Genesis Ch.1 V.32

You are locked in with the Zoo Crew on THE ZOO, the station that still believes an album side should end like a curtain coming down, not a phone lighting up. What you just rode out is “Genesis Ch.1 V.32,” the closer on I Robot, the 1977 record that put The Alan Parsons Project on the map for keeps. No lead singer stepping to the mic. No chorus you can shout back. Just keyboards, guitars, a rhythm section that knows when to lean in, and the New Philharmonia Chorus arriving like a verdict. If you came in late, that is the whole idea of this one. It is the last page of a book that never quite says the word robot out loud.

I Robot landed in the summer of 1977, the Project’s second album and the first under the Arista deal Clive Davis cut after Tales of Mystery and Imagination had already shown what Alan Parsons and Eric Woolfson could do in a room at Abbey Road. The working notion had been Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot stories. Woolfson talked with Asimov, and the writer liked the idea. The rights were already tied up elsewhere, so the comma came off the title and the theme opened out into something wider: people building machines, machines starting to look back, and the uneasy question of who ends up in charge. The record hit the racks around the same stretch of calendar that put Star Wars and Close Encounters in the theaters. Nobody planned that collision. It just made a sleek, silver-toned English studio album feel like it had been waiting for the decade to catch up.

The sleeve did its own talking. Hipgnosis, Storm Thorgerson’s shop, shot the cover on the escalator tubes inside Terminal 1 at Charles de Gaulle outside Paris. Woolfson had seen those futuristic walkways and thought they looked like a machine that had already swallowed the building. The photo went up without the airport’s blessing, which is about as rock and roll as a choir arrangement gets. That atom-headed figure on the front is still the picture most people flash on when somebody says Alan Parsons Project, even if the band was never a band in the usual sense.

Here is the short version of who they were. Alan Parsons came up inside Abbey Road as a tape op and then an engineer, the kid in the room for late Beatles sessions and the man who engineered Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon. Grammy nomination for that one. Production work followed for Pilot, Al Stewart’s Year of the Cat, Ambrosia. Eric Woolfson was the Scottish songwriter and manager who walked in with a stack of songs and a head full of concepts. Together they built a studio entity, not a road gang. Ten albums between 1976 and 1987, players and singers hired for the track in front of them, Andrew Powell writing the orchestra and choir charts that gave the records their cathedral ceiling. Woolfson died on December 2, 2009, at 64. Parsons has carried the live book ever since with the Alan Parsons Live Project. The catalog still moves. The official count sits north of 50 million albums.

I Robot was cut at Abbey Road from December 1976 into March 1977, Parsons producing and engineering, Woolfson in as executive producer and principal writer. The core of the playing on this closer is the old Pilot line that became the Project’s house band: Ian Bairnson on electric and acoustic guitar, David Paton on bass and acoustic, Stuart Tosh on drums. Duncan Mackay and Woolfson handle the keyboards. Backing voices are Tony Rivers, John Perry, and Stuart Calver, the kind of session blend that can sound like one instrument if you stack it right. Bob Howes is choirmaster for the New Philharmonia Chorus. Powell arranges and conducts the orchestra and the choir. The track times out around three and a half minutes. On the original running order it sits right after “Total Eclipse,” Powell’s own choral piece with the English Chorale, so side two does not end so much as it lifts.

The title is the joke and the thesis at the same time. Chapter 1 of Genesis runs 31 verses. The last of them has the work finished, humankind set over the earth, and the verdict that it was very good. There is no verse 32. Woolfson and Parsons wrote one anyway, and left the words off. If creation had kept going one more line, the argument goes, that line would have been the robot, made in our image the way the old story says we were made in another. The album’s sleeve note points the same direction: the rise of the machine and the decline of man, which paradoxically began with the invention of the wheel, and a warning that our brief grip on the planet may end because man created robot in his own image. You do not need the note to hear it. The piece opens measured, almost polite, then the guitars and the choir start arguing about who owns the last chord. It is prog only in the sense that nobody told them a rock record could not close with a chorus that used to sing Handel.

A few more pins for the map. “Some Other Time,” earlier on the same album, took its title from a brush-off. Parsons had asked Paul McCartney to read a line of Poe for the first Project record, payback for a favor, and McCartney said some other time. The phrase stuck and became a song, sung in split duty by Peter Straker on the verses and Jaki Whitren on the chorus, close enough that a lot of listeners still think it is one voice. “I Wouldn’t Want to Be Like You,” with Lenny Zakatek up front, was the single that carried the album onto American radio. Allan Clarke of the Hollies sang “Breakdown.” Steve Harley took “The Voice.” Jack Harris handled “Day After Day (The Show Must Go On).” That rotating cast is the Project method in one paragraph: no fixed frontman, just the right throat for the lyric. I Robot became the band’s first big American chart album, a Top 10 on the Billboard 200, platinum, and the template for everything that followed through Eye in the Sky.

Bairnson’s guitar on this closer is worth sitting with. He was never the flash name on the marquee, but he played every Project album, and when Parsons finally took the music on the road in the mid-1990s, Bairnson was the one who helped translate studio architecture into something a room could hear. Paton and Tosh do the same quiet job underneath, no fill that does not earn its keep. Mackay, who had come through Cockney Rebel, supplies the keyboard color that keeps the orchestra from turning the track into a film cue. Powell is the secret author of the last ninety seconds. He had already arranged for Kate Bush and moved easily between the concert hall and the control room. On “Genesis Ch.1 V.32” he treats the New Philharmonia Chorus like another rhythm instrument, massed voices pushing the guitars instead of floating over them.

If you want the paper trail, the official Project site keeps the album page, the credits, and the timeline in one place at the-alan-parsons-project.com. Alan’s own shop, tour dates included, is alanparsons.com. The Project’s Facebook page is facebook.com/TheAlanParsonsProject, Instagram is instagram.com/officialalanparsonsproject, and the X account is x.com/TheOfficialAPP. Longtime listeners still keep a lamp on at The Avenue, the fan newsletter that started in 1994, at theavenueonline.info. Woolfson’s own catalog and the stage musicals live on at ericwoolfsonmusic.com. And when you want the rest of the stack the way freeform radio used to play it, commercial-free and in the right order, that is thezoorocks.com.

I Robot did not invent the man-and-machine sermon. It just recorded it with Abbey Road echo, a French airport on the cover, and a final track named for a Bible verse that does not exist. “Genesis Ch.1 V.32” is that missing line, played instead of sung, choir and guitar finishing the sentence the lyric sheet refused to print. Zoo Freaks, that was The Alan Parsons Project. Stay with it.