A school friend passed it on for me to tape and I listened to it, pondering the bizarre images on the Hipgnosis sleeve and read Peter Gabriel's short story version in the gatefold and found it intriguing enough to make a slightly edited C-90. I left out the Eno collaboration The Waiting Room as it scared the hell out of me. And then I'd listen to the first side of the tape until a month or two and taped over it with something from the radio. Not the fairest of receptions but my most played album from this time was still Never Mind the Bollocks. Anyway ...
If you are unfamiliar with the record, it's a rock opera along the lines of The Who's Tommy or Quadrophenia or the Kinks early '70s concept albums. Genesis had already done side-long tracks made of discrete musical sections that formed whole narratives but this was a long and complex story over four sides of vinyl. The band worked on the music while singer and chief lyricist Peter Gabriel wrote the words and then a version of the story in prose for the album gatefold sleeve.
So, what's the story? Rael, young Manhattan tough guy, has a weird epiphany of seeing the thing in the title, a lamb lying down on the Great White Way. It plunges him into an unreal world in which he encounters caves, assembly lines with humans as the products, sex instruction, human/serpent hybrids, a colony of sex-repressed castrated mutants and so on, all the while pursuing his brother John and leading to a big revelation that is either bleeding obvious or baffling. There's a lot more detail to it than that but, like most rock operas, most of the narrative dots joined only in the mind of the lyricist and left off the musical work itself.
A lot of this gets weird and yucky and can be traced beyond Gabriel's own imagination to one of the things that zapped it: Allejandro Jodorowski's surrealist mythic western El Topo. Gabriel saw this fresh in the early '70s and came away with a ton of wow, determined to make a similarly potent statement in his own idiom.
So, how did he do? Pretty well up to the end of side two. After that, the ideas thin out and the music loses a lot of its shape before a big finale saves the day. Kind of. Gabriel and his wife had a lot to deal with on the troubling experience of the birth of his first child. You can look that one up. Also, famed director William Friedkin, fresh from extraordinary success with The Exorcist, wanted to write a movie with him. After the promising start on Lamb, Gabriel was torn away from the task for a crucial time as the band got down to writing the music, forbidden to write lyrics themselves (which ban they had eventually to violate to finish the damn thing).
So, after all that, how's the music? Really good, as it happens. From the forward charge of the title track, through some crafty surrealistic imagery and a good band at their best, the sense that something rich and strange is unfolding before running low on power and going weird and cute when it should be still powering.
There is too much here to go track by track and some of it is transitional instrumentals. The opening piano figure is a harker to the band's 20th century orchestral music but the rocking body of the opening song is a look ahead. When the band choose against their old style wasteful noodling and concentrate on the purpose of each song, they triumph. The big surging wave of Fly on a Windshield is magnificent. The Carpet Crawlers is an ethereal joy. Then again, the goofy guitar solo in Counting out Time is as embarrassing as all jokes attempted by prog rockers. The closing track which is a kind of celebration of the universality in the individual is so perky and obnoxious it sounds like a game show theme.
It's when the band find newer expressions like the odd time and queasy heaviness of the keyboard riff of Back in NYC with its robot voices and dark lyrics that we can see and hear them progressing beyond the pastoral, satirical, mythical concerns of their career to this point. This is about the alienness of a single mind and the often disturbing landscapes it conjures. For the first time, their musical virtuosity takes a back seat to the drama of the concept. Except when it doesn't and, without direction, they fall back into the old wheedling improv. That's why this can never be a perfect album, despite its impressive highlights.
The tour that followed was hampered by the kind of staging with film effects and complicated costumes that might have deserved a place in a contemporary Spinal Tap movie. For this and a book's worth of reasons, Peter Gabriel hung up his fox mask and fled, forming a solo career after a few years' rest to found a career that took him as high as that of the band he'd left behind.
That band went increasingly into the centre of the mainstream, shedding members to other careers or time out for solo projects, and doing a lot of the ruling of the middle with increasingly flavourless pop music. Complicating everything, new vocalist and incumbent drummer Phil Collins started his own solo career while remaining in the band. Everyone was having success and a happy ever after.
That's kind of the problem, though. All the prog rockers turned into standard radio rotation versions of what they'd been. However tiresome I found them, they had begun in the spirit of exploration and taken that to various peaks. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway was one such but its peak concealed the sheer drop on the other side and when things changed they did what everyone else did and churned out the kind of hits that Patrick Bateman eulogised in American Psycho. See also The Wall, a few years later. There's no compelling Pink Floyd after it.
What-ifs are as futile as single disc track listings of The White Album. What would Genesis have made of Games Without Frontiers what would Gabriel have added to '80s Genesis? With Lamb we see what a band of fine players and solid compositional minds could do to make themselves more interesting. But life got in the way. Punching the clock felt a lot easier. So it should, maybe.
Listening notes: I chose the legit hi res download from an online shop. There's an issue with this, though. There are several effects that were on the original pressings that must have been added at mastering as they are no longer in evidence in subsequent releases. You can seek these out on YouTube - significantly Back in NYC, The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging, and The Colony of Slippermen - which is worth doing if you are interested in the record. Or you could hunt down an original vinyl copy, assuming you can afford to.
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