![]() Scary with acoustic guitars, pedal steel guitars, and a piano. Guitars, drums, pianos, and the odd synthesizer here and there. But I loved it when Gabriel just had to rely on the old-fashioned instruments and musical conventions of rock and roll. Maybe it’s what people now expect of him. But maybe that has become a musical crutch for Gabriel. Starting in 1980, Gabriel started mixing the ethic world music influences of Africa into his music. ![]() ![]() The pain of loss and the pain of having everything you ever dreamed of at the same time.Īnd fourth and last, maybe it’s just because it’s Gabriel’s last rock album. You get chills when you hear it and it’s just wailing. He’s not singing any words, he’s just wailing and I’ve never heard any music before or since that makes my hair stand up like that. Near the very end of the song, Gabriel wails. But it’s Gabriel’s voice that makes the song and makes the album. So the story has a bitter/bittersweet ending. The widower used the insurance money he got to gamble at a casino. The words were taken almost straight from a newspaper story Gabriel read about a woman who jumped out of her window with her baby in her arms. There are five other great songs on Peter Gabriel but there’s no real use in describing every one of them because there is a small part on the album’s finale that is, as they say, “worth the price of admission.” The lyrics on “Home Sweet Home” are nothing special. One of his best on any record he’s appeared on, it’s underrated at worst and masterful at best. Fripp’s solo at the end of “White Shadow” blisters. “A Wonderful Day in a One-Way World” is pop reggae while “White Shadow” is one of two show-off pieces for the album’s producer and co-guitarist, Robert Fripp. Mostly just piano, acoustic guitar and McGinnis’s steel guitar, this ballad cries. “Mother of Violence” has some of the most achingly moving singing and melodies on the album. Even when he just screams “Hey!” just before the song’s chorus, you can feel Gabriel’s rage and enthusiasm. But you can hear punk in Gabriel’s voice. How unpunk sounding? Listen to Bruce Springsteen pianist Roy Bittan’s playing. “DIY” is Gabriel’s very unpunk sounding tribute to the punk ethos that prevailed in the late ’70s. Gabriel’s Mozo sounds like Ted Kaczynski to me minus the bombs and carnage. He wants everyone to know “that Mozo is here”. Mozo is lost and lonely and he’s screaming out via his microphone. Gabriel is playing the part of Mozo, a pirate radio DJ broadcasting from his amateur radio in a cabin by the river. “On the Air” blows up with Who-like guitar from Sid McGinnis while glistening synth bells from Larry Fast tinkle in the background. They are all boiled down versions of white noise, red heat, purple funk, and colorless loss. If the back of the album doesn’t represent violence, it must represent pain. I can’t see his face but it looks like his body’s contortion stems from some sort of attack. He’s hunched over, and he’s stepping forward with his left foot and dragging his right one. Gabriel has his back to the camera and he’s hunched over. He’s on an urban street somewhere - a street lined with fences, puddles of water and mounds of snow. Gabriel, dressed in faded jeans, rain boots, and a dark pea or raincoat, is hunched over. It must represent violence because it still scares me when I look at today almost 20 years later. ![]() The back of the album represents violence. ![]() And you can see a day or so’s growth of hair on his face too. It’s a thick buster brown - just short enough to look right with the windbreaker and the golf shirt but long enough to show people that it’s still 1978. It’s a black and white photograph featuring a semi-preppy looking Gabriel (in a golf shirt covered by a London Fog/Lacoste-style windbreaker) bending his fingers and scratching jagged edges of white from the top of the cover to the bottom. And his choice of musicians and producer. But that fact does not explain why Peter Gabriel is still my favorite album of all time. (But before the mega platinum success of 1986’s So.) Since Peter Gabriel was my first taste of the man’s music, that might partly explain why it remains my favorite of all his stuff. I climbed aboard the Gabriel bandwagon kind of late. The year I bought it from a Record Bar in the mall near my house must have been 1984. Gabriel’s second solo album (titled Peter Gabriel just like his 1977 debut and the two that followed in 19) was the first album I ever bought by the former Genesis lead vocalist. His voice never sounded so confident, so triumphant, so full of sex and violence. I’m sure his voice never sounded darker or more naturally menacing before or after. Peter Gabriel was only 28 when he recorded his second solo album. ![]()
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