By Ryan Sparks

Aligning themselves with England’s Canterbury music scene some 5,000 miles from their home base in Washington State, American progressive rock outfit Glass’ first attempt at bringing their music to a wider audience in the mid 1970’s proved to be unsuccessful and, on the surface, appeared to simply be a case of bad timing due in part to the genre’s waning popularity at the time.

The unique brand of symphonic prog produced by this talented trio seemed destined to be unheard by the masses, and yet fast forwarding over twenty years to the end of the millennium the band, comprised of brothers Jeff and Greg Sherman (on bass and keyboards), along with Jerry Cook (drums), was back in business preparing live concerts and independently issuing music from their extensive archives. This ultimately attracted the attention of the French label Musea Records who not only re-issued their archived collections, but also helped the band lay the groundwork towards what eventually became their first album of all new music in nearly thirty years. The creative rebirth that began with the stellar comeback disc Illuminations (2005) has been going on now for almost fifteen years and continues with their latest release entitled Emergence.

This interview is one that I’ve wanted to do for a long time, so when the opportunity presented itself needless to say I was super stoked that Jeff Sherman agreed to chat with me about all things Glass, past, present and future.

Glass might have gone largely unnoticed on their first time around but they are definitely making the most of now. Some years ago we were discussing Glass’ reemergence and Jeff remarked then that “Glass is happening in the time that is right for us”. I couldn’t agree more.

Read on to find out more about this remarkable band and their incredible journey.

Ryan: Emergence is the new release. How would you say this album differs from the rest of the bands work?

Jeff: Well, the band does have both live and studio recordings. This one falls in the studio category, but was done a bit differently in that my brother Greg who lives in Boulder CO. has set up a studio, so we decided to do all the basic tracks there. It was a little more informal in that we weren’t paying an hourly fee or watching the clock, so we were able to totally relax.

As for musically, I think that’s a hard question to ask the artist that writes and plays the music, because to me I’m in the center of it with Greg and Jerry so I don’t hear the music the same was as yourself or someone who’s on the outside looking in. However, one thing that is different is there are more compositions from Jerry, who in recent years has become more of an equal writing partner, because in the earlier days his function was more as an arranger. Greg and I would bring song ideas to rehearsals and Jerry would kind of put the jigsaw puzzle together, but after we reformed in 2001 his role changed a little bit more. On Spectrum Principle he did the production on that one and he started writing songs around that time. He had a couple of songs on Palindrome and now on this one he has even more songs. It’s more of a maturity on his part and also on the band’s part as well. So that’s probably the biggest difference on Emergence. Greg did probably 2/3’s of the writing and Jerry and I split the other third.

Jerry’s stuff is extremely experimental and he’s like me in that, when we write we start a song and then kind of just let it birth itself. He and I have had many discussions about when we produce something within Glass, something kind of takes over. It’s that Zen element. You don’t know what’s going to happen. You get the song started and it actually invents itself. To Jerry and me, I think that’s where the magic comes in.

Ryan: The gestation period between this album and the last one Palindrome seemed to be considerably shorter than in the past. Was there any specific reason for that?

Jeff: I’ll tell you, as do most things in life it all comes down to finances. You book the studio to your schedule and also to your finances most of the time. Like I said when we did this one it was in Greg’s studio, so we didn’t have to worry about the clock and we could arrange the sessions closer to what we wanted. There’s a certain amount of time it takes for each album and you never know what it’s going to be. On our earlier albums we would try to force it to happen faster, but it still takes it’s time. Illuminations was a good example of that. We wanted it to be done sooner but; the way it works is we do the basic tracks and then we sit back and do the additions and the overdubs. That is really dependent on the schedule of the person doing the overdub.

It happened quicker on this one because going into it Greg had the concept of what he wanted it to be about and he had a group of song ideas already written down, so it could happen faster. When Jerry and I got to Colorado about half of the album was already laid out, so all we had to do was come up with our parts and play it.

Ryan: I know we’ve spoken about this in the past, but can you tell me how the concepts for each album are created? You’ve referred to certain ideas on past albums belonging to one member of the band. So tell me a bit about this. Do you guys have a specific method or approach as to how an idea or concept is brought into the fold?

