My Deep Dive into Jethro Tull

Artist:  Jethro Tull

Albums: This Was, Stand Up, Benefit, Aqualung, Thick as a Brick

 BACKSTORY

All of a sudden, I’m crazy about Jethro Tull. 

When I delved into their work four months ago, I knew two songs that got into the Top 40 back in the ’70s:  Bungle in the Jungle and Living in the Past.  That was it.  I knew they produced some very popular albums, but I never listened to them. 

Now I have.  In fact, I’ve buried myself in their records since August.  This is incredible music. 

I’ll get to my detailed thoughts in the Reactions section. 

But listening to JT’s albums got me thinking about “album rock.”  So, here’s a little story about my own personal history with this form. 

The first record album (as opposed to single songs on discs what we used to call 45s) I ever bought was The Beatles’ Twist and Shout.  The Beatles’ early albums have this weird history.  As they were taking over the world with their early work, there were different albums released in different countries.  The album called Twist and Shout (which also included their classic cover of the Isley Brothers’ original hit) was a Canadian release.  It wasn’t released in the UK or the US, but you’d find songs from this Canadian release on other Beatles albums released in other countries. 

Anyway, I didn’t know that when I bought it when I was about eight years old.  I do remember seeing it at Anderson’s Records, a wonderful little music shop in a strip plaza called the Bayview Mall near our house in the northern Toronto suburb of Willowdale.  I’d wander up there and look through the albums.  Ha, this was the ‘60s, when you could be eight years old, your mom had no idea where you were, and she didn’t freak out about that.  As long as I got home in time for dinner, I was free to roam.  That’s the way it was back then. 

I’d spend hours looking over the albums in Anderson’s shop.  But I never had the money to buy them.  I was eight!  But when it came to the Beatles’ Twist and Shout album, I’d been hearing the songs on 1050 CHUM-AM and I was dying to get it. 

When I finally saved up enough allowance money, I was in Anderson’s with my family.  I think we’d just been to the diner in the plaza (a great, old school joint where I always feasted on my favourite diner dinner – the hot hamburger sandwich).  We went over to record shop and I proceeded to haul out my $4.99 in change so I could be the proud owner of Twist and Shout.  “He’s been going nuts for this record,” my mom said to the owner, George Anderson (I later found out he was also a musician in the Toronto Symphony Orchestra).  “Ah, yeah,” he chuckled, “I’ve been seeing him up here for weeks.”

That album got multiple plays, but here’s the thing:  it wasn’t really what came to be a true record album.  Really, it was just a collection of songs.  All the rock albums were like that back then.  There was no theme to them, no story, no integration between the songs.  The artists produced the songs and the labels collected them and dumped them onto a long-playing (LP) 33 record.  The Beatles, Petula Clark, Rolling Stones, Elvis, Chuck Berry, Sonny and Cher, Turtles, Beach Boys, the Supremes, this was how it was for the early years of rock.   

Then, in 1967, those same boys from Liverpool, innovators as always, did something that blew everyone’s minds:  they produced an album called Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.  This one produced some hits, to be sure – I Get By With A Little Help from My Friends, for example.  But the distinguishing feature was that the whole thing was produced as one musical journey.  They invented a band, the created characters in the band, and they took us on a trip.  It had a beginning, where we the we meet the band and it had a ending…this trippy mind journey called A Day in the Life.  To this day, I find it hard to hear one song from Sgt Pepper, without immediately thinking of the song that preceded it or followed it on the album. 

It wasn’t the first such album in pop music (Sinatra had done it and, in the rock field, The Who, The Mothers of Invention and others had produced so called ‘concept’ albums) but Sgt Pepper was the one, historians say today, that caught on, that made everyone see you could do something with more thought than just gathering a bunch of singles together. 

I was fortunate to be “of age” as this new era of rock was being born.  In fact, this became how I listened to rock.  As the ‘60s closed out and the ‘70s began, I moved away from AM singles radio and FM became my entry way into rock.  And on FM (in TO, CHUM FM that was the album station), they played music in a serious way.  The hosts weren’t fast-talking DJs, but guys who seemed to actually appreciate the music and took pains to select it themselves.   

And it was this album-focus that gave way to bands like Jethro Tull and, eventually, a genre of rock called “progressive rock.”  More on that in a minute. 

REACTIONS TO THE JETHRO TULL ALBUMS

When I launched Music I Missed, I gave myself a rule – no research into any of the artists I’d be listening to.  I wanted to experience their music in the way I would have when it was launched…by hearing it on the radio or at a party or by going to a friend’s place and they’d say, “I just bought this album.  Check it out.”  And then we’d play it. 

I’ve mostly followed that rule.  But with Jethro Tull, I cheated a bit. 

I knew that Aqualung and Thick as a Brick were the big albums of theirs that I’d missed in the early ‘70s.  At first, I decided to focus would be on those albums.  But out of curiosity, I looked up their history online, just to see what else they did.  I knew nothing of the band, other than remembering the artwork of the covers. 

