Landmark album/CD releases – whether landmark in positive or negative ways – gather layers of lore as each one rolls across the terrain that is its “public,” or its “audience.”  That audience is no static landscape, of course.  It changes, and is changed by such albums.  Such albums seem to settle over time into the status of “signposts,” marking ways through the landscape, though they are also partly responsible for blazing the very trails that they mark.

If we stop at a crossroads where one of these markers is now set, if we look closely at the ways in which the marker has weathered, eroded, and perhaps even been defaced by other passersby, don’t we always love to see the cleavages, the conflicts, the signs of fragmentation or disintegration that we have been told are there?  Don’t we often look for them with a sort of sadomasochistic nostalgia?  We listen to the Beatles’ “White Album,” and we “hear” the disruptive, threatening presence of Yoko, the creative divergences that are opening between the four discernible musical personae.  For many progressive rock fans, Yes’ Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) has this feel.  Whether hated or cherished, the music captured on its four vinyl faces embodied deepening tensions that we know were lurking just beneath its surface, manifest soon after most clearly in Wakeman’s departure.

To consider a non-prog example, I remember my introduction to the album, Shoot Out the Lights (1982) by Richard and Linda Thompson, several years after its release.  Via Rolling Stone‘s enshrinement of that album as #1 of its release year and in its top 500 of all time, I learned the mythology regarding how the album amounts to documentation of the disintegration of the Thompsons’ marriage, and how it was followed by “The Divorce Tour.”  I bring up the example of the Thompsons’ exquisitely painful album precisely because “mythology” is the appropriate term in that case.  While it is clear that the Thompson’s marriage was a tempestuous one, the idea that one can literally hear the demise of the marriage taking place in the recordings for SOTL has been disputed by a number of commentators, who have claimed that their relationship was relatively good at the time of the recordings, and did not actually fall apart until after they were completed.  Whatever the truth of the matter, the fact that there is dispute about events serves to underline the mythological character of the common narrative, “myth” here meaning precisely narrative that has solidified into a tradition, a tale that is passed on much more for its poignancy and its authentic “ring” than for its truth in the sense of historical accuracy.

There can be a properly “mythic” ring to an album more in connection with its critical drubbing (as with Tales), or more for its acclaim (as with SOTL).  The reason why I bring up all of this, of course, is in order to bring it to bear in the service of this second look at The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.  We have all heard the stories of diverging visions, of deep tension, of a near-split during recordings, all leading to Peter Gabriel’s actual departure after the tour.  One may take the divergence, tension, and dissension as directly connected to how absolutely awful the album is (reportedly helping to push at least one of my Progarchy colleagues, in disgust, in the direction of punk), or one may take the same as the key to its sublime character, its poetic and musical superiority to most other “concept albums” of the time (the latter often being my own temptation).

But here is what I most want to suggest to you here as a regard, as a possible “gaze” upon The Lamb:  Is it possible to put aside myth, to bracket the normative narrative, and listen to the album as if none of that is what really matters?  I believe that it is possible, because it is how I first heard the album.  I’ve already noted how The Lamb is the first Genesis album to which I paid careful and sustained attention, and at the time I had almost no clue regarding the band’s history or contemporary situation.  I was largely unaware of the dramatic shift from prior cooperative writing to Gabriel’s emphatic assertion of narrative and lyrical dominance.  I first encountered The Lamb as the Gesamtkunstwerk that it presented itself as being.  It was only later that I learned about the negative press regarding the album, and even more regarding the supposedly disastrous tour.

When I encounter listeners who otherwise appreciate Genesis, but who despise (or at least mostly ignore) The Lamb, I often wonder whether any of these listeners have had the chance to experience the album without being encumbered by the mythology.  Perhaps some of them have.  But I expect that there are many who have not.  My recommendation today is that you at least attempt such a look at The Lamb (admittedly difficult, but surely not simply impossible).  Listen to the way in which the band melds together like a single complicated voice, having its own “feel,” its own musical texture that can be attended to without insistently comparing it to prior recordings by the same players.  This is an auditory parallel to the sort of impact that I hoped to evoke before with regard to the packaging

My own sense is that listening to The Lamb as a singularity (rather than as an instance of…) gives little ground for the standard sorts of disparagement of the “self-indulgence” of its scope, or of the “incomprehensibility” of its story.  I may be asking the impossible, which was only possible in my case because of my idiosyncratic listening history.  But surely there are times when it is possible largely to “bracket” context for the sake of one particular look (or in this case, listen).  Can’t we sometimes briefly “forget” what an artist’s other paintings look like, how her style developed, etc., and allow ourselves to be struck anew by what this particular painting looks like?  Doesn’t the religious believer sometimes deliberately try to see a scriptural text as strange, even though it is familiar?

