The day the music died.

[WinterDeere]

Gentle Giant are indeed prog legends.

Always nice seeing kids pick up some of the old classics:

Not quite as "tight" as the original, but actually pretty darn good, for such a complex bit of syncopation.

 

[gstrom99]

Gentle Giant came up in the shuffle rotation today, and I got thinking how old those guys must be by now... if not gone.

Well, it turns out Ray Shulman, one of the three Shulman brothers that started the band, passed a year ago this month.

Gentle Giant never really saw very big commercial success, always being more "musicians musicians", than "popular musicians". Their claim to fame is more in which more popular prog rock bands they influenced, than any commercial success of their own.

Ray's contribution to the band was mostly violin and electric bass, and he can be seen playing bass in the video above. Listening to this again now, it's funny how much the synth sounds in this tune sound like Stevie Wonder's Innervisions album. Not sure which came first, but I think it was these guys.

And yeah, it's weird. That's what makes it interesting.

What "shuffle rotation" are you using, that pulls them up? GG was in my album stash, when I still had vinyl. I've forgotten about them, completely. Good memories...

 

[WinterDeere]

What "shuffle rotation" are you using, that pulls them up? GG was in my album stash, when I still had vinyl. I've forgotten about them, completely. Good memories...

I ripped my entire CD collection to hard drive, one long weekend about 15 years ago. So now I just copy that entire set to an SD card or USB thumb drive, to keep a collection of all of my music in each of our cars. Sometimes I will just put the whole damn thing on shuffle, and see what pops up.

Today’s surprise a song from Camel’s Mirage album, which played between a tune from Metallica’s Master of Puppets album, and Moondance from Van Morrison. Eclectic, if nothing else!

 

[PJSprog]

Camel is another great band that should have been bigger than they were.

 

[WinterDeere]

Camel is another great band that should have been bigger than they were.

Yeah, definitely. The Snow Goose has to be one of the top ten or twenty albums ever made, IMO. Those guys really had the full package, composition and capability.

About 16-17 years ago, I caught a YouTube post of a great old "History of Prog Rock" documentary, probably created by the BBC. One segment of the documentary focused specifically on the Canterbury scene, very similar to our 1990'ish "Seattle scene" for grunge, but in 1970 England. The big names I remember from that were Camel, Caravan, and Hatfield and the North. Of the three, Camel was the stand-out, but I always got a kick out of the Caravan album names:

1. If I could do it all over again, I'd do it all over you
2. Cunning Stunts
3. In the land of gray and pink

 

[WinterDeere]

The spontaneous origin of a mega hit:

 

[caver]

I've been away from my computer for a week and saw that Judas Priest drummer Les Binks passed away March 15 and was confirmed a month later by JP. He played on Stained Class, Hell Bent For Leather and the LIVE album Unleashed in the East which saw frequent plays on my old turntable in my youth.

 

[caver]

Rick Derringer passed.

 

[WinterDeere]

Rock and Roll, Hoochie Koo!

 

[caver]

For some reason I thought Rick played on Edgar Winter's Frankenstein but turns out it was Ronnie Montrose. Rick Derringer was the producer.