Genesis and The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

Kevin Holm-Hudson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351565806
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In 1974 the British progressive rock group Genesis released their double concept album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The story was described by Genesis's then front-man Peter Gabriel as a 'moral fable' about Rael, a half-Puerto-Rican New York City street tough who is engulfed by a solid cloud into a series of strange adventures in a metaphysical realm. The album is a surreal allegory drawing its material from religious, literary and psychological themes. More than thirty years after its release, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway still enthralls listeners, earning the distinction of being Genesis's most consistently selling back-catalogue release. Kevin Holm-Hudson analyses The Lamb within the context of Genesis's recorded output, within the progressive rock genre as a whole, and within the context of social and political changes of the mid 1970s. The Lamb marked a conscious shift in their story setting to America, and for the first time the songs were oriented to the present rather than the past or future. Significantly, while 1974 marked the peak of music industry growth and consolidation through corporate mergers, it was also the year in which America was confronted with its limits: through the first of the OPEC energy crises, the resignation of Richard Nixon, the withdrawal from Vietnam, and the effects of runaway inflation. Genesis's native Britain was also to feel the effects of the energy crisis, intensified by a period of economic slowdown that ultimately led to the rise of Thatcherism. The Lamb is set in New York City during this time of uncertainty. Within a few years the economic constraints would affect the industry as a whole and as a result progressive rock would suffer a precipitous drop in industry support. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway thus makes a particularly rich subject for detailed study, providing compelling intersections between the musical, textual and socioeconomic aspects of an album.

Chapter 1
“It’s the last great adventure left to mankind”: Situating The Lamb

With the marvelous complicity of its entire population, New York acts out its own catastrophe as a stage play.

—Jean Baudrillard¹

New York has inspired creative visionaries for decades. In transferring its rhythm and energy into words, Walt Whitman’s poetry burst through the boundaries of classical meter. George Gershwin captured the vitality of New York’s jazz age in works such as “Rhapsody in Blue.” Leonard Bernstein, Steven Sondheim and Jerome Robbins supercharged a Shakespeare story with inspirations from two of New York’s prominent subcultures and contemporary accounts of juvenile delinquency to create West Side Story. Whether one considers the diversity of literary styles between, for example, F. Scott Fitzgerald and Allen Ginsberg, or between filmmakers Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen, or between musicians John Cage and Bob Dylan, New York has provided inspiration for all of them.

New York in the 1970s was altogether less romantic. The city was in the grip of a persistent fiscal crisis that bankrupted the city by the end of the decade. Between 1970 and 1980, 824,000 residents deserted the city (Markowitz, 2003); corporations likewise pulled out, and the widespread perception of New York was of a city sinking into a seedy decline, from which it would not effectively emerge until the mid-1990s. Yet as New York lost much of its romantic allure in the 1970s, it still provided a rich source of inspiration, at least for rock musicians. Lou Reed and Paul Simon each provided their own literate, witty spins on tales of New York’s denizens, its high- and low-lifes. Punk rock was to emerge here from bands such as the Ramones, Television, and others who played at Hilly Kristal’s club CBGB. By the end of the 1970s, a thriving avant-garde renaissance would be in full flower in the “downtown” SoHo district, spearheaded by such soon-to-be-prominent musicians and artists as Philip Glass, Keith Haring, and Laurie Anderson.

This gritty urban scene would seem to be an odd backdrop for a British progressive-rock band’s concept-album fantasy, but just as New York had inspired Walt Whitman and Andy Warhol, so it also came to enthrall a young upper-middle-class English rock musician named Peter Gabriel. Like Baudrillard—and Charles Dickens, who visited the city in 1842 and was appalled by the poverty and squalor he saw, describing it as worse than London’s—Gabriel was fascinated by New York’s “catastrophe” acted out “as a stage play.” He responded by creating his own “stage play” for which the “catastrophe” of “early morning Manhattan” could serve as a fitting location. New York, it would seem, never leaves those who have lived there. The experiences of young Rael—the half-Puerto-Rican “street punk” Gabriel created as his protagonist for The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway—would be altogether different if Rael were, for example, an East-End Londoner.

