Derek Shulman.
credit: Jawbone Press
When his band Gentle Giant broke up in 1980, singer and multi-instrumentalist Derek Shulman didn’t have a plan for his next career move. One thing he knew for sure was that he didn’t want to play in another group after spending 10 years with the British progressive rock band he co-founded with his brothers Phil and Ray. Then, out of the blue, Shulman received a phone call about a job opening from a friend who was at PolyGram Records.
“My immediate answer on the phone was ‘No,’” Shulman remembers. “I hadn’t thought about it. That’s the last thing I would ever think about. It was like us [the bands] against them [the record companies]. The bottom line is that he said, ‘Well, we’re starting the rock department, and the head of the department would love to speak to you. Why don’t you just come to New York and check it out?’ I asked my wife, ‘What do you think?’ And she said, ‘Go for it.’ So I went to New York and got offered a job at PolyGram Records.”
Shulman’s second act in the music industry would elevate him to the role of a major record executive. Among his signings during his tenure at PolyGram were Bon Jovi and Cinderella. When he later joined ATCO Records, he signed Pantera, Enuff Z’Nuff and Dream Theater and oversaw Bad Company and AC/DC. Afterward, he became president of Roadrunner Records in 1997, the label home of Slipknot and Nickelback.
Cover of ‘Giant Steps’ by Derek Shulman.
credit: Jawbone Press
Now his decades-long adventures as both a musician and A&R man are told in his new memoir, Giant Steps, co-written with Jon Wiederhorn. The idea of writing a memoir, Shulman says, came from his late friend Jack Schwartz, an editor at The New York Times, several years ago. “We got together occasionally, and I told him stories about what I was doing with Bon Jovi or being in a band,” Shulman recalls. “It sounded like a glamorous lifestyle to him. He kept saying, ‘You should write a book.’ He was one of the instigators.”
From his youth in Portsmouth, England, music was in Shulman and his brothers’ blood through their father, a jazz trumpeter and band leader. In the mid-1960s, the trio found success as members of the psychedelic rock band Simon Dupree and the Big Sound, particularly with the hit “Kites.” “But having the pop hit put a millstone around our necks,” Shulman says. “We started having to play venues for very good money, but the audiences just wanted to hear the hits and not hear us play different kinds of music. It stymied our musical expansion.”
During their time in Simon Dupree, the Shulman brothers met an aspiring singer-songwriter named Reginald Dwight, who became the group’s interim keyboardist. “He was a real muso,” Shulman recalls of the future Elton John. “We became great friends during that period of time. He said, ‘You should listen to other bands doing different things.’ And then he went off to do his own thing.”
By this time, the Shulman brothers broke up Simone Dupree and the Big Sound in 1969 and started Gentle Giant, which piqued Dwight’s interest in their new venture. “He played some songs that he had written, like “Skyline Pigeon,” etc.,” Shulman adds. “I remember we listened to him and we hung out for a day or two [in Watford, England]. We went back to Portsmouth and said, ‘It’s not going to work for us.’ Thank goodness we said, ‘Reg, thanks a lot, but no thanks.’ He said, ‘Oh, by the way, I’m going to change my name to Elton John.’ And of course, a year later, he was Elton John. So thank God for him, we turned him down. We remain friends to this day.”
With a lineup that consisted of the Shulman brothers (Derek on vocals, Ray on bass and Phil on vocals and woodwinds), keyboardist Kerry Minnear, guitarist Gary Green and various drummers that included John Weathers, Gentle Giant was one of the leading British progressive rock bands of the 1970s. As heard on such classic Gentle Giant albums as the self-titled debut (1970), Acquiring the Taste (1971), Three Friends (1972) and Octopus (1972), the band’s ornate music drew from folk, jazz and the avant-garde while eschewing the commercial sound of Simon Dupree.
“The sound of Gentle Giant was the combination of different kinds of influences,” Shulman says. “At home we listened to jazz. My father loved classical music as well. I loved R&B and soul. So the combination of all the influences stirred up in a pot and put in a funnel and out dropped Gentle Giant effectively.
“We were very cocooned. We didn’t know or have any awareness of any other bands doing what ultimately was progressive. We didn’t know that word. We just did what we did. We weren’t saying, ‘We should do this or do that.’ It was something that came naturally to us composition-wise.”
Derek Shulman circa the Gentle Giant era.
credit: Jawbone Press
As recounted in Giant Steps, one of the bands that Gentle Giant became friendly with was Black Sabbath, both of whom shared the same management company. “Our first American tour was with Sabbath,” Shulman says. “That was a big eye-opener for Gentle Giant as well as Sabbath because at that time, they were huge in the States…The audience would come to see Sabbath. And we initially come on [to open for them and] we get immediate boos. I think because of our background in Simon Dupree and having that apprenticeship to bring the audience around, there were cheers and even claps from the audience. It was a weird and strange tour. We love hanging out with the guys. They were funny, and we were great friends.”
