Genesis - The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway

Released - November 1974

Genre - Progressive Rock

Producer - John Burns & Genesis

Selected Personnel - Peter Gabriel (Vocals/Flute/Percussion); Tony Banks (Organ/Mellotron/Piano/Keyboards); Steve Hackett (Guitar); Mike Rutherford (Bass/Guitar); Phil Collins (Drums/Percussion); Brian Eno (Treatments)

Standout Track - Counting Out Time

My relationship with Genesis's most mammoth offering has always been a slightly difficult one, and it's an album I deliberately left off this list for a long time before eventually giving in to its positives. My main problem with it, I think, is that it's exactly the kind of album that gives prog such a bad name. Today, prog is a genre that's sniggered at and dismissed as pompous, excessive and ludicrous despite containing some of the finest and most ambitious music in the history of rock, but it's difficult for us prog nuts to whole-heartedly defend it when albums like The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway exist. Of course, prog is generally chock-full of pomposity and excess, but albums like Yes's Close To The Edge are simply so consistently brilliant that anybody who held it up as an example of prog's failings is somebody I couldn't really take seriously. If they used The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway to make the same point, though, then I'd have to concede that maybe they're part right. It's also by no means the worst offender (the direct followup to Close To The Edge, the horribly overblown Tales From Topographic Oceans, probably takes that title), but it's perhaps one of the best-known and as such will provide ample fuel for prog cynics for years to come.

Ultimately, it's greatest crime, though, is that it's just far too long. At over ninety minutes it's yet another entry to the long list of double albums in history that would've been immeasurably improved by a bit of liberal editing. It includes a number of meandering, tuneless and totally forgettable instrumental pieces like "Broadway Melody Of 1974" or "Silent Sorrow In Empty Boats" which served purely to cover Peter Gabriel's costume changes in the live show. While it's admirable to see a band taking creative steps to keep part of their minds working on the idea of live performance, it's a shame they couldn't try to make those instrumental passages a little more interesting as it doesn't make for a particularly gripping listening experiences. It also suggests, in its insistence of generating extra material in order to accommodate Gabriel's theatrics, a slavish dedication to a concept and storyline that ultimately very few other than Gabriel himself would care about, listeners included. The album, like so many prog concept albums, explores an almost impenetrable and ludicrous story, this one about a Puerto Rican street youth called Rael who goes into the sewers to look for his brother John, where he encounters the Lamia, a mythical being, and a colony of mutated monsters called Slippermen. Eventually he finds John in a ravine but it turns out that John is actually a part of himself or something, in a classic prog rock switcheroo case of "This nonsense we've been spouting for ninety minutes has actually been exploring split identity and personality disorders the whole time, you just didn't realise." It's not the stupidest story to a prog concept album ever, although it ranks pretty highly, but it's perhaps the most laboriously told, and there's a sense that Gabriel's flights of fancy were starting to be a higher priority than concise, quality musicianship.

Inevitably, this dynamic would end up being a key element behind Gabriel's subsequent departure from Genesis. He had actually been absent for most of the writing and rehearsal sessions for the album's music due to personal problems involving his pregnant wife, meaning that the majority of the music was composed by Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett. When he was able to rejoin the band he decided to focus on vocal melodies and lyrics, overseeing the whole grandiose story and presumably demanding those additional instrumental passages so the album would fit into his vision of how it could be staged. One of the other more interesting creative presences on the album, however, is none other than Brian Eno, recently ex-Roxy Music, who was already establishing a reputation as somebody who could apply particular sonic effects to music that rendered it totally alien. Eno's sonic sensibilities seemed to gel well with the story of psychological disturbance and displacement and mythic grandiosity that Gabriel had in mind, and Eno's distinctive treatments are all over "The Grand Parade Of Lifeless Packaging" and "The Waiting Room," neither of which is a particularly compelling piece of music in itself and is only really rendered interesting by Eno's unusual sonic sculpting.

Beneath all its ludicrous excesses, though, one has to concede that The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway contains some of Genesis's finest music, if you're patient enough to sift through all the filler and the nonsense to find it. It's one I include here largely because it falls just short of genuine greatness but does so with great gusto and ambition, which is something to be applauded in itself. Also, it's worth including it here if only to give one last salute to Genesis before they began their slow decline into one of the worst bands of all time. The first truly show-stopping song is "Fly On A Windshield," a piece which opens with quiet, trembling menace before the droning howl of Tony Banks's keyboards and the slow thud of Phil Collins's drums crash in thunderously to signal the true beginning of the album. "In The Cage" is one of the more epic songs on an album that, by and large, abandons Genesis's penchant for long song-suites and again gives Banks opportunity to shine with a number of acrobatic keyboard solos. "Back In N.Y.C." is another fine piece of overblown prog, although it doesn't really do anything that "In The Cage" didn't do better, and then there's "Counting Out Time."