Try (if you’re willing to indulge me) to listen to The Lamb again in this way.  It’s the debut album by an unknown band.  Rael has nothing to do with the man who will portray him onstage in a tour to follow.  There is no genre into which either the music or the story must fit.  There are no such things as “concept albums” or “rock operas.”

It may not work, naturally, but I invite you to try.

The lights by which we often hear (to mix metaphors with way too much boldness) are the lights that shine before and after an album in the output stream of an artist.  And it is often the case that it is precisely those bright lights that we want to see.  But can we sometimes shoot out those lights, and try listening again, as if for the first time?

Contextual considerations will loom large in most of the looks to follow.  (Coming soon, for example, is an explicit consideration of how The Lamb may be seen/heard “religiously,” especially as it is served after “Supper.”)  But don’t neglect kinds of looking/listening that resist contextualization, that try to hear a well-aged and myth-laden message as fresh and new.

<—- Previous Look     Prologue     Next Look —->

If it’s going to be a “look,” then it’s always going to be personal to some extent.  It may vary to what extent.  But this first look feels very intensely personal.  My first experience of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was not yet of its music, but of its packaging.

“Keep your fingers out of my eye.”

I read that sentence after having stared for several minutes (if I’m remembering correctly, which is always iffy) at those amazing pictures on the front and back of that Hipgnosis jacket.  The largely black-and-white design ushered me into a kind of solemnity and grave expectation, which set me up to feel  as though something cold and sharp was pressing into the side of my mind when I began reading the story.  It wouldn’t even be until much later that I saw the connection of that first sentence to the way in which I was physically holding the cover.  If I may rather lamely borrow from the album itself, I was the fly on the windshield.

The personal element here lies in the timing of my introduction to the album, relative to my general familiarity with prog.  I don’t remember exactly when it was, especially in relation to other major albums to which I was introduced in the middle 70’s.  But here’s the most significant thing:  I was not really familiar with Genesis’ work in general yet.  A friend had talked about them, and I had seen a couple of the other album covers, but The Lamb was the first one that I looked at closely, and listened to attentively.

This element of personal history is important because of how I would like this look to come across to you, how I hope it “hits” you if you’re willing to think about it.  Imagine knowing nothing at all about the history of the band.  Imagine being unaware of the tensions that haunt them at this point in their career, of the hesitations other members may have had about the direction that Gabriel’s vision was taking them.  Imagine being oblivious to any expectations that might have been fed by the band’s earlier work, or by Gabriel’s onstage antics.  Imagine not even knowing who these guys are at all, aside from knowing that they are an important exemplar of a newly discovered world of genre-defying beauty.

I’ve been noticing how much my entire life has been rather like this, discovering things in medias res, often experiencing them in a kind of synchronic clearing in an otherwise dense wood, with little (if any) awareness at the time of what came before, or what will come after.  As I think about this first look, a look at “packaging,” including not only the graphic design but also the whole story, the liner notes, the printed lyrics, etc., I emphasize this personal element not only to make you aware of it, but also to recommend it.

It would be tempting to think that ignorance of the whole Sitz im Leben of the album would make that first look bereft of context, and hence, lifeless.  (The first song title that jumped out at me at an affective level was “The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging.”)  Whether or not my memory of this first look is partly a function of subsequent layering-on of meaningful associations is an open question.  But what comes back to me is the way in which that packaging was so emphatically not lifeless.  Perhaps it was precisely my lack of context that allowed the packaging of the album to cast its own contextual aura.  I didn’t even have any idea what Peter Gabriel looked like, so the images of Rael on the cover gave me my first encounter with a visual figure, an embodiment that would (for a while) be the embodiment that accompanied Gabriel’s voice when I listened.

The first time I read (was absorbed by) Rael’s story, I had not yet seriously encountered the earlier work that in so many ways foreshadowed its narrative and musical gestures.  It now seems especially important to me that I was not familiar at that time with “Supper’s Ready” from Foxtrot.  My primary reference points in prog at the time were ELP and Yes, and I was still only beginning the voyage beyond the coolness of synthesizers and Mellotrons into the wonders of musical creativity that would refuse to be contained by a category.

The packaging pulsated and breathed with life.  A living context for the sounds I would hear was already radiated around me as I opened and perused, drinking in a rich trajectory for which I had some literary benchmarks (maybe most prominantly some of the science fiction and fantasy that I had read), but even those benchmarks were only vaguely understood then.  But I encountered the opening of that context without context as an invitation.  Even before I had read through the story, I think that some part of me understood that this was a tale that I could inhabit, that I could live rather than just following it like a spectator.

Yes, of course, packaging can be lifeless.  It’s tempting to say that it usually is so.  And when it is not lifeless, I cannot assure you that this is a matter of the packaging itself, as opposed to a personal, “subjective” response to it.

But I do recommend that you look.  And if you can, I recommend that you try to look for the context that the work itself radiates, by way of its packaging.

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