Gentle Giant
Gentle Giant were a British progressive rock band active between 1970 and 1980. They were known for the complexity and sophistication of their music and for the varied musical skills of the members. All of the band members were multi-instrumentalists. Although not commercially successful, the band achieved a cult following.
The band stated that their aim was to "expand the frontiers of contemporary popular music at the risk of becoming very unpopular", although this stance was to alter significantly with time.
Gentle Giant's music was considered complex even by progressive rock standards, drawing on a broad swathe of music including folk, soul, jazz, and classical music. Unlike many of their progressive rock contemporaries, their "classical" influences ranged beyond the Romantic and incorporated medieval, baroque, and modernist chamber music elements. The band also had a taste for broad themes for their lyrics, drawing inspiration not only from personal experiences but from philosophy and the works of François Rabelais and R. D. Laing. In 2015 they were recognised with the lifetime achievement award at the Progressive Music Awards.
Band history
Prehistory (including Simon Dupree and the Big Sound)
The core of what was to become Gentle Giant comprised three brothers: Phil Shulman, Derek Shulman and Ray Shulman. The brothers were of Scottish-Jewish descent. Phil and Derek were born in the Gorbals, which was then a notorious slum area of Glasgow, Scotland. The family moved to Portsmouth, England, where Ray was born. Their father was an army musician turned jazz trumpeter, who continued his musical work in Portsmouth. He encouraged his sons to learn various instruments; and Phil, Derek, and Ray all became multi-instrumentalists. During the early 1960s, Derek and Ray became interested in playing rhythm-and-blues and formed a band together. Phil – originally acting as a manager figure in order to look after his much younger brothers – eventually became a band member himself.By 1966, the Shulmans' band – initially called the Howling Wolves, then the Road Runners – had taken on the name of Simon Dupree and the Big Sound and were pursuing more of a soul/pop direction. As lead singer and frontman, Derek Shulman took on the 'Simon Dupree' pseudonym while Phil played saxophone and trumpet, and youngest brother Ray played guitar and violin.. Signing to the EMI record label, Simon Dupree and the Big Sound produced several non-charting singles before being pushed by their management and label in the direction of psychedelia. This resulted in the UK Top 10 hit "Kites" in the autumn of 1967.
Success only served to frustrate the Shulman brothers, who considered themselves to be blue-eyed soul singers and felt that their change of style was insincere and insubstantial. Derek Shulman was later to describe "Kites" as "utter shit"." The Shulmans' opinion was confirmed, in their eyes, by the successive failure of follow-up singles to "Kites". Attempting to escape their new image, they released a pseudonymous double A-side single in late 1968 as the Moles – "We Are the Moles ". This compounded their identity crisis as the single was subsequently caught up in a rumour that the Moles were, in fact, the Beatles recording under a different name and with Ringo Starr as lead singer. The rumour was eventually debunked by Pink Floyd leader Syd Barrett, who outed Simon Dupree and the Big Sound as the band behind the record.
In 1969, the Shulman brothers finally dissolved the group in order to escape the pop music environment that had frustrated them. They did not return directly to rhythm and blues or soul, but instead chose to pursue a more complicated direction. Ray Shulman later stated, "We knew we couldn't continue with the musicians we'd had before. We weren't interested in the other musicians in the band — they couldn't contribute anything. We had to teach them what to do. It got rather heavy when we could play drums better than the drummer, and even on record we were doing more and more of it with overdubs. It got stupid having a band like. The first thing was to get some musicians of a higher standard."
Formation of Gentle Giant
Gentle Giant was formed in 1970 when the Shulman brothers teamed up with two other multi-instrumentalists, Gary Green and Kerry Minnear, plus drummer Martin Smith, who had previously drummed for Simon Dupree and the Big Sound. The classically trained Minnear had recently graduated from the Royal College of Music with a degree in composition, and had played with the band Rust. Green was essentially a blues player and had never worked with a band above the semi-professional level, but adapted readily to the demanding music of the new band. The Shulman brothers, meanwhile, settled into typically multi-instrumental roles of their own — Derek on saxophone and recorder; Ray on bass and violin; and Phil on saxophone, trumpet, and clarinet.The new band also featured three lead vocalists. Derek Shulman sang in a tough rhythm-and-blues style and generally handled the more rock-oriented vocals; Phil Shulman handled the more folk-or-jazz-influenced songs; and Kerry Minnear sang the lighter folk and chamber-classical lead vocals. Minnear did not sing lead vocals at live concerts, because of his inability to support and project his voice at a level suitable for live amplification.
According to a booklet that was included in their first album, the band's name was a reference to a fictional character, a "gentle giant" that happens upon a band of musicians and is enthralled with their music. The character is reminiscent of those from the Renaissance tales of François Rabelais.
