The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway

It is early morning in Manhattan and, as the city awakens, Rael, a young bum, comes out of the subway where he painted the letters R-A-E-L. Amid the low-life activities of the city, a lamb lies down in the middle of Broadway street.

François Couture (pictured) deserves major props for reasons other than his name and facial hair, though there's no denying the two work quite well together for a French-Canadian musicologist. He's your man if you want to bone up on some free improv but what impresses me most in his AllMusic arsenal is the scrupulous song-by-song examination (annoyingly you have to click on each one) of Genesis's The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, a high-concept story about the darkly ethereal journey of Rael played out in the ever daunting double-album rock opera format. I get the feeling François spent a year in college (maybe all four) listening to it everyday and wrote a thesis paper which he was able to re-purpose years later for AllMusic. Dude gets an A+. If you want even more obsessive analysis of TLLDOB, look at this monumental body of work.

Okay, so what was rock's first double-album? Dylan's Blonde On Blonde beat Zappa's Freak Out! by about two months in 1966. Not too surprising, François also gives the Zappa debut a similar exhaustive treatment and if you ever wondered where Pavement got the Wowee Zowee album name (and spirit) from, the answer is in one of the aforementioned links.