Jethro Tull 2022

[Originally written in 2010, rewritten in 2022.  Bracketed portions are the recent additions.]

[Recently (November 2022) I've been on document review projects.  I keep my eyes and brain on the screen, but my ears are free, and I've been digesting the entirety of Jethro Tull's repertoire, plus the solo albums of ringmaster/vocalist Ian Anderson and guitarist Martin Barre.  By now, Tull have 22 studio albums from 1968 to 2022, with a major gap between the 21st, the Jethro Tull Christmas album (2003), the last album with Martin Barre, and recently released The Zealot Gene.   Although Anderson had pretty much free rein as the leader of Jethro Tull, he still put out six solo albums.  For his part, Martin Barre has eight solo albums, half of which predate the JT Christmas album.  Now I've finally heard them all.]

Thanks to my brother, I saw Jethro Tull once again, on Tuesday June 8, 2010 at Wolf Trap.  Come to think of it, every time I’ve seen Tull has been with him, as he’s far more of a Tull fan than I am or ever was, but I can honestly say I enjoyed this show as I did the earlier ones; as Roger Waters once said, “People come to a show and they don’t like it, they don’t come again.”

 I can’t remember how we got into the band, but Iron Maiden was probably a factor.  In every interview in which bassist Steve Harris is asked his influences, he consistently names Jethro Tull and Wishbone Ash.  Maiden has covered “Cross-Eyed Mary”.

 Note: Jethro Tull himself is/was NOT in the band.  He died in 1741, sometime earlier.  Safe to say he had no knowledge of the band named after him 226 years after he died.  His claim to fame is developing the seed drill. 

 Jethro Tull IS pretty much the band of Ian Anderson, the singer/songwriter.  Anderson also plays flute, harmonica, and a small acoustic guitar.  His signature pose is standing on one leg.  Even today, at age 62, he is very spry and jumps around stage, although he no longer wears Renaissance clothing or a codpiece. 

 For a month in 1968, Tony Iommi of Black Sabbath played with Tull.  Despite being in the band for such a brief period of time, he was Tull’s guitarist on the Rolling Stone’s Rock’n’Roll Circus special, pretending to play “Song For Jeffrey” on a left-handed Stratocaster. 

 From the remarks he made on stage, and from interviews, it’s clear that Anderson is not happy that Tull is often considered a “progressive” band and lumped in with Pink Floyd, Yes, Genesis, and King Crimson (among other such bands).  He kept Tull off the bill at Woodstock because he wanted to disassociate the band from the hippie movement.  There are elements of jazz, blues, classical, and folk all wrapped up; “Bourree” is clearly classical, even if Anderson admitted they had watered it down into second-rate jazz.  Tull are one of these bands who can appeal both to rock fans who might not like classical music, and classical music fans who consider all rock to be degenerate noise.  This is why they play Wolf Trap, a smallish ampitheater for the wicker picnic basket crowd, not the 9:30 Club (moshing at a Tull show?  Perish the thought!).

 In 1989, the Grammy people decided, in their immense wisdom, to not only begin a special category for heavy metal, but to bestow that award upon Jethro Tull for their album Crest of a Knave, instead of the presumptive favorite, Metallica’s …And Justice For All.  Anderson claimed to have been as stunned and surprised as Metallica were by this choice.  I do like Crest of a Knave, and as Tull albums go it’s about as heavy as any of them, but nowhere close to …And Justice For All.  In fact, before …And Justice For All, the only people to listened to, or paid attention to, Metallica were metal heads like my brother and I.  That album suddenly broke the band wide open to the R.E.M. and “progressive rock” crowd – and here I mean the skinny, VW-driving liberals who listen to R.E.M. and WHFS, and generally slam metal music and its fans as Neanderthal idiots like Beavis and Butt-head.  Now these guys were joining the Metallica bandwagon.  So really, by anyone’s standards and imagination, …And Justice For All was definitely the album which should have won in 1989.  When Metallica did win the Grammy in 1992, drummer Lars Ulrich joked, “we’d like to thank Jethro Tull for not putting out an album this year.”  [Actually, both Metallica - the self-titled, Black Album - and Jethro Tull (Catfish Rising) released albums in 1991.]

 Aqualung.  They’ve had good albums since this one (Minstrel in the Gallery, Songs from the Wood, Broadsword and the Beast, and Crest of a Knave), but clearly this is their Dark Side of the Moon, their Sgt. Pepper.  In concert You KNOW you will hear the title track and “Locomotive Breath”, and most often “My God” as well.  One of the more recent shows we saw a few years ago was one in which they played Aqualung in its entirety, including the other longer songs “Hymn 43” and “Wind-up”, and the shorter throw-away tunes.  What I liked is that unlike the more recent spate of such efforts by bands, they did not play the songs in exact running order consecutively, but in no particular order and alternating with other songs.   

[Stinkers.  My own opinion, mind you:  Thick As A Brick, A Passion Play, Under Wraps.   And the rest are OK, neither remarkable in good quality or bad.  That includes the solo albums by Anderson and Barre.]

 Live.  By now the only original members are Anderson and Martin Barre, the guitarist.  Barre by now bears an uncanny resemblance to Joe Biden.  What you have is an old guy playing VERY mean guitar.  Anderson hogs the attention, hopping on one leg, and regaling us with witty anecdotes and comments about the songs, much more entertaining than the usual “are you ready to rock, motherf**kers???” we can expect from lesser bands.  Overall the experience is exciting, interesting, and despite all the very obvious non-rock ingredients definitely needs to be classified as “rock”. 

[We later managed to see Martin Barre perform as a solo artist in 2018.  Mostly he played Jethro Tull songs, of course:  Steel Monkey, Hymn 43, Back to the Family, Love Story, For A Thousand Mothers, Nothing to Say, Nothing is Easy, Hunting Girl, Minstrel in the Gallery, My Sunday Feeling, Sealion, Pibroch (Cap In  Hand), A Song For Jeffrey, Teacher, A New Day Yesterday, Aqualung, and Locomotive Breath.   Still very agile on the electric guitar, fortunately, and an excellent show.]