Ian Anderson interviews

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eu.dailyrecord.com/story/entertainment/music/2019/03/07/jethro-tull-morristown/2982996002/

Jethro Tull 50th anniversary tour coming to Morristown
Bill Nutt Special to the Daily Record
Published 8:25 AM EST Mar 7, 2019
Jethro Tull has been classified as progressive rock, folk rock, and even heavy metal.

Its repertoire runs the gamut from the pounding “Locomotive Breath” to the lilting “Thick as a Brick” to a ballad that was composed by King Henry VIII.


Flutist and vocalist Ian Anderson is touring in support of the 50th anniversary of Jethro Tull.
COURTESY OF Travis Latam

The fact that the music of Jethro Tull has been so hard to pin down makes Ian Anderson a very happy man.

Anderson, whose classically trained flute-playing is as associated with Jethro Tull as his distinctive vocals are, recalled that the group was originally formed in late 1967 with a different goal in mind.

“Mick Abrahams (the group’s guitarist) was a big blues and rock ‘n’ roll fan,” recalled Anderson. “He wanted to play the music he grew up with. I thought we could be a little more eclectic.”

By the time Jethro Tull recorded its first two albums — “This Was” in 1968 and “Stand Up” in 1969 — that eclecticism was already apparent.

“When Martin Barre joined in 1969, I felt we had something I could work with,” Anderson said.

For the past year, Anderson has been celebrating 50 years of Jethro Tull’s music. He is playing only a handful of shows in the U.S. on the current leg of the tour. One of those stops will be the Mayo Performing Arts Center on Tuesday, March 12.

“We started this as the 50th anniversary of Jethro Tull,” Anderson said. “It’s not the band’s 51st year, but it’s actually the 50th anniversary of the first time we played in the United States.”

Audiences’ responses to the tour have been enthusiastic, but also surprising, according to Anderson.

For example, he noted that, at some European dates, he and the current lineup of the band performed “Pastime with Good Company.” This ballad by King Henry VIII that was included as a bonus track on the reissue of the 1979 album “Stormwatch.”

“That’s not a well-known Jethro Tull song,” said Anderson. “But the reaction was surprising. People instantly responded to it.”

The idea that the same band the won the first Grammy Award for heavy metal could also cover a Renaissance-era ballad has been one of Jethro Tull’s strengths, Anderson said.

“Things were never clear-cut with us,” Anderson said. He drew a comparison to the late David Bowie, another artist who delighted in changing styles from one album to the next.
That said, one of the mainstays of Jethro Tull has been Anderson’s flute.

However, he admitted that the combination of flute and vocals has not always been easy to maintain.

“The two things, flute and singing, aren’t really compatible,” he said. “You’re making the same muscles do two different things. Plus, I don’t just play the notes on the flute. I do things you’re really not supposed to do, like singing into the flute.”

For that reason, even after all these years, Anderson still needs to rehearse before concerts.

“I have to practice, to get myself into that physical space.”

Once the current tour ends, Anderson will concentrate on finish a book of the history of Jethro Tull, which he hopes will be released later in 2019.

“It will have lots of interviews, lots of visual material,” he said.

Also slated for publication is a book compiling the complete lyrics of the band’s catalog – more than 250 songs.

That book will be augmented with photographs taken by Anderson.

“One of my hobbies is photography,” he said. “A lot of my songs actually start out with an image.”

Anderson stressed that playing with Jethro Tull is not simply “living in the past” (to quote the title of one of the band’s best-known songs).

“Like the Rolling Stones and Robert Plant and members of the Who, we’re still out there,” he said. “It’s more than simple survival. You know you can still do things. There’s a magic about it. That’s quite special, to take that into old age.”

Anderson, who is 71, said that he is grateful to still have the stamina to perform.

“It’s quite special, to take that into a serious old age and knowing you still have some dignity,” he said. “You know it will go away, but for now, you can do it.”

Ian Anderson presents Jetrho Tull: 50th Anniversary Tour
When: 8 p.m. Tuesday, March 12

Where: Mayo Performing Arts Center, 100 South St., Morristown

Tickets: $99 to $199

Info: 973-539-8008 or www.mayoarts.org

CAPTION
Flutist and vocalist Ian Anderson is touring in support of the 50th anniversary of Jethro Tull, the innovative rock band he co-founded more than 50 years ago. Anderson will play some of the band’s greatest hits and deep album cuts at the Mayo PAC on Tuesday, March 12. (PHOTO: Travis Latam.)

Published 8:25 AM EST Mar 7, 2019

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Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull
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107.1 The Boss
Published on Mar 7, 2019

Michele Amabile interviews Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. Ian Anderson’s 50 Years of Jethro Tull is coming to NJ with two shows: March 9: Ocean Resort Casino, Ovation Hall, Atlantic City, NJ

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www.newjerseystage.com/articles/2019/03/14/rock-on-this-weeks-sound-bites31419/



ROCK ON! This Week's Sound Bites...3/14/19
By Danny Coleman

"We flew in and did our first ever opening show in the US at The Fillmore East with Bill Graham who had previously booked our friends Ten Years After from Chrysalis Records; an embryonic record company, they had proceeded us by a year in the USA, rather like Led Zeppelin did. So Ten Years After were the senior model for the beginning of our career there because we shared the same management and agency and that began our long journey."

A journey that still continues to this day as Jethro Tull launches yet another tour of the US. Founding member and front man Ian Anderson recently spoke of the band's history, the upcoming tour, his love of old churches, his dislike of cell phones and much more as the east coast leg of their "50th Anniversary Tour" wrapped up for now with shows in Atlantic City and Morristown, NJ.

To understand the legacy and importance of this event, one must grasp the background of how Ian and the band evolved; for Anderson it was a lack of patience that set him down a musical path which eventually became a four lane super highway.

"I was in art college in the north of England and getting the feeling that as much as I loved the visual arts; to aspire to be a professional painter or sculptor in the world of fine art was probably not likely to happen, at least not in my lifetime. Some people get famous after they're dead but I was a bit impatient and the idea of music and its immediacy appealed to me greatly. Many of the things that were my way of thinking in terms of the painterly arts, words like tone and line and form and color; these are the same words that applied in the world of music too. So it was a very easy transition to switch from visual references to musical ones and to this day I still tend to write lyrics and sometimes music with a picture in my head. I illustrate in musical terms something that is a visual reference; that's always been part of the way I write, not all of the time but most of the time. So I still think in those terms and it seems to make it an easy transition and when that occurred I was about 18 years old I thought that music could be a career. Perhaps not long term as a performing musician but since I had an interest in how the business worked and I talked with managers and agents and people involved behind the scenes because I was fascinated with how it all came together; it wasn't just about getting on stage and playing music then going to the bar and having a few pints with the lads. That wasn't really my thing, I was more interested in how it all worked, how different cogs of the machine would mesh and produce sometimes quite a complex end result. So that was how I tended to think of music as a career; maybe I'd become a record producer or an agent or a manager or do something that had perhaps a little bit more to do with the business side of it. Although I have ended up with that role as a performing musician and I'm very lucky to still have my job."

Decades later with 40 album releases under his and their collective belts, "Tull" as they're sometimes known are still going strong. Anderson recalls the group's trials, tribulations and highlights over the years.

"I think there were a number of highlights along the way, probably in creative terms the second Jethro Tull album, "Stand Up" which was released in 1969 was not only successful in the UK and Europe but it was the record that really took Jethro Tull into the headlining capacity in the USA. I can remember being in the hotel in mid-town Manhattan having breakfast and at the time we were struggling a bit and didn't have much money and into the coffee shop walked Joe Cocker and he came over bearing a large plate of bacon and eggs and whole wheat toast, orange juice and whatever else to say, "Congratulations! I just heard your album went to number one in the UK" and I said, I don't suppose you're going to eat all of that bacon are you Joe? I was a bit peckish; I think he gave me a rasher," he recalled with a hearty laugh. "That was a highlight early on but the record that tended over a period of years to break us in a number of territories was the "Aqualung" album which was a bit of a slow burner; it didn't immediately take off anywhere but it did solidly well and continued to sell over the years. By the time that we had gotten into the era of Cold Play I remember checking with the record company to see if they had any cumulative sales and the last figure they had was just about 12 million for "Aqualung" which was just a little bit more than whatever huge album Cold Play had just released and I thought well, in cumulative terms we can hold our heads up with many of the biggest selling acts in the world. Perhaps not quite in the realms of Pink Floyd or the Eagles but not a bad sales figure if you're counting the beans. Then of course we went on to do, "Thick As A Brick" which was a bit more adventurous and crazy and then, "Songs From The Wood" another highlight album where I think the members of the band at the time were particularly cooperative in the sense of participating more in arrangements and ideas in the good spirit of the band; that was a highlight period around 1977. Things got a little bit fraught towards the end of the decade but '77 was a good year; one of those years where we played The Forum in L.A. and Madison Square Garden. I was just looking today, I think Jethro Tull played Madison Square Garden 14 times over the years which is quite a lot of shows."

To achieve such levels of success, there are many pieces to the puzzle. With them on the road once again; how does the past compare to today and how important are the relationships they've built over the years?

"Corporate music is worldwide, Live Nation, AEG and one or two other aspirants to that kind of position in the scheme of things; between them it seems they control 90 percent of the music industry in terms of live performance," he stated. "I've always liked the idea that we continue to work with independents wherever we can, those who maybe have managed to stay alive without cashing in and selling their business and their relationships to the big boys. That's what it's about when you have a relationship with artists; it's very tempting to try and cash in on that and pass them on to someone else and that doesn't always work. Sometimes it's a bit of a high ambition to think that just because you have a long relationship with an artist and you decide to call it a day that you can pass them on like some kind of asset because of course you don't have contracts with promoters you have them for individual concerts but not contracts for them to represent you in the lifelong sense of being tied to them forever. So relationships with promoters do tend to be based on mutual trust, honesty, getting the job done; that's the best way I think to have a relationship with people in the music industry rather than be contractually tied. I have a high regard for our promoters in different parts of the world and it's always a pleasure to think that they're still alive and kicking and we continue to work with them."

So as those relationships took root, Jethro Tull began to branch out in other directions. Changes in personnel, solo projects and more all make up the fabric that is their tapestry; even recording a well-received Christmas album which came packaged and released with a live disc some years after the original studio recordings.

"That was one of the earlier, original concerts that I did at Christmas which was recorded at St. Bride's Church in England. I think we had recorded the original album a year or two before that and then we did a live version of it at one of my first live Christmas concerts and since then; well I continue to this day to do a few of our great medieval cathedrals and even some churches elsewhere in Europe where we carefully blend the Christian musical liturgy with a secular concert of some respectful and appropriate nature to celebrate the Christian Christmas. I'm not one of these "Happy Holidays" kind of people; it's Christmas (laughs) but that's about the only thing that I have in common with your current President (laughs)."

Then there was, "Jethro Tull The Rock Opera," an incredibly done masterpiece of live music and video technology rolled into one. Well-conceived and constructed, this was a display of precision timing, craftsmanship and the history of the band's namesake told as never before. Anderson elaborated on the production, his venue preferences and his feelings on cellular devices during performances; mincing no words about the latter.

"The opera was in some ways sort of a poor man's Pink Floyd in terms of production, glitz and glamour," he explained in amused tones. "Thick As A Brick," when we did that in 1972; it was really very amateurish. It had a general verve and simplicity and good nature about it but I think it worked in theaters. So it's always been my returning dream to do from time to time concerts that are more of a production rather than getting up on stage, playing a few songs and heading off into the night; I do try to do that much of the time, probably more these days because the technology is more within reach. I remember playing a concert somewhere recently where there was a video wall behind us that our servers and equipment could be made to interact with and I remember thinking how enormous the physicality of this video wall was. There was probably a quarter of a million dollars worth of LED PCs that were put together to form this continuous huge wall of video. I went to see Black Sabbath in their second or third final concert ever and remembering seeing the size of their video wall and thinking, wow that's about four times what I could afford to do in a concert (laughs) but of course this was in the O2 Arena in London which is way bigger than Madison Square Garden so you really do have to do everything on a very grand scale at that level. I'm a theater guy; I don't really like enorm-o-domes. I remember going to see Iron Maiden a few months back in a similar venue and they were these tiny little figures on stage, no matter however big they may be on the video screen; I can get that experience watching YouTube. I'm much happier in a theater where everyone sits down and hopefully switches off their damn cell phones. There's nothing more off putting then sitting there and in front of you in your eyes is somebody holding up a smart phone with the screen lit up filming something; as a member of the audience that gets me really, really angry. Almost as angry as it is when I'm on stage and I'm facing people with their phones in the air and of course they don't know how to work them properly and they've got those nasty little focusing lights on them; so you've got these bright lights in your eyes and that's quite off putting when you're trying to concentrate on music and suddenly lights are flashing on and off in front of your face and they are incredibly bright. People are obviously unaware of what they're doing and frankly a lot of them just don't care anyway; when you politely ask them not to use their cell phones they just think, well f**k you I bought a ticket I'll do what I like. There's not much I can do about it whether I'm a fellow audience member or performing; am I going to be picking a fight with a stranger? That's not something that most of us want to do, hence they get away with it all of the time. I think ideally that the audience members ought to just tap someone on the shoulder and say, excuse me please don't do that and I'd be very grateful if they did."

