Talking Gentle Giant's Free Hand with Ray Shulman
The multi-instrumentalist discusses the new reissue as well as the making of the album and the band's career overall.
Thanks for spending part of your day with Michael’s Record Collection. For this week’s issue, I had the pleasure of speaking with Ray Shulman, a member of the progressive rock band Gentle Giant. I hope you enjoy this edition and you can view the entire video of my interview with Ray below. If you like what you read here, please consider sharing it with people who might find it interesting and ask them to sign up for a free account to get future issues. I’ve got some great interview subjects lined up and look forward to getting those to you in the coming weeks.
When Gentle Giant released their seventh album, Free Hand, back in the summer of 1975, it was seen as the band’s most accessible and commercial-sounding release to date. That’s not to say it was Top 40 fare, as this is Gentle Giant we’re talking about. The British progressive rock masters were known for the complexity and sophistication of their compositions, as well as the use of unconventional (and varied) instrumentation.
Nearly 46 years later, Free Hand is getting both the 5.1 surround sound and Dolby Atmos treatment from Steven Wilson, the master of the high resolution mixing desk and a brilliant musician in his own right. The new release will hit the streets June 25.
Wilson has breathed new life into progressive rock classics from the likes of Yes, Jethro Tull, and King Crimson, and this is the fourth album he’s remixed for Gentle Giant.
“Steven’s always been a fan, anyway,” said Gentle Giant multi-instrumentalist Ray Shulman — the youngest of three Scottish brothers who played in the band (although Phil had left Gentle Giant in 1973). Shulman’s and Wilson’s paths crossed due to Ray’s current job working on music DVDs and Blu Rays.
“Steven first of all got in touch for me to do one of his releases,” Shulman said, noting that Wilson had been interested in doing a 5.1 mix for Gentle Giant’s album In a Glass House (1973), but the multi-tracks from that album are lost. “That’s the one he feels could really benefit from a makeover. But they’re gone forever. But then he said, ‘I’d love to get involved and remix particularly in 5.1, to do the surround mixes of your stuff. I think the arrangements would really suit being treated that way.’
“In fact, we had a few conversations before — myself and (former Gentle Giant bandmate) Kerry (Minnear) — to maybe do it ourselves, but when Steven got in touch, and he’s an experienced 5.1 mixer with a really good ear.”
Shulman said one of the things he and Minnear liked about Wilson’s approach is that he respects the songs and brings out the best in them rather than completely changing or modernizing them. Wilson is basically left to do his thing, with only minor occasional edits or notes from the band along the way.
The new mixes should be interesting to high definition audio enthusiasts, as well as Gentle Giant fans, as the band’s incredible vocal work on songs like “Just the Same” and “On Reflection” are tailor made for the 5.1 treatment.
The members of Gentle Giant at the time consisted of Shulman (bass, electric violin, violin, viola, and vocals), his older brother Derek (lead vocals, treble recorder, alto saxophone), Minnear (piano, Hammond organ, clavinet, Mini-Moog, synthesizer, electric piano, harpsichord, and Wurlitzer), Gary Green (electric guitar, acoustic guitar, descant recorder, and vocals), and John Weathers (drums and percussion). They were all living in Portsmouth, England when work began on Free Hand. Gentle Giant had just had a messy divorce with management and switched record labels to Chrysalis, which would be their label for the remainder of the band’s existence.
“The reason it’s called Free Hand is we’d just been through some pretty kind of mean, lawyerly things with our ex-manager and all that kind of stuff,” Ray said. “It was like the ‘free hand’ was almost like freedom to do what we wanted to do. And actually the atmosphere was really good, very positive. I think we wrote it very quickly over not very many weeks.”
The band didn’t write songs together by jamming. Each individual in Gentle Giant would work on ideas on their own, develop them as far as they could, and then submit them to the group for further development.
“My process, and I think Kerry’s was quite similar too, basically was lots of improvising,” Shulman said. “If something catches your ear — maybe just a phrase or anything — then take that little chunk and just develop it into some kind of arrangement. And then a bit more development into a piece of music.
“We always left room. The basic sketch was always down as a fixed arrangement, more or less. In the studio, we always left, ‘these are the fixed parts, that’s the melody,’ but then we’d always leave room for lots of experimentation and grab whatever instruments were around.”
The band produced Free Hand themselves, as they’d been producing their own records since their Acquiring the Taste (1971) album. This was mainly due to the unavailability of Tony Visconti — who produced the band’s first two albums — for Gentle Giant’s third release, Three Friends (1972). The band tried their hand at self-producing and then just did it that way from then on through their final record, Civilian (1980).
The album has an overall baroque feel to it, with some folk and at times even Celtic influences creeping in a bit.
“That’s Kerry’s natural…that’s the kind of music he loved anyway,” Shulman said of the baroque feel. “That’s his thing, really.”
When he asked if he had a favorite song on Free Hand, Shulman singled out “His Last Voyage,” which Ray kicks off with his bass. Minnear’s ethereal lead vocal sounds like it was recorded in an old church.
“Then as it progresses, it gets a little bit jazzier and even a kind of funky section,” Shulman said. “That has a jazz tint to it too. I like it.”
Gentle Giant’s experimentation included recording a brand new piece of technology sitting in a pub around the corner from the studio. The band recorded a bit of the videogame Pong, and used those sounds as the intro to “Time to Kill.” Green recorded the game with a cassette recorder and it is believed to be the first use of a videogame sound on a rock record.
“Knowing that the track started with a hard ‘bum!’…like a hard hit to start it, interrupting something was always going to be the idea,” said Shulman. “So that comes as a bit of a shock, so the Pong thing worked out great.”
The title track is the album’s most “rock” song. It’s a Minnear song driven by Ray’s bass and brought to life by Derek’s lead vocal. Minnear sings lead during the bridge. Ray said another version the band recorded was even more rocky than the version that made the album.
Shulman said the band would typically write for about seven weeks and then record for about a month and then go on tour at that point of their careers. With the type of music Gentle Giant played, it was difficult for them to find just the right band to tour with at first, but by the time Free Hand came out, they had more say due to being headliners.
If you weren’t there — and the band came along when I was young — it’s hard to imagine a Gentle Giant concert. The songs all had to be reconfigured for live play due to the complex structures. It’s typically not music you can dance or move around much to. I asked Ray if the members of Gentle Giant thought of themselves as serious musicians or rock stars, or something else entirely.
“We wanted to be a famous rock band,” Shulman laughed. “That was always the ambition. There’d be always something dragging us back from complete commerciality, even on the later ones, which we were trying to go towards a more accessible music. There’d always be something we’d throw in just to ruin it. I think it’s something built into us. We couldn’t commit totally to doing a commercial record but we toyed with it a little bit. Plus, our musical tastes were very broad.”
The re-issue of Free Hand will be available in a new CD mix, Blu Ray, and a double vinyl LP. The vinyl version will contain both the flat mix and the new Steven Wilson remixed version. The Blu Ray will have Dolby Atmos and 5.1 surround sound and the tracks will be accompanied by custom animated visuals. The CD, housed in a digipack, will have the original flat mix, the original 1975 quad mix, and an instrumental mix.
Here’s my full interview with Ray: