GENESIS
Story and All lyrics by Peter Gabriel
except "The Light Dies Down On Broadway" by Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks
All music composed by Tony Banks, Phil Collins, Peter Gabriel, Steve Hackett & Mike Rutherford
Produced by John Burns and Genesis
Released November 18, 1974
GENESIS:
Tony Banks: Piano, Keyboards, Synthesizers, Mellotron
Phil Collins: Drums, Percussion, Vibraphone, Backing Vocals
Peter Gabriel: Lead Vocals, Backing Vocals, Flute
Steve Hackett: Guitars
Mike Rutherford: Bass Guitars, Bass Pedals, 12 String Guitars
In the vastness of all of my personal musical favorites, the band Genesis unquestionably sits near the pinnacle.
I began to explore the music of Genesis sometime during my year in the 7th grade and fully embraced them by 8th grade. I passionately defended Genesis to any and everyone throughout my high school years as they were never a band ever to be considered as "cool," and by 1986, I certainly felt a personal sense of vindication when the band, as well as solo releases by past and (then) current members had all sat at the tops of the charts. And then, once again, I had to defend them all over again as musical styles shifted and changed and the band's own output eventually began to decrease in frequency.
But I didn't care and I still do not as Genesis, like my most favorite bands and artists, has always been one of those bands that has always been a bit out of step from their contemporaries and has also existed within its own musical universe. With a diverse range of musical styles and genres from classical, jazz, fusion, pop and good old fashioned rock and roll--and sometimes all within the same song at that--their songwriting gifts and instrumental chops are nothing less than top of the line. Furthermore, it should be noted without hyperbole that over the entirety of their 40 year career and 15 album discography, there's not only not even one bad album in the bunch, there are, in fact, a few masterpieces. "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway," a double concept album released in 1974, is hands down one of the finest albums they ever made and I am so excited to honor it on the 39th anniversary of its release.
"The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway," is notable for not only being the final Genesis album to feature Peter Gabriel, it is a work that nearly redefines what it means when a piece of music is able to take the listener upon a journey. It is an album that has cast a spellbinding aura of mystery that has endured so strongly that a website entitled "The Annotated Lamb," collecting all pertinent interviews with Genesis band members about the album, as well as a variety of analyses, exists on the internet as an on-going tribute.
For me, "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" is an album that I have been listening to for over 25 years of my life and like Planet P. Project's "Pink World" (1984), which I wrote about this past summer (you can find that posting in the July section), it is one of those albums that I always find myself pulling from my shelves at least once or twice a year to experience all over again and feeling transformed each and every time I hear it. It is an album of rich, poetic darkness, spiritual allegory and bizarre surrealism that I, for much of my life with it, found to be somewhat easy to follow as well as inscrutable and indescribable. Despite some few choice words here and there, none of the members of Genesis have ever definitively explained just what the whole thing is about in the first place, thus adding to its legend, mystery and one of a kind nature as the band had not recorded an album quite like it before or since. But, I feel that I should pull back the curtain a little bit to provide a larger context, especially for those of you who have not heard the album.
The basic story line of "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" essentially chronicles the disturbing and dream-like adventures of Rael, a Puerto Rican gang member who is hurled downwards or upwards or crashing completely through our world into the grim netherworld of strange creatures and harrowing circumstances in order to potentially rescue his long absent brother John. From beginning to nearly the end, Rael is confronted not only with the sights of the titular lamb, but also finds himself being trapped inside of cages, witnessing an assembly line cavalcade of cadavers, experiences a flooding of flashbacks and memories, a meeting with Death itself, a trio of gorgeous siren-like snake women with a penchant for nibbling upon human flesh only to find themselves to be eaten in turn, masses of beings crawling upon carpets to a chamber of 32 doors, blind women carrying glowing orbs of blinding white light and there's no way that I can forget the legion of Slippermen, a collective of blob beings who then lead poor Rael to the sinister Doktor Dyper, a reformed sniper who performs a nasty bit of castration upon our anti-hero.
Now all of this may either sound to be completely impenetrable or conversely, precisely the sort of nonsense that would make you hate a band like Genesis. But please allow me to assure you that this album considerably more accessible than it may seem to be, despite having a few of the most avant garde sections Genesis ever recorded, because of two extremely crucial elements:
1. The actual music itself, which is composed and performed with the band's trademark elegance and romanticism but recorded with a (then) unprecedented toughness and abrasiveness which showcases the band's tremendous gifts, versatility and musical elasticity, from Tony Banks' swirling and doom evoking keyboards, to Mike Rutherford and Steve Hackett's co-joined bass and guitar rumblings and atmospherics to, of course, Phil Collins' monstrous drumming.
2. Peter Gabriel's compulsively evocative and thoroughly involving story and lyrics which echoes the work of Lewis Carroll and conjures the sort of surreal imagery as created by Salvador Dali or within the films of Fritz Lang.
