Mountains Come Out of the Sky

by Will Romano

  Giant was an embarrassment of riches on all levels: Octopus brought not one but two cover designs. The British Vertigo release featured an iconic Roger Dean image, while the U.S. Columbia Records edition was cut in the shape of a jar. “The idea for the U.S. version, illustrated by Charles White III, was actually mine,” says Shulman. “I bought an octopus in a glass canister in San Francisco and thought that would make a great cover image, and gave the concept to the record label, and they went with it. It cost a fortune.”

  Octopus was a triumph, further developing the band’s approach (some would say even streamlining it) and sharpening the music’s production quality (in part due to the stellar work of engineer Martin Rushent) with songs such as “The Advent of Panurge,” “Raconteur Troubadour,” “A Cry for Everyone,” “Knots” (a “latter-day madrigal,” says the band, that was influenced by British psychologist R. D. Laing, author of The Divided Self, investigating notions of normality and madness), the instrumental “The Boys in the Band,” the drumming extravaganza “River,” and others.

  “‘Knots’ is so highly contrasted, and that is what I’ve always loved about prog,” says Transatlantic and former Spock’s Beard vocalist/keyboardist Neal Morse. “Even more than classical music, in my opinion, because you’ve got the heaviness of the electric guitar.”

  On an Italian tour to support Octopus, Phil Shulman, ten years Derek’s senior (Ray is the youngest of the three Giant brothers), decided to leave, placing his personal life ahead of the music, opening a rift between his brothers that would not mend for years.

  “The three Shulman brothers were serious about what they were doing,” remembers Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson, who toured with Giant in Europe in early 1972. “The only one who had a bit of a sense of humor, back then, about what he did was the elder brother, Phil, I think. They would have furious arguments about [the music] when they came offstage in the dressing room, screaming and shouting because someone played a wrong note.”

  THE POWER AND THE GLORY

  Oddly, without the presence of a major conceptualist like Phil, Giant appeared to grow stronger, having signed with Capitol Records, just as Minnear and Ray Shulman were turning in some of their finest work to date on such albums as 1973’s In a Glass House (not released at the time in America) which opens with “The Runaway,” a track that features the sound of shattering glass—a cacophony that coalesces into a pleasing rhythmic pattern (“That was a carefully looped sound effects tape,” says Minnear); the 1974 concept record based on the idea of corrupted ideals, The Power and the Glory (“Each song was developed as an individual piece,” adds Minnear, “and only the final song, ‘Valedictory,’ taking the theme from the opener ‘Proclamation,’ indicated a complete musical circle”); and 1975’s Free Hand.

  “When I heard Free Hand for the first time, I just totally got into the song ‘Just the Same,’ just the band’s sense of rhythm, and the counterpoint vocal melodies of ‘On Reflection,”’ explains Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess. “I was studying to be a classical pianist and was seduced by Gentle Giant. While others were rebelling to Black Sabbath, Gentle Giant played my songs of freedom.”

  Giant may not have been in the same sales category as Yes and ELP, but they were generating a serious buzz in America and Europe with their live show, which featured a multiple-member percussion assault, called the Drum Bash, among other spectacular stage antics. “I saw Gentle Giant a lot of times,” says 21st Century Schizoid Band’s Jakko Jakszyk. “I was taken by the fact that as multi-instrumentalists they were able to swap instruments in the middle of the show.”

  “We didn’t trade off instruments to show off,” says Minnear, “though it was a bit of a nightmare on the stage, to be honest. [laughs]. My cello playing is rather suspect.”12

  Though Giant were winning over fans on both sides of the Atlantic, they didn’t make the commercial leaps that Yes, Tull, and Floyd had. While 1976’s In’terview (which presented an album in the format of a journalist’s Q&A with the band) and 1977’s Playing the Fool: The Official Live (recorded in 1976) boasted classic Giant musical intricacies, soon the music would devolve into something much more simplistic, as evidenced on records such as 1977’s The Missing Piece and 1978’s Giant for a Day!

