In The Studio with Redbeard

Tag: Too Old to Rock and Roll

  • Jethro Tull- Best pt 2- Ian Anderson

    Jethro Tull- Best pt 2- Ian Anderson

    The first decade of Jethro Tull’s half century, occupying that musical territory only big enough for itself, where ancient-sounding heath-covered acoustic numbers combine with sprawling progressive rock, fits neatly with the period after the debut, This Was, all the way to Heavy Horses ten years later. Jethro Tull  and its singer/songwriter/flautist Ian Anderson were fearless in those heady days, going to #1 sales with the most unlikely chart-topper since The Singing Nun, 1972’s Thick as a Brick;   brushing off the disastrous A Passion Play, then coming back strong with two Top 40 hits on War Child. Minstrel in the Gallery,  Too Old to Rock’n’Roll,  and Songs from the Wood  all followed in regular succession.


    But beginning in 1979 and continuing all the way until the late Eighties, Jethro Tull’s fate and fortunes would be quite unlike their first decade of success. Bass player John Glasscock died from heart surgery just five weeks after Stormwatch‘s 1979 album release, a tough blow, and to add insult to injury, the album was the first Jethro Tull effort since the 1968 debut not to reach the US Top 20 in sales. The Broadsword and the Beast  in 1982 easily could have been the theme for the HBO hit series Game of Thrones, albeit written thirty years too soon. Jethro Tull certainly were not alone, as many of their Seventies peers struggled as they did then amidst Pop Metal hair bands of the MTV Eighties that were selling millions of records and hair mousse by the gallon. But after an eight year drought, Jethro Tull had all of the tumblers click on the 1987 album Crest of a Knave  containing”Farm on the Freeway“,”Steel Monkey”, and “Budapest“, a Top 20 seller in the UK and #3 in the States, eventually winning a Grammy Award and reigniting concert ticket and further album sales for Rock Island  in 1989 and Catfish Rising  in 1991. Selecting the fifty songs over the twenty-one studio offerings for the 50 for 50 massive undertaking proved a challenge for Ian Anderson to curate, not simply for fan expectations. If there ever was a lyrical wordsmith who learned his songwriting trade in the widescreen cinematic tradition of the album format, and who is ill-suited for the one-song You Tube world he found himself in fifty years hence, it would be Ian Anderson. “If it’s all too much for you, if you’d rather sit down and watch an episode of The X Factor,  be my guest,” Anderson snarks in this classic rock interview as to why album sales are down. “But on the other hand, if you want something that is an antidote to that fast food music we seem to live amidst these days, then maybe this is the album for you. You can get your teeth into it, while you still have any, that is! We snack on music these days. We don’t sit down to a banquet and take two hours over it, we tend to snack. So it is a change in culture I have to recognize.” –Redbeard

  • Jethro Tull- War Child- Ian Anderson

    Jethro Tull- War Child- Ian Anderson

    Even though I lived through it, still I must admit that it is hard to fully comprehend that the evolution in sound and success between Jethro Tull’s “underground” pastoral second album, Stand Up, and their mass appeal Top 40 breakthrough War Child, with the hits “Bungle in the Jungle” and “Skating Away (on the Thin Ice of a New Day)”, took a mere five years. In between those two aforementioned musical landmarks, Jethro Tull had also released the #1-seller in the world, Thick as a Brick! By 1969’s Stand Up, band co-founder Mick Abrahams had already left Ian Anderson to guide Jethro Tull’s sound, a role Anderson relished and never relinquished for half a century.

    “We were billed originally, around Blackpool and later London, as a blues band,” Anderson admitted to me,”except we were a terrible blues band. I certainly couldn’t sing it.” Never mind. In the years 1969-74 there was no band in the world more exciting, more unconventional, and more successful than Jethro Tull.

    With back-to-back albums Aqualung  in May 1971 and then the almost accidental #1 seller Thick As a Brick  in 1972, Jethro Tull combined pastoral acoustic guitar, flute, progressive rock arrangements, Martin Barre’s hard rock guitar bursts, and Ian Anderson’s dense thought-provoking lyrics into a heady brew which had no comparison. Originating in the northern English town of Blackpool, Jethro Tull was a name borrowed from the actual inventor of the seed drill. By 1968 they were as talked about as any of the new bands on the London club scene, primarily because of the stage presence of lead singer Anderson, whose leaping, scowling, bug-eyed mad hatter theatrics made for a great show. And then there was Ian’s choice of rock and roll “axe”: not a six-string six shooter like so many other bandleaders, but a 20th century Pan with a flute!

    The  box set of Jethro Tull‘s Songs from the Wood  received the knees up full Monty treatment from Porcupine Tree remixer/surround sound savant Steven Wilson, a perfect present for any long time Jethro Tull fan (is there any other kind?). In my opinion, the results from remixing Songs from the Wood  to surround sound are the most satisfying to date of all of the reissues so far including   Benefit , the 1970 Jethro Tull  under-appreciated missing link between the eclectic folksy Stand Up   and the breakthrough million sellers Aqualung  and Thick as a Brick.   Then there was the odds’n’sods collection Living in the Past which was rushed out in the U.S. in Fall 1972 to capitalize after Thick As a Brick  became Jethro Tull’s stunning #1 seller earlier that year. 

    Revisit the UK hit “Sweet Dream”, the band’s interpretation of Johan Sebastian Bach’s jaunty “Bouree”; “Teacher”; “Bungle in the Jungle” and “Skating Away…”, both from War Child ; and the title song to “Living in the Past”. And as you find yourself humming & singing all of these familiar melodies, either here in this classic rock interview or in concert, remind yourself that  Jethro Tull still is not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. – Redbeard