LAMB ... Making of

Having been around at the time, I did NOT hear GENESIS until the album SEBTP came out ... and while there was some far out stuff in there, I did not miss a lot of it ... I already had my ANGE, VANGELIS, ALAN STIVELL, AMON DUUL 2, TANGERINE DREAM, KLAUS SCHULZE, YES, JETHRO TULL, ELP ... and so on ... and adding GENESIS was almost an after thought although I like a couple of things in it. But it did not, until TLLDOB, have the strength and innovative feeling that so many others did, and the sad thing for me, is that they tried hard to put together something like TLLDOB and then could not "finish it" and had to add a song for the radio, so people thought they were not just an artsy crafty band ... and this time, they were going around without all the costumes, which left a lot of fans weirded out, because they NEVER GOT A CHANCE to see all that stuff and the big hoopla about it ... by the time you heard of GENESIS, it was really over, and it became just a hit band with Phil Collins!

I mention the "innovative feeling" because I had been (and still AM!) into film, theater, literature and the arts in general, and the late 60's and early 70's were MASSIVE in the arts of all kind, of which the world of rock music was way too far behind, because most of the media about it, was only centered on what sold, and early GENESIS did not sell, therefore it wasn't good enough! 

The last bit of GENESIS I ever read about and saved, was the foldout (alas no tootsies!) in Melody Maker where Peter Gabriel was interviewed and he did not say a whole lot about the band, except that there were some ideological and artistic differences, and that he was hoping to go more theater/film with the whole thing, but too much of it was taken off his hands ... and then later, of course, other band members started talking about what a mess the album was ... which was their reasoning for thinking the album did not sell as much as other stuff was there was doing, and was about to be jumped on by the record company, to show that PG was not the integral part of the creativity of the band!

My thoughts at the time, were that PG wanted to go towards the other arts, and preferably into film ... but when his first solo album was just a bunch of songs, and it sold, he gave up ... he became just another rock'n'roller that thought he had more to say than you or I or anyone else, and ... that was the end of PG for me, and by the time he got to the hammer, I was gone, and not interested. Peter Hammill was my style ... not Peter Gabriel's pseudo pop! Or Genesis, for that matter!