  “Gentle Giant’s record The Missing Piece, which I’d engineered, had some good moments on it, but the band were kind of chasing success, because they knew that the era of indulgence for indulgence’s sake was going by the wayside, and artists, and even the fans, had to evolve,” says producer Paul Northfield (ELP, Rush, Gryphon).

  “On those records, there were songs that simply didn’t transcend,” says Derek Shulman, who reportedly wrote “I’m Turning Around,” from The Missing Piece, at the last minute due to record label pressure for a hit. “There was a desperation and the fact that the songs were a little more ... contrived. We saw bands like Genesis and Yes and even Kansas, having hit singles on AOR [album-oriented rock] radio. We were playing shows with them supporting us as special guests and we watched them leapfrog over us, scoring hits. I wanted my share, but changing our approach just didn’t work for us.”

  By 1980’s Civilian, the band was winding down, as both Minnear and Derek Shulman said they were no longer interested in touring. “Life on the road was difficult, but even more so [was] the separation from my family,” says Minnear. “Sally, my first daughter, was one year old during the Civilian album, so I just wanted more control over the time I spent at home.”

  However, for the ten years from 1970 through 1980, Gentle Giant (for the most part) were the epitome of what a progressive rock band should be, having written some of the most engrossing and dense music of the era. Time has revealed the sophistication of the band’s material.

  “Gentle Giant took a while to develop,” says Shulman, “and our records eventually sold hundreds of thousands of copies. But it was gradual and eventual.”

  THE MISSING PIECE

  Since Giant’s dissolution, Minnear, who had become a Christian in the early years of the band, spent time working with the church (and continues to oversee the band’s publishing company, Alucard Music); Weathers went on to work with the Welsh band Man. Ray Shulman has, of this writing, maintained a successful career in music and video production (as well as sound track work); guitarist Gary Green did session work (having appeared on Eddie Jobson’s 1983 Capitol Records release, Zinc), and eventually settled outside Chicago, where he now plays live local shows; and Derek became a record industry bigwig, signing acts such as Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Pantera, and Dream Theater to labels such as PolyGram, Atco Records, Mercury, Roadrunner Records (of which he was president), and has since established his own DRT label, which has rereleased the band’s most vital efforts, causing many to reconsider the gravity of the Gentle Giant catalog.

  One of two covers issued for the 1972 Octopus album.

  In recent years, Green, Minnear, and Mortimore formed Three Friends, a tribute bandplus, which performs Giant’s music. “I never thought I’d see Kerry or Gary again,” says Mortimore. “We met at a Gentle Giant convention, run by the On-Reflection fan club/Internet mailing list, and debuted in 2008. It rekindled my interest in the music. Even the name of the band is perfect because it harks back to the original theme of the LP Three Friends. Kerry is not playing with us at the moment, but you could actually make another concept record, Three Friends: Mach II, based on the lives of the guys from Giant. Of course, not everyone in the original band is interested in playing the Gentle Giant material, but that’s up to them. We’re having fun. Life’s too short. You’ve got to get on with it.”

  Three Friends (1972)

  In a Glass House (1973)

  The Power and the Glory (1974)

  Free Hand (1975)

  In’terview (1976)

  The Missing Piece (1977)

  (Fin Costello/Getty Images)

  PROG FOLK

  Out of the Mist

  SINCE THE MID-1960S, BRITAIN HAD CHURNED OUT a number of virtuoso �
��folk baroque” guitarists, from Davy Graham and John Renbourn to Martin Carthy, John Martyn, and Bert Jansch, whose musical innovations in the use of odd time signatures and alternate string tunings (such as Graham’s DADGAD) as well as their imaginative fusion of world music and traditional European styles carved a path for psychedelic/pop, “freak,” electric, and progressive folk artists to follow.

  Another big innovation came from the U.S., when artists such as Bob Dylan and the Byrds demonstrated that folk music could be electrified and still retain a sense of integrity.

