Interview with Kerry Minnear of Gentle Giant (Part One)
The last few months have been an exciting time for Gentle Giant fans. After years of relative inactivity, punctuated by sporadic releases of varying quality, over the course of the last few months Gentle Giant has released a large slice of its catalog in digital formats for the first time, and now those same re-masters are coming to CD versions as well. On Tuesday EMI released In A Glass House (1973), The Power and the Glory (1974) and Free Hand (1975) on CD. February will bring additional releases of Playing The Fool, Interview, The Missing Piece, and Giant For A Day, and a DVD entitled GG Live at Winchester College will emerge later in the year as well.
I have been lucky enough to interview both Derek Shulman and Gary Green from Gentle Giant previously, so I was very happy to get the opportunity to interview keyboardist Kerry Minnear, who called me from his home in the UK on Thursday, January 28th to discuss the new releases and his career with Gentle Giant. Over and over what strikes me about the members of Gentle Giant is how different they are from most of the rock musicians I deal with. I routinely interview some of the most famous musicians of a certain time period, as well as some lesser-known people, and they tend to fall into two distinct categories. The ones who have succeeded but whose success is mostly in the past tend to be embittered, looking back over their shoulders at a time in their lives that has been gone for decades, but continues to define them in the public eye in a way they can never really escape. The ones who took a shot but didn’t really achieve commercial success tend to be embittered by their lack of success.
The members of Gentle Giant, by sharp contrast, seem to genuinely celebrate the music they created together; they seem to understand that the very nature of what they created was always going to limit its commercial prospects, and they seem to be okay with that, even proud of it. There’s a humility about the members of the group that isn’t really the norm for musicians. In the case of Kerry Minnear in particular, he is so soft-spoken and unassuming that it’s almost difficult to picture him in a setting where he was required to earn his living by going out and entertaining people en masse, and it’s almost impossible to imagine him having to function in the shark tank of the Seventies music business.
Perhaps that’s a part of why Gentle Giant never garnered more commercial success, who knows? I can only say that the band left a unique and lasting legacy, and it’s a great time to be a Gentle Giant fan right now. In this podcast episode Kerry Minnear discusses the recent burst of Gentle Giant business after years of relative inactivity; the new generations of Gentle Giant fans; why In A Glass House was not released in America initially; touring with Black Sabbath; touring with Jethro Tull; The Power and the Glory and why it became a concept album; and the differences between Gentle Giant and other progressive rock bands.
Special thanks to Kerry Minnear and to Anne Leighton for arranging this interview.
Stay tuned for Part Two, which I will post Tuesday.
To listen in streaming click on the “play” button on the player below. To download, right click where it says “Listen to the Interview”. You can also access this podcast through iTunes by searching We Will Rock You in podcasts.
