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
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. Ian 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 keyboards, 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 called "Now
We Are Six", 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.2 May 1951) 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.
Shortly after, the new Tull studio album was released; Roots
To Branches. But because of the close
release-dates on the Ian solo and this album, media failed to promote the
last one of them. And as a result, the last Tull album did not get as much
attention as it deserved.
After years without new material,
Jethro Tull released a new studio album in August 1999 called Dot
Com. The cover artwork on this release
resulted in quite a discussion because of the picture of Satan playing
flute....and his genitals hanging down. Not all Tull-fans appreciated that,
and as a result, the US release of this album came with a cencored front
and back cover. Jethro Tull started their own website in 1999, www.j-tull.com,
with up to date (at least once a month) information for fans and the press.
The website is now also available at www.jethrotull.com,
after Jethro Tull became one of the few bands to win a court battle for
their own domain name. The domain was being used as a front for a porn
website, something Ian Anderson didn't like very much.
The new Ian Anderson solo album called
The
Secret Language Of Birds was ready
for release early 1999, but due to their last release mistake - they moved
the release date of this solo to Spring year 2000. A couple of tracks from
the new Ian Anderson solo album was played on air in Uruguay back in August
1998, these tracks gave us all a taste of what was to come; an Ian Anderson
solo that we had always expected and hoped for.
EMI (the legal owner's of Jethro Tull's
entire back catalogue) recently released a Very
Best Of compilation album, containing
20 remastered tracks. They are also remastering and re-releasing the entire
Jethro Tull back catalogue with additional bonus material, less the compilation
albums. The first 3 remastered albums were released in UK in September
2001, and finally in USA in January 2002. Jethro Tull also released their
first DVD, Living
With The Past, in 2002 along with
a remastered compilation CD, Living
With The Past, containing both live
material and remastered studio tracks.
Written by: Bruce Eder, corrections and additions
made by Dag Sandbu