  Suddenly, folk music wasn’t just a traditional art form. The floodgates were open for all kinds of experimentations. British bands, in particular, such as the Pentangle (of which Renbourn and Jansch were members), Donovan, the Incredible String Band, Fairport Convention, and the Strawbs, as well as faux-medieval, medievalesque, Renaissance, and Elizabethan progressive folk-rock bands Gryphon and the Amazing Blondel seized upon the opportunity to push musical boundaries and the public’s perception of what a rock (and folk rock) band could be.

  Mandalaband’s David Rohl, right, at Indigo Studios with rock idol Marc Bolan in 1974. (Courtesy of David Rohl)

  Nat Joseph’s Transatlantic, Chris Blackwell’s Island, Polydor, even Elektra Records supported and encouraged this traditional folk and ethnic folk music in the U.K. “John Renbourn was bitten by this medieval Renaissance bug and made an album called Sir John Alot of Merrie Englandes Musyk Thyng & ye Grene Knyghte,” remembers Graeme Taylor, guitarist for the British, medieval-tinged prog folk-rock group Gryphon, which used such traditional instrumentation as harpsichord, crumhorn, recorder, and bassoon. “Then there was this sort of boom around the early ’70s with groups like the Pentangle, which became quite popular by playing acoustic guitars. People say that there was a kind of wave of interest or renewed interest in medieval or Renaissance music in the early ’70s. We didn’t want to subscribe to one school or another. We wanted to create something new and different, but with the use of totally irregular instruments. Within the first six months we’d played enough around the country to make an impact and draw the attention of a talent scout, Laurence Aston, from a label called Transatlantic, who signed us and had also signed the Pentangle.”

  Influenced by jazz, jazz-rock fusion, Indian modalities, and the odd tempos typified by European art music, the five members of the Pentangle extended traditional songs to create folk-rock suites for records such as Cruel Sister and Basket of Light.

  “Changing time signatures, [and] altering melodies were an extension of the experimentation we were doing at the time,” says Pentangle vocalist Jacqui McShee. “We had a jazz-influenced rhythm section [double bassist Danny Thompson and drummer Terry Cox], and there was a lot of listening to Indian music, especially sitar music. Because of our folk background there were very few bands with the type of rhythm section we had. So, if you like, we were flying in the face of convention and [of] the traditionalists, who had a very blinkered attitude. But at the same time, we were making conscious decisions, for instance, to take a song like ‘Jack Orion’ [from 1970’s Cruel Sister] and fill an entire side of an LP with it. Some traditional songs are very long, and in that case, we were speaking to a certain heritage. We were also expanding the long trad songs and breaking them up into sections forming mini suites, making each section, hopefully, reflect the mood of the telling of that part of the story. If it sounded good then it was okay.”

  Other bands let their freak flags fly, taking influences from just about anywhere and anything. For instance, the highly influential Incredible String Band began experimenting with song form to expand the musical boundaries of folk. Mike Heron, lead vocalist, songwriter, and multi-instrumentalist of the Scottish band, penned the thirteen-minute psychedelic epic “A Very Cellular Song” (from their popular 1968 record The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, influenced by European baroque, Southern Indian, Bahamian spiritual, and even Bulgarian choir music, which was intended to, as Heron says, “take you on an outline of an LSD trip through different moods.

  “It’s also meant to have you connect, on an atomic, molecular level, with everything,” says Heron. “It starts off with the radio playing and gradually gets wilder and wilder until it ends up sending you a message wishing you well. Using substances and creating this kind of music, and the connection between the two, is a very good question. I think in the early days, the first couple of albums, we were just smoking a lot of dope, and it was a very underdeveloped thing. In Edinburgh [Scotland] there must have been fifty people who were into smoking dope. We knew them all and all the dealers and everything. It was a small-scale thing, a hippie scene where everyone was reading Jack Kerouac. I think probably we had to smoke an awful lot of joints to write ‘Cellular Song.’ We may have needed that step [laughs], if you will. But then again, we never really saw it as that, because by the time Robin [Williamson, vocalist/multi-instrumentalist] came back from Morocco [and] we reformed the band, that was what we were doing. We would [smoke] and drop a bit of acid on the side, but it was not really radical. We found this music, the two of us, and the two girls [Dolly Collins and Licorice], that seemed to make sense to us and the generation around us.”

