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After veering sharply from the blues inluences of their debut, This
Was, Jethro Tull's sound quickly coalesced around jazz-tinged
English folk influences and the antics of frontman/flautist Ian
Anderson. But it was guitarist Martin Barre's swaggering riff off
the title track of the band's fourth album that would become Tull's
indelibly clichéd trademark--and the band's entrée into a long reign as
arena-rock perennials. But there's a lot more to Aqualung than
the riffage of that cut and its cousins, "Cross-Eyed Mary" and
"Locomotive Breath.
" In an era when pseudo-Christian spirituality was a de rigueur, if
cheap, musical commodity (from the overblown operatics of Jesus
Christ Superstar to one-hit pop wonders such as "Spirit in the
Sky" and "Put Your Hand in the Hand"), Anderson and company openly
challenged the value of organized religion with a thematic album savvy
enough to layer its thought-provoking lyrics between heavy strata of
FM-friendly guitar bedrock. A cliché, perhaps; a landmark, no doubt. And
a record many maintain is still Tull's finest hour.
Track
listing
1. Aqualung
2. Cross-Eyed
Mary
3. Cheap Day Return
4. Mother Goose
5. Wond'ring Aloud
6. Up to Me
7. My
God
8. Hymn 43
9. Slipstream
10. Locomotive
Breath
11. Wind-Up
Product Details
- Audio CD: 1984
- Original Release Date: 1973
- Label: Chrysalis
Jethro Tull Biography
Jethro Tull was a unique phenomenon in popular music history. Their
mix of hard rock; folk melodies; blues licks; surreal, impossibly dense
lyrics; and overall profundity defied easy analysis, but that didn't
dissuade fans from giving them 11 gold and five platinum albums. At the
same time, critics rarely took them seriously, and they were off the
cutting edge of popular music since the end of the 1970s. But no record
store in the country would want to be without multiple copies of each of
their most popular albums (Benefit, Aqualung, Thick as a Brick, Living
in the Past), or their various best-of compilations, and few would
knowingly ignore their newest releases. Of their contemporaries, only
Yes could claim a similar degree of success, and Yes endured several
major shifts in sound and membership in reaching the 1990s, while Tull
remained remarkably stable over the same period. As co-founded and led
by wildman-flautist-guitarist-singer-songwriter Ian Anderson, the group
carved a place all its own in popular music.
Tull had its roots in
the British blues boom of the late '60s. Anderson (b. Aug. 10, 1947,
Edinburgh, Scotland) had moved to Blackpool when he was 12. His first
band was called the Blades, named after James Bond's club, with Michael
Stephens on guitar, Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond (b. July 30, 1946) on bass
and John Evans (b. Mar. 28, 1948) on drums, playing a mix of jazzy blues
and soulful dance music on the northern club circuit. In 1965, they
changed their name to the John Evan Band (Evan having dropped the "s" in
his name at Hammond's suggestion) and later the John Evan Smash. By the
end of 1967, Glenn Cornick (b. Apr. 24, 1947, Barrow-in-Furness,
Cumbria, England) had replaced Hammond-Hammond on bass. The group moved
to Luton in order to be closer to London, the center of the British
blues boom, and the band began to fall apart, when Anderson and Cornick
met guitarist/singer Mick Abrahams (b. Apr. 7, 1943, Luton,
Bedfordshire, England) and drummer Clive Bunker (b. Dec. 12, 1946), who
had previously played together in the Toggery Five and were now members
of a local blues band called McGregor's Engine.
In December of
1967, the four of them agreed to form a new group. They began playing
two shows a week, trying out different names, including Navy Blue and
Bag of Blues. One of the names that they used, Jethro Tull, borrowed
from an 18th-century farmer/inventor, proved popular and memorable, and
it stuck. In January of 1968, they cut a rather derivative pop-folk
single called "Sunshine Day," released by MGM Records (under the
misprinted name Jethro Toe) the following month. The single went
nowhere, but the group managed to land a residency at the Marquee Club
in London, where they became very popular.
Early on, they had to
face a problem of image and configuration, however. In the late spring
of 1968, managers Terry Ellis and Chris Wright (who later founded
Chrysalis Records) first broached the idea that Anderson give up playing
the flute, and to allow Mick Abrahams to take center stage. At the
time, a lot of blues enthusiasts didn't accept wind instruments at all,
especially the flute, as seminal to the sound they were looking for, and
as a group struggling for success and recognition, Jethro Tull was just
a little too strange in that regard. Abrahams was a hardcore blues
enthusiast who idolized British blues godfather Alexis Korner, and he
was pushing for a more traditional band configuration, which would've
put him and his guitar out front. As it turned out, they were both
right. Abrahams' blues sensibilities were impeccable, but the audience
for British blues by itself couldn't elevate Jethro Tull any higher than
being a top club act. Anderson's antics on-stage, jumping around in a
ragged overcoat and standing on one leg while playing the flute, and his
use of folk sources as well as blues and jazz, gave the band the
potential to grab a bigger audience and some much-needed press
attention.
