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Trivia / The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

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  • Accent Depundent: The lines "it is real/it is Rael" in "it." is built around the heavily Anglicized pronunciation of Rael's name that Peter Gabriel uses throughout the album (ɹeɪl, identically to "rail"; the proper Spanish pronunciation is ɹäe̞l).
  • Better Export for You: Most CD releases prior to the 2007 remaster feature an indexing error that results in most of "Broadway Melody of 1974" being sequenced as part of "Fly on a Windshield". However, Atco Records were briefly able to correct the error for later CD releases in the US and Canada prior to the Definitive Edition remasters, which feature the error in all regions.
  • Channel Hop: In the US, this marked Genesis' first release on Atco Records after several albums that were distributed by Charisma Records on both sides of the Pond. Atco's parent label, Atlantic Records, had previously been Charisma's Stateside distributor for the past year. The Atco deal would last for the remainder of Steve Hackett's tenure with the band.
  • Fake American: A half-Puerto Rican street kid from New York City would be unlikely to refer to money as "notes and coins". But he does anyway in "The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging". And in the next song ("Back in N.Y.C.") he says "progressive hypocrites" instead of "liberal hypocrites" — "progressive" wasn't the common term in America at the time.
    • At least he got trucks and gas stations right. Any reference to "lorries" or "filling stations" would have raised a red flag.
  • Market-Based Title: The US release of the album respectively retitles "Carpet Crawlers" and "Here Comes the Supernatural Anaesthetist" to "The Carpet Crawlers" (which was also the title it got on its single release) and "The Supernatural Anaesthetist".
  • Multi-Disc Work: Most releases of the album are across two discs. Cassette releases initially came on two tapes as well, but technological improvements allowed reissues from 1977 onward to store the full 94 minutes on one tape, with each side storing a full disc (albeit with the tracklist slightly adjusted). US 8-track releases additionally managed to store the entire album on one tape from the outset.
  • Referenced by...: Jeff Buckley recorded a Cover Version of "Back in N.Y.C." for his second album, posthumously released as Sketches for My Sweetheart the Drunk.
  • Refitted for Sequel: Two songs that the band developed early in their career but never released, "Frustration" and "The Light", were respectively reworked for this album as "Anyway" and "Lillywhite Lilith".
  • Sequel First: Due to a late injury to Steve Hackett during rehearsals and the necessary switching of venue dates that followed, the American leg of the The Lamb Lies Down On Broadway tour was scheduled to happen before the album itself had even been released in the US. The band ended up playing the entirety of the album to audiences who hadn't heard it yet and certainly weren't expecting anything like that.
  • Troubled Production: Let's see...
    • For starters, Peter Gabriel insisted on writing all of the lyrics himself, feeling that a consistent story would be necessary. At the time, his marriage was in trouble and his newborn daughter was in an incubator. This led to most of the music being written in his absence by the rest of the band.
    • The location of the recording, Mick Jagger's Stargroves mansion, which was often a favorite recording location for Led Zeppelin, turned out be be rundown. The place was infested by rats, and the band members believed that it was haunted. The group had very little sleep as a result, and what was supposed to be a way of solidifying group unity actually led to stress and strain for the band.
    • The band argued over the music and lyrics. The other members of the band would occasionally tweak Gabriel's lyrics to better fit their music, and Gabriel wrote several songs on his own (to bridge already-written sections) without the rest of the band's input (one of them, "The Carpet Crawlers", would be a live staple for the post-Gabriel band). Gabriel also ran into writer's block with "The Light Lies Down On Broadway", leaving Tony Banks and Michael Rutherford to write both music and lyrics.
    • In the middle of the album sessions, Gabriel received an offer to work with William Friedkin on a movie screenplay, and couldn't see why the rest of the band thought leaving in the middle of an album session might be a bad thing. When the others found out, they told their manager Tony Smith, who had to call Friedkin and get him to back off, which led to discontent on Gabriel's part. Gabriel made it clear he was leaving the band, although he stayed to do the live tour. The film project never came to pass because of that.
    • Due to stress from being creatively sidelined on the album and his own failing marriage, Steve Hackett snapped a wine glass in his hand during rehearsals, injuring tendons in his thumb and delaying the start of the tour. After some juggling of venue dates, this meant the first leg of the tour was to be in America, where the album hadn't been released yet. Ticket sales went "meh." Hackett would record his first solo album (Voyage Of The Acolyte) shortly after the tour, and would leave the band three years later, in 1977.
      • Hackett mentioned in an article for Prog magazine (made by the publishers of Classic Rock) that what triggered the wineglass accident was what someone said at a backstage party Hackett went to after a Sensational Alex Harvey Band concert. They said, "The band is good, but they'd be nothing without Alex Harvey". The remark frustrated Steve as that's what critics were beginning to say about Genesis with the news of Peter Gabriel's impending departure.
    • The live show was troubled by faulty equipment (including the slides meant to visually display the story). The band performed the entire double album, and only performed older, more recognized material in encores. Gabriel eschewed his trademark costumes for most of the show, and when he donned them for the second half, the overly elaborate designs prevented him from getting a microphone near his mouth, rendering the lyrics incomprehensible.
    • In the end, the album tanked on the charts, was savaged by critics and fans alike, and the band lost their ass on the tour, as well as their lead singer, nearly causing a break-up. For obvious reasons, almost all the members of the band looked back on it poorly for many years, only beginning to warm up to it much later when they could put the stress of creating it behind them. (As a sort of belated consolation, the album did eventually go gold and became a cult classic among progressive rock fans.)
  • The Walrus Was Paul: The plot summary in the liner notes flat-out admits that the titular lamb is completely meaningless; it just exists to exist.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Mike Rutherford reportedly suggested the idea of writing a Concept Album based on Antoine de Saint-Exupery's novel The Little Prince, but Peter Gabriel wanted to use a grittier, less fantasy-tinged, more American concept (ironically after an album that bemoaned the Americanization of Britain). The bookend song-cycles of Genesis' 1980 album Duke touch on some concepts similar to The Little Prince. The artwork for that album also resembles the illustrations for the book.
    • At one point, the band considered having the album Divided for Publication, releasing the second half six months after the first. Gabriel worried that a 94-minute double-LP would be far too dense of a product, and believed that this alternative pattern would give him more time to refine the second half's lyrics. Ultimately however, the full collection of material was released all at once, with Mike Rutherford and Tony Banks writing the lyrics to "The Light Lies Down on Broadway" to fill in for a writer's block-addled Gabriel.
  • Working Title:
    • "The Waiting Room" was originally called "Evil Jam".
    • "Silent Sorrow in Empty Boats" was first developed under the name "Victory at Sea".

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