Songs That Are Like Old Friends, pt. 2

Song No. 2: On Reflection

The step from song no. 1 to no. 2 is a giant one … in several senses!

My family lived for two years in Europe where, courtesy of the Armed Forces Radio Network, I became acquainted between the ages of 10 and 12 with old-time-radio shows (from Jack Benny, Henry Morgan, and Stan Freburg to “It Pays to Be Ignorant” and “The Magnificent Montague”), as well as some of the history of Sixties rock-and-roll. John Gillaland’s “The Pop Chronicles” and other compendia aired on AFN Frankfurt.

My attention to popular music was pretty spotty, because I didn’t have access to a record player. Mostly I listened to AM hits (I remember hearing a lot of “Saturday Morning Confusion,” Simon & Garfunkel’s “Cecilia,” and “Don’t Pull Your Love” by Hamilton, Joe Frank & Reynolds, which made me wonder whether that was three or four guys every time the DJ announced the band) and taped old radio shows onto an Uher reel-to-reel. We did have a cheap cassette player; on the recommendation of a record department clerk, Dad bought a cassette of Led Zeppelin II at the U.S. Army Post Exchange in Hanau, Germany, but he didn’t like it much. I got into it, though.

Back home in Oregon, I went through phases of putting Creedence, Three Dog Night, and Deep Purple on heavy rotation at home. (Eventually there were copies of everything from The Carpenters to Atomic Rooster in my collection, and of course The Beatles were a huge element: my high school American history teacher Jim Barnes allowed me to lecture on them to several periods of classes.) I think my Dad also introduced me to Chicago when he brought home the third album (one of the hardest rocking and most political of that band’s oeuvre), and I liked that, too.

An odd series of circumstances led to the song I’m featuring today. I was buying a lot of used LPs at a shop in Eugene, Oregon called the House of Records, then at 14th and Oak. One was a copy of Deep Purple’s Fireball, but much to my disappointment, when I got it home I found it contained a disk by a band called Yes. I listened to a little and then put it aside; my annoyance over not getting what I’d paid for, as well as the complexity of the music, ensured I wasn’t ready for it. I was about 14.

A year or so later, though, I found a triple live album of Yes with really cool cover artwork in a bin at a local music store. It had no plastic wrap, so my buddy Mike and I asked an employee what they’d sell it for. He looked at the numbers on the spine and said $11.99. Something told us he was not assessing its value properly, and it sounded like a good price.

When the cashier counted out my change, I stood there for a moment, struck by the feeling that something wasn’t right. Mike was pulling on my arm, and it was only when he had spirited me out the door that I realized I had been handed too much change. Yessongs was mine for even less than the low quoted price! The first of the three disks was the same one I had unknowingly brought home in the Deep Purple cover, but now I was primed for it. (At right is the Roger Dean artwork for that album, reproduced under the fair use doctrine).

Mike and I had been listening to heavy metal and progressive rock groups such as Aerosmith, Blue Öyster Cult, Led Zeppelin, Emerson Lake & Palmer, Pink Floyd, and King Crimson, but Yes became my favorite band for the next few years. The group appealed to the grandiose adolescent in me: gigantic walls of sound, mysterious and pretentious lyrics, complex time signatures, spacey cover art. When we heard Yes was going to be playing the Memorial Coliseum in Portland up state, we ordered tickets.

A little later I was over at Mike’s and he put on a new record he had just acquired. The sound blew me away. I had never heard anything like it -- not from Yes, ELP, or anybody else. I can’t be certain whether today’s song was the first cut he played or not, but it’s the most distinctive tune on what would become the most commercially successful album by a never very well-known band. After Mike had basked in my astonishment, he said, “You know what’s the best part? They’re opening for Yes!” We already had tickets to see this remarkable British group.

It was Gentle Giant. Later I realized I had heard a tiny bit of this group’s music a few years before. As a music teacher, my Dad had received small discs of music samples that illustrated various musical principles from some service, and one of them featured the first minute or so of an early, ethereal Gentle Giant piece called “Schooldays.” That sample intrigued me but I didn’t follow up on it, and possibly never discovered at the time who recorded it.

The July 1976 arena concert in Portland switched my allegiance from Yes to GG. The former were indeed extraordinary in concert, but they came across as so very cool and distant on stage, like gods who had descended from the heavens to serenade us mere mortals for a few brief hours.

By contrast, Gentle Giant appeared very down-to-earth and playful -- “aw shucks, we’re just having some fun up here” -- while executing an astonishing array of musical feats in performance: three- and four-part vocal harmonies, percussion quintets, recorder quintets. The keyboardist played cello and vibraphone, the bass player played violin, the lead singer played sax, and so on. In concert, the five members of the band played roughly 30 different instruments over the course of the show.

The music was a mélange of rock, blues, classical, medieval, folk, jazz . . . utterly intoxicating in its wealth of sounds. The lyrics were not cosmic, coy, or opaque (like those of Yes, King Crimson, or ELP), but rich, intelligent, and thought-provoking. Apart from love, schooling, work, and the life of a band, their songs occasionally drew inspiration from such sources as Camus, Rabelais, and R.D. Laing.

Vocals might feature such distinctive musical treats as counterpoint or hocketing. (Don’t worry; I’d never heard of it either, until much later when more knowledgeable fans discussed it online.) If you know a little about Seventies progressive rock, you might sense where GG was coming from generally if I tell you they shared concert bills over the years with Jethro Tull, Frank Zappa, Renaissance, Gary Wright, and Strawbs as well as Yes.