From the start, Gentle Giant was a particularly flexible band because of the exceptionally broad musical skills of its members. One Gentle Giant album would list a total of forty-six instruments in the musician credits — all of which had been played by group members — and five of the six members sang, enabling the band to write and perform detailed vocal harmony and counterpoint. The band's approach to songwriting was equally diverse, blending a wide variety of ideas and influences whether they were considered commercial or otherwise.
Early Gentle Giant: the debut album, ''Acquiring the Taste'' and ''Three Friends''
The band's first album was the self-titled Gentle Giant in 1970, produced by Tony Visconti. Combining the collective band members' influences of rock, blues, classical, and 1960s British soul, it was an immediately challenging effort, although it has sometimes been criticised for having a slightly disappointing recording quality.Gentle Giant was followed in 1971 by Acquiring the Taste. This second album showcased a band who were developing rapidly. Far more experimental and dissonant than its predecessor, Acquiring the Taste was shaped primarily by Kerry Minnear's broad classical and contemporary classical music training. It also showed the band expanding their instrumental palette " The band's sense of challenge was made evident in the liner notes to Acquiring the Taste, which contained a particularly lofty statement of intent even by progressive rock standards. Producer Tony Visconti has claimed authorship of this liner note as well as the "giant" story accompanying the first album
After Acquiring the Taste, Martin Smith left the band, apparently because of disagreements with both Ray and Phil Shulman. He was replaced by Malcolm Mortimore.
Gentle Giant's next recording was Three Friends. This was the band's first concept album, and was based around the theme of three boys who are "inevitably separated by chance, skill, and fate" as they become men. Over the course of the album, the three friends travel on from being childhood schoolfriends to becoming, respectively, a road digger, an artist, and a white-collar worker. In the process, they lose their ability to relate to each other or understand each other's lifestyles. The development and fate of each character is musically represented by separate yet integrated styles, from hard rhythm-and-blues-edged rock to symphonic classical stylings.
In March 1972, Malcolm Mortimore injured himself in a motorcycle accident. To fulfil tour obligations in April, Gentle Giant hired John "Pugwash" Weathers . Weathers was a harder-hitting player who also sang and played melodic percussion and guitar, further expanding Gentle Giant's instrumental performance options. Because of Mortimore's extended convalescence, the band opted to formally replace him with Weathers at the end of the 1972 April tour.
''Octopus'' and the departure of Phil Shulman
The new line-up of Gentle Giant released the Octopus album later in 1972. The band's hardest-rocking album to date, Octopus was allegedly titled by Phil Shulman's wife Roberta as a pun on "octo opus". It maintained Gentle Giant's distinctively broad and challengingly integrated style, one of the highlights being the intricate madrigal-styled vocal workout "Knots".The release of Octopus is generally considered to herald the start of Gentle Giant's peak period. In 2004, Ray Shulman commented " was probably our best album, with the exception perhaps of Acquiring the Taste. We started with the idea of writing a song about each member of the band. Having a concept in mind was a good starting point for writing. I don't know why, but despite the impact of the Who's Tommy and Quadrophenia, almost overnight concept albums were suddenly perceived as rather naff and pretentious"."
Before embarking on the Octopus tour, the band played a gruelling set of dates supporting Black Sabbath, during which they proved to be very unpopular with the majority of the headlining band's fans. Derek Shulman recalled, "It was perhaps the most ridiculous pairing of groups ever in the history of show business. For the most part we got booed off the stage". Following the tour, Gentle Giant underwent their most significant line-up change when a burnt-out and discouraged Phil Shulman left the band following disagreements with his brothers. Derek Shulman took over all lead vocals for live concerts, becoming Gentle Giant's de facto lead singer.
Gary Green later recalled "As I remember it, when Phil announced it at the end of an Italian tour, he said he would leave the band. He couldn't continue on. There was too much stress being on the road and the family. Plus the brothers were having a bit of a difficult time. They're brothers and they argued like hell, sometimes to the point where you thought they were going to hit each other. But I guess it was brotherly love . But when Phil said he was going to leave, we were all like stumped, 'Oh! What are we going to do? All right we'll buy a Moog synthesizer!' That's kind of trite; I don't mean it quite like that. We had to do something".
"John and I really pushed for the band to continue at that point because it looked like we were going to fold. And that seemed just ludicrous – I mean we had Kerry at full strength and Ray writing great. We were really strong live and we were about to get stronger. I think we became a stronger band after Phil left. And that's nothing against Phil. We had just been just hitting our stride as players".
Over thirty years later, Phil Shulman expanded on his reasons for departure in a 2008 podcast interview conducted by his son Damon and grandson Elliot. In the interview he stated that his main motivation for leaving was because he had realised that the lifestyle of a touring musician was damaging his family life. The two factions of Shulman brothers - with Phil on one side and Ray and Derek on the other would eventually resolve their differences and heal their relationship, although Phil never rejoined the band or returned to music as a career. Ray Shulman has subsequently assisted Phil's son Damon Shulman with his own music.