I had a somewhat similar experience in 2017, when Run The Jewels played four sold-out nights in Hell’s Kitchen at the popular club Terminal 5. My son Noah and I went to one of the shows, and it was so crowded inside we could barely move, even in the VIP area. The concert was incredible, and after the show we went backstage to say hello and congratulations to rappers El-P and Killer Mike. I can only compare what transpired to an early 90s Saturday Night Live ‘Wayne’s World’ skit, in which Mike Myers (Wayne) and Dana Carvey (Garth) utter their show’s catchphrase, ‘We’re not worthy.’ When Run The Jewels met me, they immediately bowed before me with exaggerated arm gestures and big smiles. It felt very odd because they had just played in front of thousands of adoring fans, and yet here they were honoring me as some sort of hero, which I’ve never pretended to be.
I suppose people like Questlove, El-P, and Killer Mike have their music heroes, as do we all, and when they first discovered Gentle Giant in their youth, it was a revelation for them. It’s heart-warming to me, and not just because it’s gratifying to receive accolades from artists I admire. More importantly, it means the legacy of Gentle Giant lives on in the hearts and minds of the next generation of underground music enthusiasts. We never achieved the mainstream popularity of Genesis, Yes, or Rush (even when we tried for it), but we remain cult pioneers whose music has struck a chord with a new breed of sonic experimentalists. I can’t say why this has happened. I can only guess. Maybe it’s because Gentle Giant were never trying to be a symphony orchestra. We didn’t have Mellotron parts or multiple percussionists. We didn’t want to be existential philosophers, spiritual healers, or space warriors. We wrote fairly intricate pieces that involved point-counterpoint dynamics and intertwining parts that were very good musically and interesting to listen to. And the uniqueness of the band seems to have appealed to the more creative members of the hip-hop community, who recognize and respect the authenticity of it—because that’s such an important trait of music for them as well.
With the exception of Twiztid, I credit every hip-hop act that has sampled our music for creating an original work of art. Back in 2016, A Tribe Called Quest sampled our 1972 Three Friends song ‘Prologue’ for their song ‘Mobius’ and hired Busta Rhymes and Consequence to guest on the track. When I first heard our delicate, ethereal passage underneath this confrontational beat, I felt strange. It was our music, but it wasn’t. The entire tone had changed, and the confrontational charge was never something we considered.
This is not our music, I thought, and, maybe, at that moment, I was a little disappointed. In hindsight, I realize that of course it’s not our music, and it shouldn’t be our music. Those are our notes, voices, and arrangements, but they’ve been recontextualized to fit someone else’s aesthetic. They made it their own, which is what progressivism is about.
Today, I tip my hat to them and to everyone else who has kept our fifty-year-old-plus music alive by adapting it in a modern context that we could never have imagined. And for those who care to take the time to listen to it, study it, and compare the sampled parts to the way they were originally used, I hope they come out of their analysis with bold, new ideas to take the songs even further. For me, it’s fascinating to see how the torch has been passed, because I was involved with it when it was first conceived. Now, as I look at these creative reinventions, I realize that our passages are just as real to the artists working with them now as they were to us when we wrote them.
For a guy who was part of a band that stopped writing songs in 1980—a band whose most talented member, my dear brother Ray, died in 2023; whose oldest member, my brother Phil, recently turned eighty-eight; and whose youngest member, Gary Green, was seventy-four at the time this book was submitted—it’s amazing to know the music lives on.
EPILOGUE
WALKING BACK
to HAPPINESS
Sometimes, when musicians spend too much time away from the recording studio—a place where innovation, collaboration, and sometimes confrontation blend to create something bigger than the sum of its parts—the fires of invention tend to fizzle. I’ve had an incredible time working for more than forty years to help artists of all styles evolve and develop. The rewards of nurturing untapped newcomers into seasoned professionals are considerable, both personally and financially. It has also been hugely rewarding to take the helm of new and resurrected labels and build them into formidable, competitive entities with rosters of credible, noteworthy rock bands and solo acts.
At the same time, the decades I’ve spent working with other people on their music and celebrating their accomplishments yielded vicarious victories. At best—if I had played an active role in helping shape songs (as I did with Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Dream Theater, and Men Without Hats), it was a musical win for everybody. At worst, it was a fringe benefit of working a corporate job. Most often, it was a semi-creative pursuit that distracted me from thinking about what had made me happier and more fulfilled than any other job in the world.
When I was a label guy, I almost forget the enthralling euphoria of being right in there with my brothers and best friends working on tight deadlines to write, play, and record songs that represent who and what you are, how you feel, and what you have to contribute to the history and culture of music. It’s a thrill that I subconsciously wrote off as a reward from the past—a one-of-a-kind sensation of pure freedom that came to an end when I parted ways with Gentle Giant in 1980.
Whenever I got melancholy about being away from the spotlight, I reminded myself that if great things lasted forever, there’d be no way to judge how amazing they were. My brother Ray and I had a great fifteen-plus-year run, which is five years longer than The Beatles were together. From the mid-60s, I was in creative environments with the best musicians and producers, and we worked together to turn magnetic tape into streams of authentic, high-concept art without sacrificing our integrity or resorting to pretension. Along with my blood and band brothers, I took a thrilling thirteen-album ride (including Simon Dupree and Playing The Fool) through a rock’n’roll amusement park, and I emerged sated and mostly unscathed. I figured I had accepted my fate and moved on.
That said, I have had the chance to take numerous glances in the rearview mirror to re-envision the power and glory of the past. My bandmates and I have enjoyed backward glimpses of those great times during strolls down memory lane. We were invigorated when fans fawned over us—especially those who were accomplished musicians, themselves. And, whenever we have reissued an album or unearthed old live recordings for a box set or special edition, it has allowed us to savor another taste of past lives.
Our first opportunity to hear full Gentle Giant albums reimagined and reinterpreted came courtesy of Porcupine Tree vocalist and producer Steven Wilson. He had already been creating 5.1 stereo remixes of albums by King Crimson, Jethro Tull, and Yes when he told Ray he was a huge Gentle Giant fan and would love to remix some titles from our catalogue. Ray told me right away, and then I talked to Kerry and Gary. We all loved the idea and felt it would add new luster to reissues of albums that some considered forty years past their sell-by date.
‘Is it possible for me to remix In A Glass House?’ Steven asked Ray during their first conversation. ‘That’s what I would love to work on most, of everything you’ve done. It would be exciting to get my hands on those recordings and try to do what I think would benefit those songs right now.’