Jeff: Most of the concept pieces originate with ideas that Greg comes up with. He’s a great reader, he just reads a ton of books and he always has. He comes up with a concept depending on what he’s reading and what he’s into. Back in the early days the band was living in Olympia (WA) because Greg was going to Evergreen State College. He was primarily studying philosophy and so he got into the Existential writers like (Albert) Camus and (Jean-Paul) Satre. He became sort of the guiding light when it came to concept pieces. As for my writing and my concepts, I’ll have an inspiration or a thought about a particular time or person in my life and I’ll just let the music come to me. I’ll sit down at the piano and just kind of noodle around and if it’s meant to come out it’ll come out. There’s a song on Emergence called “My Regret” and the story behind that one is that I was playing around on the piano and I was thinking back to this particular person that I had met in college back in the 70’s. There was one opportunity that I had to get together with her, but I just kind of backed off because I was too afraid to try. So the melody for that song came straight out of that feeling. You know everyone kind of gets like that, where you’ll think “God I wish I had done that’. Where would my life be if I had taken that road?” That in a nutshell is kind of how I write. Jerry’s writing I think is more; he’s like bi-polar in that he has mood swings and he’s a very intense individual. I think he’s a little more driven than Greg or I have ever been. The song on Emergence “Eternally” is basically a love song that he wrote for his wife of thirty seven years. He wanted to write her a song. We all get to this point in our lives where we want to say thank you to the people who have hung in there with us. Jerry is a bit of an enigma, but I’m guessing that he’s driven by his angst and his need to express himself.

Ryan: Tell me what you think each member individually brings to the band and how these strengths help to contribute to the overall sound of the band.

Jeff: Every writer brings their own personality to the music. Jerry has a bit of a quirky personality. He’s kind of Glass’ Robert Wyatt. He sees the world a little bit differently than Greg and I do, but it just adds that much more depth to the writing. Greg’s and my writing style has evolved to a certain degree, but when you get into your forties and fifties you kind of have a have a modus operandi when it comes to writing your songs. Greg brings the more classical and symphonic elements to Glass, his songs are more thought out and structured. I’ve always been on the jazz/ rock and experimental side of things. That’s where you get the Soft Machine meets Classical element.

In the very early days of the band when we were teenagers and into our twenties  I came up with  about 90 % of the licks that we would turn into songs. Then around 1972 or 73 Greg had this great blossoming of talent, which was around the time he picked up his first Mellotron. We were heavily influenced by Yes’ Close to The Edge album and Greg became a big Rick Wakeman fan. That was the beginning to him developing his heavy, multi keyboard approach to music. That was the beginning of Glass becoming known I guess as a Symphonic Prog rock band. Greg’s influences are really varied but his biggest ones are classical composers like Beethoven and Stravinsky. I love that as well, but the things that move me are things that are little more improvisational, so I’ve always been drawn to that jazz/ ambient / experimental side of things. 

Ryan: In addition to musical influences, how have other mediums in the arts such as film, painters and writers and their images or ideas influenced the band?

Jeff: Glass started out as a four piece cover band called The Vaguest Notion and we had a bass player in the band at the time whose parents wouldn’t let him play outside the city limits of Port Townsend (WA) which was really frustrating. We went to see Jimi Hendrix in 1968 and opening up for him was the British band The Soft Machine. The concept of the three of us playing as a bass, drums and guitar trio didn’t hit us. In that era it was almost a requisite that every band had a guitar player and I was the guitar player in Vaguest Notion. When we saw The Soft Machine open for Hendrix it was almost like a religious experience, we were blown away. For three guys with no guitar player their sound was huge. Everything about them was unique; you know they had Robert (Wyatt) a singing drummer, with a tenor voice. Their whole approach to jazz and music improvisation just clicked with us. It was like a big burning bush for Glass. The three of us literally went home after that concert and said “Ok Jeff you’re going to play bass now, we don’t need a guitar player” and we just went down that path. That’s how the three man Glass sound was born.

