Three of the songs included brief interview snippets that we staged in the studio but which accurately reflect our interactions with the media. It’s worth pointing out that we didn’t hate journalism as a whole; some of the interviews we did were lively and enlightening, and sometimes we learned more about ourselves as we carried on conversations with experienced professionals. Too often, however, these interviews were with people who didn’t like our music, didn’t take us very seriously, and treated our exchanges as an excuse to be witty and sarcastic.
The spoken segments we included on Interview were meant to be both funny and indicative of our relationship with the press. When asked to describe our music, we all talked at the same time, making it impossible to make out what anyone was saying. To those kinds of journalists, our attitude was ‘Just do your homework. If you don’t know about us, don’t ask about us.’ Subliminally, however, we were making similar statements to ourselves: Don’t ask the same question. Come on, let’s talk about something else. What we were saying was, Hey, let’s do something different. Sure, we’re popular, but that’s not all we want to be.
If we had an MO as Gentle Giant, it was to go against the grain and make music that was meaningful to us and didn’t cater to anyone else. That’s probably why we never had mainstream hit singles like Genesis or Yes. We wanted to be more like Jethro Tull and succeed or fail on our own terms. By the time we did Interview, we were getting tired of the people running the music business too, so the lyrics also echo our frustrations about industry protococlass="underline" ‘What are your plans for the future now? / And can you say who does the writing then? / How did you get, who gave the name of the band?’
At the same time, the largely self-imposed pressure we were under was gradually causing band fatigue, though we refused to acknowledge or even recognize it. So, we kept driving ourselves nonstop, relentlessly touring, writing, and recording. We had a day off here and there, but a week off was like an unplanned vacation. I’m still proud of Interview, and I stand by every song, but in retrospect, I think we could have made a better record if we had taken a breather and found a new path to walk.
CHAPTER
FIFTEEN
UNLIKELY
CONNECTIONS
What’s odd about the position we were in after Interview is that there were no warning signs to indicate that we needed some time away from one another. We were getting along great, we were performing as well as ever, and we felt like it would be a bad idea to stop and risk losing momentum at a time when we could see that prog-rock was becoming less popular but we still had our diehard fanbase hungering for new material from us. As grown adults, we were also aware that we had mortgages, car payments, and other bills to pay, and we needed to keep making money to support ourselves. That knowledge instilled in us an urgency to put out an album or two every year. Gentle Giant released eleven albums in ten years, plus a live album and countless BBC session recordings; by today’s standards, that sort of output is unheard of.
We always made money on tour. We weren’t drawing the crowd numbers we had for Free Hand, but we were headlining large venues and playing to our biggest fans. We played what they wanted to hear—and what we loved to perform—and everyone left happy. It didn’t fuel our creative hunger or propel us to new levels of experimentation, but by that point we craved stability more than tremendous growth. And we had more than ourselves to worry about. We were all in, or wanted to be in, serious relationships, and we needed to have houses and family to come home to. John had married his girlfriend, Carole, even before he joined the band. Ray met his future wife, Barbara, in 1975, and they became inseparable right away. Gary met his wife Judy around then too. Kerry was dating his future wife, Lesley, who he married in 1976. And I was about to meet the love of my life.
Back in the early part of the twentieth century, a few years before my grandfather left Poland, his brother fled a pogrom, and that side of the family wound up in the US. Soon after the band started, my mom told Ray and me that we had a great uncle named Morris Laufer in Dallas. She always encouraged us to look him up when we were in America, if we had time.
Sure, like we ever have time, I thought. Eventually, though, we did. On the Interview tour, we had two or three days off in Dallas, so I said to Ray, ‘Hey, let’s be good Jewish boys and look up this Morris guy.’
We flipped through the phonebook and called a couple of Laufers, but nobody answered. I have no idea why we didn’t get discouraged and give up. I guess it was like a challenge for us to try to find this guy, so we went to the next name in the book. I dialed, and somebody with a heavy Polish accent picked up the phone.
‘We’re looking for a Morris Laufer,’ I said.
‘Laufer? My name’s Leo Laufer,’ said the person on the other end. ‘But I knew a Morris. Oh, my goodness, you must be family!’
We told him who we were and about our grandfather’s brother, and he was thrilled that a couple of guys who might be family members from England were calling him out of the blue.
‘Okay, I’m going to come over to where you are, and you’re going to go back to my house for bagels and lox.’
‘Sounds great,’ I replied, not sure what I was getting us into, or what if anything we would talk about.
Leo drove to our hotel and picked us up, and we went back to his house to meet his wife, Shirley, and his youngest daughter, Lisa. After we ate, Leo told us his life story. He was a survivor of Auschwitz and had been interned in various concentration camps for five years. His situation at the camps became increasingly dire until a stroke of incredible luck saved his life. During the death march at Ohrdruf, Germany, he fled into the woods and amazingly escaped recapture. Most of his family lacked his good fortune. The Nazis killed both of his parents and seven of his siblings. He was desperate for family, and, by crazy coincidence, he knew my great uncle Morris. They shared the same last name. Apparently, the name Laufer in Poland is like Cohen in America. Both Morris and Leo were from Lodz in Poland. They just happened to meet at a party in New York and got along well. Leo told Morris he didn’t like living in New York, so after Morris returned to Dallas, he called Leo and told him there was a job there for him in the dry goods business. Morris was the best man at Leo’s wedding.
At that time, I was going out with a girl from Canada named Orna. She had gone to Israel for a bit, and I planned to visit her there after the tour. I mentioned this to Leo during our conversation.
‘Well,’ he replied. ‘If you go over there, look up my daughter, Rita. She’s at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. She’ll be pleased to meet someone else from our family.’
When I went to Jerusalem to see Orna, she was visiting some friends at a kibbutz, so I had some downtime. I gave Rita a call.
‘Oh my God, you met my dad?!’ she spouted, and then she laughed. ‘I hope he didn’t bore you to death with stories about the old days.’
I assured her he hadn’t and told her he’d brought my brother and me the best bagels and lox we’d had in ages. We agreed to meet for lunch, and we got along well.
‘This is crazy,’ she said. ‘When are you going back to England?’
I told her I would be in Israel for a couple more days and then, when my girlfriend went back to Canada, I was going to New York for a short while.
‘Well, when you go back to New York, I’ve got another sister there. Her name’s Sharon. You two should have a drink or something.’ Rita scribbled a phone number on a scrap of paper and handed it to me.