The new Tull package is clever, very, and complicated enough to sustain interest over an extended series of listenings. Most albums can be assimilated in five to ten throws but Thick As A Brick requires at least 20 listenings before one can make a final decision about whether the album warrants further listenings.
The main source of the album’s information overload is not the record itself, but the package that contains it. What seems to be an album cover fashioned after the appearance of a newspaper turns out to be a real (sort of) newspaper, fashioned after the appearance of an album cover. Once you take the record out, the cover has a flap that unfolds to turn it from a 12" x 12" album cover to a 12" x 16" 12-page newspaper. Really this is a triumph for conceptual art--for the first time in the history of album covers, the medium becomes the message in a complete fashion by not only containing the record physically but also providing a hypothetical situation for the album to exist in.
We are presented with The St. Cleve Chronicle and Linwell Advertiser for Friday, Jan. 7, 1972. On this particular day the lead headline on page one reads: THICK AS A BRICK, and the lead story relates how The Society for Literary Advancement and Gestation (SLAG) disqualified 8-year-old Gerald (Little Milton) Bostock when his prizewinning epic poem “Thick As a Brick” provoked a nationwide controversy after Gerald read it on the “Young Arts” program of BBC’s Channel 2. Gerald’s poem was said by four psychiatrists to be the product of an “extremely unwholesome attitude towards life, his God and Country.”
The plot thickens on page three with the column four news story: “Major Beat Group Records Gerald’s Poem.” The story explains how Ian Anderson read “Thick As a Brick” in a popular magazine for boys and immediately wrote 45 minutes of “pop music” to go with it “and Gerald is now the proud co-writer of a new Jethro Tull album titled, of course, Thick As a Brick.”
What makes the whole thing all the more enjoyable is the fact that this is a really well put-together newspaper, not just a dummy. Many of the articles refer back to each other, and reading the entire paper, right down to the ads, birth, death and marriage announcements, and connecting the dots on the “Children’s Corner” to find out who Fluffy the Duck is talking to this week, provides an enjoyable diversion (also note that most of the seemingly meaningless phrases in the text of the poem are included in articles throughout the paper). Taken as a whole this is a masterful Joycean trick (ARTICLES WANTED--Brick urgently required. Must be thick...) that goes as far as including a review of the album in which Julian Stone-Mason B.A. gives a mixed reaction: “Poor, or perhaps naive taste is responsible for some of the ugly changes of time signature and banal instrumental passages linking the main sections but ability in this direction should come with maturity.”
Contrary to the widely-held belief that this package was put together by the staff of Reprise records, one of the members of the publicity staff of the New York office confessed “We didn’t do it, but we’d like to take credit for it.” As it turned out, no one would own up to having produced the thing thus the kid’s nickname, “Little Milton” becomes significant in that Thick As a Brick is a poem “nearly anonymous,” just as Big Milton’s was. But where Paradise Lost set out “to justify the ways of God to man,” Thick... deals with God as “an overwhelming responsibility” and turns out to be a massive indulgence in wry English humor.
As it turns out, it’s a good thing that the cover is so well done, because the album inside works only as an extension of the comedy. The vinyl disc version of Thick has very little to do with Rock--it’s a formula album that can be counted on to stimulate enough interest to sell a few copies, but once you get past the cover, this album isn’t gonna make much of a dent in anyone’s imagination. It provides another aspect of the group for Tull’s extant legions, and thus justifies itself, and it will undoubtedly impress an awful lot of dull minds with the superficial grandiloquence of its scope (it even makes a really fine mid-section for the group’s live act). But once you get past the flash, this album pales when held up next to either Benefit or Aqualung, and Jethro Tull ought to think about coming down from the clouds to do their next one.
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