As for other mediums, well you’re old enough to know that back in the late 60’s and early 70’s there was the first dabbling’s of rock bands in film. You had The Doors who were very visual.  (Jim) Morrison and (Ray) Manzarek were film students at UCLA and that’s how they met. They understood early on the importance of the visual element. We thought how our music was developing, that it was made for film. We weren’t doing vocals and didn’t have words to distract what you’d be seeing on a screen. We never really wrote with the idea that we were going to be doing film scores, but we have been contacted over the years by people who’ve thought that our music would be perfect for their little movie. There’s a film that I saw called Koyaanisqatsi that my friend and Glass mentor Paul Black took me to see when it first came out, and it just blew me away. The music and the whole overarching theme of life out of balance together it just hit me. That was the first time that I thought that I’d like to consciously write some music for something like that. Later on when some of the software tools were available I started making little videos to go with some of my progressive ambient music as I like to call it. You can see some examples of the videos I’ve made on my YouTube channel.  I got more into it than the rest of the guys, but Glass is still kind of waiting around for someone like Steven Spielberg to discover our music and say “Yeah I’d like to use your suite “Broken Oars” for this new movie I’m doing”.

Ryan: I’ve always thought that Glass’ music would lend itself really well to film. Have you had the chance to explore that?

Jeff:  Yeah actually we did some music for one film that people can probably find online. A friend of mine Rudy Vargas did this film called Flight of The Quetzal that was about the exploitation of the Native Americans in a place called Quetzaltenango in Central America. He brought us in and we recorded a bunch of our song ideas which they ended up using for the film. You can probably find it online. It was just a small film about Central America and about the people helping these people who literally have nothing. So we did the music for that. The interesting thing behind it is we tried to use native instruments to Central America and when you get right down to it there’s only a few and one of them was like a marimba, so there’s lots of Glass marimba in it.

I would love for Glass to have a project to do with a noted filmmaker, but I’ll tell you one of the first things I wanted to get into when I first came down to Southern California many years ago, was to do soundtracks for movies and television. That is like the most sought after gig on the planet. It’s very, very difficult to break into that area as you can see by the fact that there’s only three or four people like Hans Zimmer and Danny Elfman. That’s the gig that those guys graduated to when they get to be our age and older. Think about it, you get to sit in your own studio, you don’t have to tour the country and someone plays you two or three million dollars to do a soundtrack. Everybody wants that gig. I’ll occasionally put feelers out but you can’t force the universe to bend to your will, it just isn’t going to happen. You have to get in with the flow, see what comes your way and move yourself into as good a position as you can be in, but you’ll drive yourself crazy if you think you’ve “got to make it”.  

Ryan: Tell me more about the Soft Machine influence.

Jeff: I remember back in the day when we were still in high school and we were doing these battles of the bands. We were doing these as Glass, as a trio and we were doing all Soft Machine music and people in the audiences their mouths would be hanging open. For one thing we were really loud. It was like when we saw them open for Hendrix. The judges would always be the local teen queen, the high school music teacher and someone else. They would have these little critique sheets and we had one from this one judge that said “keyboard player should use left arm more”. I think we kept that one and pinned it up on our practice wall.

Ryan: [laughing] Wow that’s rough. For those who don’t know the story behind it, can you put that into context?

Jeff: When Greg was three he had an accident and he ended up losing his left arm. Because he was so young and because of his nature he just grew up telling everybody that he could do what everybody else could. Apparently he was correct because he’s one of the best keyboard players I’ve ever heard. We decided very early on in Glass that we weren’t going to use that or exploit that in any way. To this day unless someone has seen us live, there are still people who are surprised when they see a picture of Greg with his sleeve hanging down. They’re like “What? Who’s he?” [laughing]

Ryan: I alluded in my review that I thought that the music on Emergence, much like your past work, has such a cohesive quality to it that it always feels like its part of bigger picture so to speak. What I mean by that is, there’s a real stream of consciousness thing going on that makes it feel like it’s all a continuation of one never ending composition. Would you say this is intentional or something that has just naturally evolved through the process over time?

Jeff: Jerry, Greg and I started playing together as Glass when we were fifteen, sixteen and seventeen. Right now we’re sixty six, sixty five and sixty four. That’s a lot of years to be close with someone and when you have a creative relationship with someone, in a lot of ways it’s like a marriage. There’s a certain exchange of energy that happens between the individuals and continues to be there even though they may be separated by hundreds of miles. There’s that exchange that happens between friends that grow up together. You form a bond because you know all the versions of that person. Everyone is changing all the time, but an old friend knows all those versions of you. So Jerry, Greg and I have been through a lot of stuff.

