1974 is the last year of progressive rock's golden age. Having reached something of the limit of the form in 1973, at least commercially and critically, with Yes's Tales from Topographic Oceans, the genre then began to fracture, morph, and then break apart entirely. Legendary keyboardist Rick Wakeman left Yes [1], and the group went into creative free fall; after their 1973 album, A Passion Play, Jethro Tull left the genre in favor of returning to its hard-rock roots; The Moody Blues had already been on hiatus since the release of 1972's Seventh Sojourn; King Crimson, the progressive granddaddy of them all, already in its second stable lineup, released both Starless and Bible Black and Red in 1974 and then promptly dissolved.
Progressive rock, facing increasing ridicule from critics and seeming unsure of where to go after having conquered the entire length of an LP side [2], made one final confused and desperate shudder in 1974 as if suddenly stricken with a debilitating disease. It was a year of inter-band bickering, lineup changes, and creative frustration, and the genre would barely survive it all. And no album better encapsulates the atmosphere of this period better than Genesis's masterwork, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
The story of Genesis is the story of progressive rock's first wave. Forming in the psychedelic flush of British 1967, the band began as most progressive rock bands did who didn't already have blues rock connections, as a mildly experimental folk-rock group looking to follow up on the expansive studio technique and adventurous song composition promised by 1967's crop. Each successive album, beginning with their 1969 debut, From Genesis to Revelation (get it?), and continuing on through their 1970 and 1971 releases, showed Genesis experimenting with lengthier song structures and increasingly arch compositions until, in '72 and '73, they established themselves as a major voice at rock's vanguard with the 23-minute opus "Supper's Ready" (off the 1972 album Foxtrot) and the ambitious, political concept album Selling England by the Pound (1973). Insert different album names, and this same formula can work for any number of proggers. Genesis is, in a way, the archetypal progressive rock band, and that's part of what makes them interesting to examine as they enter progressive rock's troubled mid-'70s years.
They are also interesting because of one band member in particular: Peter Gabriel. Yes, that Peter Gabriel. That Peter Gabriel. That Peter Gabriel. Lead singer and prolific songwriter Peter Gabriel had been a constant and vital member of Genesis for years by the time 1974 rolled around—in fact, he founded the band with schoolmates Tony Banks, Mike Rutherford, Anthony Phillips (who left the band in 1970), and Chris Stewart (who left the band even earlier [3]). And when it was time for the band to write their followup to Selling England by the Pound, it was he who suggested the concept that would eventually become the laborious and twisty rock opera The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
Gabriel's idea was this: a double album about a half Puerto Rican boy named Rael as he wanders through a surreal and Jungian New York City as he explores his own ethnic and sexual identity within the crass and commercial world of modern-day America. Also, he may or may not have a split personality [4]. And that's more or less how the album turned out: a sprawling double LP dense with mythological, literary, and pop culture allusions, satire, allegory, and political commentary. It's a little convoluted, but it's also ridiculously effective; fiercely clever and sonically inventive while also maintaining a strong melodic through line, it's the progressive rock idealized into everything the genre claimed it wanted to be. And at 94 minutes, 13 minutes longer than Tales from Topographic Oceans, it represents the largest and most ambitious work of progressive rock's first age.
The funny thing is, this wasn't what the band's sixth album was supposed to be. Mike Rutherford had originally wanted to do an album adaptation of the children's fantasy The Little Prince, an idea that feels very much at home within prog's reputation as a haven for fantasy, outer space, and the various other proclivities of precocious British schoolchildren. And it seemed like the band was on-board, save for one particularly adamant member. Peter Gabriel hated the idea. According to Robin Platts's retrospective of the band, Genesis: Inside & Out (1967-2000), Gabriel insisted that "prancing around in fairyland was rapidly becoming obsolete," perhaps in reference to Selling England by the Pound (a complex analysis of British national identity, but also admittedly home to lyrics about knights and ladies and Neptune). And that's the primary word here: "obsolete." It's in that word that you can see the forces that twisted damaging cracks throughout the progressive rock.