In the 1970s, if you were young and artistically ambitious, it seemed as if writing the “Great American Novel” was no longer a worthy pursuit; instead, chances are you were a rock musician trying to record the ultimate concept album. The concept album—a collection of songs (or sometimes a even single album-length song) arranged around a single subject (“concept”) or narrative structure, became the rock version of the nineteenth-century song cycle. It became the vehicle of choice for exploring “deep” philosophical ideas in a sustained manner, an invitation for the listener to join in the artist’s contemplation and enter their artistic universe for a while. Music critic Jon Landau once asserted, “The criterion of art in rock is the capacity of the musician to create a personal, almost private, universe and to express it fully” (Garofalo, 1997, p. 249). If Landau is correct, the concept album was one of the most prominent and distinctive manifestations of rock’s “art” impulse in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Art and commerce: Progressive music and “progressive” marketing

“Nobody went around actually calling themselves progressive,” recalls Tom Newman, a musician who wound up working as engineer on Mike Oldfield’s gargantuan Tubular Bells album—the album that launched a record mega-label (Virgin) and embodied progressive aesthetic with its epic pseudo-classical structure and its look-mum-I-can-play-it-all-myself conceit. “The press did, the industry did” (Stump, 1997, p. 76). Before 1972, at least, progressive rock was “hardly a unified style,” according to musicologist Allan Moore, in his book Rock: The Primary Text (one of the first to objectively examine progressive rock’s aesthetics). Moore notes that at one point the term “extended from ‘art’ rock on the one hand through ‘hard’ rock to styles of ‘folk’ rock” (2001, p. 69). The commonality among all these styles involved extending rock’s formal and musical syntaxes “through infusion with a variety of foreign influences” (ibid.), especially “musical features seeming to have little in common with those of Afro-American musical traditions” (p. 102). Even as late as 1973—by which time, thanks to the success of albums such as Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Yes’s Close to the Edge, the music industry was moving toward excising non-“symphonic” elements from accepted definitions of “progressive” style—Lester Bangs cast a very wide stylistic net for his discussion of what he called “the Progressives.” Bangs’s article covered groups as diverse as Traffic, Soft Machine, Jethro Tull, Emerson, Lake and Palmer (ELP), Pink Floyd, Procol Harum, The Band, the Grateful Dead, the Allman Brothers, and Johnny Winter:

Why do we call ‘em the Progressives? Because that’s what they are …. They have the common aim in mind of advancing the whole of rock as an art form through the systematic and craftsmanlike absorption of the likeliest elements from every other style of music known to this planet. You might not like to hear rock ‘n’ roll called “art,” and some of the musicians in this chapter would agree with you. Some of them would even say that the term “rock ‘n’ roll” is too inhibiting. Why put labels on anything anyway? Just let the music be what it is. Others among this motley crew would insist that rock must fulfill itself as art to transcend its crude beginnings. And, further, that they are the ones who are enabling it to do that so that it may survive. (Bangs, 1973, p. 87)

Originally, then, “progressive” artists sought to expand the commonly accepted boundaries of what was considered to be “rock.” At the same time, these musicians sought to validate their work as art; and, even though few of them had extensive training in “classical” music, such music provided a ready model for their cultural aspirations. Journalist Paul Stump, in his book The Music’s All That Matters, writes that this music was “‘progressive’ in the sense that the sounds these musicians made seemed to shake up, superficially, existing popular-music expression and urge it vaguely towards modernist/Romantic art music” (1997, p. 90). It was “a beseeching of—or a defiant gesture towards—a parental generation that had explicitly belittled the idea that their children’s music could ever attain artistic credibility” (p. 50).

The seven-inch 45 RPM single, the medium associated with rock and roll since its beginnings, came to be seen as something to be transcended. Few pop singles were longer than three and a half minutes long; the seven-inch single represented, by virtue of its own limitations, the temporal limits imposed by commercial radio. Albums, at least until 1966 or so, were usually marketing afterthoughts intended to compile successful singles; the single was what drove the market. In the mid-1960s, artists began to work toward circumventing the three-minute limit. Back in 1964, for example, producer Phil Spector misrepresented the length of the Righteous Brothers single “You’ve Lost That Loving Feeling” on the record’s label as 3:05 (rather than its true length of 3:50) so that it would get airplay, and Bob Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” (1965) was so long it was split across both sides of the 45, resulting in many stations playing the album track instead.