As for your insightful observation, it’s absolutely true that there is something, call it Zen or the Dao that goes through all of the music. It’s a connecting breath and it’s probably the essence of who the three of us are in the Dao, in the moment or in the stream of life. When we do an album there’s a space in time, and then more music comes to us and we do another one.

Ryan: Keeping with that thought. I know your concepts were behind the previous album Palindrome. There’s an interesting story behind where and how you recorded that one and I wonder if you could share more about that?

Jeff: Well to give the readers some framework, we take turns producing each album, so on Palindrome it was my turn. I can remember thinking right from the beginning that the one thing that I wanted to do differently was to make it a little less polished. My brother is really great with using studio tools and we were editing our music back before there was software to do it.

Ryan: You were splicing the tape with a razor blade.

Jeff: Exactly. So, up to that point I felt that our studio albums were very slick sounding. Illuminations is a good album because it was our comeback, so a lot of work went into that one to make it sound the best that it could. With Palindrome it was my turn to produce it. I thought back to the early days of the band and the fact that we used to do tons of live recordings and by that I mean not necessarily in front of an audience. We wrote and played all the time but we didn’t always have a bunch of gigs. What we would do when we weren’t gigging is that we would rehearse at our house in Olympia. I had a really nice Revox tape recorder and big board that we would use. So we would record instead of touring, because this was Washington State in the 70’s and when we did play people would always cock their heads and wonder where the singer was or they just didn’t get what we were doing. For   Palindrome I wanted to do a recording in the same fashion of another live recording that we had done, which in the Glass world is commonly known as The Arcadia Tapes. Arcadia was a big ranch setting with a barn just outside of the Port Townsend city limits and way back in ’72 I think it was I literally went to the owner and asked him if we could set up and record in his barn. So we did that and it produced this really cool set of recordings. When Palindrome came around I thought it would be cool to go back there and record the way we used to do it, which was to literally set everything up, get the two track recorder and just roll tape. It wasn’t exactly like a rehearsal, but it had that looseness. It was like let’s lay down something in the moment. Palindrome was more like that than the original Arcadia tape because when we went to record that first time we pretty much had the songs already picked out and we knew what we were going to do. This time I wanted to go back to the same space and I wanted us to collect ideas and bring them to the sessions and then just literally work them out there. Then we would record them right after we’d worked them out. There were both positive and negative aspects to working like this. On the negative side, you’re a little more on your toes, because you’re just learning the song and figuring out what you’re going to play. It can also sound a little rougher. On the positive side and to my way of thinking, this is just how I am, you’re catching the original vibe and these ideas pretty much as they’re being created. I wanted the experience to be as Zen like as possible and to capture as much of the unplanned element as possible, as opposed to sitting down, working it out and over practicing it.

I expected that the album wouldn’t be as well received because it’s not as polished and is a little more organic, but it’s turned out to be a pretty popular Glass album. One of the cool things that happened and this is another Zen like moment, is that we got access to use an 1889 Whalley Genung pipe organ at the church that Greg and I used to go to when we were kids. Greg had wanted to play that thing ever since he was a kid. Everything just kind of fell into place. I went and talked to the pastor and we went in there and Greg literally laid down those organ parts. Then we brought the recording back to the Arcadia barn, which is now called The Palindrome, and Jerry and I overdubbed the rhythm tracks.   

Ryan: Let’s go back to early days of the band. Things happen for a reason, but the fact of the matter is by the time you guys had honed your craft to the point of being able to get it down on tape, Progressive rock in the mid 70’s was on its way out. Do you remember how you came to the decision to shut it down in 1976?

