Gentle Giant Share Early 1970s Denver College Radio Interview
The interview forms part of a new series on the band’s official YouTube channel called ‘The Missing Interviews: The Early Days’.
Gentle Giant have released an early interview of band mainstays Derek and Ray Shulman being interviewed on Denver college radio in the 1970s.
The interview forms part of a new series on the band’s official YouTube channel called ‘The Missing Interviews: The Early Days’. You can listen to the new interview in full below.
“From 1972-1976 music director Jeff Pollack conducted a series of short interviews with Ray and Derek Shulman as part of a series called English Musicians on KCFR College Radio in Denver, CO,” the band say. “The interviews were only aired once but the original cassettes were recently found and digitised, marking the first time both fans and the band have heard them since they were first conducted.”
Although the band haven’t played live since they disbanded in 1980, Gentle Giant have been highly visible in the past 12 months. Their virtual reunion for the lockdown fan video of Proclamation won the Event Of The Year category in the Prog Magazine Readers’ Poll for 2020.
More recently the band released rare footage of a 1980 interview from the Gusman Cultural Center in Miami on their final tour.
“It amazes me that there are still things to be discovered,” said Noah Shulman, son of Derek, and the man who put together the Proclamation fan video earlier this year that saw the surviving members of the band reunite (virtually) for the first time since 1980.
Jack Skelly who compiled Gentle Giant’s Tour History had chronicled the events of that evening, said: “Interestingly, Derek introduced the song Knots to the crowd as a “psychedelic” song. One fan claims Giant looked ill during this concert, even remembering John Weathers repeatedly throwing up into a bucket on stage during the show. As it turns out, the fan was correct. The band had eaten some bad burgers beforehand, jokingly described by Derek in a backstage press interview after the gig, as “Kentucky Fried Rat”.
“This also explains why Derek frequently left the stage when he was not singing. The food poisoning hit the players when the opening act, a group called Hoochie, took the stage, and continued through all of Giant’s set. Gary recalls this difficult gig, but says they still managed to put on a good show, even though they played without their own lighting and sound rig. This equipment was, unfortunately, on its way to Houston, the site of the following night’s show.”
Listen to the best of Gentle Giant here.
