KEVIN GILBERT: 20 years of "The Shaming Of The True" - The unknown prog masterpiece

1. October 2020

Kevin Gilbert

KEVIN GILBERT: 20 Jahre „The Shaming Of The True“ –  Das unbekannte Prog-Meisterwerk

Kevin Gilbert's concept album "The Shaming Of The True", which is about the rise and fall of rock musician Johnny Virgil, is one of the great unknown prog masterpieces. Since Gilbert could not complete the work on his opus magnum due to his early death - he died in 1996 at the age of 29 - his friend Nick D'Virgilio, who was drumming with Spock's Beard at the time and is now in the service of Big Big Train, stepped in. D'Virgilio helped finalize the album and set the final tracklist. In 2000, "The Shaming Of The True" was released in a first edition of 1400 copies, but the audience response was so great that two remastered reissues followed in 2008 and 2011; the album will be released as a double LP at the end of 2020. So it's high time to shed light on the exciting genesis of Gilbert's stroke of genius

"The Shaming Of The True" is inseparable from Kevin Gilbert's biography, which is also reflected in the name of the protagonist. "Some things were definitely influenced by his experiences in the music business," says Nick D'Virgilio in an interview with eclipsed. "On the other hand, he was able to deform the lyrics to make you wonder who that person is."

If you want to understand the background of the album, it is worthwhile to take a look at some of the stations in Kevin Gilbert's life. At the age of four he was already playing songs on the piano, later he was to become a concert pianist. At the age of 15, he made his first recordings with NRG (comparable to Saga), worked as a recording manager in a studio and decided to record ten of his own songs every year from then on. After studying film in Los Angeles for a short time, he hired Eddie Money as a tour keyboardist in 1986 and founded the progressive pop group Giraffe (CD tip: "The View From Here"), with which he won the "Yamaha Soundcheck International Rock Music" competition in 1988 - at the world finals in Tokyo, the band made it to second place after all. Nevertheless, giraffe had no future: Gilbert moved to Los Angeles at the invitation of Madonna's producer Pat Leonard, but his fellow musicians did not want to take this step

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