Jeff: I can tell you exactly how that happened. We didn’t really pay attention to trends because we kind of lived in the Glass bubble. So the idea that Prog rock was over never really hit us. The way Glass ended up going into retirement was actually as most things in life, it was due to a personal event. We had done a tape, spent a bunch of money and had taken it to England. Erik (Poulsen) our soundman had gone to Denmark and I was living in London with my girlfriend for the summer. I had taken the tape around with the idea of getting it to someone who liked us, because this was obviously where our music had come from. I wanted to get it to someone who would basically fund the band and get us to move to Europe. We had no clue what the economic situation was like in England, because like I said we lived in the Glass bubble. So I get over there in the summer of ’75 and I was playing the music for a couple of influential people. I even got it to Sean Murphy who had taken over as Soft Machine’s manager. They basically thought it was great music and if we were able to get our band over to England that they would help us, but no one was going to give us the money to move us and our gear to England. They were trying to send their bands to America. It was just a reality disconnect. At that point as fate would have it, Jerry’s first wife basically told him to choose between the band and her. So after all that time and expenditure Jerry basically quit the band. We brought in our second drummer Paul Black to keep the music going. We brought in someone who was familiar with the music and who had been mentoring us even before Glass. He was also one of the first people who pushed Glass. When he first heard us he said “Man this is it, you guys have found your way”. When everyone else seemed confused as to our direction he was someone who totally got it. It was a seamless transition, but his playing style was different than Jerry’s so we had to adapt the music at the time more to his style. We made another set of Arcadia recordings and then took those to New York. Paul had a sister there and so he took the latest set of recordings in an attempt to get us work and get someone in the recording industry interested. He found us a producer who said he would get us a bunch of gigs. We drove across country to meet Paul and play but there was nothing. We got a couple of bar gigs on our own at a place out on Long Island called Michaels, and we made a couple of recordings there. The timing just wasn’t there. We came back home and that’s when Greg and I decided that we needed to take a break, because by that point we had been doing it for about 8 years straight. We didn’t get together and say we were breaking the band up. It was just time for us to be apart.

Ryan: And things stayed that way for the band until the mid to late 90’s which was when you decided to start going through your archived recordings and preparing them for a proper release.

Jeff: Yeah, what happened was Greg and I ended up being in a band called The Sherman Brothers Band and we became huge in the Port Townsend area. It’s so ironic, we were doing Thin Lizzy covers, but we were really good at it and we had a couple of players who were like 4 years younger than us, but really wired into their generation. We were like the hometown Beatles. All the popularity that we had hoped would come to us playing complex jazz stuff finally came to us. We had scenes that were right out of Hard Day’s Night with groups of kids running up to us yelling “it’s The Sherman Brothers”, it was so bizarre. It was kind of a reward because for the first time we were making pretty good money doing music. It only lasted a couple of years and it wasn’t based on us doing original songs. We were just a bar band.

Somewhere in between 1995-1997 I began listening to the archived recordings and I started bugging Jerry and Greg. I was writing them letters and calling them telling them that we had all these great studio recordings. By around 1999 I had gotten them both convinced to at least do an archival release of the stuff. We formed our own little label and released a two disc set. We originally had enough for four discs but we paired it down to two and that came out as the original No Stranger To The Skies Vol I & II. It did so well that it caught the attention of Musea Records who at that time were the place to go if you were a progressive band. They basically told us they wanted to release it and anything else that we had. So we’ve been in a working relationship with them ever since. At that point we weren’t really discussing the idea of playing together again, but we had this music that was now out and we had people asking us when they could come and see us play. So we mulled that over and in 2001 we had our reunion concert at the Port Townsend Legion Hall which we had played many times in the 70’s. We hadn’t played together in about twenty years and when we had our first rehearsal, we all looked at each other and it felt like we had taken a week off. It was just there. 

Ryan: The band’s sound on those early recordings and something that continues to this day is quite layered. What kind of challenges did you face with regards to reproducing the songs in a live setting?

Jeff: This will be the shortest answer. It’s called MIDI [laughing]. Greg is a guy who just grasped that stuff. He’s basically a computer programmer so it didn’t present much of a challenge for him. That layering is pretty much keyboard layering, so we found the only way we could really reproduce the studio sound was to use MIDI interfaces and we do that to this day. If you watch live footage of us you’ll see we’re using MIDI and Jerry is great at following the click track. He’s always wearing the headphones onstage because as a drummer he’s got to be able to hear the timing track if we’re using the MIDI. We ended up using that to great advantage and it worked for us. It does however pose problems if something goes wrong, if there’s a power dump or if the programming gets messed up, you’re basically out on the wire. That did happen at one of our very first gigs outside of Washington State. It was at ProgWest in California. It was our big chance to play in front of a large audience and for a lot of people it would be the first time they’d get to hear us play. We were all set to go and nothing was happening. There was something wrong with the PA so I had do like a forty five minute stand-up routine while people were scurrying around trying to find out why we weren’t getting any sound out of our instruments. There were some people who felt we let them down. We eventually did get to play and we were a little rattled, but it was still good.

