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Prog legends Gentle Giant have been dead and buried since 1980, but that hasn’t stopped the band from releasing a series of reissues lately. The latest of these reissues is an expanded edition of the band’s 1977 live record, Playing the Fool.
Gary Green, Gentle Giant’s guitarist, looks back on the inception of the original release, telling ClassicRockHistory.com, “We thought, ‘We’re playing really good, we should capture what we’re doing right now.” We took a mobile studio on tour, recorded four gigs, and took the best from each.”
“That was where we were at that point,” he says. “At that point, after all those studio albums, and with us playing so well, and being match fit, we decided to make a live album. The sort of cultural freedom around it… it was just a ripe time to do it.”
As for how the 2025 expanded edition of Playing the Fool compares to the 1977 edition, Green says, “It’s amazing. The listening experience is greatly expanded, and so is the quality of the recordings.”
When Playing the Fool was originally released, Gentle Giant had just released their best-selling release, 1976’s Interview, an album that the band initially disliked, but went on to fuel their prog dreams, not that Green saw it that way at the time. “We just thought of ourselves as a band that played music, honestly,” Green says.
“That’s the truth,” he adds. “We never thought, ‘We’re a prog band.’ But I suppose other bands would say that, too. But that’s the truth—we were a rock band. That’s it. We liked to make loud noises with musical instruments onstage and got applause for it. It’s very basic; it’s like a teenage kid standing in front of the mirror with his guitar, saying, ‘Why not?’”
What can you say about the reissue of Gentle Giant’s 1977 live album, Playing the Fool?
In the wake of re-releasing a lot of other albums, since you can enhance the sound these days with how great technology is, we’re doing this one. The concept was that we didn’t just want to put it out like it was; the idea was to make it sound like you’re actually at the concert.
What’s the trick to making that happen?
Well, we expanded on the original double album because back in those days, there was a limit without how much you could put on the albums. I think that if you were to put out a triple album back in those days, it just wouldn’t get built. But now, there’s a bit more of a targeted audience for that.
So, does this version feature the entire concert?
Yeah. We wanted to put the whole concert out, like, as an actual live experience. And the remixing and remastering made it sound exactly like you’re there. So, if you’re going to reissue something, that’s great, but it’s got to sound really good. It’s really like sitting in the audience and sort of watching the thing happen.
When you look back at the tour that produced Playing the Fool, what can you say about where Gentle Giant was as a band at that time?
I’m not sure that we were thinking of it in terms of what we’ve accomplished; we were just a rock ‘n’ roll band, steaming ahead, trying to have a hit. And at the time, we were in such good live form, and sort of match fit. So, we thought it was a good time to capture the band live.
Were the members of Gentle Giant satisfied with the band’s musical direction after 1976’s Interview?
After we’d made Interview, there was… I don’t know what the world is, but we wondered kind of what we’d done. It had been many albums, and we’d been going into the same studio for several albums. It began to feel a little bit like clocking in and going to work. We loved it, but it seemed like we all needed… it was a bit stultifying in some way.
So, I don’t think we thought Interview was a great album at the time. Although now I really like it. I think there’s some really good music on it. But that caused us to think, “What should the next album be after Interview?” We thought, “What should we do? Should we do another studio album?”
It’s interesting that the band didn’t think Interview was very good, as it was Gentle Giant’s highest charting album to that point.
You know, when you’re close to something, I don’t know that you can tell what you’re doing. At least, that’s my experience. That’s why producers are such a huge plus for bands. You need a dispassionate outside voice to tell you when to stop doing what you’re doing, like, “Stop it. That’s ridiculous,” you know?
You need someone there just as a bit of a course correction. And at that point, with Interview, we’d been producing the albums ourselves, and to me, I don’t know… it seemed to feel like we were too close to it. We didn’t realize what we had at the end of it, you know… we couldn’t tell. I’m sure everybody else has got a different opinion on that, but yeah…
When we talk about ‘70s guitar music and “Guitar Gods,” a lot of prog players are often excluded from that conversation. What are your thoughts on that?
I don’t know… I’m okay with that. I loved Guitar Gods; I grew up listening to and saw Cream a bunch of times in tiny, little spaces. And there was Peter Green, and the whole British blues scene—I loved that. That’s where I came from. But Steve Hackett from Genesis, for example, came from, I think, a bit more of a classical background. They were, dare I say, better musicians than myself. They certainly knew about music.
Would you say that your blues background guided Gentle Giant in a slightly different direction from your contemporaries?
Gentle Giant was a part of all these disparate influences. We all loved all kinds of music and weren’t particularly hard-headed about it being one way or another. We felt like whatever moved us emotionally, you know, that was where our hearts took us as far as the music.
It doesn’t seem like a stretch to say that a lot of prog rock bands from that era had a collective mindset as opposed to being individualistic.
Yeah… it was more about progress. Probably, at that time, it was more about the long compositional form, and we were doing that, as were a lot of the other bands. It was more about composition and painting pictures. And I think that appealed to people.
Why do you think it appealed?
Prog came out of… I don’t know… the ‘60s hippie thing, where there was a lot of bland rock ‘n’ roll and pap. It sounds a bit bogus, but prog was something more substantive, with its long-form compositions; it’s like we had our own classical music. And people were getting older, too. The teen rush of the ‘60s was over, and they wanted to sit down and enjoy their smokes a bit longer. [Laughs]
Do you think that records shifting from mono to stereo had anything to do with it, too?
It’s hard to say why that particular thing happened at that time. At that point, stereo had only come into existence in, I don’t know… the late-60s? I remember buying albums in mono and got Beatles albums that were monophonic. So, when stereo came in, that was an enormous expansion in sound.
Plus, the availability of certain substances in the culture led to these amazing listening experiences that you could have at home when stereo record players became available. I remember going to buy a set of stereo speakers, a stereo amp, and it was new technology. Actually having stereo equipment was amazing.
When you look back on the prog explosion in the ‘70s, how do you measure Gentle Giant’s importance?
It’s difficult to remember us ever thinking, “We’re a prog band.” There were so many bands on the circuit back in the day, everybody was touring, and drinking in little vans, and we were bumping into each other all over the place. Every band knew every other band because you’d meet at all these sorts of rest stops on motorways and stuff.
But when we came to America, our first real tour was with Black Sabbath. We had this sort of period, where I don’t know… a couple of weeks where the tour sort of abruptly finished, and we sort of waited around. Then, we got on a tour with Jethro Tull, and they were a similar band to us, you know?
I think that’s when we thought, “This is kind of where we fit.” They were being touted as a “prog band,” and so ‘round about that time, we figured, “Okay, this is sort of our niche,” if you like. That’s when we thought, “Okay, we’re a prog band.” So, if we had to live with a label, there’s the label.
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Gary Green of Gentle Giant: The ClassicRockHistory.com Interview article published on ClassicRockHistory.com© 2025
