows (and, in the case of Steve Hackett and Phil Collins, joined the band onstage for live performances) and commented that, from a technical perspective, they were often better than the originals, since—in the case of The Lamb, at least—performances were almost never without some technical difficulties. Meanwhile, Genesis fans who were too young or not fortunate enough to have seen Genesis in its prime have been known to travel halfway around the world to see a Musical Box show, and hopes remain high that the group will one day tour The Lamb again.
For the enduring appeal that The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway has enjoyed, it is somewhat surprising that Tony Banks has said, “I don’t think [the album] advanced our career in America at all. It was OK, but I don’t think we won people over particularly.” He continues:
The album wasn’t a great success, we have to be honest about this, it did alright and although some of the crowds were good, I don’t remember it being as nearly as well received as the previous tour, because it didn’t have as many good live songs. Some of the songs like “In The Cage” worked well live, but just kind of faded away, so you got most of your applause for “It” which wasn’t the best of live songs. (Russell, 2004, p. 208)
Certainly there is an element of truth to this statement, in that some shows were indeed cancelled because of a lack of ticket sales toward the end of the European leg of the tour. But Banks’s general jaundice toward The Lamb is also certainly colored by the feelings of being betrayed by Peter, who grew up with him in Charterhouse and who was in effect living a lie as Genesis’s front man for virtually the entire Lamb tour. Every performance, Banks knew, put them one show closer to the point when Gabriel would leave them. That must have been a terrible burden to bear, playing the same set in the same order night after night.
If Banks is right, however, that The Lamb simply wasn’t that successful, its stature has—unlike many progressive rock albums—actually grown over the years; Mike Rutherford acknowledges, “I do think that we have been colored very much by people’s reaction to The Lamb” (Gallo, 1980, p. 68). Gabriel’s determination to steer the band away from fantasy and myth subjects and toward a contemporary, realistic protagonist has actually helped the album age reasonably well. As Mike Rutherford put it: “For once we were writing about subject matter which was neither airy-fairy, nor romantic. We finally managed to get away from writing about unearthly things which I think helped the album” (Fielder, 1984, p. 90).
At the same time, critics of progressive rock do cite The Lamb as evidence of the genre’s obscurantism. Rutherford says, “I think it’s a great album, and I stand by it very much. There are some great bits in there, but a lot of people got put off it because they just didn’t get around to listening to the whole thing. That’s what a lot of the criticism is down to” (Gallo, 1980, p. 68). Responding to the critique that The Lamb is too obscure, Gabriel says “I think probably that is right, but we were pushed from every side. There was a release date to expect, and a tour to start …. I can look objectively perhaps about some points in it that I was defensive about beforehand, but … I’m still proud of what I did, and what they did” (Gallo, 1980, p. 155).
In his otherwise excellent book I’ll Take you There: Pop Music and the Urge for Transcendence (2005), Bill Friskics-Warren discusses the notion of spiritual transformation in the work of a number of performers, whom he classifies by spiritual archetypes—mystics (Van Morrison, Al Green, Moby, etc.), Dystopian “naysayers” (Nine Inch Nails, the Sex Pistols, etc.), and prophets (Curtis Mayfield, U2, Public Enemy, etc.)—yet in so doing he curiously makes no mention of progressive rock. Such a blanket omission may be indicative of the general indifference given the genre by modern rock historians, but it is also inexcusable; in its visionary subject matter, Romantic aesthetics and technological adventurism, progressive rock is a genre that is manifestly “about” transcendence. Macan (2006) even cites transcendence as one of the foundational principles of progressive rock ideology, along with idealism, authenticity, “the artist as prophet figure,” and the modernist doctrine of progress (p. xxxviii). Regarding transcendence, Macan writes that the idea is “fairly modern (think Schiller, Schopenhauer, E. T. A. Hoffman, Nietzsche) in its specifics,” but more generally it can be traced “back to neo-Platonism and the belief that an ultimate Good, Beauty, and Truth exists, and is imperfectly expressed in great art, the contemplation of which can lead one ever closer to the ultimate good, that is, God” (2006, p. xxxix). One can find many transcendent or sublime moments in The Lamb: The moment when the “wall” engulfs Rael in “Fly on a Windshield,” the alternating delicacy and majesty of “Hairless Heart,” Hackett’s guitar work on “The Carpet Crawlers,” Gabriel’s impassioned performance in “The Chamber of 32 Doors,” Tony Banks’s otherworldly aquatic ripplings and Mellotron surges that grace “The Lamia,” and the group-created sense of real-time chaos and claustrophobia in “The Waiting Room.” In the frustratingly finite world of the 1970s, such glimpses of the sublime offered welcome relief and escape, reminding us that it was still possible to transcend the mundane through the power of the imagination.
