Air Wreck Genheimer
(With Robert Duncan and Lester Bangs: post-humously).
Creem, 5/77
If all record reviews had headlines, then the headline for this one would be: Ian Anderson Drops His Codpiece And No One Notices!
Why bring up a rather lame locker room joke? Because this is yet another one of those Fascinating Jethro Tull albums where absolutely anything and everything goes...all those delightful musical notes rather flatulently emitted scrape the stale urine and scum-encrusted peepshow floor and still manage to pierce the beauty of the clouds above the skyscrapers and everything just like you never pictured it. This album be one confused donut personified crystal clear baby, ooh! WOW!
As Ian Anderson leads the listener through a computerized celebration of medieval droolings, the large black dog on the album cover demands a Milkbone. Anderson has hinted at a Renaissance of Old English eel pies on his previous pressings just as critics have clamoured “Over and over and over again until streams of piss-strafed flamingoes, their nausea blooming mountains of turd-bed death camps, escape to trailer park lawns.”
A truly glistening highlight is “Hunting Girl” which depicts the rape of a noble dish by a lowly nebbish: Boot leather flashing and spur-necks the size of your thumb/This high-born hunter had tastes as strange as they come/Unbridled passion: I took the bit in my teeth/Her standing over: Me on my knees underneath.
Can it be that Ian copped this musical query of ‘who is really raping who’ from a previous critical adulation? “She dropped her pants. Beside her a Chinese watched intensely. Something was in his hand. Fleshy yet hard. A curly mound revealed itself beneath the opaqueness of what passed for her underwear. Elmer’s Glue in spastic random explosions splotched onto the ceiling of the bungalow. White women were new to Chiang.” Your sister hopes so.
Continuing to venture through themes of lost virginity and the ancient wisdom of Earnest and Julio Gallo, Anderson wisely points out the intelligence of the virtue of patience: Frogs and newts slip in the dark/Too much hurry ruins a body/I’ll sit easy; fan the spark. Leave it to Ian to distill what critics have obliquely mumbled about for years: “A drivel-driven loon crouched moaning low in the foliage by the side of the Arapaho footpath...Squatting behind tumbleweed, he peered trembling at yonder clearing, where tomcats ten feet high with oysters for eyeballs danced whooping in a circle, stopping their ritualistic cakewalk at arbitrary intervals to inhale deeply from the ends of charred, furiously smoking bones. Eyeless in gaza...”
In sum, a genuinely brilliant album! Virtually every two lines rhyme with each other and there’s even a Christmas song. However, Ian Anderson is not the only one who has learned the economy of recycling without partaking in necrophilia.
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