"I encounter that in all of the cathedral shows that we do and we do ask people to turn off their cell phones, partly because it is a cathedral or a church and it's not very respectful in a house of God whether you're a believer or not. I don't do this because I'm a Christian, I just do it because I like playing music in old places; because I'm very respectful of the traditions, I go by what I believe are a set of unspoken rules. I find it really disrespectful to be using phones in a church in that way so we ask people to switch them off but the quid pro quo is; in the encore you can take all the pictures you want. That's your eight minutes worth of go nuts with your camera and we get it out of the way at the end and hopefully everybody feels that they got that moment; it's kind of a trade off, a bit of a bargain that we have to strike with people to buy their compliance for the rest of the show for the sake of everybody."

Formed in 1968, Jethro Tull had its 50 year anniversary in 2018 but they continue to celebrate their first show in the United States which occurred in 1969. They will return to the US in July for three west coast shows after an extensive European tour and then again in September for four shows; one of which is at the Xcite Center inside Parx Casino in Bensalem, PA.

"It was actually 50 years since Jethro Tull became Jethro Tull, it was the end of January 1968. We're actually about to embark on 51 years of Jethro Tull which is our coded term for the production concerts that begin in Europe later this year. We will be changing some of the material from the 50th anniversary production concerts that we did last year. We will be performing in the USA on three short tours where we will vary the music a bit from the stuff that some of our fans saw us play in various parts of the USA during 2018. Technically in America it is the 50th anniversary of Jethro Tull's American experience so we will continue to call it the "50th Anniversary Tour" at least as far as the US is concerned."

To discover more about 50 years of Jethro Tull and their return to the US, please visit www.jethrotull.com.

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www.njarts.net/pop-rock/ian-anderson-celebrates-half-century-of-jethro-tull/


Ian Anderson celebrates half-century
of Jethro Tull
By: DANNY COLEMAN | 18 HOURS AGO



This year marks the 50th anniversary of Jethro Tull’s first tour of the United States. The British band “flew in and did our first ever opening show in the U.S. at The Fillmore East with Bill Graham, who had previously booked our friends Ten Years After from Chrysalis Records, an embryonic record company,” said frontman Ian Anderson. “They had preceded us by a year in the U.S.A., rather like Led Zeppelin did. So Ten Years After were the senior model for the beginning of our career there, because we shared the same management and agency, and that began our long journey.”

A journey that still continues to this day. Ian Anderson recently spoke of the band’s history, the upcoming tour, his love of old churches, his dislike of cell phones and much more as the East Coast leg of the Ian Anderson Presents Jethro Tull: 50th Anniversary Tour wrapped up with shows in Atlantic City and Morristown. They will have at least two more shows in the area, though, in the fall: Sept. 13 at the Xcite Center in Bensalem, Pa.; and Sept. 14 at the Forest Hills Stadium in Queens, N.Y. Visit jethrotull.com/tour-dates.

To understand the legacy and importance of this event, one must grasp the background of how Anderson and the band evolved. For Anderson, it was a lack of patience that set him down a musical path which would eventually become a four-lane superhighway.

“I was in art college in the north of England and getting the feeling that as much as I loved the visual arts, to aspire to be a professional painter or sculptor in the world of fine art was probably not likely to happen, at least not in my lifetime,” he said. “Some people get famous after they’re dead, but I was a bit impatient and the idea of music and its immediacy appealed to me greatly. Many of the things that were my way of thinking in terms of the painterly arts, words like tone and line and form and color … these are the same words that applied in the world of music too. So it was a very easy transition to switch from visual references to musical ones, and to this day, I still tend to write lyrics and sometimes music with a picture in my head. I illustrate, in musical terms, something that is a visual reference.”

His musical career, he said, “wasn’t just about getting onstage and playing music then going to the bar and having a few pints with the lads. That wasn’t really my thing. I was more interested in how it all worked: How different cogs of the machine would mesh and produce, sometimes, quite a complex end result.

“So that was how I tended to think of music as a career. Maybe I’d become a record producer or an agent or a manager or do something that had perhaps a little bit more to do with the business side of it. Although I have ended up with that role as a performing musician, and I’m very lucky to still have my job.”

Decades later, with 40 album releases under his and their collective belts, Tull (as they’re sometimes known) are still going strong. Anderson recalled the group’s trials, tribulations and highlights over the years.

“I think there were a number of highlights along the way,” he said. “Probably in creative terms the second Jethro Tull album, Stand Up, which was released in 1969, was not only successful in the U.K. and Europe but it was the record that really took Jethro Tull into the headlining capacity in the U.S.A. I can remember being in the hotel in midtown Manhattan having breakfast, and at the time we were struggling a bit and didn’t have much money, and into the coffee shop walked Joe Cocker, and he came over bearing a large plate of bacon and eggs and whole wheat toast, orange juice and whatever else, to say, ‘Congratulations! I just heard your album went to No. 1 in the U.K.’ And I said, ‘I don’t suppose you’re going to eat all of that bacon, are you, Joe?’ I was a bit peckish. I think he gave me a rasher.”

He laughed heartily, then continued: “That was a highlight early on, but the record that tended, over a period of years, to break us in a number of territories, was the Aqualung album, which was a bit of a slow burner. It didn’t immediately take off anywhere, but it did solidly well and continued to sell over the years. By the time that we had gotten into the era of Coldplay, I remember checking with the record company to see if they had any cumulative sales, and the last figure they had was just about 12 million for Aqualung, which was just a little bit more than whatever huge album Coldplay had just released. And I thought, ‘Well, in cumulative terms, we can hold our heads up with many of the biggest selling acts in the world.’ Perhaps not quite in the realms of Pink Floyd or The Eagles, but not a bad sales figure, if you’re counting the beans.

“Then of course we went on to do, Thick As a Brick, which was a bit more adventurous and crazy. And then Songs From the Wood, another highlight album where, I think, the members of the band at the time were particularly cooperative in the sense of participating more in arrangements and ideas in the good spirit of the band. That was a highlight period, around 1977. Things got a little bit fraught towards the end of the decade, but ’77 was a good year — one of those years where we played The Forum in L.A. and Madison Square Garden. I was just looking today: I think Jethro Tull played Madison Square Garden 14 times over the years, which is quite a lot of shows.”

In 2003, the band released The Jethro Tull Christmas Album, which was well received, and re-released, in 2009, with an added, a live disc.

“That was one of the earlier, original concerts that I did at Christmas, which was recorded at St. Bride’s Church in England. I think we had recorded the original album a year or two before that and then we did a live version of it at one of my first live Christmas concerts, and since then … well I continue, to this day, to do a few of our great medieval cathedrals and even some churches elsewhere in Europe where we carefully blend the Christian musical liturgy with a secular concert of some respectful and appropriate nature to celebrate the Christian Christmas. I’m not one of these ‘Happy Holidays’ kind of people. It’s Christmas (laughs) but that’s about the only thing that I have in common with your current president (laughs).”

Then there was “Jethro Tull the Rock Opera,” an incredible masterpiece of live music and video technology rolled into one. Well-conceived and constructed, this was a display of precision timing, craftsmanship and the history of the band’s namesake told as never before. Anderson elaborated on the production, his venue preferences and his feelings on cellular devices during performances, mincing no words about the latter.

“The opera was in some ways sort of a poor man’s Pink Floyd in terms of production, glitz and glamour,” he said. ” ‘Thick As a Brick,’ when we did that in 1972, it was really very amateurish. It had a general verve and simplicity and good nature about it but I think it worked in theaters. So it’s always been my returning dream to do, from time to time, concerts that are more of a production rather than getting up onstage, playing a few songs and heading off into the night. I do try to do that much of the time — probably more these days because the technology is more within reach.

“I remember playing a concert somewhere recently where there was a video wall behind us that our servers and equipment could be made to interact with and I remember thinking how enormous the physicality of this video wall was. There was probably a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of LED PCs that were put together to form this continuous huge wall of video. I went to see Black Sabbath in their second or third final concert ever and remembering seeing the size of their video wall and thinking, ‘Wow, that’s about four times what I could afford to do in a concert (laughs),’ but of course this was in the O2 Arena in London, which is way bigger than Madison Square Garden, so you really do have to do everything on a very grand scale at that level.

“I’m a theater guy; I don’t really like enormodomes. I remember going to see Iron Maiden a few months back in a similar venue and they were these tiny little figures onstage, no matter however big they may be on the video screen. I can get that experience watching YouTube. I’m much happier in a theater where everyone sits down and hopefully switches off their damn cell phones.

“There’s nothing more off-putting than sitting there and in front of you in your eyes is somebody holding up a smart phone with the screen lit up filming something. As a member of the audience, that gets me really, really angry. Almost as angry as it is when I’m onstage and I’m facing people with their phones in the air, and of course they don’t know how to work them properly and they’ve got those nasty little focusing lights on them. So you’ve got these bright lights in your eyes and that’s quite off-putting, when you’re trying to concentrate on music and suddenly lights are flashing on and off in front of your face and they are incredibly bright. People are obviously unaware of what they’re doing and, frankly, a lot of them just don’t care, anyway. When you politely ask them not to use their cell phones, they just think, ‘Well, f**k you! I bought a ticket I’ll do what I like.’ There’s not much I can do about it, whether I’m a fellow audience member or performing. Am I going to be picking a fight with a stranger? That’s not something that most of us want to do, hence they get away with it all of the time. I think, ideally, that the audience members ought to just tap someone on the shoulder and say, ‘Excuse me, please don’t do that,’ and I’d be very grateful if they did.”

While it has been 50 years since Jethro Tull’s first U.S. tour the band came together year earlier, in 1968.

“We’re actually about to embark on ’51 Years of Jethro Tull,’ which is our coded term for the production concerts that begin in Europe later this year,” Anderson said. “We will be changing some of the material from the 50th anniversary production concerts that we did last year. We will be performing in the U.S.A. on three short tours where we will vary the music a bit from the stuff that some of our fans saw us play in various parts of the U.S.A. during 2018.”

Still, he said, “we will continue to call it the 50th Anniversary Tour, at least as far as the U.S. is concerned,” since “technically, in America, it is the 50th anniversary of Jethro Tull’s American experience.”

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Interview with Ian Anderson (JETHRO TULL) 2019 - Mystery Tour Radio Show
9 views

Mickey E.Vil
Published on Mar 17, 2019

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www.tt.com/kultur/musik/15495438/ian-anderson-von-jethro-tull-drogen-habe-ich-nie-versucht



Ian Anderson from "Jethro Tull": "I never tried drugs"
Ian Anderson will be guesting with "Jethro Tull" on May 3rd in Imst. A conversation about moving five decades in the rock business.


Ian Anderson taught himself the flute playing: "I was probably not good, but very loud."

They became known as the rock star with the flute with Jethro Tull. Did not you think your guitar playing was good enough?

Ian Anderson: I was barely 20 when I switched from guitar to flute in 1967, just like that. There was no real reason for that. I taught myself to play the flute. Soon I played the instrument on stage. I had no idea about the technology. I was probably not a good flute player, but a very loud one.

Did you ever catch up with flute lessons?

Anderson: Around 1990, my daughter started to learn the flute. She showed me how to grip correctly. It took me six months to relearn. But I had to be able to continue to play all that I had played in my own way for 20 years. I still practice every day today when I'm not on tour. One hour in between to keep your fingers moving.

You will be 72 this year. Many of your band members are no longer with us. How did you survive?

Anderson: We were not a band that gave in to alcohol, drugs and wild parties. We were quiet guys, at least relatively. Who was caught with drugs, was out because he harmed the band. In the 1970s, a crew member was arrested for drug-related crime in Germany. I paid a lot of money for the bail, took him home and quit him.

