Leaving Jennie was a milestone in my life. It shook me up psychologically and made me question what kind of a person I was, what I wanted, and why I couldn’t marry a perfectly great Jewish girl when I knew I wanted to start my own family. A few months later, I was no closer to epiphany, but at least I was over the hump of emotional turmoil. Jennie and I tried rekindling our relationship. We went out on dates. We even slept together, but there was no spark. Our time together was over.
I had come to a major crossroads, and I knew my life moving forward would change dramatically. There would be no marriage, and Simon Dupree & The Big Sound were over. It was time to stop taking the safe path forward. I needed to take chances, whether they worked out or not. It was time to listen to the voice in my head that was telling me, You don’t want a backup plan. That’s not who you are. You need to do what you want to do right now because life is short.
Of all the pop stars we knew, Elton John might have played the biggest role in the Shulman brothers’ transition from Simon Dupree & The Big Sound to Gentle Giant. Reg was an incredible music scholar and collector. He listened to everything that was going on in Europe and America. When I told him we wanted to play a different kind of music, he suggested we listen to some bands for inspiration. One of them was Spirit. We checked out their first two albums, Spirit and The Family That Plays Together, which combine a bunch of musical styles including psychedelic rock, jazz, blues, and folk. It was intriguing, inspiring, and not that dissimilar to the kind of music we were already considering. Elton also suggested we listen to Frank Zappa and Miles Davis, two other artists we grew to love.
At one point when we were still doing Simon Dupree, Reg told us he was a songwriter as well as a pianist and he’d love to write a song for us. We had enjoyed touring with him, so we said we’d love to hear anything he came up with. The next time we saw him, he played us a really good song on the piano called ‘I’m Coming Home,’ and we went right into Abbey Road studio and recorded it for a future single. Then we got caught up in a whirlwind of angst and drama. I was ending my engagement, we were becoming disenchanted with the band, and we were talking about breaking up. So, ‘I’m Coming Home’ never got released, and it fell through the cracks for decades. Then, in 2021, I saw that Elton was playing in New York, so I called his agent Barry Marshall, who, funnily enough, used to book Simon Dupree & The Big Sound. Barry got me two tickets, and before my wife and I went to the show, I tracked down the recording of ‘I’m Coming Home,’ which I had on a cassette tape. I gave it to Elton backstage after the show. He hadn’t remembered doing it with us and said he couldn’t wait to hear it. The next time I talked to him, he told me he loved the song and that it brought back some great memories of being on tour and hanging out with us.
Rewind back to 1969. I’m talking to Reg about finding musicians for our new band, and he says he has written a bunch of new stuff and might be interested in joining us. ‘That could be really great,’ I tell him, and we agree to get together to listen to his new songs.
Ray and I met Reg in London, and we were excited to hear what he had put together. As much as we wanted to work with him again, as soon as he started playing the tape, we knew the music wouldn’t fit our new direction. His new songs were good, but they were rooted in R&B and pop, and that was exactly what we wanted to get away from. We knew that he still wanted to play commercial music, and if he joined our new band, he wouldn’t be happy. We told him we didn’t think it would work, and he was gracious about being gently rejected.
We changed the subject and kept chatting, and Reg told us he wanted to change his stage name, too.
‘Oh yeah?’ I said. ‘What are you thinking?’
He told us he’d chosen the name Elton John because he was a big fan of Soft Machine, whose sax player was Elton Dean. And he got the surname John from the vocalist Long John Baldry, with whom Reg had played in the band Bluesology.
‘Reg, that will never work!’ I spouted. ‘What a stupid name that is.’
‘Maybe you should come up with something else,’ said Ray, who was trying harder than I was not to laugh.
Not long after that, the music Reg wrote with lyricist Bernie Taupin started to take off. By 1970, ‘Your Song’ was a major hit and ELTON JOHN was playing to packed houses at the Troubadour while we were scrambling around Guilford trying to get gigs. Clearly, Reg had the last laugh.
