From Stage Lights to Executive Heights
Derek Shulman has indeed been on an improbable journey, from being one of six children in a Glascow tenement building, to being one of three starstruck brothers in 1960’s pop band Simon Dupree & the Big Sound. To fronting seventies prog meisters Gentle Giant… finally to becoming a record company executive with a number of major labels, including Polygram and Atco, sitting as he says, “with the ‘suits’ who make the decisions.” Everything he’d learned on one side of the stage, he used on the other side to help prevent artists from experiencing some of the rip-offs and hassles he’d experienced as a performer, particularly in the sixties and early seventies. He was in the business of other people’s music and, as he modestly puts it, “I was damn good at it, I was sh*t hot.”
Giant Steps is an eye-opening memoir. Shulman had a front row seat in the music business, being an eyewitness to some quite extraordinary times and adventures.
Shulman’s early life gave no indication of his future path. He grew up with four brothers and a sister, sharing a small house with an outhouse, no heat and no bathroom. As he says, “rock stardom wasn’t exactly on the horizon”. His early life is shaped by his music-loving father, who played trumpet in a jazz band and encouraged his sons Derek, Ray and Phil, in their musical leanings, and his early death when Shulman was seventeen was a major blow, but it determined him to make a success of his life. He tells his teacher he’s going to be a pop star, which was met with scorn and derision, but this doesn’t stop him.
His late teens and early twenties are spent with pop band Simon Depree (named after a previous Mayor of Portsmouth, where the Shulman family had relocated to). They score a few minor hits and one major one, ‘Kites,’ which reached no. 8 in the charts in 1967 and is still played on classic pop radio today. But in 1970 the brothers decide the time is right to become more musically adventurous. This being the dawn of progressive rock with ELP, Yes Genesis and the Floyd leading the way. Recruiting Kerry Minnear and Gary Green, the Shulman brothers form Gentle Giant. Gentle Giant were one of the seventies’ more adventurous progressive rock bands, who released eleven studio albums, plus one ‘live’ album, in ten years before realising the times are-a-changing again, and creatively they’re beginning to run on empty. So Giant folds in 1980. But, rather than cash in on his name as a successful prog rock vocalist, he travels in the opposite direction, accepting an offer to work for Polygram, which ultimately leads to him running his own label.
The business he entered in the early eighties was awash with cocaine, which he eschews, and, in the era of MTV, increasingly run by people who now see music as ‘product’ and artists as ‘facilitators.’ But he comes to terms with the landscape and gradually makes his mark, going on to play an integral role in launching the careers of Bon Jovi (he even gives them their name!), Pantera and Dream Theatre. He helps Uriah Heep get a record deal at a time when they couldn’t even get arrested, and helps relaunch the careers of Bad Company and AC/DC, amongst others. Along the way, he discovers the Beach Boys have surly attitudes and can’t play, The Eagles are extremely obnoxious and The Jams’ anti-Americanism was a major hindrance in attempting to break them in the States. He also encounters a surprised Gene Simmons, who remarks “aren’t you the guy whose band played with Kiss in Philly? What the f**k are you doing here in a suit?”
This is a rare case of someone working for a record label who’d actually played in two successful bands. Gentle Giant had benefitted enormously from record company people like Tony Visconti and Gerry Bron, and Shulman’s desire to want to help musicians arose out of his own experiences. He already knew the music business was a shark pool because, in the early seventies, he’d fallen foul of two legendary music business crooks, Don Arden (Ozzy’s father-in-law) and Tony Meehan. It was Shulman who first alerts Black Sabbath to how much they and Gentle Giant are being ripped off by Meehan’s firm, WAM, with some quite staggering amounts missing, leading to an angry Ozzy hurling a bottle at Meehan’s head, narrowly missing. Tony Iommi’s realisation, after several hit albums, that he didn’t own his house or car came as quite a shock!
In total, Derek Shulman’s career in the ‘business of music’ spans more than fifty years, and he knows the stage and the inner workings of the business, and all the shady, underhand tricks involved, so who better to give the view from both sides of the divide? After reading this highly enjoyable book, my only concern is, next time I play a Gentle Giant album, will I be thinking about music or business?
Karma is a bitch: After Simon Dupree & the Big Sound have a top ten hit with ‘Kites,’ the same teacher who’d ridiculed Shulman’s desire to be a pop star asks him to autograph his copy of the single!
Pre-order (UK/EU): https://tr.ee/GiantSteps-UK-EU
