Genesis, "Genesis Live" (Charisma, 1973)

When record companies started jazzing up the appearance of LP labels in the late '60s and early '70s, some came up with very distinctive designs.

One of the more memorable was Warner Bros.' pastoral palm-tree-lined street motif, reminiscent of the industry giant's headquarters in Burbank, Calif. Another eye-opener was used for Swan Song, the custom Led Zeppelin label; you'll remember it as the winged man based on the painting "Evening, Fall of Day" by 19th-century artist William Rimmer.

Among my favorites was the design used by the Famous Charisma Label, featuring the Mad Hatter bursting into song for the benefit of Alice's rabbit. U.K.-based Charisma Records had a decidedly British roster of artists, including Van der Graaf Generator and its lead singer, Peter Hammill, as a solo artist, along with Monty Python's Flying Circus for comic relief.

Also from Merry Old England was a band that, as of 1973, had gained a decent following on its home country but was basically anonymous over here. The group released a live album that year, and it turned out to be the last LP issued by Charisma through its U.S. distribution deal with Buddah Records. (Buddah, which rode the "bubble-gum" wave of the late '60s, was pretty much ready to call it quits by then.)

When record companies went under in those days, their inventory would end up at reduced prices in the cutout bin, next to LPs that had far more copies printed than folks who were interested in buying them. The classic example of the latter was Casablanca's miscalculation of the demand for solo albums by each of the four members of Kiss in 1978; you still could find those things in cutout bins right up to the CD era.

So around 1976, a kid with a couple of bucks (like me!) could buy a sealed Charisma copy of "Genesis Live," the fifth album by the then-quintet and the third to feature a drummer named Phil Collins.

For fans who are familiar with Genesis' latter-day concert material ("Three Sides Live," "The Way We Walk"), "Genesis Live" sounds very little like the hybrid pop-rock vehicle Collins fronted to superstardom. The '73 release was the work of Peter Gabriel's band, featuring just five extended song-suites over the two sides of the LP.

The material draws mainly from the prior two Genesis albums, "Nursery Cryme" and the U.K. commercial breakthrough "Foxtrot," featuring a sound driven by Tony Banks' keyboards and Gabriel's distinctive vocals. Steve Hackett's guitar playing is exceptional, although he shies away from overwhelming the music, instead focusing on weaving low-key melodies using a sustained, atmospheric tone.

The songs - all of which clock in at eight minutes or longer - definitely belong to the progressive rock genre, although they're far less bombastic than some of the material along those lines to emerge at the time. "Genesis Live," however, doesn't include the epic "Supper's Ready," the 20-plus-minute anchor of "Foxtrot." (The extended composition did appear in full-length form on the live post-Gabriel album "Seconds Out.")

The high point of "Genesis Live" is "The Musical Box," a song that plays as a lullaby turned nightmare, alternating quiet sections with ones that must have been ear-splitters in concert, as Hackett steps out of the box to thrash away over Banks' monster organ chords. The live version is superior to the studio take on "Nursery Cryme," at least as far as the performance; unfortunately, "Genesis Live" suffers from some sonic limitations in the recording and/or mastering process, and the general sound is unfortunately muddy.

But that shouldn't detract listeners from exploring a vital chapter in the long history of what's become one of the world's better-known bands.

Just don't look for it in the cutout bin these days.