  “Some major artists, like the Incredible String Band, were using instruments like harpsichords,” says Gryphon’s Graeme Taylor. “That was harkening back to an older era. Even still, the Incredible String Band went into wonderfully ethnic music while using these instrumental tools and used them for their own means, as opposed to trying to re-create something I would consider ‘authentic’ or traditional.”

  Fairport Convention employed American West Coast influences in their music in the early years only to dive headlong into British folk, making them one of the most popular progressive folk acts of the early 1970s.

  Taking their name from guitarist Simon Nicol’s parents’ home (one they owned in Muzzle Hill, North London), Fairport did their first gig in May 1967, eventually making a name for themselves by performing Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell tunes.

  Featuring three guitarists—Nicol, Richard Thompson, and Ian Matthews—bassist Ashley Hutchings (who was a member of the Ethnic Shuffle Orchestra with Nicol), Martin Lamble on drums, and singer Judy Dyble, Fairport were getting exposed not only to the scene in London but to a wider range of authentic British traditional music.

  “Certainly folk music was something that Richard, Ashley, and myself had all heard as fresh listeners going out to clubs in London,” says Nicol. “So we had absorbed the ethos, even if we were not scholarly about the music’s background.”

  After Dyble split for Giles, Giles and Fripp, Fairport hooked up with singer Sandy Denny, a chilling and emotional singer, an expert interpreter of ancient song, who had been working with bluegrass band the Strawbs.

  Although Fairport had yet to fully incorporate the sound that would make them famous, bringing Denny into the fold was a historic and fateful step in the band’s evolution.

  “Sandy, when she came along, had come directly from the folk clubs as a singer/songwriter, who had drawn on the tradition of the ballad form, as it was properly done—proper ballads without known writers; things that had been handed down from generation to generation,” says Nicol.

  Eventually Fairport progressed to more traditional music, recording songs such as “Nottamun Town” and “She Moves Through the Fair” (from the band’s second record, What We Did on Our Holidays) and continuing to push musical boundaries.

  “There was a big step made when we did A Sailor’s Life,’ which was a significant song on the third album [Unhalfbricking],” says Nicol, “where we took a straightforward story-song from a tradition and played with it in a way that wouldn’t have been possible without the freethinking influence of West Coast American bands from around about that same era. And hearing Dave Swarbrick’s fiddle work on the song, something just clicked. We knew there was something different happening here. This wasn’t Jefferson Airplane.”

  After a tragic motor accident claimed the life
of drummer Lamble, Fairport took stock of their situation and eventually rebuilt the band, then released what may be their crowning achievement—1969’s Liege & Lief, which blurred the division between modern and traditional music, resulting a uniquely British folk music.

  Songs such as “Matty Groves” (about infidelity and murder), the haunting “Tam Lin” (based on the Scottish ballad involving a pregnant maiden and fairies), and other traditionals demonstrated Fairport’s ability to interpret distinctively British music with electric instruments. Like their progressive rock counterparts, Fairport would often work in odd time signatures, an outgrowth of the structure of the song.

  “If we were playing in strange time signatures, we were doing so because the song dictated it,” says drummer Dave Mattacks, who’d replaced Lamble. “Many of the traditional songs have unconventional tempos, and we were attempting to be true to these.”

  By 1970, Denny had left the band to pursue a solo career (she appeared on Led Zeppelin’s self-titled 1971 album on the track “The Battle of Evermore” but died tragically in 1978 from a brain hemorrhage as a result of a fall), and Hutchings went on to form traditional folk band Steeleye Span.

  In the meantime, Fairport tapped bassist Dave Pegg (later of Jethro Tull) and continued to experiment on Full House (featuring the nine-plus-minute song “Sloth”) and 1971’s much underappreciated concept album, Babbacombe Lee (in the wake of Richard Thompson’s leaving). In the grand British folk tradition (which speaks to all aspects of the human condition), the band based the record’s concept on the real-life story of a Babbacombe, West England, man who was scheduled to be executed by the state but whose death was prevented three times owing to technical malfunctions.