Did you keep your fingers off drugs?

Anderson: I have never tried drugs myself. I have not even smoked a joint.

That will surprise some fans.

Anderson: I'm very pragmatic about that: why should I take something that causes problems? Some of my - few - friends in the music business were heavy on drugs. Today they pretend that everything was alright because it's over. There is still no good role model, I say. Because many did not get rid of it. They are not alive anymore. Cream's bassist Jack Bruce has ruined his health with drugs and alcohol. The last years of his life were marked by illness and surgery. And I know more examples.

The cast of Jethro Tull has changed many times .

Anderson: Over the past 50 years, 36 musicians have worked with Jethro Tull. Some of them are dead. I'm the last dinosaur apart from Martin Barre, the ex-lead guitarist who tours with his own band.

You will probably never stop playing live. Or is there a deadline for your career?

Anderson: There is a deadline literally. I'm there like a cowboy dying in boots. Fortunately, my job does not require me to retire. Others have to do that with 65. If I was a Formula 1 driver, I would have to go in my mid-30s. Unless you're Kimi Raikkonen. He still drives with almost 40.

How many concerts a year do you come to?

Anderson: 80 to 100 are. Three hours show in the evening save me the gym. I'm in good shape for my age, I think. The current tour started last April. We are celebrating 50 years of Jethro Tull. It's very simple: we go to the stage, play our songs, and then we disappear into the night.

Are there usually smaller concert halls today, like those in Imst at the beginning of May?

Anderson: I always liked to play in smaller concert halls, in front of 1000 to 5000 people. In America, we performed in huge football arenas, so I'm not feeling well. I do not just want to be a little dot somewhere on the horizon. You feel disconnected from the audience, and the audience from the artist.

With you as British, we can not ignore the Brexit debate.

Anderson: This debate is embarrassing. My opinion: Great Britain should be a strong voice in the EU to make it fit for the next 40 to 50 years.

After five decades in the music business: Are you a wealthy man?

Anderson: I pay 50 to 60 percent of taxes in the UK. Of course I can afford that and I also try to feel good about it. But what about all those who could pay a lot more but invest their money offshore to avoid taxes? There are also famous musicians among them, stars who otherwise preach high moral standards. If you can get your money out of the country, it may be legal and you can not go to jail. But hopefully the victims will end up in hell. You can quote me.

The interview was conducted by Markus Schramek

To person
Ian Anderson was born in 1947 in Dunfermline, Scotland, and later grew up in northwest England. As a singer, composer and flutist of rock band Jethro Tull, Anderson became a star in the 1970s. With the album "Aqualung" and hits like "Locomotive Breath" the band made the breakthrough in 1971.

Ian Anderson will perform with Jethro Tull on May 3rd in Imst (Glenthof). Information: www.artclubimst.at

---

And as I'm not that certain that the google translation is particularly good, this is the article in German so that those of you with linguistic skills can decide.

Sie sind mit Jethro Tull als Rockstar mit der Querflöte bekannt geworden. Hielten Sie Ihr Gitarrespiel denn nicht für gut genug?

Ian Anderson: Ich war knapp 20, als ich 1967 von der Gitarre zur Flöte wechselte, einfach so. Es gab keinen wirklichen Grund dafür. Ich habe mir das Flötenspiel selbst beigebracht. Bald spielte ich das Instrument auch auf der Bühne. Ich hatte keine Ahnung von der Technik. Ich war wohl kein guter Flötenspieler, dafür aber ein sehr lauter.

Haben Sie den Flötenunterricht denn je nachgeholt?

Anderson: Um 1990 herum begann meine Tochter Flöte zu lernen. Sie zeigte mir, wie man korrekt greift. Ich brauchte sechs Monate zum Umlernen. Ich musste aber weiter all das spielen können, was ich 20 Jahre lang auf meine Art gespielt hatte. Ich übe heute noch jeden Tag, wenn ich nicht auf Tour bin. Eine Stunde zwischendurch, damit die Finger beweglich bleiben.

Sie werden heuer 72. Viele Ihrer Bandmitglieder weilen nicht mehr unter uns. Wie haben Sie überlebt?

Anderson: Wir waren keine Band, die sich dem Alkohol, Drogen und wilden Partys hingab. Wir waren ruhige Typen, zumindest relativ. Wer bei uns mit Drogen erwischt wurde, war raus, weil er damit der Band schadete. In den 70er-Jahren wurde ein Crew-Mitglied wegen eines Drogendelikts in Deutschland verhaftet. Ich bezahlte viel Geld für die Kaution, holte ihn heim und kündigte ihn.

Sie haben die Finger von Drogen gelassen?

Anderson: Selbst habe ich nie Drogen versucht. Ich habe bis heute nicht einmal einen Joint geraucht.

Das wird manchen Fan überraschen.

Anderson: Ich bin da sehr pragmatisch: Warum sollte ich etwas nehmen, das Probleme verursacht? Einige meiner – wenigen – Freunde im Musikgeschäft waren schwer auf Drogen. Heute tun sie so, als ob das alles in Ordnung gewesen sei, weil es ja vorbei ist. Es gibt trotzdem kein gutes Vorbild ab, sage ich. Denn viele sind nicht mehr davon losgekommen. Die leben nicht mehr. Jack Bruce, der Bassist von Cream, hat sich mit Drogen und Alkohol die Gesundheit ruiniert. Die letzten Jahre seines Lebens waren geprägt von Krankheit und Operationen. Und ich kenne weitere Beispiele.

Die Besetzung von Jethro Tull hat oft gewechselt.

Anderson: In den letzten 50 Jahren haben 36 Musiker bei Jethro Tull mitgewirkt. Einige davon sind tot. Ich bin der letzte Dinosaurier, abgesehen von Martin Barre, dem Ex-Leadgitarristen, der mit eigener Band auf Tour geht.

Vermutlich werden Sie nie aufhören, live zu spielen. Oder gibt es für Ihre Karrier­e eine Deadline?

Anderson: Eine „Deadline“ gibt es ganz wörtlich. Ich bin da wie ein Cowboy, der in den Stiefeln stirbt. Glücklicherweise verlangt mein Beruf von mir nicht, dass ich in Pension gehe. Andere müssen das mit 65. Wenn ich Formel-1-Fahrer wäre, müsste ich schon mit Mitte 30 gehen. Außer man ist Kimi Räikkönen. Der fährt mit fast 40 immer noch.

Auf wie viele Konzerte pro Jahr kommen Sie?

Anderson: 80 bis 100 sind es schon. Drei Stunden Show am Abend ersparen mir das Fitnessstudio. Für mein Alter bin ich ganz gut in Form, glaube ich. Die aktuelle Tour startete letzten April. Wir feiern 50 Jahre Jethro Tull. Es ist ganz einfach: Wir gehen auf die Bühne, spielen unsere Songs, und nachher verschwinden wir in die Nacht.

Sind es heute meist kleinere Konzerthallen, wie jene in Imst Anfang Mai?

Anderson: Ich habe immer am liebsten in kleineren Konzerthäusern gespielt, vor 1000 bis 5000 Menschen. In Amerika traten wir in riesigen Football-Arenen auf, da fühle ich mich nicht so wohl. Ich möchte nicht nur ein kleiner Punkt irgendwo am Horizont sein. Man fühlt sich getrennt vom Publikum, und das Publikum vom Künstler.

Mit Ihnen als Briten kommen wir an der Brexit-Debatte nicht vorbei.

Anderson: Diese Debatte ist peinlich. Meine Meinung: Großbritannien sollte eine starke Stimme in der EU sein, um diese fit für die nächsten 40 bis 50 Jahre zu machen.

Nach fünf Jahrzehnten im Musikgeschäft: Sind Sie ein wohlhabender Mann?

Anderson: Ich zahle 50 bis 60 Prozent Steuern in Großbritannien. Natürlich kann ich mir das leisten, und ich versuche auch, mich gut dabei zu fühlen. Aber was ist mit all jenen, die viel mehr zahlen könnten, ihr Geld jedoch irgendwo „offshore“ anlegen, um Steuern zu vermeiden? Da sind auch berühmte Musiker darunter, Stars, die sonst hohe moralische Standards predigen. Wenn man sein Geld außer Landes schafft, mag das legal sein, und man kommt nicht ins Gefängnis. Aber hoffentlich landen die Betroffenen in der Hölle. Da können Sie mich zitieren.

Das Gespräch führte Markus Schramek

Zur Person
Ian Anderson wurde 1947 in Dunfermline, Schottland, geboren und wuchs später im Nordwesten Englands auf. Als Sänger, Komponist und Flötist der Rockband Jethro Tull wurde Anderson in den 70er-Jahren zum Star. Mit dem Album „Aqualung“ und Hits wie „Locomotive Breath“ schaffte die Band 1971 den Durchbruch.

Ian Anderson tritt mit Jethro Tull am 3. Mai in Imst (Glenthof) auf. Infos: www.artclubimst.at

[maddogfagin]

From back when we were all a little younger

www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-09-19-ca-45526-story.html
Tull's Ian Anderson Is a Fans' Fan
JOHN ROOS September 19 1996

Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson is one rock 'n' roll star who acknowledges his fans in a most tangible way. The affable singer-songwriter-flutist makes no bones about his indebtedness to fans during the band's 28-year career, and he's determined to reciprocate their loyalty.

"Touring is the only real way to gain fan loyalty," a chatty Anderson said by phone from St. Louis, a recent stop on a summer tour also comes to Irvine Meadows on Saturday. "I wouldn't say I answer every piece of fan mail I get, but I do try to write a couple of lines each to a lot of our fans."

"That [responsibility] comes with success. If you go out there and reach out to people's hearts and minds with your music, and someone takes the time to acknowledge you, it's certainly not asking too much to acknowledge them back.

"I spend one day a week doing my mail," he continued. "I imagine there are some folks out there who are surprised to receive an autograph or a couple of lines from me. They've earned that by supporting us. They've probably bought 10 of our albums and spent hundreds of dollars on concert tickets over the years."

Such Tull concert veterans know well that each night's set list will vary, depending on the time of year and type of venue the band is playing.

"Right now, we're on a predominantly outdoor-amphitheater tour of North America," Anderson said, "and I definitely feel there's an obligation to play a retrospective of what it is we've done.

"On a warm summer's evening . . . and even now when it's getting a little cooler, you have the feeling that people have come along not to be challenged or tested by your latest work, but to sit back and relax with a glass of wine, or whatever, and hear the things that many of them grew up listening to."

Yet Anderson, a 49-year-old native of Edinburgh, Scotland, insists that that doesn't result in a static program of oldies.

"We have so much material that we can always play something we haven't performed live in ages, or in some cases ever," said Anderson, famous his perched-on-one-bent-leg flute playing.

Jethro Tull was basically a blues band when it began in Blackpool, England, in 1968. The group's stylish blend of rock, jazz, blues and Celtic-based folk music would develop into "Aqualung," a startling album from 1971. Its railings against organized religion found an audience with such songs as "Hymn 43," "Cross-Eyed Mary" and "Locomotive Breath." (A remastered CD has been packaged with five additional tracks plus a 24-page booklet to mark the album's 25th anniversary.)

Other key albums from the Tull catalog include "Thick as a Brick" (1972) and "A Passion Play" (1973), two back-to-back concept albums that reached No. 1 on the pop album charts.

Live, Jethro Tull--named after an 18th century British agronomist who invented the machine drill for sowing seed--has been both lauded and lambasted for its classical underpinnings, extended instrumental solos and extravagant stage shows. Even Anderson concedes that some of the criticism is valid.

"Sure, we're a little over the top and idiosyncratic, but I love passion and creative originality," said Anderson, who is joined in the current Tull lineup by keyboardist Andrew Giddings, drummer Doane Parry, bassist Jonathan Noyce and longtime lead guitarist Martin Barre.

"I truly believe we're a band that did something that no one else was doing. I admire musicians like Richard Thompson, the Ramones and the Stranglers because they're quirky and one-of-a-kind. They refuse to fit into that Bon Jovi mold."

Alone and with Tull, Anderson has continued in the '90s to experiment, with albums ranging from his flute-driven instrumentals in "Divinities: Twelve Dances With God" to the band's most recent collection of relatively standard rock 'n' roll, 1995's "Roots to Branches."

Anderson said he's planning to release a solo acoustic album next year that will be "my most personal and introspective collection of songs yet."