I've mentioned in some of my other reviews of Genesis's work that what they really have going for them that some of the other big prog bands don't is a real sense of colourful silliness and a sense of humour. They may not be as fearsomely powerful as King Crimson or as intricately beautiful as Yes, but they have an odd knack, largely through Gabriel's quirky vocals, of making something that sounds a huge amount of fun (this is the band that managed to pull off the lyric "There's Winston Churchill dressed in drag, he used to be a British flag, plastic bag, what a drag!" back on Foxtrot), but that sense of slightly camp silliness is largely abandoned here in favour of a darker and more sombre tone, but "Counting Out Time" goes a long way to redressing that balance in one of the most gloriously fun, chirpy and upbeat tunes the band ever wrote, also boasting a fearsome guitar riff from Steve Hackett on the chorus, and a gloriously silly distorted, almost vocal solo ushered in by Gabriel's "Whoopee! Take it away, Mr Guitar," easily my favourite moment in Genesis's discography. It's followed by "The Carpet Crawlers," a fairly bland ballad that has proven an unaccountably popular Genesis classic.

The album's second half kicks off with more filler but picks up with "Anyway," a song dripping with menace and longing and blessed with a truly lovely piano riff and a passionate guitar solo from Hackett, while "The Colony Of Slippermen" is another highlight. It's one of the album's silliest moments, with Gabriel's gargling monster voice, and is all the more daft for being apparently played fairly straight, in contrast to the blatant silliness of "Counting Out Time," but it also boasts further great soloing from Banks. "The Light Dies Down On Broadway" is perhaps the album's emotional highpoint, with Gabriel's strident and pain-wracked vocals being surprisingly affecting as Rael catches sight of his brother lost in the ravine. And the album closer of "It" is a stirringly upbeat note on which to finish the album, powered by the intense strumming of Hackett's guitar, finally giving him something of note to do after an entire album that left the majority of the showing off to be shared between Gabriel and Banks.

The autocratic control Gabriel had taken over the album's lyrics and concept having been absent from the writing of most of the music had exposed certain divisions between the band, and these weren't made any better by the album's monumentally ambitious and theatrical tour which included costumes, mannequins, lasers, explosions and the like. Both the critical and audience reactions to the show seemed to place all their focus on Gabriel himself and ignore the contributions of the rest of Genesis, something that understandably riled the band. Gabriel had actually made the decision fairly early into the tour that he was going to leave the band but, though tensions continued to rise, things remained amicable enough that he would see out the entire tour before announcing his departure to the public. It seems more, then, that his departure occurred due to an inevitability of the two moving in different directions than due to some sort of explosion of clashing personalities. Whether or not Gabriel's fairly domineering control of the band at the time was a little questionable, he would go on to be one of the finest art rock musicians in history in the late 70s and up to the present day, while Genesis's fortunes would slowly start to fade.

1976's A Trick Of The Tail has some great moments in songs like the "Squonk" or the beautiful "Entangled" but fall a bit too short of real brilliance, and from there things just got worse. Hackett departed to pursue a fairly underwhelming solo career, and the remaining three soldiered on as a trio, with Collins now in the lead vocalist seat as well as drumming. By the time of 1980's Duke they had started to morph into a more commercial pop-rock outfit and developed a knack for producing albums that contained one or two genuinely brilliant songs (the title track from Abacab or the great "Mama" and "That's All" from Genesis) but, alongside those standouts, an album's worth of the most execrable dreck ever recorded by a band that used to be good. While plenty of prog acts went pop in the 80s, some of them managed to do so with confidence and style - Yes in the 80s may have been glossy and over-the-top pop-rock but they were also really, very good at it, while Genesis just produced horrible-sounding music that's genuinely difficult to listen to more than once. Finally, in 1986 they managed to ape Yes and record an album that, while hardly of any great artistic merit, was at least a genuinely good pop album in the form of Invisible Touch, but until then The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway was the last time the band made something that can be deemed a success on its own merits.

It's by no means flawless, and there are plenty of moments that I tune out of, but the fact is that, if the band had only had the restraint and the self-control to prune perhaps as much as half of the material, it does contain some brilliant stuff, some of it among the best material the band recorded. Perhaps in that sense it summarises my overall feelings towards Genesis as a whole. While bands like Yes or King Crimson or Jethro Tull are bands I've been able to whole-heartedly love and become obsessed by, there have always been just a few too many moments that come across as too overblown, forced or meandering for me to ever truly abandon my reservations. Ultimately, the thing Genesis must be thanked for above all else is that it led us to Peter Gabriel's astoundingly good solo career, and for that alone they must be saluted. And in leading us to that they also provided us with some genuinely great music. It's just a shame they had to give prog such a bad name while they were doing it.

Track Listing:

All songs written by Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett & Mike Rutherford

1. The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway

2. Fly On A Windshield

3. Broadway Melody Of 1974

4. Cuckoo Cocoon

5. In The Cage

6. The Grand Parade Of Lifeless Packaging

7. Back In N.Y.C.

8. Hairless Heart

9. Counting Out Time

10. The Carpet Crawlers

11. The Chamber Of 32 Doors

12. Lilywhite Lilith

13. The Waiting Room

14. Anyway

15. Here Comes The Supernatural Anaesthetist

16. The Lamia

17. Silent Sorrow In Empty Boats

18. The Colony Of Slippermen

19. Ravine

20. The Light Dies Down On Broadway

21. Riding The Scree

22. In The Rapids

23. It