Paul Stump (1997) singles out the music of Genesis as representing something of an apex in progressive rock’s mastery of studio resources, noting that “the methodical organization of sound which characterized Progressive can also lead to immense and indelible musical jouissance, due to the structural ambition that mastery of the recording studio can bestow upon recording artists.” He continues:
The intervallic developments and crashing climaxes of Genesis’s “Firth of Fifth,” for example, use a harmonic language not that much more advanced than most mainstream pop music. Yet for me it is as goose-pimply thrilling as any Gladys Knight or Jimi Hendrix performance, for the simple reason that the application of new structural techniques to the placing and deployment of emotional triggers in the music—diminished seventh chords, cycles of fifths, etc.—in a quasi-classical format, and the organization of the orchestral-style soundstage upon which these are subjected to timbral manipulation to enhance emotional effect, is a result of studio exactitude and perseverance as well as the adrenalizing jolt of creative ecstasy. Studio mastery did not begin and end with Progressive—but its centrality to the way Progressive used its own quirky language is unique in rock and pop history. (p. 352)
Careful listening to The Lamb reveals plentiful examples of such jouissance, or delight, in the arranging capabilities presented by the studio. For example, in no previous Genesis album does one find the variety of percussion that one finds on this album, including vibraphone (on “Fly on a Windshield” and “The Lamia” for example), xylophone (on “Anyway”— listen at [0:50–0:58], perhaps portraying the “pale horse” on which Death is supposed to ride), glockenspiel and finger cymbals (“Cuckoo Cocoon”), temple blocks (the introduction to “The Colony of Slippermen”), ratchet (“The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging”), and various whistles (“The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging”). In his inventive and colorful use of percussion on this album Collins approaches the multi-percussion variety of his progressive-rock peer Carl Palmer; however, it can also be pointed out that Collins’s “extra” percussion cameos call far less attention to themselves than Palmer’s do, and that whereas Palmer’s use of orchestral percussion sometimes appears to be for the sake of variety alone, Collins is far more purposeful and subtle in his multi-percussion touches.7
It is because of this combination of stylistic uniqueness, studio experimentation and sublime aesthetic experience that Stump points out progressive rock offers that Armando Gallo is able to assert: “In its concept and execution, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was a milestone not only in Genesis’ career, but in the history of the recording industry” (1980, p. 68). Certainly, it was a time of rapid change and waning innocence in the music industry. As Robert Fripp (in the King Crimson Great Deceiver boxed-set booklet) and others have attested, bands were forced into extended periods of arduous touring to pay back studio-budget advances from the record labels; the labels also invariably controlled the royalties on those recordings, so the only real income a band could get was from touring and merchandising (such as T-shirts) associated with those tours. Furthermore, the phenomenal success of Peter Frampton’s Frampton Comes Alive! and Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours, both in 1976, led to massive changes in the way the industry promoted its artists; suddenly every major release was expected to sell in the quantities demonstrated by those two releases, and artists with a top-draw track record were given the lion’s share of available promotion funds. This made it more difficult for less marketable artists to survive and for new artists to establish themselves. Progressive rock in particular was seen as a “rich man’s rock,” as the huge banks of keyboards used by Keith Emerson, Rick Wakeman, and so forth were beyond the reach of the average garage-band musician. All of these factors, combined with the economic stagnation in the UK, ultimately came together to spawn the rise of punk rock. Meanwhile, the music business had learned to “play it safe” under the dual pressures of economic slowdown and the desire for ever-higher profit margins.