Even after all these years, he said, writing remains an arduous task, the fear ever-present that the creative well will run dry.

"The juices don't always flow when you want them to," said Anderson.

"If you're patient, you can wait and follow your muse sometime later," he said. "Or you can get up, have a cup of coffee, and get on with it. Personally, I've found myself doing it both ways.

"I believe everybody has at least one great song in them, and if nothing else, I hope I've been able to inspire the unearthing of that creative spirit within someone else. I'm convinced it's just waiting to be set free."

[steelmonkey]

Love that Ian gives props to RT, Stranglers and Ramones. I agree on 3/3.

[steelmonkey]

Search for Ian Anderson MTV interview with Mark Goodman 1982 to see one hour jewel I somehow missed till today

[steelmonkey]

It's on Tull Tapes you tube channel

[maddogfagin]

Ian Anderson (Jethro Tull)
FEBRUARY 25, 2019 

Download here: www.centerstageshow.com/ian-anderson-jethro-tull/

[steelmonkey]

Ian says Stormwatch is done, full of unreleased stuff and ready for late summer.

[maddogfagin]

May 18, 2019 1:05:38 GMT steelmonkey said:

Ian says Stormwatch is done, full of unreleased stuff and ready for late summer.

Hey wait - no time for retirement as the subsequent albums after Stormwatch will need the remixing supervised, the official book will require proof reading etc., and the new album will need finishing, cover artwork decided upon and tour dates for 2020 agreed with promoters.

Oh and the chillies will have to be watered in the greenhouse

[Equus]

May 18, 2019 1:05:38 GMT steelmonkey said:

Ian says Stormwatch is done, full of unreleased stuff and ready for late summer.

Fantastic! bring it on Ian, bring it on!!!


 

[JTull 007]

                      Ian Anderson interview on WFDU  by  GhostyTMRS 
   
   Ian Anderson was a guest on the 5/19/2019 edition of 89.1 WFDU fm's "The Vintage Rock & Pop Shop"
hosted by Ghosty. Topics discussed include Tull's success in the USA and around the world, the 50th Anniversary
tour,1984's Under Wraps album, the upcoming Jethro Tull book and remixed and remastered Stormwatch album.

[tullabye]

Great interview! Definitely a new album this year with a total of twelve tracks. Ian mentions that he will discuss an actual live drummer for UW with Steven Wilson signaling a continuation of IA/SW remixes after Stormwatch which is now complete.

[maddogfagin]

May 22, 2019 1:36:26 GMT tullabye said:

Great interview! Definitely a new album this year with a total of twelve tracks. Ian mentions that he will discuss an actual live drummer for UW with Steven Wilson signaling a continuation of IA/SW remixes after Stormwatch which is now complete.

Good news about the drums on Under Wraps which if a "live" drummer for any new version of the album comes to fruition, will take some getting used to after all these years of listening to a machine.

Now can I put Clive Bunker's name forward to re-do the drums ?

[argentull]

May 22, 2019 6:29:26 GMT maddogfagin said:

May 22, 2019 1:36:26 GMT tullabye said:

Great interview! Definitely a new album this year with a total of twelve tracks. Ian mentions that he will discuss an actual live drummer for UW with Steven Wilson signaling a continuation of IA/SW remixes after Stormwatch which is now complete.

Good news about the drums on Under Wraps which if a "live" drummer for any new version of the album comes to fruition, will take some getting used to after all these years of listening to a machine.

Now can I put Clive Bunker's name forward to re-do the drums ?

In my humble opinion, Clive´s style does not fit the music in Under Wraps. I think Duane is the right option.

[maddogfagin]

May 22, 2019 12:56:42 GMT argentull said:

May 22, 2019 6:29:26 GMT maddogfagin said:

Good news about the drums on Under Wraps which if a "live" drummer for any new version of the album comes to fruition, will take some getting used to after all these years of listening to a machine.

Now can I put Clive Bunker's name forward to re-do the drums ?

In my humble opinion, Clive´s style does not fit the music in Under Wraps. I think Duane is the right option.

It would be nice to have some former Tull members along to guest on any re-recording - Barrie Barlow perhaps as well as Doane but Clive is my choice for at least 50% of the material. It's a shame that Mark Craney is no longer with us as I reckon he would have done an excellent job on the songs.

[maddogfagin]

bravewords.com/news/jethro-tull-legend-ian-anderson-featured-in-the-rhino-podcast-audio

JETHRO TULL LEGEND IAN ANDERSON FEATURED IN THE RHINO PODCAST; AUDIO
June 5, 2019, 12 hours ago



Available below is the latest edition of the official Rhino Podcast, featuring legendary Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson discussing the band’s 50th anniversary and more.

[maddogfagin]

www.palmspringslife.com/jethro-tull/

His Music is Golden
50 Years of Jethro Tull: Ian Anderson chats about the evolution of the group’s sound and whatever became of Gerald Bostock.
KENT BLACK JUNE 12, 2019 ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT, CURRENT DIGITAL


Jethro Tull, led by flutist extraordinaire Ian Anderson, brings his 50th anniversary tour to the desert July 5.
PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY FANTASY SPRINGS RESORT CASINO

It’s inconceivable that some of the greatest classic bands of all time are passing the midcentury mark. The Rolling Stones aside (who have been touring since the 1890s), there are some surprising names that every few years pull the Fenders and Martins out of the attic and get back on the road. Whether it’s ego, a needed Social Security supplement, or the clamor of a new generation of fans, groups such as Led Zeppelin; the Moody Blues; the Beach Boys; Crosby, Stills, and Nash; Santana; the Who; and Deep Purple can still fill the bleachers.

On July 5 at Fantasy Springs Resort and Casino, one of the most original bands of the late ’60s will be playing their unique blend of rock, folk, blues, jazz, and progressive rock. Jethro Tull (named after a 19th-century agronomist after leader Ian Anderson tired of coming up with a new name every gig for his nascent band) is touring in celebration of their first U.S. tour in 1969 just after the release of their bluesy This Was album.

Anderson, whose distinctive one-legged, flute playing stance is, in fact, the Jethro Tull logo, agreed to a phone interview with Palm Springs Life while his wife was in a curry shop getting takeaway for a family dinner — a family that includes son-in-law, Andrew Lincoln, former star of The Walking Dead.

I understand you’ve written on Indian cuisine. Is Indian cuisine an obsession?

I wouldn’t say it’s an obsession. In spite of the fact that, as we speak, my wife is ordering a takeaway curry since I have some of my family over for dinner tonight. But it’s something that I’ve enjoyed eating since, I suppose since I was about 19 years old. We had an Indian drummer from Manchester for a little while. His name was Richie. His mother cooked a meal for us. It was the first Indian food I’d had. I think to wind us up a little bit, Richie had asked his mom to make it really crazy hot. And so everybody sat down to eat this food and were coughing and sputtering and drinking copious amount of cooling water. I, on the other hand, for some reason just thought, Well, that was the greatest thing I’ve ever had.


PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY JETHRO TULL
Jethro Tull includes (from left) drummer Scott Hammond, bass guitarist David Goodier,
keyboardist John O’Hara, Ian Anderson, and guitarist Florian Opahle.

What can we expect from this tour? Are you going to be doing most of This Was?

There are indeed a few songs from the very first album. We take it, not entirely chronologically, but it features, I suppose, most of the material is from the first 10, 15 years of Jethro Tull. I think the period where most of our fans got to know about us was [the] end of the ’60s through the end of the ’70s.

Jethro Tull has always been well known for showmanship.

There’s a little bit of psychedelic light show stuff going on here and there. Which was kind of a little bit like when we first appeared at the Fillmore East.

On This Was, there’s a lot of blues influence because of Mick Abrahams. When he went on to Blodwyn Pig, did his leaving Jethro Tull free you creatively to stretch out toward more progressive rock and jazz?

Indeed it did, because in the summer of 1968 when we’d been together for about seven months I suppose, I began to write the music that would become the Stand Up album in ’69. Some of it I played to Mick, and we went through it a little bit. But it wasn’t something that I think he found … he readily … could absorb. And then Mick began to withdraw a little bit from the band musically and in terms of reliability. [He went] back to work with some guys who he’d work with before like Jack Lancaster and they went on to form Blodwyn Pig. So, everything was fine. Blodwyn Pig was adopted by the Chrysalis Record Company and given a very good head start.

So you were less constrained by that previous sound?

Yes, freeing, certainly in the sense of creativity. And with the changing of some of the musicians, of course there comes a new lease at life as people bring their own idiosyncrasies, musically and stylistically, and perhaps technically, into the equation, which may offer a new horizon. first for myself, secondly for the other musicians in the band, and thirdly, to get some acceptance from our listeners. If I’m not having a good time, no one else is gonna have a good time. So, I set out to please myself. I think that’s the best way for a songwriter to be. You gotta be true to yourself, and not just turn into a factory producing hits. To me that’s just like [offering] up the musical equivalent of a lap dance.


PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY JETHRO TULL

I’ve read that the impetus for Thick as a Brick was to satirize the sort of grand rock opera albums that were popular at the time.

No, the inception of the album, really, was all from the opening stanza of the song: “Really don’t mind if you sit this one out.” It’s a bit of a slap in the face to the listener. I went on to develop the music as if it was written by a precocious schoolboy. That was the whole thing lyrically that followed that thread. And of course to make a little bit of a spoof, you have to be true to the musical stereotype, if you like. So, of course, it became a prog rock album, isn’t it? No way in dodging that. It wasn’t all dense, heavy progressive rock sounding. It had a little bit more in the way of contrast and changes within the shape of the album structure, within the shape of the song. I’m always being careful about making sure things are in different keys, different tempos. Sometimes it’s upbeat and cheery. Sometimes it’s grim and whingeing and moan-y. Sometimes it’s aggressive. Sometimes it’s, I roll over on my back and I let you tickle my tummy.

I understand though that it was difficult for band members at the time to execute the entire album at one go, especially live; it presented a lot of difficulties musically.

It presented a lot of difficulties in the sense you have to learn it. You gotta memorize it all, and you gotta technically play, not only to make the record, but then to be able to recreate it on stage. So yes, it presents difficulties, but they’re difficulties that grown-up musicians in long pants should be able to deal with. It’s part of what they do. It’s certainly easier than being a classical flutist and having to play a Mozart flute concerto.

I understand the last time you performed, the entire Thick as a Brick was in Iceland in 2012.

I’m not sure that was the actual last performance, but it was in 2012 when we went there to do Thick as a Brick I and Thick as a Brick II, the 40-year-later sequel album. So, been there, done that in 2012, and I don’t feel the need to do that again anytime soon.

Do people still ask what’s become of Gerald Bostock (the fictitious young author of Thick as a Brick)?

I suppose four or five years ago, yes, because that was when they threw the new album material and the promotion and marketing and all the rest of it. But I think Gerald Bostock is a fictitious character. He propped up again in 2012. In a kind of a roundabout way in a follow-up album called Homo Erraticus, released in 2014. But, again, when you’ve done these things once or twice or maybe three times, it’s, I think, perhaps a good idea to let it lie. It’s best to quit while you’re slightly ahead.

I do have to tell you one quick anecdote. I used to live in Copenhagen. And in the ’80s, I had a friend who was a law student. And one day he came to me with this album, Thick as a Brick, and he said, “I found this record written by a 12- year-old boy.” And he was absolutely convinced that there was a real Gerald Bostock. As late as 2000, I saw him in Mexico and he still believed Gerald Bostock was a real person, was a real poet. The clincher is that this guy, as a far as I know still believes in Gerald Bostock, and went on to become one of Denmark’s Superior Court judges.

Well, it’s not to suggest his tendency to gullibility. I suppose in a way you could make the same argument for the New Testament. There are those people who believe in Jesus Christ. Jesus was the son of God. And there are those of us who believe in Jesus of Nazareth. He was a real historical character, he was a slightly contemptuous Jewish prophet of his age, and he fell foul of the authorities, sticking to his guns. And I’m a firm believer in Jesus, but I can’t classify myself as a Christian.

Right.

However, I am a huge supporter of the Bible, and I’m a huge supporter of Christianity as a religion. It’s just … easier to believe in the idea and the spirit of the Christian message, but when it comes to the detail, I have to say, “Whoop, no, wait a minute. This is as a far as I can go.” And I think the same thing applies. You can want to believe in the idea of this schoolboy, the precocious kid who is writing all this stuff. But he doesn’t really understand himself. He’s got a distorted idea of the adult world … because of the times in which he lives and his access to knowledge, which is really through books and comics and through the culture of that time. And then sometimes you were in for a bit of a shock when you realized it wasn’t really like that. That’s the Gerald Bostock I wanted to present. A slightly confused, slightly misguided child in for a rude awakening when he became a young adult.