They opened for Pink Floyd on June 29, 1968, at the
first free rock festival in London's Hyde Park, and in August they were
the hit of the Sunbury Jazz & Blues Festival in Sunbury-on-Thames.
By the end of the summer, they had a recording contract with Island
Records. The resulting album, This Was, was issued in November. By this
time, Anderson was the dominant member of the group on-stage, and at the
end of the month Abrahams exited the band. The group went through two
hastily recruited and rejected replacements, future Black Sabbath
guitarist Tony Iommi (who was in Tull for a week, just long enough to
show up in their appearance on the Rolling Stones' Rock 'N Roll Circus
extravaganza), and Davy O'List, the former guitarist with the Nice.
Finally, Martin Barre (b. Nov. 17, 1946), a former architecture student,
was the choice for a permanent replacement.
It wasn't until April
of 1969 that This Was got a U.S. release. Ironically, the first small
wave of American Jethro Tull fans were admiring a group whose sound had
already changed radically; in May of 1969, Barre's first recording with
the group, "Living in the Past," reached the British number three spot
and the group made its debut on Top of the Pops performing the song. The
group played a number of festivals that summer, including the Newport
Jazz Festival. Their next album, Stand Up, with all of its material
(except "Bouree," which was composed by Johann Sebastian Bach) written
by Ian Anderson, reached the number one spot in England the next month.
Stand Up also contained the first orchestrated track by Tull, "Reasons
for Waiting," which featured strings arranged by David Palmer, a Royal
Academy of Music graduate and theatrical conductor who had arranged
horns on one track from This Was. Palmer would play an increasingly
large role in subsequent albums, and finally join the group officially
in 1977.
Meanwhile, "Sweet Dream," issued in November, rose to
number seven in England, and was the group's first release on Wright and
Ellis' newly formed Chrysalis label. Their next single, "The Witch's
Promise," got to number four in England in January of 1970. The group's
next album, Benefit, marked their last look back at the blues, and also
the presence of Anderson's longtime friend and former bandmate John Evan
-- who had long since given up the drums in favor of keyboards -- on
piano and organ. Benefit reached the number three spot in England, but,
much more important, it ascended to number 11 in America, and its songs,
including "Teacher" and "Sossity, You're A Woman," formed a key part of
Tull's stage repertory. In early July of 1970, the group shared a bill
with Jimi Hendrix, B.B. King, and Johnny Winter at the Atlanta Pop
Festival in Byron, GA, before 200,000 people.
By the following
December, after another U.S. tour, Cornick had decided to leave the
group, and was replaced on bass by Anderson's childhood friend Jeffrey
Hammond-Hammond. Early the following year, they began working on what
would prove to be, for many fans, the group's magnum opus, Aqualung.
Anderson's writing had been moving in a more serious direction since the
group's second album, but it was with Aqualung that he found the
lyrical voice he'd been seeking. Suddenly, he was singing about the
relationship between man and God, and the manner in which -- in his view
-- organized religion separated them. The blues influences were muted
almost to non-existence, but the hard rock passages were searing and the
folk influences provided a refreshing contrast. That the album was a
unified whole impressed the more serious critics, while the kids were
content to play air guitar to Martin Barre's high-speed breaks. And
everybody, college prog rock mavens and high-school time-servers alike,
seemed to identify with the theme of alienation that lay behind the
music.
Aqualung reached number seven in America and number four in
England, and was accompanied by a hugely successful American tour.
Bunker quit the band to get married, and was replaced by Anderson's old
John Evan Smash bandmate Barriemore Barlow (b. Sept. 10, 1949). Late in
1971, they began work on their next album, Thick as a Brick.
Structurally more ambitious than Aqualung, and supported by an
elaborately designed jacket in the form of a newspaper, this record was
essentially one long song steeped in surreal imagery, social commentary,
and Anderson's newly solidified image as a wildman-sage. Released in
England during April of 1972, Thick as a Brick got as high as the number
five spot, but when it came out in America a month later, it hit the
number one spot, making it the first Jethro Tull album to achieve
greater popularity in American than in England. In June of 1972, in
response to steadily rising demand for the group's work, Chrysalis
Records released Living in the Past, a collection of tracks from their
various singles and British EPs, early albums, and a Carnegie Hall show,
packaged like an old-style 78 rpm album in a book that opened up.