Gabriel is a futurist, an experimenter, one whose main ambition in music is to expand its boundaries, to find new sounds [5] and structures and craft them into compelling and often political works of art [6]. There was at least one of these figures in most of the prominent prog groups, most notably Robert Fripp in King Crimson and Roger Waters in Pink Floyd [7]: dyspeptic and intellectual gentlemen with idealized and inquisitive visions. This worked out relatively well for Fripp, who had (and still has, even today) nearly totalitarian control over King Crimson, but it spells trouble for a more democratic band—Waters's increased wrestling of control from his band mates throughout the '70s culminated not just in the climactic releases of the almost auteurist The Wall and The Final Cut but also the dissolution of Pink Floyd. Peter Gabriel faced some of those same struggles in Genesis, and in doing so, his vision for The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway reveals a central tension within progressive rock. Rutherford and, presumably, the rest of the band pushed back against the abstractions of Gabriel's concept and especially the directing role he took over the entire project. While much of the strife during Lamb's production lies in Gabriel's power struggle, the album's background also reveals a fissure in progressive rock that formed in many bands around this time: that between the vision of progressive rock as some form of grandiose pop and the idea of full-on experimentation. I've written about this divide before, but it's no more important to prog's history than here, when the conflict comes to a head again and again in a variety of bands during the tense 1974-75 years.
The non-Gabriel parts of Genesis were certainly not opposed to experimentation and forward-thinking (their previous, more egalitarian records prove as much), but their particular version of the band's ambitions resided not so much in the avant-garde that Gabriel occupied and more within the whimsical melodics of, say, Selling England by the Pound, an album that sounds very different from the hard-hitting, nervy compositions and ambient interludes of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway [8]. This became even clearer after the album's completion, when Gabriel left the band, and each party could go further down their respective paths; in his solo material, Peter Gabriel continued to explore a grounded, real-world avant-garde, releasing several albums of experimental pop that don't really sound all that experimental anymore because they became so influential, while the remains of Genesis soldiered on, producing several more albums full of whimsical fantasy before, following the departure of guitarist Steve Hackett, essentially becoming a mainstream pop act in the '80s.
Arguably, Genesis's retreat from progressive rock may have happened anyway, even without something as divisive as The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. There are indications that the band was already finding the prog tropes they had helped innovate to be restricting: Selling England by the Pound's "Dancing with the Moonlit Knight" and "Cinema Show" were originally conceived as a side-long opus in the vein of so many prog albums at the time, but Genesis ultimately decided to chop it into two separate tracks on different sides of the LP. The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway shows even more weariness with progressive rock's expectations: even disregarding the clearly more-Bowie/Townsend-than-prog interests of the album's lyrics, the record shows a continued winnowing down of lengthy compositions. Each side of the album forms a suite of continuous sound, but it's clear that these are supposed to be separate tracks and not merely movements within a larger symphony. The longest song on the album is only 8:16, positively sprightly for peak prog, and the majority of the tracks fall below 5 minutes. Genesis seemed to have realized before everyone else that the bigger-and-bigger model for prog innovation was only good for so long. But the question of where to take prog once size was no longer the primary directive split the band between its experimental and whimsical factions.
The same thing happened throughout prog. Aside from the aforementioned Crimson and Floyd sagas, there's also Yes, which, in sort of the mirror image of Genesis, jettisoned its whimsicist Rick Wakeman (whose solo albums include Journey to the Center of the Earth and The Myths and Legends of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table) before going hard-nosed into jazz-fusion territory on 1974's Relayer. And that's to say nothing of their '80s flirtation with synth pop, which put the band back firmly in Genesis's trajectory.
And so, one by one, each of the progressive rock mainstay acts either fell apart or transformed into something else entirely as they each tried to answer the same questions that Genesis wrestled with on Lamb: mainly, what does a genre whose entire identity is based on progress go once it's reached the location it set out to find? And with a startling speed, progressive rock imploded over just a few short years.
But of course that isn't the end of the story, and in the next few entries of Prog Progress, I'll explore what some of the lither bands were able to do at prog's margins as the rest of the genre crumbled around them.
Until 1975!
1] He apparently hated playing Tales, so much so that at one show on the band's 1973-74 tour, he reportedly sat down and ate a curry onstage in protest
2] Or four LP sides, in the case of Tales from Topographic Oceans
3] Eventually to be replaced by Phil Collins—yes, that Phil Collins
4] The album is clearly drawing heavily from The Who's Tommy and especially Quadrophenia—often recognized as punk godfathers, The Who don't get nearly enough credit as progressive rock influencers
5] The liner notes on The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway credit Gabriel with, in addition to lead vocals and flute, "varied instruments" and "experiments with foreign sounds," if that says anything
6] At least at this point in the '70s—this gets a little hazy if we include his more recent twilight-years output
7] Although Waters was much less a formal experimenter than Fripp or Gabriel (and Pink Floyd's status as a progressive rock band is a topic of some contention anyway, one to explore in a future blog post, I think)
8] Speaking of ambient, Brian Eno provided additional sounds to two tracks on the record
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