Yes, of course.

If there’s any skill in writing that, it was to try and find just that middle ground between people taking it seriously and knowing full well that it was a slightly surreal spoof. And I think I kind of got it right, because I would guess that 50 percent of the people were taken in by it, and 50 percent of the people got it straight away. There’s probably some people who are probably left wondering, “Was it verbatim? Was it real, or was it all a hoax?”

And what was it?

The answer is it was both of those things.

[JTull 007]

Rhino  Interview Episode 29 - Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull Pt. 1  LINK

[maddogfagin]

bravewords.com/news/ian-anderson-celebrates-50-years-of-jethro-tull-the-rhino-podcast-part-2-audio



IAN ANDERSON CELEBRATES 50 YEARS OF JETHRO TULL - THE RHINO PODCAST, PART 2; AUDIO
June 19, 2019, 11 hours ago



Just released and available below is the latest edition of the official Rhino Podcast, featuring Part 2 of an interview with legendary Jethro Tull frontman Ian Anderson discussing the band’s 50th anniversary and more.

[maddogfagin]

ttps://www.desertsun.com/story/life/entertainment/music/2019/06/26/ian-anderson-reflects-jethro-tull-farming-and-climate-change/1279623001/

Ian Anderson reflects on 50 years of Jethro Tull — and his left turn into farming
Bruce Fessier, Palm Springs Desert Sun Published 12:34 p.m. PT June 26, 2019

When music pundits debate the best bands not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the conversation ultimately turns to Jethro Tull.

The British unit fronted by flutist Ian Anderson was one of the biggest bands of the 1970s, when it earned 11 gold albums. It played Madison Square Garden 18 times, according to Setlist.fm, including every year of the ’70s except 1970, ’74 and ’76.

A website dedicated to the snubs, notinhalloffame.com, named Tull the third most deserving band still knocking on the hall doors after Kraftwerk and Oasis. Kraftwerk was nominated this year and Oasis just became eligible in January.

Jethro Tull didn’t even get nominated in 2019. Progressive rock bands generally get little respect from hall of fame voters, but Tull became a symbol of their denigration in 1989 when it was ridiculed for winning the first Grammy Award for Best Heavy Metal Band over the obviously harder-rocking Metallica and Jane’s Addiction.

But that doesn’t seem to bother Anderson. The articulate, highly literate composer of such rock classics as “Aqualung,” “Locomotive Breath” and “Living in the Past” is proud of his reputation of not fitting neatly into any one musical category.

Anderson, 71, brings his latest incarnation of Jethro Tull, featuring his ensemble from his last solo act, to Fantasy Springs Resort Casino July 5 as part of an anniversary tour marking 50 years since a booking agent named Anderson’s fledgling blues band after an 18th century agriculturist. Anderson's 2017 album, "Jethro Tull – The String Quartets," featured the Carducci String Quartet, but this concert will feature the band's most popular repertoire.

Anderson, born in Scotland but raised to speak the Queen's English in Blackpool, Lancashire, discussed his half century with Tull in a telephone interview with a reporter culminating his 40 years with The Desert Sun, which became a starting point. The interview was edited for length and clarity.

THE DESERT SUN: This is my last Desert Sun interview and, looking back at my career, I realize this isn’t what I set out to do, but it’s better than how I thought it would end. So, let me ask you, when you were starting out, did you think this is where your journey would lead you?

IAN ANDERSON: Well, I suppose everybody starts out with different ideas that become a fantasy of where life might take you. In my early childhood, that was suggested by literature — children’s comics, I suppose. I went through all this in “Thick As A Brick 2.” That album was about what you might become in your life. The original “Thick As A Brick” was seen through the eyes of an 8-year-old schoolboy who is infused with some of the stereotypes of growing up post-World War II.

“Thick As A Brick” took that on so well, we did (the sequel) in the spirit of that: “Whatever happened to Gerald Bostock?" (the fictional schoolboy). We looked at the various options that might have resulted in his choices along the way, kind of mirroring not only my life, but the life of your ex-president George (W.) Bush, who, in an autobiography called “Decision Points,” describes his pivotal moments as he reached certain crossroads. I was 17 when I exited grammar school, having really been expelled for a misdemeanor, and I thought, “What am I going to do?” I went to enroll in the Blackpool police cadet force and they wouldn’t let me because I had too many examination (dis)qualifications. So I went to the local Blackpool Evening Gazette to become a journalist. They didn’t even need a tea boy (go-fer), so my third choice was to be an international rock star. That seemed to work out fine.

Were you really expelled for refusing to accept corporal punishment?

Yes, that was the reason I got removed. I said, "I’ll accept another form of punishment, but I won’t allow you to get whatever mysterious satisfaction you get from an old man" – late 50s or early 60s, actually – "beating a young boy on the buttocks with a cane."

Your music seems so literate. How did you discover a love for learning?

Well, for a couple years I went to art college, studying painting and drawing. It seems everyone over here (in England) went to art school to learn to be a musician. But that gave us some of the elements of creativity. We use the same terms in the “painterly” world as we do in music. We talk about line and tone and form and color and harmony. As an expression, music was far more immediate. You pick up a guitar, you make a noise, you entertain people or they throw things at you. If you’re a painter, it could be after your death before you’re recognized and that seemed to be an awfully long time. So I thought, “I’ll take that chance and go for potential reward now, being a musician.”

What were your early inspirations?

I would have to say what infused me musically in my late teens is pretty much the same as now. I grew up hearing church music and Scottish folk music and that went on 'til I first heard rock 'n' roll when I was 9 years old. I heard Elvis Presley sing “Heartbreak Hotel.” That’s the one that spoke volumes to British youth.

Bill Haley was perhaps the first sight we caught of a rock 'n' roll American (with) “Rock Around the Clock.” Many of us thought, ‘Oh, that sounds sexy and interesting.” But then we looked again and saw a middle-aged man, a little overweight and looking a bit uncomfortable playing what was basically sped-up country music. White man’s rock and roll, to begin with, was Elvis. There was something darker about him, which we didn’t really know until a few years later when (electric blues pioneer) Muddy Waters came on the scene as part of the traveling train of blues musicians brought to Europe by my good friend to-be, the German legendary promoter Fritz Rau. He got these guys (Willie Dixon, Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, Sonny Boy Williamson II, John Lee Hooker, Memphis Slim and more) over from the U.S.A. They were part of a series called the (American) Folk Blues Festival.

I guess I was 18 when I first saw Buddy Guy and J.B. Lenoir and a few others in Manchester. This was the real deal. You were looking at people from a different culture, a different history. We didn’t know then what we know now about the history of black American culture. We just knew it was something seductive and interesting and inspiring. That is what kicked off the whole British blues thing during the mid-‘60s and gave rise to all the spin-offs, from the Rolling Stones to Led Zeppelin.

I love your string quartet album. It sounds like you've studied and appreciated great classical music despite coming from a blues background. What inspired some of your career left turns?

I’ve never studied classical music, but I do listen to it. I started with classical music seriously in the early ‘70s. It came through a Stanley Kubrick movie, which employed the music of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, “A Clockwork Orange,” which was scored by Wendy Carlos. It was shiny new, programmable synthesizer music, which she (used to) faithfully reproduce the 9th Symphony. It became a starting point for me and I quickly moved to (Herbert) Von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic, which is probably where I got into symphonic classical music in a way that was very inspiring. Over the years, I just continued to listen to a bigger variety of classical music. At the moment, my favorite is Handel.

I heard a radio interview in which you were talking about all the different kinds of music that was re-arranged from the same four notes, starting with Beethoven’s Fifth. Do you remember that?

Yes. The world’s iconic riffs that stay in the minds – sometimes in classical music, often in folk music and, on a very regular basis, in blues and rock 'n' roll. It is a minor miracle if you’re able to come up with (sings the riff to “Aqua Lung”) or (sings the riff to Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love”). Maybe you recognize it at the time, maybe you don’t, but suddenly, with the simplest arsenal of weaponry, you’ve actually obliterated a small town in the Midwest, which is what Zeppelin did. They just steamrolled across America with (sings the riff to “Whole Lotta Love”) and people were seduced by this without really knowing why. For a few of us who have those pieces to our names, it’s rather special.

Hitting the road and looking back at 50 years, how do you handle the different incarnations of Jethro Tull? How do you decide what to play from the various eras?

Well, on the 50th anniversary tour, it does focus for the most part on the first 10 years or so because that is when most people got to hear Jethro Tull. Younger fans learning about Jethro Tull will probably be drawn to the origins of the band and the first records. Since you can’t in two hours fit a huge amount of music, you’ve got to be a little editorial. There are a few songs from our very first album and a sprinkling of things through the ‘70s and into the '80s. You obviously have to leave a huge amount of stuff out, but we do other concerts, so we get to do different things.

So, at this point, are you happy with your direction?

I do feel I’ve managed to stretch out across what broadly passes as pop and rock music. I think I’ve covered maybe more than most people in my profession. I can think, "Well, I’ve tried a bit of this, I’ve done that. Sometimes it works, sometimes not so good, sometimes downright embarrassing." Giving it a fair amount of risk-taking along the way, that in itself is satisfying. Of course, there are other areas in life that I really am frustrated because I know I will never ever be an airline pilot. I will never be a politician, I will never be a famous war photographer. I can enjoy my interest in politics and I can enjoy my pursuit of photography as a hobby, but the chances of making a living at it are long since gone.

I did actually receive a couple weeks ago an email from a political party asking if I would consider standing as an MEP (Member of the European Parliament) in the European elections. Nice to be asked, but I thought they obviously aren’t checking my age or the fact that I have a pretty full diary. There are lots areas where I thought, maybe I should have stopped halfway through and done something completely different. To an extent, I did that when I went into farming and agriculture. That was 20 years of farming on the land and the scene from the late ‘70s through the new millennium. Then I thought, "Been there, done that," and I chose to carry on with being a musician because, obviously, farms aren’t necessarily sexy, while we flute players, the world is our oyster!

There was once a chance that I could have helped manage a farm in my retirement. But, that’s hard work!

It’s hard work, but it’s also in some sense spinning the roulette wheel because, however good you are at it, you are at the mercy of not just the weather but the national and international economics in terms of food production. It’s going to be a rough ride in the future for American farmers. Climate change, in spite of the flat earth deniers like your current president and his henchmen, really is happening and it’s really taking its toll. A degree-and-a-half and we’re talking about agricultural upheaval at a time when planet Earth has increased its population by slightly more than three times since I was born in 1947. That should cause pause for thought: We are faced with the almost impossible task of producing food for an estimated 13 billion, certainly 12 billion people by the end of this century (almost double today's population).

Leaving aside climate change, that would (mean) having to find radical agricultural improvements and new methodologies. Factor in climate change, and the rape of our forests and fields for producing crops that are of little use to us but make cattle fat, we are really facing some radical times.

I guess the one thing that gives me pleasure these days is planting trees. As a silviculturalist, I can claim about 30,000 oak, ash and other indigenous species of broad-leafed trees that we’ve planted here in the last years. It does give some real satisfaction to think that maybe, in some way, I’ve offset my carbon pollution from flying around the world in search of taxable dollars and all the other currencies I’ve burned.

Jethro Tull comes to Indio
What: Ian Anderson presents Jethro Tull in concert
When: 8 p.m., July 5
Where: Fantasy Springs Resort Casino, 84-245 Indio Springs Parkway, Indio
Tickets: $59-$129
Information: [phone] or fantasyspringsresort.com

[maddogfagin]

www.ocregister.com/2019/06/26/10-jethro-tull-stories-ian-anderson-told-us-before-bands-southern-california-shows-to-celebrate-50th-anniversary/

10 Jethro Tull stories Ian Anderson told us before band’s Southern California shows to celebrate 50th anniversary
Opening for Led Zeppelin, skipping Woodstock and how Eric Clapton influenced him


Ian Anderson, co-founder of Jethro Tull, will play the band’s music in celebration of the 50th anniversary of its U.S. debut at shows in
Indio and Irvine on July 5-6, 2019. (Photo by Nick Harrison)

By PETER LARSEN | [e-mail] | Orange County Register
PUBLISHED: June 26, 2019 at 8:20 am | UPDATED: June 26, 2019 at 8:20 am

Ian Anderson is a natural-born storyteller, but spend five decades as the flute-playing, occasionally cod-piece-wearing frontman of Jethro Tull, and yeah, you’ll have some stories to tell.