The real difference between progressive rock and “pop” of the day, according to Moore, “lay in the connotation the style had for its audience; for few students and hippies did the music function primarily as entertainment” (p. 69). Indeed, for rock’s student and hippie cognoscenti music was a ritualistic backdrop—for getting high, for discussing philosophy and politics, and ultimately for defining one’s social and subcultural identity. Paul Willis, in his important study of the hippie subculture Profane Culture, notes that music occupied a central role in the hippie lifestyle, and it held pride of place in the hippies’ construction of identity because of its ambiguous “meaning” for outsiders: “It was impossible to decode. It could safely hold contradictory, otherwise unexpressed or profound meanings” (1978, p. 106). Music was part of what Stump describes as “an entire leisure commodity” that “immediately began generating its own signs and signifiers: dislocation, sensory autonomy, pluralism. The discourse, the Romantic individualism consecrated by the Beats in the 1950s, was beginning to assume its own concrete identity” (1997, p. 29). This ethic of “Romantic individualism” can be traced back in part to the success of the Beatles as original songwriters, which “nullified mediation between performer and production process, a luxury unavailable to most popular entertainers outside the jazz world” (Stump, 1997, p. 40). Referring to music as part of a “leisure commodity,” on the other hand, suggests that this lifestyle could be packaged and marketed. This is exactly what the music industry set out to do, and exactly what Frank Zappa recognized as early as 1967’s prescient We’re Only In It For the Money album.

When the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in June 1967, they were already at the top of the global music industry. Its commercial success was thus virtually pre-ordained; its artistic success, however, while not unexpected given the experiments already glimpsed on Rubber Soul (1965) and Revolver (1966), was unprecedented. The success of Sgt. Pepper was pivotal in establishing the progressive aesthetic. Moore credits Sgt. Pepper with the “realignment of rock from its working-class roots to its subsequent place on the college circuit” (2001, p. 65).

Granted, other albums—such as Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention’s Freak Out! (1966)—had already begun to breach the boundary between “disposable” pop and “serious” rock. Sgt. Pepper merely gave an established “commercial” rock voice to an alternative youth culture that had been brewing in London as early as 1961, around a “loose coalescence of jazz, Beat poetry and avant-garde art” (Stump, 1997, p. 24). By 1964, with Britain in the grip of Beatlemania and the first wave of British Invasion bands succeeding in the American pop charts, Britain’s “art-school preoccupation with art’s sacred stature, the primacy of individual expression, had been filtered through jazz to young British musicians who now saw the Beatles pointing a guitar-led route to riches” (Stump, 1997, p. 25).

Musicologist Edward Macan, in his study of English progressive rock and its roots in the counterculture Rocking the Classics, defines progressive rock as an extension and consolidation of earlier psychedelic music. He summarizes psychedelic and progressive rock’s original subculture, as it coalesced between 1966 and about 1971, as “regionally distinct” and “essentially homogeneous in terms of its members’ ages and class origins”:

Like the musicians, the audience was young (under thirty); it was centered above all in southeastern England; its socioeconomic background was solidly middle class and it shared the musicians’ general educational backgrounds, and thus their familiarity with the art, literature, and music of high culture. The only major difference between audience and performers at this time involved gender: while the audience seems to have had a roughly equal female–male ratio, the performers were overwhelmingly male. (Macan, 1997, pp. 151–152)

Stump also connects the subculture with Britain’s universities, asserting that “redbrick colleges practically kept Progressive alive” in its early years, helping to create “an audience for Progressive as a lifestyle, as a separate culture, a signifier for a newly-defined ‘other’” (1997, p. 73).

