The midsection of the song is an extended drum solo from Martin that’s eventually accompanied by jazzy piano, and then the song returns to the pensive vocal harmony of the opening verse. If we had really thought about it, we would have asked, Who in their right mind would put a long, phased drum solo on a studio album? It’s a dumb thing to do on an album, but we weren’t thinking. We were just acting and reacting. And we must have realized subconsciously that it would come across really well in concert—that we could extend it to showcase Martin’s chops. Crowds loved endless drum solos.
The songs on Gentle Giant are not perfect, but they were a joy to work on. It was a tremendous learning experience for all of us and a heavenly departure from what we had done in Simon Dupree & The Big Sound. We paid careful attention to what everyone else was doing, and since we each brought different skills to the studio, we all came out of the experience as more eclectic musicians. We were all reborn as a better band to grow and improve with each other. We were all part of this Giant thing, and while Ray, Phil, and I actually shared DNA, we were all brothers with the shared goal of making music that would change the world. We were all good, but Kerry and Ray proved how naturally gifted they were and how well they played off one another. I felt lucky to be a part of the explosive creativity.
We started promoting the album a while before it was available in the shops. If we didn’t tour, we would just have been sitting around, so we booked any gigs we could and played some great shows. We were on the bill of a memorable concert in Hamburg, Germany, at the Open Air Festival. It was the first of many concerts we played with Black Sabbath. They were incredibly nice to us. We talked about The Beatles (Ozzy’s favorite group) and the wave of great music coming out of England, and, over the years, we grew to be good friends. It had been just a few months since Sabbath released their groundbreaking self-titled album, so they were still fairly straight and sober. At later shows, we were in the eye of the hurricane as the band discovered decadence, debauchery, and especially cocaine. But that stuff came in America after they released their second album, Paranoid.
The festival in Hamburg included Uriah Heep, who Bron also managed, as well as Humble Pie, Manfred Mann, Renaissance, East Of Eden, and Keith Emerson. We were always treated well in Germany, and the fans there loved us. Considering the strength of the lineup, we were surprised that only about ten thousand people attended the two-day event; the grounds seated twice that many. I don’t remember being upset by the crowd size, though. We thought it was funny to look out from the stage and see a half-empty festival.
We saw Reg Dwight and spent some time with him on July 4 in Portsmouth at a daylong stadium show that featured Hookfoot, the band he played in right before he went solo as Elton John. He seemed happy for us and reiterated how talented he thought we were. He also pointed out that it was a good thing he hadn’t joined us because he had much bigger commercial aspirations than we had. It seemed like an odd comment, and we figured he was trying to save face. Little did we know how right he was.
Another fun show was at the Marquee Club in London, one of the city’s most historic rock venues. On July 15, we opened for Slade, which might seem like an incompatible pairing, but at the time, there was no friction between glam rockers and prog bands, and the gig itself was hilarious. Slade were really fun to be with and constantly joked around backstage. We went down really well with the crowd, yet it was only one of a few shows we ever played at the venue. Since we were a big up-and-coming rock band, it seemed strange to us that the Marquee didn’t reach out more often, but it was symptomatic of the reaction we received throughout England at the beginning of our career. We never felt as welcome at home as we did in Italy, Germany, Canada, or, when we finally got there, America. I believe our problems in the UK were triggered by the British press, some parts of which were indignant that Simon Dupree & The Big Sound had the nerve to become a ‘new, progressive’ band. It was almost as if we wore badges in the UK that read ‘UNCLEAN.’
Our Gentle Giant record release show was in Glasgow, at a club called Morpheus. It was a meaningful show, especially for Phil but also for me, since we’d both been born in Glasgow, and playing there symbolized how much we had accomplished since we lived there in poverty. That was a great show, as were gigs across Europe. But the final three shows in London emphasized how we were not destined to be darlings of the city’s art scene. Melody Maker, which had frequently praised Simon Dupree, called our performance at the Lyceum ‘twee’ and declared that the way Gary, Ray, and Kerry traded instruments during the show was ‘pretentious for the sake of it.’ As much as we hated being called pretentious—because we despised pretension—we appropriated the phrase and used it as a symbol of irony, even naming our 1977 compilation album Pretentious For The Sake Of It.
While the scenesters didn’t climb into the open arms of Gentle Giant, the mainstream press praised us, including the BBC, which was important to generate record sales. Gentle Giant didn’t land us back on Top Of The Pops or anything, but it was recognized and admired by a wide variety of tastemakers, including Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, Jethro Tull, Black Sabbath, and comedic actor Sherman Helmsley (who played George Jefferson in All In The Family and The Jeffersons). He declared Gentle Giant his favorite band, and, later in our career, he would come into our lives in a wild and unexpected way.
CHAPTER
NINE
SENSORY
PLEASURE
We spent more than a year writing and recording our first album, then we focused on touring. We were enjoying the shows, getting a good feel for our new fanbase, and tinkering with new material backstage and during whatever downtime we had back home.
All of a sudden, Gerry told us we needed to hurry up and release the follow-up to Gentle Giant to keep the momentum going. He wanted us back in the studio with Tony right away. There were a couple of songs that hadn’t made the first album, so we had those to work with, as well as bits and pieces of music we had put together, but nothing was fully realized.
I appealed to Gerry’s supportive side: ‘We just need a little more time, to get the songs right.’
‘We don’t have more time,’ he shot back. So, into the studio we went.
We tracked the mostly finished songs we didn’t use on the first album, then used a click track to record all the other leftover bits we liked. Finally, we spontaneously built the rest of the parts onto the click. Kerry and Ray wrote everything, and we’d record the passages as soon as they came up with them and figure out where to put it all later.
Between these hectic sessions, we toured around England from the beginning of January 1970 until the end of March. Our lives were a fragmented collage of gigs, van trips, writing sessions, and studio stints. There’s a saying that art imitates life, and our second album, the highly experimental Acquiring The Taste, reflects that axiom. It’s the only Gentle Giant album that wasn’t completely written before we started recording it. A lot of people have told me it’s their favorite, the best we ever did. To me, it’s a very odd record, and I’ve never liked it very much.