Originally Posted by
GuitarGeek
Interesting. I never knew they had been on the cover of Rolling Stone. Isn't it ironic, dontcha think?
I guess my perception of Gentle Giant not being as big as the other bands is, I guess, somehow, they sort of slipped out of visibility during the 80's. Yeah, they broke up, I know, but even the individual band members seemed to disappear off the face of the Earth. No solo albums, no forming new bands, etc.
So, those of us who grew up in the 80's, and initially knew of the then contemporary works of Yes, Crimson, Genesis, etc (or even Asia and GTR...I'm young enough that my initial knowledge of Yes, Crimson, and ELP was they were names on the resumes of the members of Asia), there's no equivalency for Gentle Giant. I think I heard them mentioned here and there a couple times, in Keyboard magazine and a couple other places, but it really wasn't until the 90's that I ever heard any of their music.
So in a way, in my mind, at least, Gentle Giant belongs more in the same level as VDGG, Hatfield And The North, Caravan, the Italian bands, etc, though I fully realize that for those who are even just a few years older than me, that might not be the case.
(come to think of it, I think I might have heard of VDGG and Hatfields before I heard of Gentle Giant, as I remember a kid I knew in the tenth grade, that'd be 88-89, telling me about VDGG, and Steve Stevens mentioned PFM, Hatfields, and Flash in a piece he wrote for Guitar World magazine about his favorite prog rock records)
And my apologies for derailing the discussion by asking my initial question. I just know there's a lot of debate of exactly who the "big bands" were of progressive rock, though the responses indicate a level of obviousness that had escaped me at the time of asking. Maybe I was thinking too much about the Doctor Who DVD's, Blind Lemon Jefferson CD's and Uriah Heep t-shirts I was waiting for in the post at the time.
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