So I went onto AllMusic.com (a terrific site).  I discovered JT had three albums before their big breakout hit, Aqualung.  And, much to my surprise, the first one, That Was, was a full-on blues album.  And the writer noted that after this album, the band began a slow but steady evolution, from a blues band to this odd form called “prog rock.”

That bit about the blues got me.  I’m serious blues aficionado.  In all humility, I know my stuff when it comes to the blues.  And I can play the blues harp reasonably well.  So, the fact that Jethro Tull’s first album was a serious blues album, drew me in. 

I decided to listen to their first five so I could get a fuller story. 

And thus began a four-month journey for me. 

The first album:  THIS WAS 1968

This remarkable album is like a lesson in the blues.  The band takes the form and explores it in every way possible.  And they could really play.  This wasn’t just English rockers doing their impression of the blues – they got it from the inside-out. 

But first, there’s something you need to realize about Jethro Tull.  And that’s leader Ian Anderson and his flute.  Of the five albums I listened to, that flute shows up regularly.  No question he can play it well.  But it’s an odd instrument to play such a prominent role in a rock band.  Either you’ll see it as the signature sound of JT or, as I did, as a distraction.  After finding it interesting in my early listening, I then found myself thinking, “Oh God, here we go with that flute again.” 

So, be ready for that. 

Now onto the music of This Was. 

My Sunday Morning is a jazz blues.  I could imagine Sammy Davis Jr. singing this.  It really swings.  But on the next song, they go to a Sonny Terry-Brownie McGee country blues on Some Day the Sun Won’t Shine For You.  That’s Ian Anderson on the harp (harmonica), nailing the way Sonny played.  Beggar’s Farm is a more straight-ahead blues rocker, with a sultry riff by Mick Abrahams on guitar.  And then there’s the instrumental, Dharma for One.  Perhaps a hint of what was to come from JT a few albums into the future…a fast tempo blues with jazz tones AND a classical flavour.  There’s also a mighty, long and Buddy Rich-inspired drum solo by Clive Bunker.  And then there’s Cat’s Squirrel, another instrumental.  A loose, fast blues rocker, feeling a lot like what Cream was doing around that time.

The second album:  STAND UP 1969

What a transition.  A year after debuting with the bluesy This Was, JT has added a folk feel to their blues/jazz thing.  It busts out with a hard rocker in A New Day Yesterday.  And then everything changes.  Back to the Family, Look into the Sun and Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square tap into what we know now as the folk-rock wave that became emblematic of the late ‘60s and into the ‘70s.  And the band plays it well.  But they haven’t abandoned the blues-jazz-rock of This Was.  Bouree is an instrumental and, apparently, a jazz-rock re-working of a piece by a dude named Beethoven.  Nothing Is Easy is exciting and sophisticated, a mash of jazzy syncopation and hard rock.  Those my age may remember the superb work of Toronto jazz legend Moe Koffman did in taking Bach and Vivaldi and re-thinking it as jazz with rock inflections.  Koffman and his band laid that work down in TO around the same time as JT was doing so in the UK.  Coincidence?  Whatever, this is a terrific album. 

The third album:  BENEFIT 1970

Three albums in three years.  These guys were hard workers. 

But I’m mixed about this album. 

Glass half-empty…it didn’t grab me with the exciting jazz and blues hooks of the first two albums.  In fact, it bored me.  This Was and Stand Up often soared as the players showed their notable talent.  Those albums felt like jam sessions, in a good way.  But Benefit just felt too structured to me and too pleasant.  You could play this in a restaurant and it would be nice background music for the diners. 

Glass half-full:  that structure, the stick-to-the-plan music is a good indicator of the prog rock approach they were about to totally fold into.  I could feel it as I listened.  Things heat up toward the end of the album on Play in Time, with a heavy and catchy flute and guitar riff driving it and some cool organ providing a nice groove.  But this was the only song that I played twice.  Otherwise, this album is like a practice for the bigger ideas Anderson and the band were about to launch.  Kind of like looking at a map of eastern Canada as drawn by Champlain back in his day – remarkably close to the detailed, accurate maps of the future…but not quite there yet. 

The fourth album:  AQUALUNG 1971

This was the album that made me aware of Jethro Tull.  In 1971, I was 13.  I know I heard title track on CHUM-FM.  And, man, that’s a hell of a guitar anthem.  You hear that guitar on Aqualung, with this don’t-mess-with-me edge, DA-DA-DA-DA-DAAA-DA, and your ears perk up.  Then there’s this notable silent pause and it’s played again.  Then the drums kick in and Anderson shouts, “Sitting on a park bench…”

And then Anderson tells you a story and it’s quite a provocative one.  While I was familiar with that guitar anthem, I had never really heard the whole song.  As I’ve learned from this JT listening experience, Anderson was a strong lyricist.  Aqualung is, seemingly, about a homeless man.  I later read that Anderson’s wife had shown him a photo she’d taken of a guy “living rough.”  That got Anderson thinking.  “I had feelings of guilt about the homeless, as well as fear and insecurity with people like that who seem a little scary,” he told an interviewer. 