COPENHAGEN, DENMARK – JANUARY: (L-R) (back) Gary Green, Kerry Minnear, (front) Derek Shulman, Ray Shulman, Phil Shulman and Malcolm Mortimore of progressive rock band Gentle Giant pose for a group shot in January 1972 in Copenhagen, Denmark. (Photo by Jorgen Angel/Redferns)
Redferns
A turning point for Gentle Giant came when, after the release of Octopus, Shulman’s elder brother Phil departed from the band to spend more time with his family, leading to a period of estrangement between the two sibkings. “On the first couple of albums, we were just babies and becoming adolescents,” says Shulman. “I think the prime adolescent album was Octopus. Then my brother Phil left the band. After that, we found that being a five-piece was much easier and better. And personally, as well as sibling-wise, it was better for all of us that me and Phil weren’t at each other, which we were in the earlier days.”
Shulman says Gentle Giant was at their creative peak with the albums The Power and the Glory (1974) and Freehand (1975). The group carried on until 1980, and Shulman transitioned from the stage to the front office within the music industry. One of his first major signings as an executive was an up-and-coming rocker from New Jersey named Jon Bon Jovi. Shulman knew early on that Bon Jovi was destined for stardom after hearing the song “Runaway” on local radio.
“He was putting his band together,” Shulman says. “I do remember sitting down with him, and he walked into my office, and, of course, all the girls’ heads would turn. I said, ‘Jon, you’re putting this band together, and it sounds like it’s going to be great. But what do you want to be? Who is it you want to be?’ And he looked me straight in the eye and he literally said this to me, ‘I want to be as big or bigger than Elvis.’ You could tell when somebody is that driven and believes in himself that much that nothing was going to get in his way.”
Derek Shulman with Jon Bon Jovi, 1996.
credit: Jawbone Press
“They worked their asses off. I introduced them to Doc McGhee, the manager, and we recorded a couple of albums [Bon Jovi and 7800° Fahrenheit]. Then, thankfully, I introduced him to Desmond Child to co-write with him, and that’s another story in itself. We went to Vancouver because I got friendly with Bruce Fairbairn, Bob Rock and Mike Fraser. We all went out there and came back to New York. And when we played Slippery When Wet to the rest of the company, I knew that Jon Bon Jovi and Bon Jovi were going to be as big as Elvis.”
Most of the artists in Shulman’s orbit — among them Cinderella, Pantera, Dream Theater and Nickelback — fell in the hard rock/metal genres, although Shulman also worked with other musicians outside of those styles, such as synthpop act Men Without Hats. The fact that he was once a musician himself proved crucial for Shulman in helping his signees’ careers.
“I understood the lifestyle and what it was. All the bands that I was involved in, the one thing that is important to me: they were all leaders in their field. Dream Theater, for instance, they were doing something that nobody else was doing. These bands were leaders in their field, and they were authentic bands, not doing something that a band on the charts was doing and trying to follow that.”
While some of his progressive rock peers from the 1970s — among them Genesis, Jethro Tull, Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer — have continued to perform or reunite over the decades, Gentle Giant has remained inactive for 45 years. While Shulman still likes making music for himself, he has no desire to either perform publicly or reform Gentle Giant (His brother Ray died in 2023).
“Because I’ve been in music all of my life, there’s a time when you have to hang up your boots,” Shulman says. “ I don’t have anything against any band continuing with reform. But I didn’t ever want to be a tribute band or a parody of myself. That would be horrific. And my brothers certainly felt the same way.”
More than 50 years after their formation, Gentle Giant remarkably lives on through hip-hop artists, such as Travis Scott, De La Soul, J Dilla and Run the Jewels, sampling the band’s music. One of Gentle Giant’s biggest fans is the Roots’ Questlove, as told in Giant Steps.
“It was a couple of years ago when I was overseeing a record company,” Shulman remembers. “I brought Ann Wilson from Heart to play as a special guest with the Roots [on The Tonight Show]. The musical director said, ‘Are you the Derek Shulman who was in Gentle Giant?’ I said, ‘Yeah. How do you know that?’ He said, ‘Wait. Hold on a minute.’
“So he went to the green room and out came Questlove and the Roots. They said, ‘Wow, we can’t believe that you’re here.’ They actually had Gentle Giant albums, and they were asking me for my autograph. Meanwhile, Ann Wilson was standing there in the corner wondering, ‘What is going on here?’
“Questlove actually said to me, ‘I don’t know if you know it, but you’ve got a ghetto pass.’ The hip-hop world has taken our music. And in fact, Travis Scott had the biggest-selling and most played song of the year with “Hyaena,” and it starts with “Proclamation” by Gentle Giant.”
Outside of his memoir, Shulman remains active in music, which has included his involvement in remastering and reissuing Gentle Giant’s back catalog in collaboration mostly with musician/producer Steven Wilson, who himself is another fan of the band. “I’ve got to finish off the 5.1 mix of [1973’s] In a Glass House. I’m doing it with another engineer, but Steven Wilson is advising me about how to put it together. So I’m still working, even at my old age.”