Anderson, who called from his office in England recently to talk about his upcoming shows in Southern California, is continuing the celebration of Jethro Tull’s 50th anniversary, which kicked off last year – 50 years after the band’s first gigs at Marquee Club in London – and continue this year to celebrate 50 years since Tull made its live debut in the United States.

“We did three U.S. tours in 1969,” Anderson says. “Early spring, I think July, and then again later in the year.”

“As a child growing up in the U.K. shortly after the end of World War II, we were brought up on a diet of all things American,” he says. “American comics, American TV programs, if you were lucky enough to have a television in those days back in the U.K.

“And so we grew up with a steady diet, I suppose, of appreciation and envy of this incredibly brash and culturally exciting world.”

The tour billed as Ian Anderson’s 50 Years of Jethro Tull – he’s been the sole original member since Martin Barre left in 2012 – plays the Fantasy Springs Resort Casino on July 5 and FivePoint Amphitheatre in Irvine on July 6.

Since Anderson, 71, is so good at spinning a tale, we decided to get out of the way and let him talk about everything from why Jethro Tull decided to pass on playing Woodstock to how Anderson ended up a rock-and-roll flautist in the first place – Eric Clapton is responsible for it, he says. But we’ll start with their very first U.S. shows when Tull opened for another British band.

1) Opening for Led Zeppelin: “We were in that invidious position of going on before one of the world’s most loved and appreciated bands, musically speaking. So it was a tough opening act to do, but I think generally speaking we did OK. The first couple of times we had 35 minutes to try and show that we were not complete idiots, and we obviously managed to do OK since we were invited to do it again and again.”

2) Taking a Page from Jimmy: “The Zeppelins, they were a good act to open for because you really had to learn, and you could learn from them a lot of useful tricks about stage presentation and dynamics. Generally speaking on a good night they were the best band in the world,” says Anderson. “There was always something fresh to learn from watching them, except for me watching Robert Plant because he was in a class of his own. I couldn’t learn anything from him because I couldn’t dream of doing that kind of performance, either the macho bare-chested kind of strutting or the incredible operatic range of his voice. I learned perhaps more from the way Jimmy Page presented himself, his little bit of theatrical stuff, bowing his guitar with a violin bow, for example.”

3) Playing Newport Jazz ’69: “The jazz festival was a fairly staid affair, and not really a great venue for Jethro Tull. It had a night that was dedicated more to blues, well, non-folky, more electric music, but I’m not sure for most of the audience we were a welcome component of the lineup or not. But I do remember (jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan) Roland Kirk coming backstage and saying hello to because he’d heard I’d recorded music by him on our first album. It meant a lot to me that he sought me out.”

4) Skipping Woodstock: “I said, ‘What’s the sort of shape of this festival, what kind of people are going to be there?’ (Our manager) said, ‘I think it’s going to all be naked hippies taking drugs.’ So I said, ‘Well, I think actually I can be washing my hair that day,’ because back then I used to have quite a lot of it so it was a plausible excuse.’ I didn’t feel it was the right thing for Jethro Tull so early in our career to be fixed with that label of being a hippie band.”

5) Coming to America: “The American boy (at Anderson’s primary school) used to give me his American comics once he read them, so I grew up knowing about all the things that were on the back page, all the sort of postal ads that you could off and get anything from a plastic Elvis ukulele to a ‘Wynn’ bicycle. And BB guns, which fascinated me. Of course, we’d seen lots of cowboy movies — that rather Midwestern kind of more rural America was the America that I thought was what it was until in my mid-teenage years when I was listening to jazz and blues. Then it was the upper Midwest — the Chicago thing became my sort of vague awareness of American, and through jazz musicians a little bit of New York.”

6) Messing with Texas: “The thing that impacted on me most of all about the USA was you couldn’t just talk about ‘the USA’ in the way that you might talk about Germany or Switzerland or Spain. Because America’s like five or six different countries in terms of social and cultural differences, as well as in terms of topography and the physical geography of that big chunk of a continent,” says Anderson. “You realize just how enormous and how diverse it was, and how different people were in their behavior and perhaps their acceptance of people like us. We were warned, be careful when you go to Texas. And I do remember stopping once in a station wagon when we were traveling, we got out at some gas station, and we suddenly realized that we better get back in the car and get out of there very, very quickly because some very threatening guys were coming down to take us to task for having trousers that were too tight and long hair and sort of Carnaby Street clothes.”

7) Learning from Eric Clapton: “Like many of my peers I was a teenager who fantasized about being a guitar player, and perhaps a singer. And so my first two or three years were doing that. But then a bad thing happened. I bought an album by John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, featuring a new guitar player by the name of Eric Clapton, and I thought, ‘I think I better find something else to play.’ And so in the summer of 1967, I traded in my Fender Strat guitar.”

8) Selling a special guitar: “Being a 1960s vintage Strat, apart from being owned by me it was also previously owned by Lemmy Kilmister — then from Rev Black and the Rocking Vicars — but of course more famous for Motörhead. He’d owned it before me, it’s a vintage Strat, so this guitar for sure would have to be worth £30,000, £40,000 today,” says Anderson. “But I traded it in for a £30 Shure Unidyne III microphone, which I rather coveted, it looked rather sexy. And for the balance — What do I want? — I saw this shiny flute hanging on the wall (for £30 pounds). So for £60 I got myself a real made-in-Chicago microphone and a student flute I couldn’t play.”

9) Figuring out the flute: “I had a go at it; I couldn’t get a note out of it. About four months later, December of ’67, I thought I’d give another try, see if I could get a noise out of it, and all of a sudden a note popped out of it: ‘Ooh, that’s how you do it!’ And then I got another note. Soon I had five notes. And I had the pentatonic blues scale, and I could play solos and riffs,” says Anderson. “A few days later I was playing it on stage in the early days of Jethro Tull in the Marquee Club, and people noticed. ‘Oh, there’s a band that plays the blues but they’ve got a flute player?’ And that, in marketing terms, was a point of difference in good marketing and promotion. People noticed it because we were different than other bands.”

10) Going on fifty years: “It stood us in good stead over the years, and over the years I’ve come to really enjoy the flute much more than when I started. I can do a lot of stuff that I couldn’t do before, but I can still do the stuff I did in the first week that I was playing it. That way of playing never leaves you. I can do that in my sleep, which sometimes I do. It keeps me awake at night.”

Ian Anderson’s 50 Years of Jethro Tull
Friday, July 5: Fantasy Springs Resort Casino, 84245 Indio Springs Dr., Indio. Show at 8 p.m. Tickets are $59-$129.
Saturday, July 6: FivePoint Amphitheatre, 14800 Chinon, Irvine. Show at 8 p.m. Tickets are $33.50-$135.
For more: Jethrotull.com/tour-dates

[maddogfagin]

It's interesting to re-read some of the early interviews with Mr. A, here's one from 2012

www.theaquarian.com/2012/11/07/arguing-with-ian-anderson-of-jethro-tull/


Arguing with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull
Mike Greenblatt November 7, 2012

Jethro Tull has been around now for 45 years. 28 musicians have been in the band but only one calls the shots: Ian Anderson. The image of Anderson, on one foot, playing the flute, is one of the more iconic images in all of progressive rock. He’s incorporated jazz, folk, blues and classical into his seamless mix and continues to tour globally with fans—Grateful Dead style—following him around the world. The current album, Thick As A Brick 2, imagines what might have happened to its original 1972 protagonist, Gerald Bostock, decades later.

The conversation below was almost adversarial in that I had interviewed beloved Tull guitarist Martin Barre earlier in the year, and he was clearly upset over not being asked to participate in TAAB2. I knew Anderson, who is one of the more articulate, intelligent, philosophical and literate rock stars, could take my incessant grilling, so I went in with a mission. To his credit, he was a good sport and handled me with patience, professionalism and with a profound zen-like wisdom.

How do you know when to get rid of certain guys and get other guys? You’re a crafty individual both in business and music, no?

Well, it’s not as cynical or crafty as “getting rid” of guys. I have relationships. You come to enjoy oftentimes passionate friendships with other musicians whom you find productive for a while but sometimes you go into it knowing this is not going to be forever. It’s exciting—intellectually and emotionally—to play with certain people. No one is under any long-term marriage contract to make it a union for life so it’s not really a question of deciding when to get rid of them.

It’s mutual. To drag on beyond the point to where it’s not fun and productive is not the best thing to do. Working with me, you can use that relationship to further your career. But then move on and do other things! Don’t get stuck in a rut by thinking you have to stick around me forever because I can manage quite well without you. I’ve given that advice to more than a few people. I’m not a guy who hires and fires like buying a new member of a football team. I’m a band leader in the tradition of Frank Zappa or John Mayall. I don’t think it’s fair to say we “get rid” of people just because they play a wrong note or something. We’re not that mean.

Unless you’re James Brown.

You’ll notice I didn’t mention James Brown amongst the good band leaders. He had a very bad reputation amongst his musicians for being exactly the kind of guy that maybe you’re alluding to. Another one very much in that vein is Van Morrison. He fires people when he gets bored with them!

I love the lineup from ’95 to ’05 of you with Martin Barre, Jon Noyce, Andrew Giddings and Doane Perry.

I think on a purely musical basis, it was a more flexible and adept lineup. Martin was at his best, continuing to develop. They were polished on stage, too. I don’t think, though, they quite had the fire in the belly for recording. At least a couple of them were never at their best in the studio. I think the pressure got to them.

Who?

That’s not something I feel I would want to say because it would suggest somebody wasn’t up to the mark. I never betray my friends, musicians or otherwise, by criticizing them. Some people enjoy the stage but tremble at the knees when they walk into a studio where it’s for real—a test, if you will—with the resultant pressure. I feel the pressure too as a producer, musician, composer and arranger. The buck stops with me. But, nonetheless, the adrenaline rush of building momentum is one that overcomes the trepidation. So I can see it from both sides.

Why wasn’t Barre or Perry part of TAAB2? The fans were up in arms about it and it caused no small amount of controversy. You told Pat Prince of Goldmine magazine it was a scheduling conflict but Martin told me that…

I did not use the phrase “scheduling conflict.” Back in June of 2011, on a few occasions, I met with Martin and Doane to talk to them about 2012. I explained I had been working on a new project which was probably going to take up most of my 2012 time, that it was a conceptual project; that I did not want to pursue it under the Jethro Tull banner. We then discussed what those guys might be doing in 2012. The talks were well-scheduled and we all agreed they would pursue other avenues that they had, mind you, already been thinking of. That’s hardly a “scheduling conflict.” It was a plus, a bonus; it was finally time to do some other things on a personal basis. Particularly for Martin. He’s actually a year older than me. We’re not guys who can go on forever. Martin and I have talked over the last few years about him pursuing some solo projects. It’s not anything unusual or even particularly new. Look, I have no intention of being drawn into a sparring match here. There is no conflict. It’s just people doing their own thing. Maybe Martin might have felt, in some way, snubbed, not to be asked to do Thick As A Brick 2 and, if so, I can understand that, but there was plenty of notice for Martin and Doane to think about pursuing actively their alternative personal plans. Martin, as you probably know, is out and about doing tours as we speak. Doane is recovering from a health issues.

How often do you keep in touch with them and other ex-Tull musicians?

We’re in regular touch and chat about this and that. In fact, I’m sort of disappointed if a couple of days go by and I don’t get an email from one of the 28 musicians I’ve played with over the years in Jethro Tull. I’d like to think I’m on pretty good terms with most of them. In fact, looking down my emails as I speak to you now, I can see yet another email from an ex-musician who was once in Jethro Tull. Ooh, he’s inviting me to a, well, I should have a degree of discretion; let’s just say it’s an important private function. I rather like when I get these… Wait, hang on, let’s see, here’s one… Two, two ex-musicians, three, another musician who once came to work with me very briefly and decided not to pursue, ooh, hold on, here’s another two, and this is just today’s emails. I kind of like the fact that we have this big extended family thing going on that I’m a part of.

