Celebrating Peter Gabriel on his 74th birthday. —Ed.
When Peter Gabriel split Genesis to venture out on his own in 1975, his first solo album was 1977’s eponymous Peter Gabriel. In hindsight, he would judge it overproduced. But artists rarely prove the best judges of their own work. Come the end of his life Picasso would say, “What’s with the weird faces? Nobody looks like that.” Or maybe it was me who said that.
Gabriel featured an odd cast of characters. Gabriel brought King Crimson and art rock guitarist Robert Fripp and synthesizer innovator Larry Fast on board, while producer Bob Ezrin—best known for his work with Alice Cooper–lassoed Cooper guitarists Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, as well as bass player Tony Levin. Art rock met lowbrow shock metal on Gabriel, and it was Ezrin’s responsibility to make it work.
And he did, for the most part. One of the LP’s songs sounds like it crept in through a studio side door and bribed its way onto the record. But overproduced or not—and I fall into the camp that believes it isn’t—Gabriel is a powerful piece of work, and a move in the right direction by a guy who, come the punk revolution, would later say, “prancing around in fairyland was rapidly becoming obsolete.”
By “prancing” he might have been referring to Jethro Tull, or his band Genesis for that matter. At the close of each show of the live tour promoting 1975’s The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Gabriel would appear on stage in a ridiculous yellow body sock festooned with buboes that made him look like a day-glo leper. Prancing? More like dada gone horribly, horribly wrong.
The best of the LP’s songs is the one you occasionally hear on FM radio, “Solsbury Hill.” The song’s deceptively simple bounce, Gabriel’s flute, and Wagner’s power chords at song’s close are all great, but what truly makes the song is its aura of mystery—where, one wonders, is home, and who is taking Gabriel there? There’s no doubt the great “Here Comes the Flood” borders on overproduced—the London Symphony Orchestra guarantees that—but it goes with the apocalyptic chorus and opening lines that draw you right in: ”When the night shows/The signals grow on radios/All the strange things/They come and go, as early warnings.”
The lyrics of “Slowburn” may be cryptic, but not so its fast-paced hard rock meets Genesis feel; “Humdrum” opens on a hushed, late night note, evolves briefly into some sort of exotic Caribbean dance music, then opens up to one of the biggest and loveliest passages Gabriel would ever compose. I could do without the Caribbean vibe—but I’ll forgive the song anything for those brief moments of transcendence.
“Moribund the Burgermeister”—in which a town goes mad and the burgermeister, in a guttural voice says “”I will find out” the cause of the mass insanity—throws power chords, symphonic overkill, and a dynamite chorus your way. It’s a curious choice as album opener, but there’s no denying its oddball charm.
I love the way Fripp’s extended solo puts paid to the lounge piano/ vaudeville hybrid “Waiting for the Big One” more than I love the song itself. Fripp avoids the limelight for the most part on Gabriel, and it’s nice to hear him take a well-deserved solo turn. “Modern Love” is the most conventional song on the LP, both musically and lyrically. The guitar riff is brutal, the keyboard line is sustained throughout, and an impassioned Gabriel shows no signs of his habitual British reserve. This one was straightforward enough to release as a single, but Charisma Records obviously didn’t agree.
“Down the Dolce Vita” opens with the London Symphony Orchestra going all out, then the band breaks into some speed disco punctuated by orchestral bursts and a slow passage. The song’s frequent stylistic shifts and relative complexity prove you can take the man out of prog but you can’t take the prog out of the man, but Gabriel would come to avoid such excesses as time went on.
As for the barbershop quartet turned Broadway show number “Excuse Me,” I can’t for the life of me figure out what it’s doing on Gabriel. Who puts what amounts to a novelty song on a deadly serious LP? “Excuse Me” would have made a great B-Side for the LP’s only single, “Solsbury Hill,” but on Gabriel its as out of place as Edgar Winter in the Ohio Players.
I would hardly call Peter Gabriel a prophet, but he was a smart guy who knew which way the wind was blowing, and that was well away from progressive rock, which was already in its death knell. But while Yes and his old band Genesis slowly moved in the direction of the vapid pop mainstream, Gabriel set his sights on an art-tinged but still accessible rock that won him critical plaudits rather than contempt. Never again would Gabriel take the stage looking like a minor character from The Fifth Element. Instead he took a sledgehammer to his past, set his sights on the future, and never stepped foot in Asia.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
