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The concert at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, in January 1975, appears to be the only one to have been professionally recorded among the roughly 99 shows performed by Genesis during the tour that followed the release of the album The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway.
The story of that tour is well known to the band’s fans; about this I'll just say that the setlist at each date included a full performance of the double album, punctuated by some appearances by Peter Gabriel, at the beginning and during the concert, in which he would present, always in a surreal way, the adventures of Rael narrated in the songs that were to follow.
At the end of the performance of The Lamb, one or two songs from previous albums were included as encores; in the case of the Shrine Auditorium concert, the encore was The Musical Box.
Most of the material from those recordings had already been officially released in '98 on the Archive 1967–75. In that edition, "It," the last track on the album (replaced by the studio version), the final encore of The Musical Box, and the last of Gabriel’s three spoken interludes (at the end of The Chamber of 32 Doors), in which he touches on the events narrated in the second half of the album, were missing.
The most significant flaw in that edition, however, was the heavy use of overdubs: Peter Gabriel had re-recorded most of the vocal parts in the studio, and Steve Hackett had re-recorded various guitar sections, both of them unsatisfied with their performance in the original live concert.
These choices somewhat compromised the artistic honesty of the project and its documentary and philological value.
That concert has recently been reissued inside the 50th anniversary box set of The Lamb, this time in its entirety, with It, The Musical Box, and all of Gabriel’s interludes, and above all cleaned up from many of the overdubs. Some overdubs were probably kept in order to guarantee the sound quality, but in general this new version SHOULD be a much more faithful reproduction.
Unfortunately there is no official standalone release of the concert outside of the box set, so if you want it on physical media you have to settle for bootlegs or buy the whole set. As for me, I listened to the concert via streaming, and that’ll do for now.
After a few listens I must say I don’t understand why Gabriel felt the need, in the late ‘90s, to re-record the vocal parts for the Archive 1967–75. As it is, the concert is really excellent, definitely better than the Archive version.
The vocals are very much up front and separated from the music; while on the one hand this may seem like a flaw, on the other it gives more humanity to the tale and makes the experience different from the studio album. For example, precisely because you can savor the raw grain of Gabriel’s voice, the entire ending of The Lamb really shines, including It, which I always considered a bit lackluster compared to the rest of the album (here the vocals are really beautiful).
It’s always a great journey, best experienced in its entirety.
Once, talking about The Lamb with P.P. Farina, I said that for me the album was no longer progressive rock, but already beyond, in new musical territories (here I listed it as such just because I had to pick a genre). He replied something like: “Certo che è rock progressivo, non saprei altrimenti in quale altro genere catalogarlo.”
Pier, you didn’t know how else to categorize it because there is no genre for The Lamb: it’s a black hole in Genesis’ discography and in the history of music of that era. It already contains what would come to rock music in the following years. It even contains punk, the very negation of prog.
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