Genesis - "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" (1974) - Atco
Hello Friends,
We've got a true prog-rock classic on the turntable tonight.
Genesis's 1974 double LP of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway arguably captures one of the great bands of the seventies at their absolute apex.
The process of writing, recording and touring for the record would nearly break the band and, in fact, would cause frontman Peter Gabriel to depart once the "Lamb" tour commenced. Out, Angel, Out.
This is a crazed, bombastic, overly-ambitious affair that on paper probably shouldn't work at all. However, it was an important album of the era and holds up today as a classic. Actually, we think this album even gets better listening to it over the years. Revisiting it from time-to-time is like checking in on an old friend: familiar, yet distant.
Every time we listen to this record, we hear something we've never realized was there before!
There's a storyline going through the album, which to be honest, we don't really understand or care too much about. Something about a Puerto Rican hoodlum, Rael, who while spray painting graffiti on some building in downtown New York stops and witnesses a literal lamb lying down in the middle of Broadway. Some sort of portal opens up and Rael ends up in some underground/alternate world trying to save his brother, John. Most of the songs vaguely describe the events, creatures and characters witnesses during Rael's "descent" and all winds up good(?) when Rael finally saves his brother from drowning and realizes that, the whole time, he and his brother were the same person. Upon this sudden realization, Rael/John's spirit/consciousness melts away and he becomes part of his surroundings.
Definitely weird. Whitman-esque. Lynchian to boot. And there's more than a few hints that it might be Gabriel trying to work out some of his one schizophrenic tendencies.
We try not to get too bogged down in the specifics of the concept. The star of the record is without a doubt Gabriel's vocals.
As with most of Gabriel-era Genesis, he can simultaneously emote whimsy, confidence, intelligence, slyness, cleverness, while all the time sounding somehow extremely vulnerable, human and unsure. Like Ziggy Stardust (or a Replicant), he's like an alien to this world that appears to be more human than human. Its like he's in on some mastermind "in joke" that we're all struggling to understand, but the twist is that he's as clueless and ignorant as the rest of us!
He's a Messiah & Everyman. A prophet & popstar. A headbanger and a folk singer.
The music is nothing to sneer at either. Mike Rutherford, Phil Collins, Tony Banks and Steve Hackett provide Gabriel with an equally as weird, bombastic and ambitious canvas to work with musically. (Even Brian Eno makes an appearance with some vocal treatments!) Throughout the 22 songs, the band achieves a near perfect balance between the soft & sublime and the over-the-top, hard-edged cacophony.
For all its overt weirdness and avant-garde concepts, there's actually a good number of songs that you can really pound your fists to. The opening title track, "Cuckoo Cocoon", "The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging" & "Carpet Crawlers" could all have been songs on Cheap Trick, Wire or Guided by Voices records. "Counting Out Time" is one of the power poppiest songs of the mid-70's.
The album's momentous closing track, "It", teeters very closely to a dance-disco track but actually wouldn't sound entirely out of place on a later period Flaming Lips record.
Like any great, important piece of music (or work of art) those who create it do so and leave it up to us, the audience, the fans, to make heads or tails of things. They provide an outline, a road map, but the themes and lessons are up for personal interpretation. Is this a parable of a man trying to navigate his way through the music industry? Is it about a struggle with drug-addiction? A religious experience? An ode to America, more specifically, New York City in the 1970's? Is it ultimately a tale about sexual frustration? Schizophrenia? Madness? Is it a lot of stream-of-consciousness nonsense? A combination of all of these things?
(Personally, I always sort of pictured this punk kid doing some graffiti art when he's literally distracted by a small lamb crossing busy Broadway. Mesmerized, and thinking he's imagining it, he goes to approach the lying lamb street and BOOM he's run over by a passing taxi! The rest of the album is the character's spiritual journey through Hades, Heaven or wherever.)
Whatever the consensus, at the end of the day, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway is a rock & roll record. Sure, it appears to be something that's much bigger than the sum of its parts, but its the dozens of amazing hooks throughout the record that keep us coming back for more and more!
'Cos its only knock & knowall, but I like it...
RATING: 5 carpet crawlers heed their callers out of 5
