 ethro 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 1970's. 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 No. 3 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 No. 1 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 No. 7 in England, and
was the group's first release on Wright and Ellis's newly formed Chrysalis label. Their
next single, "The Witch's Promise," got to No. 4 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 No. 3
spot in England, but, much more important, it ascended to No. 11 in America, and its
songs, including "Nothing Is Easy" 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,
Georgia, 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 No. 7 in America and No. 4 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 No. 5 spot, but when it came out in America a
month later, it hit the No. 1 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 E.P.'s, early albums, and a
Carnegie Hall show, packaged like an old-style 78 r.p.m. 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, and
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 No. 1
in America (yielding a No. 8 single edited from the extended piece) and No. 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, WarChild -- 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 No. 2 in America and No. 14
in England. The dominant theme of WarChild 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 No. 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 began 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-1970's. The next Tull, album, Minstrel in
the Gallery, showed up 10 months later, in September of 1975, reaching No. 7 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 line-up 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 unproduced 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 E.P. entitled "Ring Out Solstice Bells" got to No.
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 1970's, 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) break-up.
The Stormwatch tour with the new line-up 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 line-up, future tours by Jethro Tull, especially in
America, would provide a basis for performances by reformed incarnations of Fairport
Convention.
The line-up 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 line-up 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
line-up -- including Barre, Pegg, 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 No. 76 in the U.S., it became the group's poorest selling album, partly a
consequence of Anderson's developing a throat infection that forces the postponment 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 No. 19 in England and No. 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, and 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 No. 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 No. 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.
-- Bruce
Eder |