Any Townsperson worth his or her salt has given it up for the above Jethro Tull performance of “Song for Jeffrey” from The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus film. Unless you’re really old and really cool – or really young and only think you’re cool – chances are you came across this performance long after suffering the inevitable mixed feelings brought on by the likes of the following number:
I’ll leave our Townswomen out of this, although it’s possible a few women in the world have a taste for the chunky guitar riffs and codpiece-clad, medieval hi-jinx promised by Classic Tull. If you listen between the lines, so to speak, you may hear a combination of the fractured blues of Captain Beefheart and the newly forged metal of Black Sabbath.
“He said ‘snot.’ Huh, huh…huh, huh!”
For me, one can only dig so deep into 70s rock without coming up empty, and Jethro Tull is one of those bands that scrapes the bottom of the well. They always sound stale, lacking the dynamics of a band like Yes to make up for the conceptual overkill.
I’d much rather listen to some of the newer freakier folk bands that are mining Tull’s territory (hippie flute playing, self-consciously dramatic) but taking it in a more interesting direction.
Thanks for kicking off this discussion, Dr. John. Come on, folks. It’s not often we get to work through Tull issues among friends. Mwall, would you like to share next?
Much of their second record, Stand Up, is great. I mean, besides the pop-up cardboard cut-out of the band when you open the gate-fold. Parts of Stand Up are like the missing gnome link between Hendrix and Led Zep.
You think I’m kidding?
I am not kidding.
Ah, no, I never had TWENTY Tull albums, more like 10 or so. At the time, that would have been more than everything else but the Beatles.
My recollection is that I had every album up to Too Old To Rock and Roll/Too Young To Die. I believe the next phase involved synths which were an anethema to me during that time. Or maybe just worse songs.
Probably, I was more into the technical nature of music in high school, and some prog was ok for me up to a point. I like Anderson’s voice a lot more than the others mining this area, and if he abuses things, even that seems to be the nature of the genre. Somehow I find a little warmth in their sound; a lot of fat guitar and bass, and although I would admit the actual concepts are a little hard to take in large doses, there’s less suspension of lyrical sensibility involved than hearing, say, the words Robert Plant sings. I don’t know enough about Genesis, Rush, or Yes, and that ilk to compare further. Liking Tull never made me want to get more Ponderock.
Teacher has a very cool bassline, along with that jagged guitar part working against it. There’s interesting bits that work within the songs and without stepping all over a decent groove or melody. The jam-out parts are as windy as the rest of the prog stuff I’ve heard, and it wears me out, but I think there are good moments buried in there occasionally. Bakshi will pillory me, but I like those first couple bluesy albums. Ah, I see T-Vox is with me – we REACH.
However, I must have listened to Thick As A Brick way too much, because I’m dumber now than I’ve ever been.
Somehow I didn’t see when this thread first hit the site. Anyway…
Tull is a band that I’ve tried, on multiple occasions, to like. I tried when I was about 20, and I tried again in grad school, and just last year I tried again when I picked up that 2-CD Tull compilation for about 8 bucks. I tried because some of the British electric folk rock bands, like Fairport and Steeleye Span, have made records that I like a lot.
But I can’t do it. I can’t bring myself to like Jethro Tull.
Some songs rock, sure, and some have kick ass guitar parts. Some of the bluesy numbers on Stand Up have their moments too. The few obvious big songs are enjoyable enough when I hear them on the radio–as long as I can also laugh.
I just can’t stand Mr. Anderson’s voice, that’s the main thing. It’s mannered and grating, Elves’ Bells rather than Hell’s Bells, even when the song is otherwise okay. Yes, the flute parts often suck, but I could even get through those if that voice wasn’t coming back. Notice, by the way, the mannered pauses when he sings. Even when he’s silent, his voice is mannered, if you see what I’m saying. Everything that’s pretentious about Tull starts with Anderson’s voice, and comes back to it in the end.
I may need a little bit of time to get my arms around the Jethro Tull situation. For now, I’d like to propose that the ideal situation for Tull – one in which they’d have a much healthier rock legacy – would be a world where a Rock World’s Fair or Rock Expo was held in a major city each year, and Tull would have set up a booth to debut a new guitar riff for attendees.
