Nothing Is Easy: Defending Jethro Tull (1968-1975)
Put down the overpriced "monster heavy psych" reissue and get to know Ian & Co.
I honestly can’t understand why more people under 50 aren’t down with Jethro Tull. They have the hard rocking, psychedelic edge, stoned riffs, the Brit folk is never more than a song or a chorus away and their records all sound amazing and ARE CHEAP.
Do people really hate the flute and jazz so much?
Not only is it often buried in the mix or laid down for Ian Anderson’s wonderful acoustic guitar playing but when it’s pushing air it creates a classical and gentle atmosphere that every good prog band needs on every record.
The first album, This Was, is something of an outlier in the discography (of which, only the 60s and 70s I have any real understanding of) but it’s a furious and thrilling piece of blues rock with its progressive leanings only beginning to form. They do something most rock bands weren’t doing at the time and cover jazz great Rahsaan Roland Kirk (NRBQ and the MC5 had their Sun Ra fascinations at this time, though) and made an album I always consider a companion piece to the first Sabbath album. That’s a great twofer.
The prog got a capital P later on but not before a couple more albums of just great psychedelic rock— Stand Up (1969) and Benefit (1970)-- were issued. The former a front-to-back masterpiece, the latter only a smidge less consistent.
Aqualung from 1971 is where things started to get more “serious” and it deserves every bit of boomer celebration it gets. If, like me, you were raised on classic rock radio, you may recoil at its mention, but it deserves reappraisal before another 40 dollars is spent on a reissue of lesser, more obscure music.
The 1972 compilation Living in the Past is essential. Collecting singles, outtakes and cuts from the previous records, it serves as a great entry into the band’s early days and the title track is one of their finest. Thick As A Brick also arrived in ’72 and it’s not as impenetrable as the original LPs listing of two 20+ minute tracks would lead you to believe. Drop the needle and reveal a band so tight and focused and weird you just have to wonder what these dudes’ day-to-day lives were like back then. Forget about Led Zeppelin, these guys were probably LARPing Tolkien for real.
A lot of people jump ship by 1973 but they miss fantastic moments on that year’s A Passion Play as well as 1974’s more concise War Child, containing the god awful ‘Bungle in the Jungle’ but also the mystifyingly beautiful ‘Skating Away (On The Thin Ice of a New Day)’. The following year saw the release of Minstrel in the Gallery and while it may not have any hits or tunes you walk away humming, it’s another folk-prog experience that heads need to try at least once.
We’ll end it there for now but I do want to mention most of my listening is on US first pressings plucked out of dollar and budget bins and I’ve never found any of them lacking. I also stream the Steven Wilson remixes where available and they are really great.
Are you a grizzled Tull fan? What hooked you? What would you play for a newb? Let me know in the comments…
“...an album I always consider a companion piece to the first Sabbath album.” Imagine what it might have been like if Tony Iommi had stayed in Tull for more than just one appearance?
Indeed I’m an ultra grizzled Tullophile, having first heard them at the Kinetic Playground in Chicago in the summer of 1969 on a bill that included Led Zeppelin, Savoy Brown, and local garage band graduates The Litter. All for about three bucks. We didn’t know anything about Tull--in fact thought Ian’s name was Jethro Tull. His between-songs raps were incomprehensible and the music was like nothing else we’d heard. I went out the next day and bought This Was and I’m still listening at age 72, especially the first four or five albums and the sublime Songs From The Wood. Cheers!