At
this point, it seemed as though Jethro Tull could do no wrong, and for
the fans that was true. For the critics, however, the group's string ran
out in July of 1973 with the release of A Passion Play. The piece was
another extended song, running the length of the album, this time
steeped in fantasy and religious imagery far denser than Aqualung; it
was divided at the end of one side of the album and the beginning of the
other by an A.A. Milne-style story called "The Hare That Lost His
Spectacles." This time, the critics were hostile toward Anderson and the
group, attacking the album for its obscure lyrical references and
excessive length. Despite these criticisms, the album reached number one
in America (yielding a number eight single edited from the extended
piece) and number 13 in England. The real venom, however, didn't start
to flow until the group went on tour that summer. By this time, their
sets ran to two-and-a-half hours, and included not only the new album
done in its entirety ("The Hare That Lost His Spectacles" being a film
presentation in the middle of the show), but Thick As a Brick and the
most popular of the group's songs off of Aqualung and their earlier
albums. Anderson was apparently unprepared for the searing reviews that
started appearing, and also took the American rock press too seriously.
In the midst of a sell-out U.S. tour, he threatened to cancel all
upcoming concerts and return to England. Fortunately, cooler heads
prevailed, especially once he recognized that the shows were completely
sold out and audiences were ecstatic, and the tour continued without
interruption.
It was 16 months until the group's next album, War
Child -- conceived as part of a film project that never materialized --
was released, in November of 1974. The expectations surrounding the
album gave it pre-order sales sufficient to get it certified gold upon
release, and it was also Tull's last platinum album, reaching number two
in America and number 14 in England. The dominant theme of War Child
seemed to be violence, though the music's trappings heavily featured
Palmer's orchestrations, rivaling Barre's electric guitar breaks for
attention. In any case, the public seemed to respond well to the group's
return to conventional length songs, with "Bungle in the Jungle"
reaching number 11 in America. Tull's successful concert tour behind
this album had them augmented by a string quartet.
During this
period, Anderson became involved with producing an album by Steeleye
Span, a folk-rock group that was also signed to Chrysalis, and who had
opened for Tull on one of their American tours. Their music slowly begun
influencing Anderson's songwriting over the next several years, as the
folk influence grew in prominence, a process that was redoubled when he
took up a rural residence during the mid-'70s. The next Tull album,
Minstrel in the Gallery, showed up ten months later, in September of
1975, reaching number seven in the United States. This time, the
dominant theme was Elizabethan minstrelsy, within an electric rock and
English folk context. The tracks included a 17-minute suite that
recalled the group's earlier album-length epic songs, but the album's
success was rather more limited.
The Jethro Tull lineup had been
remarkably stable ever since Clive Bunker's exit after Aqualung,
remaining constant across four albums in as many years. In January of
1976, however, Hammond-Hammond left the band to pursue a career in art.
His replacement, John Glascock (b. 1953), joined in time for the
recording of Too Old to Rock 'n Roll, Too Young to Die, an album made up
partly of songs from an un-produced play proposed by Anderson and
Palmer, released in May of 1976. The group later did an ITV special
built around the album's songs. The title track, however (on which
Steeleye Span's Maddy Prior appeared as a guest backing vocalist),
became a subject of controversy in England, as critics took it to be a
personal statement on Anderson's part.
In late 1976, a Christmas
EP entitled Ring Out Solstice Bells got to number 28. This song later
turned up on their next album, Songs From the Wood, the group's most
artistically unified and successful album in some time (and the first
not derived from an unfinished film or play since A Passion Play). This
was Tull's folk album, reflecting Anderson's passion for English folk
songs. Its release also accompanied the band's first British tour in
nearly three years. In May of 1977, David Palmer joined Tull as an
official member, playing keyboards on-stage to augment the richness of
the group's concert sound.
Having lasted into the late '70s,
Jethro Tull now found itself competing in a new musical environment, as
journalists and, to an increasing degree, fans became fixated on the
growing punk rock phenomenon. In October 1977, Repeat (The Best of
Jethro Tull, Vol. 2), intended to fill an anticipated 11 month gap
between Tull albums, was released on both sides of the Atlantic.
Unfortunately, it contained only a single new track and never made the
British charts, while barely scraping into the American Top 100 albums.
The group's next new album, Heavy Horses, issued in April of 1978, was
Anderson's most personal work in several years, the title track
expressing his regret over the disappearance of England's huge shire
horses as casualties of modernization. In the fall of 1978, the group's
first full-length concert album, the double-LP Live-Bursting Out, was
released to modest success, accompanied by a tour of the United States
and an international television broadcast from Madison Square Garden.