I would eventually get to see Gentle Giant live in concert three times -- in Portland and Boston -- and collected nearly all their 11 studio productions and one live double album on vinyl (and, in most cases, on CD later on), as well as half a dozen bootleg recordings. Their heyday was the Seventies, they broke up in 1980, and for a time in the late Eighties I wondered if I would ever meet anyone who had heard of the band, let alone learn what the members had been up to since or get a chance to tell them how much their music had meant to me.

But the Internet brought Gentle Giant fans -- many of whom were musicians themselves -- in touch across the globe in the mid 1990s. Some of us arranged for in-person gatherings, and former members of the band itself occasionally joined us. At a 2003 get-together in Portland, I got to sing the lovely GG ballad, “A Reunion,” with a pickup band of fans in front of three of the members of that amazing group: guitarist Gary Green, keyboard player and composer Kerry Minnear, and drummer John Weathers.

My chosen song number 2, “On Reflection,” features several earmarks of many GG compositions: rich lyrics, recorders, strings, and electric guitars, abrupt switches in time signature, dramatic pauses, a variety of musical styles from madrigal (I think) and Renaissance ballad to rock, interlocking vocal and instrumental rhythms. (Since the vocals can get kind of dense, please note that if you click on the “Show More” button on this YouTube page, you can see the marvelous lyrics to this incredible song. At left is the cover art from the album the song was released on.)

Another delightful thing about Gentle Giant was that in concert, the songs might sound very different from what you heard on the albums. It wasn’t just the usual challenge of concocting a tidy outro for a cut that had just faded out on vinyl on endless repetitions; the band might alter the instrumentation, change the rhythms, combine two or more songs into a medley, or insert a percussion quintet -- as in the aggressively quirky “So Sincere” on the official live album, Playing the Fool.

(Once you get past the spastic acoustic and vocal section, the band basically turns into a power trio that consists of Minnear dancing on keyboards, Green doing heavy electric blues on guitar, and Weathers blasting away on the drum kit -- it starts at about 3:27 -- while the rest of the band and roadies bring out the drums and bells for the percussion quintet that kicks in at 5:14. Don’t miss the lovely chills when they switch to the bells at 6:42, then start peeling off one by one at 8:02 to return to the drums for a thundering climax.)

The Renaissance-style “Raconteur Troubadour” (which includes an instrumental bridge inspired by one of Minnear’s favorite composers, Edward Elgar; you know, the one who composed the music you marched to at high school graduation) became a dual-acoustic guitar instrumental break in a (roughly) five-song medley called “Excerpts from Octopus,” the album they’re all from. (That’s the Roger Dean cover art to the album above.) You’ll hear this fairly delicate section starting at 2:16, although the actual, gorgeous “Raconteur” section doesn’t begin until 3:21, after a gradual transition from the initial, loud speed-prog portion that quotes “The Boys in the Band.”) The simple ballad “Funny Ways” got expanded in concert with the insertion of a lengthy vibraphone solo by Minnear.

I prefer the studio version of “On Reflection” because it’s more crisp and fresh, but the live version also starts very differently: violin, cello, and vibraphone perform the slow section that doesn’t turn up until the middle of the studio version, and then the lead vocalist cuts in with the verse that opens the song on the studio album.

This song is a huge favorite among serious Gentle Giant fans. The long-running online discussion list devoted to the band, going strong now for nearly two decades (and based, oddly enough, in the servers at the University of Oregon, only a mile or two from the House of Records where I bought many of my first GG albums), is called On-Reflection. Besides getting together occasionally to share stories and music, members of the list have collaborated on Gentle Giant tribute discs, albums of original music done in GG style, and so on.

Another trait that distinguished Gentle Giant from other progressive rock acts was their obvious sense of humor. An album called Interview has mock question-and-answer clips between several of the cuts, as well as the title song, which talks about the endless repetitive process: “Now that he’s gone, turn off our faces/Wait for the new man to arrive./Soon the same song, sung for the next one/saying our piece, though not alive.” A series of random crashes of breaking glass form themselves into a rhythmic foundation for the introduction to “The Runaway.” They even titled one of their collections Pretentious … for the Sake of It.

I’ve provided plenty of links above, but if I were to choose three songs that give an excellent sense of what was so great about Gentle Giant (assuming anyone’s still paying attention here), I’d suggest “Just theSame,” an ostensibly straight-ahead rocker that possesses bewildering complexity the more closely you listen to it (note the syncopated finger-snapping intro); “Knots,” one of the band’s most startling vocal compositions; and “Experience,” which features marvelous lyrics, and complex instrumental lines (acoustic and electric) that lead to a hard-rocking climax.

But one could get just as rich (yet very different) a sense of what they could do from the bouncy yet aggressive “Proclamation,” the spacey “The Advent of Panurge,” and the gorgeous and eerie “Memories of Old Days.”

As a devoted fan I always felt sorry that Gentle Giant never attained the recognition and success they deserved -- not even at the level of fellow prog-rock giants Yes, Tull, or ELP -- but on the other hand their relative obscurity helped to preserve the elitist snob appeal that is an undeniable element of satisfaction for the devotee.

My friends and I discovered Heart, Ambrosia, Bobby McFerrin, and other artists before they became more widely known, but their success ultimately diminished their appeal for us. Nobody likes to have to share his passion.

That never had to happen with Gentle Giant. They’re like a marvelous secret that only the “inside” folks can share.