One year, they’d present their plans for the opening to “Aqualung” to skeptical fairgoers. Another, they’d draw up schematics for “Cross-Eyed Mary” to look at while you eat your astronaut ice cream or fried Snickers bar. A working scale model of the riff from “Hymn 43” would wow the crowds who had already seen President Coolidge’s pygmy hippo at the expo.
Under these conditions, it’d be a lot easier to embrace Tull. As it is, however, I eagerly await the day they are brought in to face charges on the Rock Crime of putting out an album called “J-Tull.Com”.
I was introduced to Tull as an eight or nine year-old by The Cool Kid in the neighborhood, who I think took a shine to me because I had a good musical head on my shoulders, and probably also because I idolized him and his ability to DRUM REALLY FAST on table tops with his hands. (Man, that fascinated me — I still remember his mad skills at tabletop hand drumming. Anyway.)
So this kid — I think his name was Kevin something — had an even cooler older brother who was a “hippy” drummer, and who was disowned for falling in love with a Japanese girl. (I actually watched the moment of disowning happen; I couldn’t believe a father would say “sink in your own shit, buddy” to his son. Anyway…)
So The Cool Kid’s Even Cooler Brother was the real source for the accepted coolness of the Tull, and I was drawn into the band’s orbit at this tender age. I remember being lent “Thick As a Brick” and not getting it *at all* — but also being lent “Aqualung” and quite liking it, for both musical and “snot running down his nose!” reasons. Kevin tried explaining the words/concepts to me, and I pretended to understand, but all I got out of his explanations was that Jethro Tull were all about brainy rebellion against… something.
I’m still unclear on that one. What exactly is the point of the band’s early street bum Look? The spastic, psycopath flautist thing? Why?
In the end it doesn’t matter, I suppose. One look at the first 30 seconds of that “New Day Yesterday” clip and you can see the *real* reason those guys broke out in a big way. They fucking *smoked* live!
But here’s an important caveat: I think the only Tull that works is the shabby streetperson Tull. Once Anderson gets into those fluorescent spandex spacesuits, it’s all over. Again, I don’t really know why, but I don’t think it matters.
I’ve rediscovered the early Tull in recent years, but for me, the band is a *classic* example of the “C-60 Band” — a group that you could, and probably should, make a *killer* C-60 comp of. In modern Kidz parlance, I suppose that makes them a classic iTunes band. In fact, I think I’ll head out there now to pick up the 60 minutes of Tull I really need.
There’s the question: what tunes are those? Off the top of my head, I’d say a few of the ones Mod posted Youtubes of, as well as “Solitaire,” “Skating Away,” “Fat Man” and… well, what do you think?
HVB
I think Tull was a victim of frontmanitis. The early group, when they were more of a band, was interesting, sometimes quite good. But their rise in popularity coincided with Anderson’s increased control and ego, thus spelling the end of their creativity. Plus a flute in a rock band in itself is a Rock Crime. In the hands of the band’s leader, it’s particularly fatal.
I love Skating Away and Hunting Girl and I’m a-okay with some “big hit” stuff like Locomotive Breath and Bungle in the Jungle. And I like Martin Barre’s guitar sound/style. I haven’t listened to them in years and the only thing I own by them is Warchild, which I bought when it came out, but I have fond memories of Tull. I’ll take them over Yes, Rush, et al any day.
I recognize that their look and stage antics are deplorable. I am not a fan of bombast, the flute, prog rock, Renaissance Fairs, or men in tights mincing about so I’m not sure why they get a free pass from me but they (kind of ) do.
One of my sisters had the “folkie” SONGS FROM THE WOOD album, and I recall thinking that was pretty good. Probably haven’t heard it in close to 30 years, though.
I liked them when I was a teenager in the 70’s. They were a spot where my punk friends and my more classic rock fan friends could be okay with. They had some shorter, straight to the point songs, and then they had some cool guitars now and then. I saw them a few times and they were okay.
I remember when that live album Busting Out came out. They had Aqualung on some TV show and my dad (not a rocker by any means, but I could have had a Japanese girlfriend at least) asked if I liked them. I said they were okay and he just asked if I had noticed that the song had been on for what seemed like hours and showed no signs of anything ever happening in it, and I really had to agree with that.
That was the first and probably only time that my dad’s dislike of something actually made me see a song or or band in a negative light. Usually that had the exact opposite effect. But for all Tull’s bluster and noise, nothing ever seems to happen.
The only superfan of them I ever met was a gnome looking guy that I couldn’t stand. Nothing ever happened with him, either.