Ryan: 2007 was a watershed year in the band’s career because that year not only were you able to take the band on the road, but you did a European Tour.

Jeff: [laughing] Well I’ll tell you that tour, pretty much like everything Glass does, it was done on a shoe string budget. The only reason that tour happened was because we had reached an age where we all kind of simultaneously realized that we couldn’t put it off anymore. We had always wanted to play in Europe. I bought the roundtrip tickets to Heathrow before I’d even booked the tour. I called the guys up and said I’d bought the tickets and that I would book the tour and we’d go over there and play. There was an attitude of no failure because we just wanted to go do it.

The first gig was supposed to be in Kingston, a little suburb of London. We go to the gig and we meet the guy and it was like the first time he was hearing about it. The place was a bar that also doubled as a strip club. It was kind of a half and half thing [laughing]. I tried to call the guy who I’d booked the gig with but he was in the hospital. It was just a comedy of errors. There were maybe twelve people there.

Ryan: Not including the strippers?

Jeff: There were maybe ten people there and four of them were strippers. When I watch Spinal Tap that’s why I double over laughing because all the crap that happened to them was happening to us.

The next gig was supposed to be up in Glasgow in Scotland. We drive up there and that’s a long ass drive. So we drive up there in our rented van and when we get to gig, the gig was legit, but the guy who booked it hadn’t done any advertising so that made dealing with him a bit difficult. We played the show and afterward when we went to collect our money he had taken off and completely screwed us. We went back to his place where we had left our stuff and he had locked us out. This is the second gig of like six or eight shows so it’s not looking good at this point.

Ryan: You’re not exactly living the dream are you?

Jeff: No we’re not. Anyway, we resolved that and that guy was lucky Jerry and Greg didn’t beat him to a pulp. We never did get paid though, plus he grabbed a bunch of our tour t-shirts and ran. So not only did we not get paid, but he stole from us as well.

After that mess we had a band meeting and Jerry and Greg both said that the next gig in Oslo was one where we couldn’t take another financial hit. Fortunately the guy that I was dealing with Per-Helge Berg was a really great guy and he had booked us into this club. I called him ahead of time and told him that I hated to lay it on him but that we needed to get paid double and we needed some hotel rooms and stuff. He came through like you would not believe. We got to the gig and everything was cool. He paid us ahead of time and had booked a couple of rooms for us in one of the best hotels in Oslo. That was the point where it became real and we thought that this was how it was supposed to go. It was smooth sailing from that point on. The great thing is I still converse with him on Facebook and he’s willing to have us back anytime. My dream still is to do another club tour over there.

Ryan: What’s next for the band? Where do you go from here?

Jeff: Well I will say that when we finished the No Stranger to the Skies project my approach from that point on was going to be that this could be the last thing or not. I quit trying to shape the future for Glass and to just let it happen. We still haven’t done any kind of tour here in the US and there are a couple of Prog Festivals on the east coast that I’d like to see us play. On the horizon I’d say there’ll be another album. There’s a couple of things that I’ll tell you right now that nobody else knows. One is that Jerry wants us to do another live album. We recorded this gig in Boulder a couple of years ago that we did in conjunction with Zeitgeist media who did a three camera video shoot and used some of the footage for the Romantic Warriors III: Canterbury Tales DVD. The supplemental disc of that DVD has about forty minutes of us playing live, plus interviews with both Jerry and I. Jerry wants to take the live recordings from that show and make a live album out of it. Then it will be my turn to produce and a project that has been on the Glass drawing board for many years is to release everything that was done under the Arcadia tapes. There are two sets of sessions and a bunch of recordings that we did with Paul Black, many of which have never seen the light of day. There’s some really good stuff that we did with Paul. I just want to get this stuff out there. We’re not getting any younger. When I’m gone I don’t want my wife to be stuck with a bunch of boxes of tape. I just want to get it out there, and who knows maybe fifty years down the road Glass might become a household name.       

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass_(band)

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