Speaking of family, I’m a paid-up member and supporter of an entity called “Population Matters.” I’m very concerned about people’s attitudes towards birth control. I’m one of those people who believe we all should be entitled to have a child or two… But stop at two! Let’s try and put the lid on population expansion. We’re already at a point where we can’t feed the planet. There’s no real possibility of increasing our food production for years to come in this topsy-turvy climate change world. This is something that actually matters to me. I have two children. I have two grandchildren whom I hope to have a hand in fostering. So that’s okay. I’m on target. I’m a responsible inhabitant of the planet Earth. I’m in that place where we can see minimal or no population growth as a direct result of my personal seminal fluid.

But I have my extended family, 28, wait, two of them, sadly, have passed on, so 26 surviving Jethro Tull mates who I’m kind of proud of.

So you would not be adverse, then, in the future, to possibly playing again with Martin Barre?

Absolutely not. In fact, in one of the last conversations I had with Martin, I was talking to him of doing a little acoustic outing with just the two of us! We’ve never done that before. We’re all too used to the media-whipped frenzy of a Jagger-Richards will they/won’t they kind of thing…

Well, this then, is the Jethro Tull equivalent. There’s a magic when you and Martin play…

My point was going to be that it’s not the Jethro Tull equivalent! There isn’t that kind of a friction or bust-up. Jagger and Richards have had longstanding bad blood between them. No no, I don’t see it as an equivalent at all. Can we move on? We’ve done this one to death.

On the new album, you almost go back to the original two Jethro Tull albums: less rock and more of other genres like jazz and folk.

Well, there are some elements of jazz and blues at work in much of what I’ve written over the years. I’m a very eclectic musician who draws upon a number of different musical genres to try and integrate them into the musical mix. Jazz and blues are certainly part of that mix. What they have in common is improvisation. That’s the element that I think I take with me through my musical life. But I’m more drawn instinctively towards folk music and classical music. By folk, I don’t just mean the music of Great Britain or the United States; I’m talking about ethnic music of different cultures in different parts of the world. I’m more drawn to that as being something earthy, [heartfelt], built upon tradition, never changing.

I’m less concerned with recreating historic folk themes or identities in the way we imagine they were done originally. I’m more passionate about folk music as an evolution based upon tradition of a culture. As far as classical music is concerned, classical is music of the head! It is the conscious skilled authority of learned musicians plying their trade. I’m drawn to that: The potential marriage of heart and mind, which seems the ideal music to pursue, combining the intellectual part of the process with the emotional.

Finally, would you consider TAAB2 a metaphor for how our generation has changed through the years never knowing the kind of person we’re ultimately going to be?

Not only would I consider it a metaphor, but it was designed and written very specifically to be, if you like, a metaphor for the lives of all of us who might look back and think how we might have done this life differently. “Oh, if I’d only married the girl next door. Oh, if only I’d taken up that offer of a full-time position. Oh, if only I’d have been a football player or professional bungee jumper.” Still, that said, TAAB2 is not just for us old folks. I really try to put in there some of the notion that it might amuse or kick-start a little thought for people in their teens or early 20s who are very much in that firing line of decision making where things are coming thick and fast with potential changes in life. It’s easy just to go with the flow, and some people do. Nothing wrong with that if you want to be relatively passive and let things wash over you and end up on whatever beach the tide and wind take you to. Some of us, though, want to swim against the tide. It’s good to encourage people to do that: taking seriously responsibilities not only for their own future but for friends and family who have played and will hopefully continue to play a part in their lives. Sometimes you have to make decisions on doing the right thing and sometimes that might mean accommodating the wishes of your parents!

The album, in the end, is all light-hearted conjecture, really, but one can take out of it what one will. There’s a good chance I’ll be showing up on your doorstep to perform it within the next few months but, if you’re talking a few years down the road, you’ll just have to talk to my doctor.

[JTull 007]

JUNE 5, 2019 Ian Anderson and Jethro Tull   LINK
    This edition of KVC-Arts is focused solely on Ian Anderson and Jethro Tull.    Jethro Tull,
on their 50th Anniversary Tour, will be in or near our listening area at three different locations
July 5th - the 7th. Jethrotull.com for details. David Fleming speaks Ian Anderson about the tour,
the concept album - his parody of it AND his embrace of it, the concept of the greatest hits album,
                                         the Jethro Tull String Quartet and more.         48 min.     28 sec.

[maddogfagin]

Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull bites the bullet for 50th anniversary tour


Jethro Tull is shown in 1972, with band leader Ian Anderson seated in the center.(File photo)

Cited as an inspiration by everyone from Nick Cave to the band Midlake, Jethro Tull is now 51 years old, but band founder Ian Anderson is not one for nostalgia.
By GEORGE VARGA
JUNE 30, 2019 5:01 AM

It’s no surprise that the few rock stars still actively touring and recording 50 or more years after launching their careers are happy to take a nostalgia-fueled victory lap or two. Jethro Tull founder Ian Anderson is most assuredly not one of them.

“I don’t enjoy nostalgia and I’m not one for anniversaries or celebrations,” affirmed the flute-playing guitarist and singer-songwriter, who brings his “Ian Anderson’s 50 Years of Jethro Tull” tour to the San Diego Civic Theatre next Sunday, July 7. (See below for ticket information and a bonus Q&A with Anderson.)

This is actually the second year of that 50th anniversary tour, which began in 2018 and was quickly extended. It will now run until at least late October, book-ended by two “Jethro Tull Performed by Ian Anderson” tour legs and five “Ian Anderson Christmas Shows” concerts in Germany and the U.K. in December

Anderson, who will turn 72 in August, launched the pioneering English band in late 1967. The jazzy blues-rock group scored its first hit, “Living in the Past,” in 1969, the same year it toured the U.S. for the first time.

By 1971, Anderson was the sole original member still on board and his band was at the forefront of the budding progressive-rock movement, thanks to such increasingly bold and ambitious concept albums as “Aqualung,” “Thick as a Brick” and “Passion Play.”

All told, Anderson led several dozen lineups before the band ceased to exist — at least under the name Jethro Tull — sometime around 2004. Since 2011, he has performed the band’s music in concert under his own name, rather than that of Jethro Tull, whose worldwide album sales are estimated at more than 60 million.

Then again, this is the same Ian Anderson who emphatically declared in a 1988 Union-Tribune interview: “I don’t think anyone will remember Jethro Tull, except as an obscure reference in some book. I hate all this nostalgia. I don’t have any gold records around the house or other memorabilia. I’ve never kept anything like that, and I’m very glad ...”

That perspective put Anderson in a challenging quandary when he realized the band’s 50th anniversary was approaching.

How does a musician so certain of his future obscurity celebrate a landmark anniversary of a band he led for so long, a band whose name continues to be synonymous with his own?

“I realized I’d have to bite the bullet,” Anderson said, speaking recently from his office outside London.

“I could have ignored the anniversary and just carried on without acknowledging it. So it became an intellectual exercise. I thought: ‘Well, if I was to do a 50th anniversary tour, what would make it fun
and appealing for me, intellectually?’

“I worked up a set list and then thought about how to accompany that with video material that would add something to to the music and, perhaps, the lyrics. It’s about giving context context, really, and — from that point of view — kicking off a show with elements of what was in the news in 1968. The Vietnam war, the U.S. space race with the Russians; all of these were the stuff of not just of news, but reflected the culture of that time. So we play a lot of that visual imagery in the show.”

Vicarious enjoyment

Anderson let out a wry chuckle.

“Ironically,” he said, “the next concert I have to play is in Athens, in an ancient Greek amphitheater where it’s impossible to erect a screen (behind the stage).”

No matter how great his aversion to nostalgia is, the combination of classic Jethro Tull songs in tandem with archival footage from decades ago makes it difficult to not think of “Ian Anderson’s 50 Years of Jethro Tull” as anything but.

“Well, generally speaking it is nostaligic,” Anderson allowed.

“And I am kind of enjoying it, vicariously, because I enjoy other people enjoying it. But for me and other members of the band — some of whom weren’t alive back then! — its about trying to remember thousands of notes. Plus, there’s a huge physical aspect for me, singing and running around the stage. We don’t have time to crack beer open a during our concerts and talk over old times with our buddies. We have a job to do and people expect you to do it with with some proficiency.”

There is, Anderson noted, at least one other major challenge for him as a performer revisiting decades worth of a singular musical legacy.

“You’ve really got to respond to the music, give yourself yourself over to that moment and give new life to it (on stage),” he said.

“For me, that will be difficult with certain songs. I find it quite difficult to sing certain lyrics without an uncomfortable feeling about the adequacy of my songwriting skills and my lyric writing skills. Sometimes, if I read back lyrics of mine — particularly from early days — I feel a bit self conscious. Most of the songs I feel pretty good about. And, with some, I have a modicum of pride: ‘Did I really write that? Wow, that’s not bad.”

‘Let’s not look too eager!’

In early 1969, Jethro Tull was one of nine bands and three solo artists featured on the Island Records compilation album, “You Can All Join In.”

Its cover features a photo of no fewer than 29 young musicians, all brimming with hope and enthusiasm, early in their careers. Among those posing on the cover are singer-songwriter John Martyn, organist Mick Weaver and members of Traffic, Free, Fairport Convention, Spooky Tooth, the Spencer Davis Group, Clouds and Nirvana (a duo in no way related to the Kurt Cobain-led Seattle grunge band that was formed in 1987).

“I remember that photo session,” Anderson said, “and the concern of our manager, Terry Ellis, when I said: ‘We’ll stand in the back; let’s not look too eager!’ So there are four little faces at the back of the photo — us — and others who were a bit more anxious to be noticed, a bit more keen to try to achieve the limelight and push their way to the front. Oddly enough, some of those who did push to the front never enjoyed successful careers. I felt more confident hanging in the back and waiting to see how things worked out.

“It was a pretty awful gathering and a pretty awful photo!”

As the leader of Jethro Tull since its inception, Anderson has often been referred to by many inattentive fans as a person named Jethro Tull. Now, having performed the band’s music under his own name for over a decade, how does he delineate between “Jethro Tull” and “Ian Anderson?”

“Well, I don’t really have to, not on a personal level,” he replied. “It’s not something on my mind; it’s something that may or may not be self-explanatory to the audience. When I think of it I think in terms of the repertoire, because it’s hard to think of the 37 musicians who have been in the band. So many people have been part of Jethro Tull, in terms of recording and touring, that’s its kind of easy to think of the songs, which are indelibly linked to me. So I guess it means the music of Jethro Tull.”

Anderson is now at work on several new books and is also completing a new album, which has been delayed by the 50th anniversary tour.

“I hope I’m remembered fondly,” he said. “But it might bring me some pleasure knowing I may, perhaps, be thought of as someone who was moderately successful in spite of not being in the mainstream of pop or rock music. I’d like to be remembered for being a little bit outside the stable norms of contemporary music, in the same way as my two favorite American artists, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. They may not have enjoyed so much commercial success in their lives. But, from an artistic point of view, if you try to name important musicians celebrating Americana — but not in the way ZZ Top or many other bands did — they were way off the beaten tracks.”

Ian Anderson’s 50 Years of Jethro Tull
When: 8 p.m. next Sunday

Where: San Diego Civic Theatre, 1100 Third Ave., downtown

Tickets: $56.50-$106.50, plus service charges

Online: ticketmaster.com

Bonus Q&A with Ian Anderson

Q: In a 1993 interview you told me that your daughter, Gael, had recently informed you that you were not playing the flute correctly. You replied at the time to her: “What do you mean? Who’s the flute player around here?” Then you told me: “And she was right! I knew my technique was unorthodox, but it was horribly unorthodox….Happily, three months later, while you’ll hear one or two wrong notes – which I can only apologize for – you’ll also hear me play 2,000 or 3,000 other notes, many of which will sound a lot more tuneful than you’ve heard me play before.”

So, here we are 26 years later and I’m reminded of a quote attributed to Vladimir Horowitz: “If you don’t practice for a day, you know it; if you don’t practice for a few days, your wife knows it; and, if you don’t practice for a week, the whole world knows it.” How often do you practice, and what do you practice?

A: Well, first of all, the quotes are entirely appropriate and, indeed, that was an illustrative moment in my flute playing career when I realized I really had to do quite a bit of work. Something you take for granted, like riding a bike or brushing your teeth, there are better ways to ride and more hygienic ways to brush your teeth. And flute playing has turned out like that. Over the years, it have given me pause to play flute in a (certain) way… which is to play as amateur musician, (for which) I don’t get paid and it’s for fun. That is something I do virtually every day. I still tend to pick up the flute and play it once or twice a day for fun. It is fun. But, intentionally or not, it is practice, because you are keeping your physical engagement with this instrument alive. And, mentally, you have to be pushing yourself to remember complex passages of music in order to notice if you are slightly fluffing any notes.

