Memory:David Loftus
Oddly enough, I heard a little Gentle Giant years before I knew who the band was. In about 1972 or so, my father was teaching secondary school music and received in the mail a series of 45-sized discs that played at 33-1/3 rpm and iillustrated various musical points with contemporary examples. (I remember Felix Caveliere talking about multi-tracking with the Rascals.) One of these discs included the first minute or two of "Schooldays," which I found interesting, but I didn't follow up on it at the time; I was 13 or 14 and mainly listening to Creedence and Deep Purple then.
By 1976 I was a confirmed Yes fan, and a buddy and I got tickets to see them at Memorial Coliseum in Portland, Oregon in July. We lived in a small town on the southern Oregon coast (Coos Bay, where the New Carissa grounded in February 1999), so not too many of our classmates shared our tastes. A month or two before the show, he played me a new addition to his collection called Free Hand. After I was blown away by the first two cuts, he announced the awesome news: This band was opening for Yes!
I left that concert with my allegiance switched to Gentle Giant. Yes was properly incredible, but there was something very cool and distant about the band, as if they were gods who had come down from the heavens to serenade us mere mortals for a brief time, while the Giant had a warm, approachable, "aw shucks, we're just a bunch of guys having fun up here" attitude while doing these incredible things musically. I wish I could remember what they played - probably the percussion quintet with "So Sincere" and the recorder quintet with "The Advent of Panurge" - but I was too new to the band to know the songs.
I saw them at least twice after that, both at the Paradise in Boston, where I went to college. I was at the very same show described by Lindsey Spratt and Brian McAllister where Dr. Feelgood opened. I've since read a remark from Derek that GG really liked the opening band, which sounded to me like "middle-aged punk" and singularly inappropriate for pairing with our prog heroes, but I was still shocked that the fans could be so ugly. Not only were they yelling nasty things, but tossing ice cubes from their drinks. The lead singer responded by spitting and yelling "Fuck you!"
Again, I was too young and inexperienced in my concertgoing career to make notes about the setlist or for my memory to preserve much of the show, but nobody could touch the band either on vinyl or stage, for me. When some airline or other lost my luggage during one of my transcontinental flights between home and school, I was most crushed that my Missing Piece tour T-shirts were lost forever.