“I Lost My Head” by Gentle Giant
From the 1976 album Interview
My engagement with this blog has certainly fallen off, and I apologize to those of you (if you exist) who are disappointed by my lack of ongoing enthusiasm for it. There are multiple factors involved: 1) I stopped finding interesting things on YouTube (partly because I wasn’t looking); 2) too many of the best videos (especially any involving Robert Fripp) were pulled; and 3) the summer ended and life got in the way.
The Hall of Prog is not dead, just hibernating. Yes, winter is upon us. And with our first real winter snow storm having hit us here in Minneapolis yesterday (a few unseasonable fluke snows in October, which quickly melted, notwithstanding), I am thinking back, as I always do, to December 1992. I was a freshman in college, and thanks to Usenet newsgroups like alt.music.progressive (this was in pre-Web days), I was learning about more obscure prog bands than I had ever been able to discover with the limited resources available to me at the pathetically understocked (and now long-since closed) Musicland in the dying mall in my hometown.
Interestingly, the band I was just getting into in December 1992, and the band I always think about when the first real winter snows hit, was a band I did not learn about from the nascent Interwebz. It was a band I found scouring the pages of my well-worn copy of the Rolling Stone Record Guide. The guide gave Gentle Giant’s The Power and the Glory a bullet — their worst rating, not worthy of even a single star. (Even Tales from Topographic Oceans mustered that much.) I was convinced that any prog band willing to offend the fickle Rolling Stone reviewers to such an extent must be worth hearing, and I was right. Luckily, a slightly less-pathetic record store existed in a neighboring, slightly less-pathetic city, and they had a few Gentle Giant CDs in stock. I cleaned them out over my Christmas break from college, and spent most of the rest of the winter immersing myself in the bizarre (even for prog) intricacies of their work.
The most intriguing element of Gentle Giant’s music, for me, is its brevity. While every bit as complex as any prog you’ll find, Gentle Giant’s music crams as much intricate arrangement and virtuosic instrumentalism into 4 minutes as most prog bands managed to fit into their requisite side-long epics. In fact, aside from live performances, Gentle Giant’s longest track barely cracks the 9-minute mark, and that’s on their first album! Over the years they recorded a few other tracks in the 7- to 8-minute range, but the vast majority of their songs are under 6 minutes.
Anyway… perhaps Gentle Giant’s brevity is a lesson I should take to heart in writing these blog posts.
This is a pretty cool video, even if the band is lip-syncing to the studio version of the song. I honestly didn’t realize they weren’t playing live until Derek started singing in the rock part halfway through the song. Maybe I was too distracted by John Weathers’ Oakland A’s uniform.