Genesis themselves seemed to reflect on the music industry’s shift toward privileging the bottom line over the artistic impulse in their song “Down and Out,” which opened the 1978 … And Then There Were Three album. Like Pink Floyd’s better known “Have a Cigar” (Wish You Were Here, 1975), the lyrics adopt the persona of a high-powered music executive, though musically the song is a distant cousin of “Back in N.Y.C.” (albeit with a more complex asymmetrical meter). Given that both … And Then There Were Three and its successor, Duke, were decisive shifts away from the band’s earlier high-progressive style and toward the brand of streamlined pop that they would adopt in the 1980s (on Abacab, Genesis, and Invisible Touch), the song can be read retroactively as a kind of early warning from the group to their core progressive audience. Thus, the pairing of The Lamb with Invisible Touch as polar opposites in Giraffe’s introduction to the Lamb performance at 1994’s ProgFest is telling. Gallo is correct in his assertion that The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is a milestone in the music industry, but mainly because 1975 seems to have been the music industry’s last year of countercultural idealism.
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1 The performance was preserved on the bootleg recording The Lamb Woke Up Again (Stonehenge STCD 2008/09, 1990).
2 According to Bright, “Mozo was inspired was inspired by Aurora Consurgens, a medieval alchemical treatise based on The Song of Solomon. It was brought to light by Carl Jung, who thought it the work of St. Thomas Aquinas. The text is full of alchemical and religious symbolism and apocalyptic imagery” (Bright, 1988, p. 126). For more information on Mozo, see Bright, 1988, pp. 126–128.
3 Among the videos in circulation are performances for the Belgian “Pop Shop” TV show on March 20, 1972; a Parisian show at the Club Bataclan on January 10, 1973; a full-length concert filmed at the Shepperton Studios in Borehamwood, UK on October 30, 1973; a performance of “Watcher of the Skies” and “The Musical Box” for the American NBC network Midnight Special program on December 20, 1973; and the French ORTF TV studios Melody Programme on December 10, 1974. Many of these clips can now be seen on video hosting sites such as http://www.YouTube.com.
4 For example, the earliest demo recordings of the Beatles’ “Strawberry Fields Forever”— recorded by John Lennon in a hotel room in Santa Isabella, Spain in 1966—reveal that the second verse of the song was the first part completed, and that the third line (“that is you can’t, you know, tune in but it’s alright”) was the first line of lyric conceived. The hotel recordings can be heard on a Beatles bootleg entitled It’s Not Too Bad (Pegboy 1008, 1997).
5 Excerpts of video footage may be seen on the video Genesis: A History (Virgin, 1992, originally broadcast by the BBC in 1990), as well as Inside Genesis: A Critical Review, Volume 2 – The Gabriel Years, 1970–1975 (Classic Rock Legends, 2005).
6 For example, Marillion’s Misplaced Childhood (1985)—the group’s highest-charting (number 47) album in the US as well as a number 1 hit in the UK—contains a number of Genesis timbral/stylistic references besides the oft-cited resemblance of the group’s original vocalist Fish to Peter Gabriel. In the opening section “Pseudo Silk Kimono” and elsewhere, Steve Rothery’s guitar uncannily resembles the sighing sound that Steve Hackett imparted to his solos on “The Carpet Crawlers” and “Firth of Fifth.” The introduction to “Bitter Suite” recalls the modal drone-based improvisations of “Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats” and the opening to “The Colony of Slippermen.” The most striking resemblance to The Lamb, however, is found in the song “Lords of the Backstage,” which in its deep pedal tones, insistent keyboard arpeggios, and asymmetrical meter particularly recalls “Back in N.Y.C.”
7 A similar observation might be made in comparing the keyboard styles of Tony Banks with Keith Emerson or Rick Wakeman; in fact, the text for the Lamb tour program guide sardonically noted, “Banks wisely kept his keyboard playing melodic and lyrical instead of succumbing to the obvious desire to create a Third World War like so many of his peers and contemporaries” (McMahan, 1998, p. 398).