Genesis has never been given enough credit for not only being world class musicians but perhaps even more importantly as songwriters as like The Beatles, the band hs always discovered impressive ways to create the perfect musical landscapes which merge the lyrics and music in lockstep, ensuring that one simply cannot exist without the other. This gives "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" an especially strong sense of purpose and even pathos.
And still, what does it all mean?
As I previously stated, I had always found the album easy to follow from a storytelling standpoint. Rael goes here, he goes there, he meets these creatures and so on. But still...what is it all about? I think what had confounded me the most was actually the arrival of the album's propulsive and majestic final song entitled "it," which contains lyrics like the following:
"...it is the jigsaw, it is purple haze
it never stays in one place but it's not a passing phase
it is in the single's bar, in the distance of the face
it is in between the cages, it is always in a space
it is here, it is now..."
Huh, what?
That song truly upended the album for me for years and years because it (ha, ha) seemed to function completely outside of everything else that appeared before it. The story propelled itself along in its own nightmarishly straightforward way and then...what? But then, I stumbled upon one person's thoughts on "The Annotated Lamb" and then, everything seemed to snap into place for me. What if "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" is a story completely about death and spiritual ascension? Of course!
Now, dear readers and listeners, what I am writing is not meant to suggest to you that this interpretation of "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" is the definitive one. Remember, none of the band members have ever delivered a set-in-stone answer whatsoever. The connections are all up to you. But for me, this suggestion that the album's storyline may be a tale of a soul in anguish and wrestling with departing the material world for some sense of salvation certainly resonated in a way where the song "it" finally, at least in my mind, seemed to provide the answers that I had been seeking and thus gave the album as a whole a certain weightiness that I had not felt before.
The album opens with Tony Banks' piano twinkling away at a pattern that somehow suggests a slow fade-in if this were a movie onto a scene of New York city from the depths of night into a slow sunrise. As the album's title track sets itself into full swing, Gabriel sets the scene immediately ("Early morning Manhattan, oceans winds blow on the land...") and gives us vignettes of porn movie theaters closing for the dawn, a prostitute named Suzanne heading home, and the gathering rise of cars into gas stations. We are soon introduced to Rael, rising from the subway with his spray can hidden but something is terribly wrong when he utters, "Something inside me has just begun/Lord knows what I have done."
By the album's grim second track, "Fly On A Windshield," Rael describes the scene after viewing the titular lamb indeed laying down on Broadway. He spots what appears to be a cloud or better yet, "a wall of death" descending onto Times Square yet no one but him seems to notice it at all. As the cloud approaches Rael, he finds himself becoming encased within a hardening dust, making him unable to move as he expresses, "I'm hovering like a fly, waiting for the windshield on the freeway..." And then...the music crashes, bring the sound into widescreen as waves of Banks' Mellotron, Rutherford's bass pedals, Hackett's angular guitar playing and Collins' John Bonham-esque drumming envelops the listener and propels Rael through the audio/visual iconography of New York ("Broadway Melody Of 1974") before he awakens in an unknown location comfortably surrounded by a cocoon ("Cuckoo Cocoon") and musing over his fate ("Don't tell me this is dying 'cause I ain't changed that much".).
Before I go any further, I am thinking that what has happened in the story so far to fit with any themes of death and ascension is that within the first song, when we first meet Rael, I am wondering if he has suffered some life threatening injury from a gang fight in the subway. The sight of the lamb laying down on the street may possibly be a symbolic gesture of Rael being a sacrificial lamb. By the second track, Rael dies and his soul begins its harrowing journey, in a fashion that now makes me think of something like Director Adrian Lyne's deeply disturbing film "Jacob's Ladder" (1990).
We first meet Rael's brother John in the increasingly dizzying track "In The Cage," where John silently refuses to release Rael from his prison as a tear of blood slides down his cheek. John is next seen in "The Grand Parade Of Lifeless Packaging," a sinister carnival-esque sounding track that may suggest that Rael has traveled to Hell, with its sea of corpses ("Got people stocked in every shade/Must be doing well with trade/Stamped, addressed in odd fatality/That evens out their personality").
Side Two bring us from the horror of Side One's conclusion to Rael spiraling back through his pyromaniac memories as a gang member with the roaring "Back In N.Y.C." Yet this brutal portrait is belied by the comical, almost showtune number "Counting Out Time," which details Rael's first, awkward and ultimately failed sexual experiences, suggesting that all along, he was more lamb than lion. Returning to the unknown netherworld, I think Rael begins to attempt his spiritual ascension with the track "The Carpet Crawlers," which features a collective of individuals performing the spiritual act of crawling upwards upon a floor of lamb's wool towards "a heavy wooden door." This pilgrimage leads Rael and his fellow travelers to "The Chamber Of 32 Doors," the album's deeply emotional centerpiece where our anti-hero is desperately trying to find his way out but which door should he choose? "My Father to the left of me/My Mother to the right/ Like everyone else, they're pointing/But nowhere feels quite right," explains Rael via Peter Gabriel's voice of rich, soulful despair suggesting a soul painfully attempting to follow through with a transition, but unfortunately, not knowing how, why or to where and what.
