Jethro Tull: Everyone Will Start To Pulsate
Dick Lupoff, Crawdaddy, 6/8/70
When you go to a Jethro Tull concert--they played two-a-night, Thursday-Friday-Saturday just the other week--you have to expect to mingle with some of the elite of the Lower East Side Oddball Society. Jethro Tull, the group, and in particular Ian Anderson, its mainspring, have a peculiar appeal that attracts some to the decidedly unusual people, even by the broad standards of our rather eccentric subculture. But back to this topic in a little while.
First, for the vital facts: they were good. They were very, very good. Not great, not quite, at least not at the Friday late show that I caught, but that’s an unpredictable matter. (Of timing, personnel, environment, the weather outside, the condition of the stock market, what you had for lunch and the current price of dope--God knows what.) You know, sometimes that thing just happens.
I’ve seen it happen with Jethro Tull: they’ll just catch, and the audience will catch, and everyone will start to pulsate on a shared wavelength, the music is right, but beyond that a kind of spirit-force starts flowing among the musicians and between them and the audience and it can just go on until morning.
Or it doesn’t happen and if it didn’t the other night we still had a fine set of music from Jethro Tull and you won’t hear me bitching about how I spent my time or money.
ODD LITTLE GUY WITH RED HAIR STICKING UP
Ancient history time, gang! Couple years ago we had tickets for a Blood Sweat & Tears concert at Graham’s place and when we got there the marquee listed one of the other groups as Jethro Tull, of whom we had never even heard. I performed one of my patented instant plausible but wrong analyses, as follows: country is getting very big and Homer and Jethro have been doing that stuff for eons and I hadn’t heard that they’d split but maybe they have, and I don’t know their last names, but maybe Jethro is Jethro Tull and he’s doing this single.
So these four guys come onstage, three kind of ordinary-looking scruffy rock musician types and the fourth, well, he’s some kind of odd little guy with huge red hair sticking up all over the place, pate, and face, carrying a flute, and wearing an ancient battered shin-length frock coat.
He peers owlishly at the audience and introduces the band: Clive Bunker (drums), Glenn Cornick (bass), Martin Lancelot Barre (guitar), himself: Ian Anderson (flute). “Maaatin,” he tells us, “Maaatin Baaaa just joined the group, Mick Abrahams has left us.”
Neat-o, never heard of any of them.
So he whips this flute up to his mouth, gives the band a count-off to start by, jerks one foot up in the air like a flamingo watching the ponies at Hialeah, and wham! away we go into this wild and unique jazz-blues-rock thing that has since grown familiar.
Between numbers Anderson raps, and it’s an odd twitchy kind of rapping--interrupting himself and wandering off on tangents; funny, ingratiating, nutty, ever so diffident. (One time somebody in the audience hassled him for talking too much, and he said, “I have to talk to get up my nerve to play, you know we’re scared shitless up here, just us four guys, and all of you out there looking at us.” Then he whips his flute up so it’s sticking out of his crotch and he fondles it once and says, “Don’t you wish your prrrick was all shiny and silvery like this?” and then he counts one-two-three and wham! off they go with this fantastic music again!)
* * *
So after a while Jethro Tull isn’t playing curtain-raisers for anybody, buddy. They get top billing and the tickets start to go real fast when they put ’em on sale, and by now, 1970, Graham has to bill them for three nights instead of two to meet the demand.
When they started out, in 1968, I think they were feeling their way, making a band. Mick Abrahams plays lead on their first album, This Was. He’s since gone on with his own group, Blodwyn Pig. Anderson wrote the liner notes for This Was and he says “This was how we were playing then--but things change. Don’t they.”
The album isn’t too great--they really were just getting it together, and I don’t think the mix was right anyway; I’ve played with the levels all over the place and I think I can finally hear something like what they intended, but the flute doesn’t stand out the way it should and it’s generally a record of promise, not delivery.
By last year the group really had it together, and both their concerts (Ian had got himself a beautiful new frock coat, of heavy green-gray material with black frogging) and their second LP, Stand Up, were outstanding. They had made their band, now they were thoroughly together and concerned with making music. Songs like “A New Day Yesterday,” “Look Into the Sun,” “Nothing is Easy,” “Fat Man,” “For a Thousand Mothers,” wow, music for pure listening, music to get stoned by, to fuck to, the whole thing.
ANDERSON DOMINATES
Now--it’s 1970 time, gang!--they’re into something new again. Their third album (all on Reprise here, Island in Britain), Benefit, shows the familiar Anderson-Cornick-Bunker-Barre configuration on the cover, but John Evan is credited for piano and organ, and at the Fillmore this time around Jethro Tull is a quintet, Evan is part of the group.
The album--I’ll have to hear it a few score more times to really get into it--seems to show an interest in what I guess is virtuosity. Anderson writes the music, does the lead singing, plays lead flute, sometimes guitar as well, dominates on- and off-stage. I think he’s trying to give everybody in the group a fair share of the spotlight: everybody solos. But Ian drives the group; when he’s onstage there’s electricity, when he’s off-stage it’s just a pretty good band.
At the Fillmore, Bunker took a long solo during “Dharma For One.” He’s a fine drummer, he did everything you could possibly ask him to do--repeatedly. It was just plain too long, by at least forty percent. Martin Barre is developing into a really fine lead guitarist. He managed to hit a few clunkers but he plays with intensity, with virtuosity; he played a long, good solo that went on even longer than Bunker’s had.
Evan’s keyboards give the group a different sound, and it takes some effort not to dislike the effect just because I dug the old four-man version so much. But to be honest he does add to the effect of the band. In fact, the problem with adding keyboards--or brass, I suppose, or any major new “section” (as we used ter call ’em back in big band days)--is that the new instruments may overwhelm the old balance of the band, and distort or dominate the new balance that emerges.
* * *
Jethro Tull is going through changes, incorporating Evan, rather as Quicksilver Messenger Service is with Nicky Hopkins. There are other changes. Martin Barre used to switch off to play flute duets with Anderson, now it’s Anderson who switches to play guitar duets with Barre. Anderson is doing more singing than he used to, and the others are starting to do a little.
So when they do old numbers like “Nothing is Easy,” “Dharma For One” (their “Who Do You Love” or “Track in A”), “For a Thousand Mothers,” new ones like “Sossity, You’re A Woman,” even brand new material that’s to be on their fourth LP in a few months, the sound is evolving.
Which I guess is a pretty good answer to the question of what you do after you’ve reached however modest a form of perfection. There would be a temptation to just travel around the country and in each town just march onstage and with mechanical perfection run through your standard numbers, which some groups we all know do.
Jethro Tull have clearly chosen a different and more difficult road, changing instrumentation, balance, arrangements, as well as material, so that every time around [typo, words omitted]. Don’t change a winning team, they say in sports--but in the long run it’s the only way to avoid sterility and stagnation.
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