Ray and I and even Phil knew we couldn’t keep Simon Dupree & The Big Sound going. It had gotten to the point where we would play shows and could feel the audience waiting for us to play the hits. As much as we had enjoyed seeing guys singing along and young girls screaming in ecstasy when we played those songs, it wasn’t artistically rewarding anymore. It felt cheap. We wanted crowds to listen intently to everything we played and to have to focus on multiple rhythm and tempo changes to understand our music. We didn’t want to write predictable songs anymore. Verses and choruses were okay, but we didn’t want the hooks to be so obvious that fans didn’t even have to pay attention to dance along with the music.
We were all in regarding the new musical direction we wanted to take, and we knew we couldn’t do that with our bassist, Geary Kenworthy, nor sadly my old school friend, keyboardist Eric Hine. They were good pop musicians, and they played well for a mainstream crowd. We needed guys who were capable of playing complex, multifaceted music and changing direction on the fly. We wanted to make the kind of music Spirit made without sounding like Spirit, and we needed to play with musicians who could do anything and contribute ideas and parts that were as forward-thinking as ours. Securing the right lineup was going to be hard enough. Before that, we had to convince our label and our team that we didn’t want to make pop music anymore; our priority was no longer to get played on the radio.
When John King stepped down, we had talked to various managers, including Don Arden, who worked with Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Gene Vincent, and other guys we admired and listened to on American Air Force radio. But these guys didn’t want to take risks.
‘You’ve got a great name and an established fanbase. Why would you throw that away?’ Arden had said.
‘We need to do something different,’ I said. ‘If we can’t put a new band together, we don’t want to do any more music. That’s how strongly we feel.’
Arden laughed. He may have thought we were making a bad move, but he respected our integrity. ‘Well, good luck then,’ he said. ‘Just not with my money.’
In retrospect, we were fortunate that Don wasn’t interested in us back then. We’d cross paths with him again soon enough.
Some of the other people who found out we were breaking up Simon Dupree & The Big Sound and starting a new, more adventurous band were similarly surprised. They shouldn’t have been. When The Beatles became more adventurous and started prioritizing meticulous, well-crafted studio productions over peppy live performances, they had an influence on a range of like-minded musicians that was almost as influential as the wave of excitement and enthusiasm they generated with ‘Love Me Do’ and ‘I Wanna Hold Your Hand.’ Suddenly, lots of pop groups were trying new, left-of-center types of music. When they were teenagers, Robert Fripp and his school friend Gordon Haskell played together in the pop/soul band The League Of Gentlemen before Fripp formed the more progressive King Crimson in 1968 (Haskell joined the band for a short time in 1970). Jimmy Page from The Yardbirds joined forces with Band Of Joy vocalist Robert Plant, the singer’s childhood friend John Bonham, bassist John Paul Jones (who had played with Page in various session gigs, including some for the Yardbirds), and, in one brief tour, transformed from The New Yardbirds into Led Zeppelin. Two members of the failed London rock band Episode Six, vocalist Ian Gillan and bassist Roger Glover, helped carve a new face for Deep Purple in 1969. Mid-60s jazz and rhythm & blues outfit The Graham Bond Organisation featured future Cream bassist Jack Bruce and drummer Ginger Baker, as well as guitarist John McLaughlin. Rhythm & blues band The Soul Agents brought the world a young Rod Stewart. Anon, a band featuring Mike Rutherford and Anthony Phillips had just broken up, as had Garden Wall, which featured Peter Gabriel, Tony Banks, and Chris Stewart. All five musicians were students at Charterhouse School in Surrey, and they joined forces as Genesis in 1967. Bassist Chris Squire, vocalist Jon Anderson, and drummer Bill Bruford were in Mabel Greer’s Toyshop until the group broke up in 1967 and they formed the more progressive Yes. And Steve Howe played in the English beat band The Syndicats, the psychedelic pop group Tomorrow, and the rock band Bodast before joining Yes in 1970. Maybe most of the guys in those bands didn’t get to play Top Of The Pops until they were reborn with their more intricate, progressive groups, but, over the years, we had a lot of good times with many of these guys.