James Galway told me some years ago that, as he got older, he had to practice a lot more than he did to begin with, just to stay at the level expected of him when he performs solo, or with an accompanist, or a concert with an orchestra. The demands are considerable. And I suppose in his line of work, the criticism will be pretty relentless if he has an off night, just as poor, old Pavarotti couldn’t deal with the hammering he got later in life, so he would cancel performances. That’s especially sad for singers — no one is great all the time, even if you’re Pavarotti (and) even with a sore throat, it wouldn’t negate the pleasure of giving people a concert.

But, of course, you’ll have to expect someone will be a trained opera critic and will take you to task. It’s either that or (cancel) the show, which I tend not to do, but Pavarotti did. You have to accept you’ll never be at your best and your best may start off like mine or somebody else’s, (at) 75 percent, but that’s as good as it will get.

Q: Do you alternate flute practice with vocal practice?

A: I tend to check my voice every day. Because, since I’ve been a child, I’ve been susceptible to throat and chest infections.

Q: Last year, two versions of the band Yes did a 50th anniversary tour with overlapping dates. This year, you are embarked on the second year of Ian Anderson’s 50 Years of Jethro Tull tour, while the Martin Barre Band is embarked on a “Celebrates 50 years of Jethro Tull” tour.” Fair play? Confusing?

A: I would hope it would not be too confusing to people who know anything about the band. But Martin was in Jethro Tull for – goodness me! – from 1969 to 2011. And much of that music, as a musician, it’s his inheritance to have that as kind of an asset for him. And something I always said to him, years before the new millennium, was: “Martin, you should get out and so some concerts and tours under your own name, doing Tull’s music as instrumentals. Given that the guitar parts are quite iconic you can go out and make it your own.” But he was a bit of a slow-starter and he didn’t get to grips with it until two, three or four years ago. I think he realized time was running out and he had to step up

It’s great he’s out there doing that. Perhaps what’s not so great is he felt the obligation to have a flute player and singer, so it did come across a bit as a cover band, with Martin as the central figure, when it should be about him and his guitar playing.

Q: You are a big fan of the late Frank Zappa. Did you know him?

A: I never met Frank and, sadly, never got the chance to, because he was in bad shape for the last weeks of his life. I got a message, shortly before he died, saying: “Frank would like you to call him.” I was staggered, because I thought Frank hated Tull from some comments he made in the 1970s – which, frankly, hurt me a lot, because I was a big fan of his, so to hear he wanted me to call him, knowing he was a dying man, I wasn’t sure what he wanted to say to me. I dialed the number three times over a period of a week and hung up each time, because I couldn’t face up to having to cope with someone in that position and not knowing what he was going to say. Maybe he was going to say: “I really loved your music and I’m sorry we didn’t get a chance to meet.” Or maybe he would have said: “I wanted to let you know, before I died, how much I still hate Tull’s music.”

Who knows? I never will. I couldn’t bring myself to have that conversation with someone on his deathbed.

[maddogfagin]

www.sentinelandenterprise.com/community/ci_32715725


Anderson weaving a tale of Tull
Peter Larsen, Southern CaliforniaNews
UPDATED: 07/05/2019 10:32:18 AM EDT


(Nick Harrison / Lowell Sun)

Ian Anderson is a natural-born storyteller, but spend five decades as the flute-playing, occasionally cod-piece-wearing frontman of Jethro Tull, and yeah, you'll have some stories to tell.

Anderson, who called from his office in England recently to talk about his upcoming shows, is continuing the celebration of Jethro Tull's 50th anniversary, which kicked off last year — 50 years after the band's first gigs at Marquee Club in London — and continue this year to celebrate 50 years since Tull made its live debut in the United States.

"We did three U.S. tours in 1969," Anderson says. "Early spring, I think July, and then again later in the year."

"As a child growing up in the U.K. shortly after the end of World War II, we were brought up on a diet of all things American," he says.

"American comics, American TV programs, if you were lucky enough to have a television in those days back in the U.K.

"And so we grew up with a steady diet, I suppose, of appreciation and envy of this incredibly brash and culturally exciting world."

The tour billed as Ian Anderson's 50 Years of Jethro Tull — he's been the sole original member since Martin Barre left in 2012 — heads to Europe, then returns for a gig at Mohegan Sun in mid-September.

Since Anderson, 71, is so good at spinning a tale, we decided to get out of the way and let him talk about everything from why Jethro Tull decided to pass on playing Woodstock to how Anderson ended up a rock-and-roll flautist in the first place — Eric Clapton is responsible for it, he says.

But we'll start with their very first U.S. shows when Tull opened for another British band.

1) Opening for Led Zeppelin: "We were in that invidious position of going on before one of the world's most loved and appreciated bands, musically speaking. So it was a tough opening act to do, but I think generally speaking we did OK.

"The first couple of times we had 35 minutes to try and show that we were not complete idiots, and we obviously managed to do OK since we were invited to do it again and again."

2) Taking a Page from Jimmy: "The Zeppelins, they were a good act to open for because you really had to learn, and you could learn from them a lot of useful tricks about stage presentation and dynamics.

"Generally speaking on a good night they were the best band in the world," says Anderson. "There was always something fresh to learn from watching them, except for me watching Robert Plant because he was in a class of his own. I couldn't learn anything from him because I couldn't dream of doing that kind of performance, either the macho bare-chested kind of strutting or the incredible operatic range of his voice. I learned perhaps more from the way Jimmy Page presented himself, his little bit of theatrical stuff, bowing his guitar with a violin bow, for example."

3) Playing Newport Jazz '69: "The jazz festival was a fairly staid affair, and not really a great venue for Jethro Tull. It had a night that was dedicated more to blues, well, non-folky, more electric music, but I'm not sure for most of the audience we were a welcome component of the lineup or not. But I do remember (jazz multi-instrumentalist Rahsaan) Roland Kirk coming backstage and saying hello to because he'd heard I'd recorded music by him on our first album. It meant a lot to me that he sought me out."

4) Skipping Woodstock: "I said, 'What's the sort of shape of this festival, what kind of people are going to be there?' (Our manager) said, 'I think it's going to all be naked hippies taking drugs.' So I said, 'Well, I think actually I can be washing my hair that day,' because back then I used to have quite a lot of it so it was a plausible excuse.' I didn't feel it was the right thing for Jethro Tull so early in our career to be fixed with that label of being a hippie band."

5) Coming to America: "The American boy (at Anderson's primary school) used to give me his American comics once he read them, so I grew up knowing about all the things that were on the back page, all the sort of postal ads that you could off and get anything from a plastic Elvis ukulele to a 'Wynn' bicycle.

"And BB guns, which fascinated me. Of course, we'd seen lots of cowboy movies — that rather Midwestern kind of more rural America was the America that I thought was what it was until in my mid-teenage years when I was listening to jazz and blues. Then it was the upper Midwest — the Chicago thing became my sort of vague awareness of American, and through jazz musicians a little bit of New York."

6) Messing with Texas: "The thing that impacted on me most of all about the USA was you couldn't just talk about 'the USA' in the way that you might talk about Germany or Switzerland or Spain. Because America's like five or six different countries in terms of social and cultural differences, as well as in terms of topography and the physical geography of that big chunk of a continent," says Anderson.

7) Learning from Eric Clapton: "Like many of my peers I was a teenager who fantasized about being a guitar player, and perhaps a singer. And so my first two or three years were doing that.

"But then a bad thing happened. I bought an album by John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, featuring a new guitar player by the name of Eric Clapton, and I thought, 'I think I better find something else to play.' And so in the summer of 1967, I traded in my Fender Strat guitar."

8) Selling a special guitar: "Being a 1960s vintage Strat, apart from being owned by me it was also previously owned by Lemmy Kilmister — then from Rev Black and the Rocking Vicars — but of course more famous for Motörhead. He'd owned it before me, it's a vintage Strat, so this guitar for sure would have to be worth £30,000, £40,000 today," says Anderson. "But I traded it in for a £30 Shure Unidyne III microphone, which I rather coveted, it looked rather sexy. And for the balance — What do I want? — I saw this shiny flute hanging on the wall (for £30 pounds). So for £60 I got myself a real made-in-Chicago microphone and a student flute I couldn't play."

9) Figuring out the flute: "I had a go at it; I couldn't get a note out of it. About four months later, December of '67, I thought I'd give another try, see if I could get a noise out of it, and all of a sudden a note popped out of it: 'Ooh, that's how you do it!' And then I got another note. Soon I had five notes. And I had the pentatonic blues scale, and I could play solos and riffs," says Anderson.

10) Going on 50 years: "It stood us in good stead over the years, and over the years I've come to really enjoy the flute much more than when I started. I can do a lot of stuff that I couldn't do before, but I can still do the stuff I did in the first week that I was playing it. That way of playing never leaves you. I can do that in my sleep, which sometimes I do. It keeps me awake at night."

[JTull 007]

                                              Ian Anderson:     LINK 
  "Jethro Tull born in times of dreamers, today we lack powerful ideas"
        The group Tuesday, July 16th at 9 pm, on the stage of the Arena del Mare
           the "50th Anniversary Tour",   presenting the best of the repertoire
                                                    Claudio Cabona 15 JULY 2019

Genoa - On 2 February 1968, in the rock temple of the Marquee Club in London, Jethro Tull
performed for the first time with this name, later becoming one of the greatest progressive
rock bands of all time. The group led by Ian Anderson , on Tuesday 16th July at 9 pm,
will celebrate the "50th Anniversary Tour" on the stage of the Arena del Mare, presenting
the best of their repertoire. "Locomotive breath", "Aqualung", "Thick as a brick",
"Too old to rock and roll: too young to die" will accompany the audience on a timeless journey.
The live is part of "Goazilla", a new review curated by the Goa-Boa festival
                                                                    and dedicated to the "sacred monsters" of music. 

Mister Anderson, how hard is it to summarize 50 years of music in a concert?

"One must have the lucidity to work in two directions. The first makes happy the old fans,
those who know us from the beginning, who remember our first records. For this we will dust
off old songs and rarities: it will be a retrospective. The second must necessarily look towards the
            boys born in the 90s, who have not experienced the best of the classic 60s-70s rock.
                             It is necessary and important to let him discover it with freshness ».

Why do young people have a fascination for that period according to you?

«It could not be otherwise. It was the years of immortal rock. How can you not understand
what animated Jimi Hendrix or Led Zeppelin? But above all what I have known for a long time
                        is a renewed interest in the live dimension, a sort of new curiosity ».

Why don't they know those sounds?

"Exact. Today's kids, listening mainly to rap, between synthesizers and PCs, at some point
they are hungry to hear how a rock piece sounds, listening to it live. With our lives we try to bring
new generations into that world. Like in music I also love contaminations in the public.
Seeing a boy next to a sixty-year-old gentleman generates a mix of emotions and inspirations ».

Do you like rap?

"It's what I call" spoken music ". He certainly has a strong tradition, for example I think of America.
But I like music to touch it, I love playing, I always create different sounds with instruments.
              Break the patterns.       Rock for me is real, it's real life, it doesn't float in the air ».

Does rock still have the capacity for renewal?

«He took the same path as classical music. Let me explain: the classic Brahms had an innovator,
an artist capable of going beyond the fences. The genre, also thanks to those who dared, touched
the top, coming to produce music that has come to this day. Rock did the same: in the 60s and 70s
there was the sacred fire, then came the 80s where pop began to "distract" people.
At that time it was heavy metal that somehow resisted. Then the new blood: Nirvana, Pearl Jam,
very different from everything that had been there before, but they were there. Today that capacity
     for renewal seems weakened. There is nothing around that has the same charge as the years
                      I mentioned, so the rock and the classic seem to have a common destiny ».

So "going beyond the fences", as you say, is somehow also linked to the era in which you live?

"We are children of Neil Armstrong's dream of going to the moon, pushing the limits. Now people
seem to be asleep. Do you see dreams so powerful today, capable of breaking boredom and normality? "

The beginnings of Jethro Tull?

«I was a kid, grew up listening to different types of music, there was a lot of quality blues at that time,
but I had to go looking for it. The scene was limited to what came on the charts. When I thought of
                 a definitive job for my life, it hardly occurred to me that I could live playing.
           I said to myself: around the age of thirty-five I will have to stop,  leave the stage.
      We didn't do it for money.    We just wanted to express ourselves and somehow survive ».