Side Three finds Rael accepting assistance from the "Lilywhite Lillith," the aforementioned blind woman, accompanied by the glowing orbs, who leads him into "The Waiting Room," as presented through a truly frightening instrumental the band referred to as "The Evil Jam" (if you are willing to go on the hunt, check out some liver versions of this track to hear Phil Collins just pulverize the drums!). "Anyway" finds Rael in a more philosophical mode as he is trapped by a collapsed ceiling ("Does Earth plug a hole in Heaven/Or Heaven plug a hole in Earth?/How wonderful to be so profound/When everything you are is dying underground") until he meets his "hero" Death, as referred to as "The Supernatural Anesthetist," who arrives armed with a snuff box ("If he wants you to snuff it/All he has to do is puff it").
By this point in the album, it seems as if all of this surreal madness of "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" is essentially designed to be a series of tests that Rael must pass in order to find ultimate salvation and true ascension. And the seriousness and severity of his choices and consequences arrives most poignantly in "The Lamia." Feeling the presence of death to be just an illusion, Rael "survives" his encounter only to find himself in a new chamber filled with a pool of pink water and is soon met by "three vermilion snakes of female face/the smallest motion filled with grace." Rael succumbs to their erotic spell and feast upon him only to decompose at the first taste of his blood. A distraught Rael then feats upon their remains and moves onwards from the room not knowing that, as Gabriel sings,"once again the stage is set for you."
Side Four brings Rael to his ultimate tests as he happens upon "The Colony Of Slippermen," a collective of people who have all been enraptured by the Lamia and have now found themselves transformed into "Slubberdegullions on squeaky feet" with skin "all covered in slimy lumps" and "lips that slide across each chin." Rael is informed that their appearance is what is in store for him, as well as his brother John, unless they visit the aforementioned Doktor Dyper for castration. Holding onto his sense of vanity, Rael is indeed castrated (as is brother John) and his member is then placed into a "yellow plastic shoobedoobe," which is then promptly stolen by a large raven and dropped into the raging waters below. Rael asks for John's assistance in retrieving his penis but "he walks away and leaves me once again/Even tough I never learn, I hoped he'd show just some concern."
While that escapade could simply exist as a sick joke (and it does), I do think there is also some serious purpose in regards to the theme of ascension, for if the body is simply a shell for the soul, what would the soul need with a penis anyway? Rael's transition is happening whether he realizes it or not and in the final stages of the album, he is faced with his ultimate choice.
Walking along the river's edge feeling despondent at the loss of his penis and John's unwillingness to help him gather it back, "The Light Dies Down On Broadway" finds Rael spotting a window forming in the sky depicting the life he knew in New York City. Yet, below in the water, he hears and sees his brother John drowning. Rael has a serious choice to make: return to the life he knew or save the brother who has failed him time and again. He chooses to save his brother in the Tony Banks keyboard showcase "Riding The Scree" and after rescuing John and swimming "In The Rapids," Rael turns to face his brother only to discover "Something's changed, that's not your face...It's MINE!"
And the album catapults into the cosmos of "it." Fin.
With those final sections, Rael makes the ultimate selfless sacrifice to save his brother at the expense of returning home, thus, he has truly saved himself, finally allowing his soul to ascend into...it, a song that could represent the afterlife or a notion of God or more properly the force of life itself. As Gabriel sings, "It is chicken/It is eggs/It is in between your legs...," and of course, that is what it just may be all about.
...And also of course, this is all speculation...
"The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" is a dreamworld of an album, filled with strife and triumph, the mysterious and the majestic, the hallucinogenic and the hallowed. Trust me, dear readers and listeners, it is not as dense as it may seem to be. Yes, it is a wild story, practically bursting at the seams with vivid imagery that may read as nonsensical or else completely fueled by illicit substances. But, I truly believe that you will discover so very much to be just entertained by if you give it a chance. The musicianship is crackling and I continue to remain astounded by Gabriel's singing in which he performs the roe of Rael, the narrator and all of the creatures with superb aplomb and dexterity. You always know which role he is playing and the grit contained within his performance ensures the entire proceedings remain grounded, possess a rock and roll edge and do not float away into the ether.
But for me, the allegory of the album stirs me to my core, especially once we arrive at "it." To think, the song that once confused me endlessly is the one the entire album is reaching for. A sense of completion through transcendence, which in and of itself is something that is never truly complete. "The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway" is an album that can meet the listener wherever they may happen to be internally and it is also a work that will grow with you for it will always find you. As I grow older and view the world and beyond with a wider canvas than when I did at the age of 15, this album's canvas has also expanded with each listening, providing me with a new lens to view life, which is sometimes quite surreal underneath any seemingly mundane surfaces.
And furthermore, the band created a damn good batch of songs, beautifully composed, inventively played and produced with complete commitment. Not one moment is phoned in or feels false and most impressively, it has aged well as it is representative of its time but is also a timeless work.
Take the journey, dear readers and listeners, into one of this DJ's most favorite albums and whatever it means to you, is whatever it means...
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