1979
was a pivotal and tragic year for the group. John Glascock died from
complications of heart surgery on November 17, five weeks after the
release of Stormwatch. Tull was lucky enough to acquire the services of
Dave Pegg, the longtime bassist for Fairport Convention, which had
announced its formal (though, as it turned out, temporary) breakup. The
Stormwatch tour with the new lineup was a success, although the album
was the first original release by Jethro Tull since This Was not to
reach the U.S. Top 20. Partly thanks to Pegg's involvement with the Tull
lineup, future tours by Jethro Tull, especially in America, would
provide a basis for performances by re-formed incarnations of Fairport
Convention.
The lineup change caused by Glascock's death led to
Anderson's decision to record a solo album during the summer of 1980,
backed by Barre, Pegg, and Mark Craney on drums, with ex-Roxy Music/King
Crimson multi-instrumentalist Eddie Jobson on violin. The record, A,
was eventually released as a Jethro Tull album in September of 1980, but
even the Tull name didn't do much for its success. Barlow, Evan, and
Palmer, however, were dropped from the group's lineup with the recording
of A, and the new version of Jethro Tull toured in support of the
album. Jobson left once the tour was over, and it was with yet another
new lineup -- including Barre, Pegg, and Fairport Convention alumnus
Gerry Conway (drums) and Peter-John Vettesse (keyboards) -- that The
Broadsword and the Beast was recorded in 1982. Although this album had
many songs based on folk melodies, its harder rocking passages also had a
heavier, more thumping beat than earlier versions of the band had
produced, and the use of the synthesizer was more pronounced than on
previous Tull albums.
In 1983, Anderson confined his activities to
his first official solo album, Walk Into Light, which had a very
different, synthesizer-dominated sound. Following its lackluster
performance, Anderson revived Jethro Tull for the album Under Wraps,
released in September of 1984. At number 76 in the U.S., it became the
group's poorest selling album, partly a consequence of Anderson's
developing a throat infection that forced the postponement of much of
their planned tour. No further Tull albums were to be released until
Crest of a Knave in 1987, as a result of Anderson's intermittent throat
problems. In the meantime, the group appeared on a German television
special in March of 1985, and participated in a presentation of the
group's work by the London Symphony Orchestra. To make up for the
shortfall of new releases, Chrysalis released another compilation,
Original Masters, a collection of highlights of the group's work, in
October of 1985. In 1986, A Classic Case: The London Symphony Orchestra
Plays the Music of Jethro Tull was released on record; and Crest of a
Knave performed surprisingly well when it was issued in September of
1987, reaching number 19 in England and number 32 in America with the
support of a world tour.
Crest of a Knave was something of a
watershed in Tull's later history, though nobody would have guessed it
at the time of its release. Although some of its songs displayed the
group's usual folk/hard rock mix, the group was playing louder than
usual, and tracks like "Steel Monkey," had a harder sound than any
previous record by the group. In 1988, Tull toured the United States as
part of the celebration of the band's 20th anniversary. In July,
Chrysalis issued 20 Years of Jethro Tull, a 65-song boxed-set collection
covering the group's history up to that time, containing most of their
major songs and augmented with outtakes and radio performances. In
February of 1989, the band won the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock/Metal
Performance for Crest of a Knave. Suddenly, they were stars again, and
being declared as relevant by one of the top music awards in the
industry; a fact that kept critics buzzing for months over whether the
group deserved it before finally attacking the voting for the Grammy
Awards and the membership of its parent organization, the National
Association of Recording Arts and Sciences.
Rock Island, another
hard rocking album, reached a very healthy number 18 in England during
September of the same year, while peaking only at 56 in America, despite
a six-week U.S. tour to support the album. In 1990, the album Catfish
Rising did less well, reaching only 27 in England and 88 in America
after its release in September. And A Little Light Music, their own
"unplugged" release, taped on their summer 1992 European tour, only got
to number 34 in England and 150 in the United States.
Despite
declining numbers, the group continued performing to good-sized houses
when they toured, and the group's catalog performed extremely well. In
April of 1993, Chrysalis released a four-CD 25th Anniversary Box Set --
evidently hoping that most fans had forgotten the 20th anniversary set
issued five years earlier -- consisting of remixed versions of their
hits, live shows from across their history, and a handful of new tracks.
Meanwhile, Anderson continued to write and record music separate from
the group on occasion, most notably Divinities: Twelve Dances with God, a
classically-oriented solo album (and a distinctly non-Tull one) on
EMI's classical Angel Records. J-Tull.Com followed in 1999.
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