Gentle Giant Home Page:About
The Gentle Giant Home Page was created by, and is still run by, Dan Barrett.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed material!
History
The GG home page was born on September 4, 1994. It was written in plain HTML and hosted from Dan's graduate student account at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. The URL was http://www.cs.umass.edu/~dbarrett/GG.
After Dan graduated, he moved the site in October 1998 to his own domain, blazemonger.com, at the URL http://www.blazemonger.com/GG. New graphics were designed by Chad Bruce.
In 2009, Dan redesigned the entire site to run on MediaWiki software and unveiled it on April 21, 2009. The current home page graphics were added by Chad Bruce in May 2010. In April 2020, the website adopted a new URL, https://gentlegiantmusic.com.
The GG Connection
The Gentle Giant Home Page is known to all the members of Gentle Giant, who occasionally visit the site, give their support, and give permission to reproduce certain materials found on these pages. How this happened is an interesting story.
In 1995, a British music magazine called Q noticed the site and printed a picture of the main page. This was noticed by PolyGram Records in the UK, who asked Dan to help them compile a new Gentle Giant anthology, which became Edge of Twilight. While working on the track list, Dan approached Kerry Minnear about obtaining unreleased material for the anthology. Although no unreleased material was used, this did get Dan and Kerry talking.
Then in 1997, Dan and 41 other Internet musicians released Giant Tracks, a Gentle Giant tribute album (see Keyboard Magazine, January 1998, for the full story.). This album required more discussion between Dan and Gentle Giant concerning rights and royalties, and it also drew the band's attention to the possibility of releasing their own material online. Dan then worked with Kerry and Ray Shulman and fan Dan Bornemark of Sweden to create Under Construction, a 2-CD collection of unreleased GG tracks, and market it on the Internet.
Dan has worked with the band on further Internet-related projects, including a Bon Jovi video site in 1997 (remember, Derek signed them) and some GG-related ideas. In 2000, he created an online store for Alucard Music (for free) so they could sell their CDs. (Alucard migrated to a new store in 2014.)
Copyrights
The Gentle Giant "giant head" logo, album covers, lyrics, transcriptions, and audio samples are reproduced with the kind permission of Derek Shulman of DRT Entertainment (USA), and Kerry and Lesley Minnear of Alucard Publishing, Ltd (UK). If you believe any material on this web site violates a copyright, please contact Dan Barrett and he will be happy to work things out.