We played ‘No Woman, No Cry’ by Bob Marley, then launched into some Rolling Stones songs and finished with ‘Hey Jude.’ Everyone in the audience joined in at the end: ‘Na, na, na, na, na, na, na / Na, na, na, na / Hey Jude.’ Even the Russian Jews, who didn’t speak a word of English, figured out the lyrics. It was one of the best gigs I’ve ever played.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
THE END
OF AN ERA
If Genesis’s commercial template inspired The Missing Piece, our next album, Giant For A Day!, was a product of the supernova success of musically challenging radio rock bands. Our old peers Yes, Pink Floyd, King Crimson, and ELP had broken through, as had the aforementioned American bands inspired by Gentle Giant, to say nothing of Rush. As the band’s manager, it was an easy call.
‘We’ll do an album that’s even catchier and more direct than The Missing Piece,’ I said one day. ‘No more Pretentious—For The Sake Of It,’ I added, referencing the title of our compilation album. Through the eyes of a future record label exec, it made sense. Everyone realized prog rock, in its purest form, was a withering beast, and only a select group of serious musicians, math nerds, and nonconformists were still clinging to genre. So, we wrote a pure pop-rock album and abandoned our former reliance on contrapuntal arrangements, convoluted rhythms, and folk sensibilities. Each of the ten songs was good. I’ll never deny that. They were creative and catchy. They were well-played, and the production sounded good. They just weren’t Gentle Giant. I had let my role as manager interfere with my innate musical instincts.
The high level of commerciality we injected into the songs couldn’t turn us into a successful pop band because we were never that. It was the first time we wrote an album that wasn’t one hundred percent us, and no matter how much we worked on the material, it was destined to flop. When you try to do something as a band instead of playing what comes naturally, you’re doomed to fail. It was a catch-22. We couldn’t be what we once were because it was no longer 1974. At the same time, we couldn’t become a platinum rock group. We could still get good gigs at three-thousand-seat venues, but the days of six-thousand and ten-thousand-seaters seemed to be behind us. We were desperate to get that back, but we couldn’t. As much as we wanted to turn our career back around by going with the status quo, it wasn’t going to happen.
We gave the hit formula thing a shot; it didn’t work, but I don’t regret making Giant For A Day! As an artist, looking back with regret is one of the worst things you can do. Nothing we did was a misstep or even a compromise. They were efforts to reach a certain goal. We had a valid reason for making every song on the album, and if some of those moves turned out to be missteps, that was okay. If the reason we did something was wrong, we had to accept it and find our way again. But we couldn’t regret anything.
Our fans hated Giant For A Day! We didn’t tour the album, which was ultimately important for our personal growth. Instead, we spent the time reassessing our priorities as a band and as individuals. For most of 1978, all of 1979, and the beginning of 1980, Gentle Giant were out of the public eye. We were offered tours of Europe, but we refused to play any shows. We received invitations to play big summer festivals, but we said no. We spent the bulk of our time with our loved ones, trying to steal back lost time.
The years we went without writing anything new for Gentle Giant—which would have previously been unthinkable—reinvigorated our love for the band. We all wanted to make another album, and this time the goal would be to create great rock songs, whether they were commercially marketable or too experimental for widespread appeal. We wanted to go back to making an album solely for ourselves, and we wanted to make it great. We didn’t care about critical acclaim or mainstream popularity—we wanted to be Gentle Giant entirely on our own terms, at least one more time. We could smell the bloom of the rose, and it was exciting, inspiring, and a little scary. We wanted to turn the bloom into a full, glorious rosebush and create the roots to sprout a full garden, thorns and all. We wanted to start fresh—again.
When enough time had passed, I met with our guy at Capitol, Rupert.
‘We have an option with you, so I wanted to ask you when we can start the next album,’ I said.
‘We’re not going forward,’ he responded without a pause. ‘We’re going to drop you.’
That was a slap in the face. I left feeling dejected, but then I got angry and determined. I returned to the band. ‘Okay, fuck Capitol. Let’s find another label and get enough funding to make a new album.’
Everyone was on board and excited to get started. I got a haircut, shaved, donned my sharpest manager outfit, and flew to Los Angeles. I spent six weeks hunting down a new deal, and by the time I met with Columbia, it didn’t take too much convincing for them to sign us. They knew we had been dropped, which is never good, but we still had a strong following, not to mention fans who hadn’t seen us for years and were hungering for another tour. Columbia knew that we would be profitable and that any money made from the album would be gravy. They gave us a sizable advance, and I convinced my bandmates that we should make the new album in LA, which I had gotten to know and enjoy during the time I spent shopping for a new deal there.
Ray, Kerry, Gary, and John met me at LAX with their wives and girlfriends, and we spent quality time exploring the city, visiting restaurants, and watching shows—partly to reconnect as a family but also to soak in some of the vibrant energy of the city with the hope it might cast some sunshine on the album. On some level, I wanted the record to mark a full circle and to summon the kind of excitement, impulsiveness, and determination we had put into albums like Octopus and Free Hand.
I called Geoff Emerick, who was there with us when we started our adventure as Simon Dupree & The Big Sound, and asked him if he would be the engineer. He said he’d love to, so I flew him to LA. It was the perfect way to bookend our recording career. Geoff was in the room when, as teenagers, Ray and I auditioned for a slot on the Parlophone roster, and he was strongly in favor of signing us. Now, he would be there to end our legacy. We didn’t know for sure that Civilian would be the last Gentle Giant album, but we had some idea. We wrote and recorded the album at the legendary Sound City in Van Nuys and did overdubs at Bijou Studio in Los Angeles. I enjoyed the process immensely, and I felt like Gentle Giant had rediscovered our path. Ray, who was always full of creativity, also felt invigorated. Gary wasn’t a big fan of LA, but as long as he was working on music he loved, he would have been content practically anywhere. Not so Kerry and John. For them, LA was too bright, warm, fast-paced, and fashion-focused, and they hated it. They felt uncomfortable and out of their element. John hit the bottle to cope with his unhappiness, while Kerry just moped. But they were professionals, so they coped. Any time either of them complained, I reminded them of our misadventures recording The Missing Piece in Holland, and they stopped griping.
Having developed a solid understanding of the music business at major labels, I knew we had to have some kind of ‘in’ with someone in radio to kickstart the airplay. Once that happened, the label would pour more money into promotion and marketing. I knew a guy named Lee Abrams, who was a consultant to seventy-five or so AOR radio stations. He was a big progressive-music fan, and he loved Gentle Giant. He knew what radio was looking for in these uncertain times, and he felt like he could help us make music that was just hooky enough to entice radio. Since Lee was a friend, we bounced ideas off him to find a way to make a record that was completely us but would be accessible to the masses. His greatest piece of advice was to approach the music from many angles but keep the tempos constant, which made it easier to listen to from front to back. He didn’t come into the studio the whole time, so he was more of an adviser than anything else, but there’s no question that he helped guide the sound and feel of the album—and even less question that he deserved credit in the liner notes.