So in this remarkable, long song, Anderson explores how he would express his imagined perceptions upon seeing a guy living on the streets.  “Snot’s running down his nose, greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes.”  And those perceptions go from Anderson thinking the man was harboring bad thoughts about the kids he was seeing to Anderson seeing the man in a more sympathetic way, as the guy goes to the Salvation Army refuge for shelter. 

And that’s just the first song.  It all feels like a concept album, where every song is connected to the others.  Anderson said later that he didn’t intend it to be a concept.  Still, at least musically, it all feels connected, sourced from a few musical ideas that he and the band expand on.   

It’s an incredible album.  I should have paid attention back in 1971.

Unlike Benefit, its dreary predecessor, JT find a powerful way to inject blues and heavy rock back into the music, with an often lovely mix of folkie acoustics.  There is even a string section used to great effect in some passages.  And throughout, there’s Anderson’s flute, this time nicely blended into the work instead of overpowering it. 

It’s an album of one smart, creative musical after another, all connected, something like a symphony or opera.  I was fascinated by all of it.  Listening to it first on a cold November afternoon, was like experiencing a great adventure series on TV. 

What really impressed me is how well orchestrated all of this is.  It’s all tightly planned, structured and then executed.  But it doesn’t feel that way.  Full of delicious riffs and sassy lyrics (Hymn 43 is a great example), the playing often feels like jamming…but not.  And the players sure do sound like they’re having a good time. 

The 5th album:  THICK AS A BRICK 1972

As adventurous and exciting as Aqualung was, Thick as a Brick is like taking a musical roller coaster. 

Remember – my policy with the music I listen to for Music I Missed is to simply take in the albums and not do any reading about them.  I want to experience them as I would have back in the day when they were released. 

That’s what I did with this one.  And I’m glad I experienced Thick as a Brick without knowing what Anderson and the band intended when they set out to make it.  I’ll explain why in a minute. 

So, as I listened, I loved how surprised I was as the album unfolded.  It all starts with acoustic guitar and Anderson singing as a folkie English troubadour, sounding a lot like Cat Stevens on Tea for the Tillerman (a massive hit back around the same time).  It’s all quite lovely, with his flute and a bit of gentle piano coming in occasionally, along with soft sounds on the cymbals. 

That’s how it goes for the first three minutes.  I really thought the whole album would be like this. 

Then at 3:03…everything changes and for the next 38 minutes, the band puts on an impressive musical tour-de-force. 

A classical music symphony is usually in four parts.  Thick of a Brick is like a mini-symphony.  The album is not made up of songs but of two long pieces of about 22 minutes each.  There are lyrics to each part, but I have no idea what Anderson is singing about.  It feels as if he is trying to make a point; if he was, I don’t get it. 

Weirdly, though, that didn’t matter to me.  The non-vocal music that carries the lyrics is the story here.  The two pieces are a smartly connected variety of musical ideas, incorporating the acoustic folk music that starts it off and then veering into hard rock, hard blues (a la Deep Purple) with frequent leaps into the note-perfect classically influenced workouts that Emerson, Lake and Palmer specialized in. 

Back and forth it all goes.  At the 16-minute mark of Part I, we’re back into easy-breezy acoustics, all soft guitars and flute and little ringing bells and happy organ, with lyrics about someone shuffling into a courtroom.  At 18 minutes, it’s back into a rock-blues. 

I thoroughly enjoyed it all.  And what really got me is what always gets me about so-called “progressive” rock:  it’s so finely structured and it goes on for so long -- do they memorize all this?  Do they follow sheet music?  I know in my own rock band experiences, playing songs, we memorize it all.  In fact, I had one veteran player tell me once, “NO SHEET MUSIC IN ROCK.”  So, I memorize the drum pattern for the beginning of, say, the Doobies’ China Grove, because it has to be exact or the singer won’t know when to come in. 

But China Grove, as a great a song as it is, is about 3 minutes long.  How the HELL did Jethro Tull play 44 minutes of intricately plotted and complex music?  I don’t know.  I have some homework to do on this. 

But as I learned later, Anderson and Co. entered into this whole venture as a kind of in-joke.  With this music, they were actually doing a satire of prog rock music by bands very popular at the time like Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes.  It was all some kind of in-joke. 

And once I learned that, I was pissed off.  Because I both admired everything I heard.  If JT was just kidding around, that bugs me.  But, maybe the joke was on JT…as one critic noted a few years ago, nobody seems to have realized Thick as a Brick was a joke.  It’s one of the most respected prog rock albums in history. 

SURPRISE FACTOR:  10+. 

There is so much about JT that surprised me, in a good way – their evolution from pure blues to prog rock and the impressive quality of their playing. 

WILL I LISTEN TO MORE? 

Yes.  They were a prolific band.  These five albums (especially Aqualung and Thick as a Brick) established JT and remain their signature albums, but there are many more albums after these five and many of them well-regarded.  In fact, I believe Anderson (and some version of the band) is still recording and touring.