Genesis- The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway 50th- Phil Collins, Mike Rutherford

It was mid-November 1974 when progressive rock band Genesis let livestock loose on The Great White Way with the ambitious The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. The lead singer Peter Gabriel was employing performance art in Genesis concerts long before anyone had even coined the term. But when asked if everyone else in the band encouraged the riveting, bizarre costumes and make-up worn by Gabriel, Mike Rutherford admitted, “Had Peter run it by us, we probably would have said ‘No.’ Peter had the brains to actually realize, ‘Don’t tell them what I’m doing, just DO it.’ And it worked that way, otherwise we would have vetoed most of his things, knowing us!”

The sublime Genesis album Selling England by the Pound was the bridge to the storied swan song of the Peter Gabriel era, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. Released in Autumn 1973,  Selling England by the Pound was, like so much of progressive rock, music conceived of low-angle sun and long shadows. There are several revelations in this Genesis classic rock interview  with band members Phil Collins and Mike Rutherford, specifically about the initial five Genesis studio albums including  1972′ s Foxtrot,  Selling England by the Pound   the following year, and the dense, conceptual  The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway,  all at a time when the charismatic Peter Gabriel was fronting the English progressive rock quintet. Fifty years ago rock music’s live conventions simply were not equipped technically to pull off the multi-media visions of Pete Townshend’s Quadrophenia or Peter Gabriel’s concept opus for Genesis, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. When the technology to realize some of these fantastic concert effects was later invented and implemented initially on Pink Floyd’s The Wall tour at the dawn of the Eighties, the special effects were so expensive, and concert ticket pricing so baked in then, that the tour was a financial disaster and had to be terminated early.

Rutherford confesses that the first Genesis personnel departure, that of his Charter House prep school chum guitarist Anthony “Ant” Phillips, was actually the hardest of all of the  subsequent defections which would later occur in the band’s  fifty year run. Still, Phil Collins grudgingly admits to being somewhat annoyed at  having to defend, even now, the wisdom in the Genesis evolution of a band whose members have sold collectively upwards of 130 million records and still stayed together longer than  practically all of their peers.

Some longtime Genesis fans of the original band retain mixed emotions regarding The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway: at least creatively, Peter Gabriel may have out-kicked his coverage much in the same way that some Styx fans and critics would feel about Dennis DeYoung’s ahead-of-its-time Kilroy Was Here ten years later. But in the case of Genesis, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway‘s creative peak turned out to be Peter Gabriel’s swan song, as the brilliant front man announced that he would be exiting the progressive rockers at the conclusion of the tour, leaving the future of the Charterhouse boys very much in doubt then. Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks, and Phil Collins are my guests In the Studio for the fiftieth anniversary of one of the pillars of Progressive Rock, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, as Genesis loose livestock on The Great White Way and Mike chronicles the first distinct era of Genesis 1970-75 in part one of our look into the Genesis R-Kive  three-disc anthology companion to the BBC/ Showtime documentary Genesis: Sum of the Parts.  And be sure to listen to part two here. -Redbeard