I cannot stand Gentle Giant

Damn dude that's a really self-limiting issue to have, especially with prog! It takes time, that's all I can say. Iv've been listening to both bands for years and I can't fathom how others can't hear the excellence, lol. Understandable.

 

As Old As You're Young is one of my faves too. GG were very good. Up there with Tull and Le Orme :)

There are hundreds of singers and bands in Prog that I DO like, so I wonder if it's really worth the time and  effort to try and acquire a taste for the difficult and complex music of Gentle Giant and Van der Graaf Generator when I could be listening to music I CAN really appreciate instead.

Wow! Thanks for sharing mate. 

You are welcome! 

Several months ago I have invented a sentence that pretty much shows my attitude to the Soviet Union as it is seen now in retrospective: 

HITLER turned HILTER turned HEaRTLI 

What started as the primal definition of political and social disaster, eventually became a strange twisted edition of Russian Empire with exceptions from every rule here and there. Like, heartli is not a regular word and there's an irregular additional a in it - but still it's no hitler or even hilter anymore, it's heartli. Not quite heartly, but everybody gets that it's close. 

I have no doubt about regimes in North Korea, Pol Pot's Cambodia and such - they are plain evil and wrong. With perhaps a few per cents of something good and perhaps one per cent of something great (even feces contain vitamins, after all) North Korea is plain bad, unfair, wrong. I also have no doubt that Nazi Germany after they started eliminating their enemies and Jews, was also plain evil. But when it comes to the USSR... I have never heard of Americans or Britons defecting to North Korea, for example. Yet there actually were Americans who moved/defected to the USSR or USSR-allied Socialist countries - take the singer Dean Reed, for example. So, there were not only intelligent officers. 

The USSR (=Soviet Union) had that Pythonesque aura, you know. Not as funny, sometimes even tragic, but there often was so much comedy even in those tragedies. So, tragicomic. 

For example, the first man in space from other country than the USA or the USSR was from Czechoslovakia. Yes, a weak excuse for Prague' 1968 - but still. The second one was from Poland. There was a state program Interkosmos, they also have sent to space, among others, a Bulgarian, a Syrian (!), and even a person from Capitalist France! Yes, the first French citizen to ever fly to outer space traveled there on the Soviet rocket. His name was Jean-Loup Chretien, back then only the USSR sent foreign citizens to space, as far as I can understand. He was the military officer of the Capitalist country and in 1982, before Perestroika, before Gorbachev, he was allowed to travel somewhere on the Soviet rocket. I mean, he got access to some Soviet space program secrets, to some details of the capsule, of the systems working in the rocket. There was no problem about it. 

When in countries of true dictatorship like North Korea or Nazi Germany they say that everybody should serve in the military, it means every living person. I have told you that in the USSR there was a terrible hazing in the military since the 1960s (when the government allowed/let the former prisoners to serve in the army, and the former prisoners brought the prison traditions to the army), but... bingo! - engineer was the most popular Soviet profession, engineers effectively constituted the Soviet middle class, people mainly studied for engineers at the Polytechnic Institutes, all male students of which had one 40-days training course in the military (where they hardly suffered from real hazing) and they all graduated from the Institutes as lieutenants to never serve in the military anymore... Yes, it means, that lots of Soviet men, the core of the Soviet middle class, actually never really served in the army (and so never experienced army hazing), at all. Meanwhile, by the law, the army service was obligatory for all Soviet males. If we count one 40 days' training for service - it was really obligatory for all males... And this is one example of the Pythonesqueness of the USSR. 

Add to this the excellent Soviet TV series about Sherlock Holmes, the Soviet adaptation of Three Musketeers, the Soviet version of Three Men In A Boat (which included many scenes not depicted in the book, many decent tunes, three traveling women to accompany three men, and even one light foot fetish scene in the protagonist's dream), the Soviet children's movie about Buratino (Pinocchio re...make?) with its excellent songs. 

I do not think in Cuba or North Korea they did Sherlock Holmes TV series...  I've never watched one. 

Plus to that, Elton John performed there, Samantha Smith visited it. 

Soviet folk-rock band Pesniary even made a song definitely influenced by Gentle Giant: 

So, the last paragraph matched the topic well. And I can stand Gentle Giant.