Macan argues that there is a homologous relationship between the musical elements that characterize progressive rock and the values of the hippie counterculture. For example, he finds that “the consistent use of lengthy forms such as the programmatic song cycle of the concept album and the multimovement suite underscores the hippies’ new, drug-induced conception of time” (1997, p. 13). Elsewhere he provides other homologies:

Progressive rock’s attachment to dense arrangements, complex mazes of shifting meters, and spasmodic solos created the sense of unpredictability, tension, and nonconformity which the hippies found so spectacularly lacking in the Establishment-approved pop styles. Furthermore, its complexity served as a symbol of resistance against the Establishment, as a gate that separated the uncomprehending “straights” from the mysteries of the hippie subculture. (Macan, 1997, p. 51)

This last point is important, for it brings to mind the modernist and somewhat exclusivist stance on art espoused famously by Arnold Schoenberg: “If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art” (1975, p. 124). The “resistance” inherent in musical complexity is an implicit point in Schoenbergian apologist Theodor Adorno’s neo-Marxist critique of popular music, which in its formal standardization was found to embody the ethic of capitalist mass-production and unquestioning acceptance of the “culture industry.”² Nonetheless, with a few notable exceptions (Henry Cow and the “Rock in Opposition” subgenre of progressive, for example), progressive rock was notably apolitical, especially when compared with some of the American psychedelic (Jefferson Airplane) and hard rock (Steppenwolf) groups of the period. As Allan Moore puts it:

Some musicians were associated with the (“progressive”) aims and ambitions of late-1960s’ counter-culture, always more apparent in the USA than in the UK, but “association” was normally as far as any relationship went …. Few of the musicians were as politically involved either as their audiences believed, or indeed as many of those audiences themselves were. (Moore, 2001, p. 64)

Some of the comments made by progressive rock musicians themselves confirm Moore’s statement. For example, Genesis’s keyboardist Tony Banks, referring to the group’s first overseas gig in Belgium in 1971, noted that the group’s song “The Knife” was a particular favorite among audiences. “They seemed to go for the pseudo-revolutionary thing which was very tongue-in-cheek from our point of view, but they seemed to take it seriously and they loved it” (Russell, 2004, p. 203).

If the musicians saw no inherent politicization in their musical complexity, then, some fans certainly did. The music industry—which was already cashing in on radical chic with advertising slogans such as Columbia Records’ “The Man can’t bust our music”—was quick to oblige in furthering this perception. Thus, popular music scholar Reebee Garofalo’s critique that the label of “progressive” rock was “a term which resonated nicely with the radical rhetoric of the era” (1997, p. 244), while perhaps somewhat cynical, is not inaccurate. It was all too convenient a label for describing and positioning this nascent musical style.

Popular music sociologist Simon Frith has outlined the procedures for the emergence of what he has calls new “genre worlds” in the music industry. Once a musical style seems to spontaneously emerge from the “streets” or from the “ground up,” as it were, the music industry isolates particular features of that style and thus constructs the new genre as a marketing category. Frith writes that a new “genre world” is “first constructed then articulated through a complex interplay of musicians, listeners, and mediating ideologues, and this process is much more confused than the marketing process that follows, as the wider industry begins to make sense of the new sounds and markets to exploit both genre worlds and genre discourses in the orderly routine of mass marketing” (1996, p. 88). The music industry sets such “genre boundaries” through its marketing and distribution practices: financially successful bands tend to receive higher production and promotional budgets, which in turn tend to further the successes of those groups; more marginal groups receive less support and accordingly often remain marginal, “cult” bands. At the same time, new groups are often formed in emulation of successful examples. Moore’s observation that “once the norms of any style have been set, many less well-known musicians work quite happily within them” (2001, p. 68) is thus true in a marketing as well as a musical sen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of musical figures
• General Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction “This is the of Rael”
• 1 “It’s the last great adventure left to mankind”: Situating The Lamb
• 2 “There’s something solid forming in the air”: Recording The Lamb
• 3 “Counting out time”: The Lamb, song by song
• 4 “The Lamb seems right out of place”: In the press and on tour
• 5 “it”: Interpreting The Lamb
• 6 “And the light dies down on Broadway”: Genesis and Gabriel after The Lamb, and The Lamb after Genesis
• Appendix “Once again the stage is set for you”: The Lamb tour itinerary
• Bibliography “Searching printed word”
• Index