Lecture Series, part 11: Gentle Giant, and a conclusion
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Okay, I'm getting the feeling this has gone on long enough. The comments per post have slowly dwindled over the last few weeks, and my desire to keep posting on the topic has frankly waned as well. I'd like to think that I accomplished my original goal, which was not to get everyone to fall in love with progressive rock, but just to clue you in on the fact that not all prog is capes and over the top pretentious snobbery. I'd like to end with one of my all time favorite bands, and one of the most well known unknown bands out there, if that makes sense. I'm talking about Gentle Giant. Even though the last official thing they did together was way back in 1980, among "prog circles", such as it were, Gentle Giant is still one of those bands that is talked about in whispers of hushed reverence. Ask 10 prog lovers which band they would gladly travel thousands of miles to see and spend way too much money in the process, and I wouldn't be surprised if more than half answer Gentle Giant. (That's not a scientific poll, mind you, just a gut feeling). And while not everyone gets into them (I'm looking at you, capndad!) even the haters out there recognize that Gentle Giant actually did what so many other prog outfits through the decades failed to do--they created something completely and totally unique, in every sense of the word.
A rather unflattering picture, IMOGentle Giant started in the late 1960's, and at first they were a good, but rather typical prog band. As their sound developed, though, they grew increasingly complex. What makes them different than the other complex bands out there can be broken up into three areas, I think: First, Gentle Giant drew their influences from all over the place; rock, jazz, the other usual places. But they also drew heavily on more medieval sounds as well, and brought this in through odd instrumentation, and a more medieval sounding approach to playing, including counterpoint, fugues, and other musical terms I don't care to dredge up. The point is that there are mamy examples of GG playing songs where all the instruments are basically playing different things, bringing them together in unusual ways. Here's a song from the album Interview that demonstrates that in part. Note how the instruments are each playing separate phrasings, picking up where others leave off:
A rather unflattering picture, IMOGentle Giant started in the late 1960's, and at first they were a good, but rather typical prog band. As their sound developed, though, they grew increasingly complex. What makes them different than the other complex bands out there can be broken up into three areas, I think: First, Gentle Giant drew their influences from all over the place; rock, jazz, the other usual places. But they also drew heavily on more medieval sounds as well, and brought this in through odd instrumentation, and a more medieval sounding approach to playing, including counterpoint, fugues, and other musical terms I don't care to dredge up. The point is that there are mamy examples of GG playing songs where all the instruments are basically playing different things, bringing them together in unusual ways. Here's a song from the album Interview that demonstrates that in part. Note how the instruments are each playing separate phrasings, picking up where others leave off: Second, add this medieval, multi-layered sound to the vocals. There are exactly two bands I know of that people refer to in terms of their vocals. One is The Beatles. The other is Gentle Giant. The phrase "Gentle Giant like vocals" immediately brings to mind something like this next song. You have a band full of people who could all sing intricate complex rhythms as wella s play them, and they did. Sometimes they had these crazy vocals inside songs, but in other times the vocals themselves were the whole point of the song. This next is a clip of them performing the song "On Reflection" live. It starts off kind of slow, but if you skip forward to about the 2 minute mark you'll hear what I'm talking about. I know of no other band that could pull that off and make it sound interesting. Third, and most importantly: even through all this musical highmindedness, they just simply wrote songs that kicked ass. They could rock out, they could settle into a groove, they could wail, they could be melodic. They really could do it all. Here's another video of them, this time just playing a great rocking tune, in spite of its more complex subtext:This is "Proclamation":And one more, because they just completely rock. This is "Octopus Medley," a live medley of songs from their album called OctopusSadly, Gentle Giant went the way of the Dodo and the Diplodocus. And unlike many other bands who have reformed, it's been confirmed that a Gentle Giant reunion will pretty much never happen. They all went their various ways, but what's interesting is that the singer, Derek Shulman, eventually became a bigwig at PolyGram records. While there, he signed acts such as Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Kingdom Come, Tears for Fears, Men Without Hats, and Dexy's Midnight Runners. Later he was the president of ATCO, signing Pantera, was the President of Roadrunner records, signing Slipknot and Type O Negative, among others. So, there you have it. Not to say that there won't be more prog in future postings, but that's it for the "lectures!"
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