Ian Anderson interviews

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www.theday.com/article/20190915/ENT10/190919867

Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson speaks freely before Sun concert
Published September 15. 2019 12:01AM

By Rick Koster Day staff writer

Who knows how many interviews Ian Anderson has done over the course of his half-century career? As the flute-brandishing front man, hyper-literate poet-in-residence and deftly complex structural architect of Jethro Tull, Anderson oversaw the creation of such genre-spanning and -spawning (and hugely-selling) progressive rock records like "Aqualung," "Thick as a Brick," "A Passion Play," "Heavy Horses," "Songs from the Wood," "A Minstrel in the Gallery," "Crest of a Knave" and many more.

What question(s) could a journalist possibly ask that Anderson hasn't heard before? Particularly since multiple press phoners have been ongoing with the artist in preparation for the multi-date "Jethro Tull the 50th Anniversary Tour by Ian Anderson," which lands tonight in the Mohegan Sun Arena?

Well, as one of rock's wittiest and most eloquent stars, Anderson has anticipated this problem. Publicists provide prospective interviewers with a comprehensive list of questions/answers that Anderson has already dealt with myriad times. This is indeed helpful and gives the writer advance opportunity to think of at least a few unharvested topics prior to the conversation. The current lineup, for example, includes guitarist Florian Opahle, drummer Scott Hammond, bassist David Goodier and keyboardist John O'Hara.

On the appointed date in late August, the phone rings and, yes, that mellifluous baritone voice — far more John Barrymore than any Cockney Rock Dude — says, "Hi, this is Ian Anderson. Apologies for being (five minutes) late, but you're the last one of the day's schedule, so we have a few minutes ..."

The problem is, as the writer finds out, Anderson doesn't really require questions anymore. He just starts ... talking. He speaks fast but in a pleasant tone of voice, and the filibuster begins in response to the journalist's polite "How are you doing, Ian?"

"I'm fine," he assures. The journalist is hoping to immediately ask about the difficulty in choosing an anniversary tour setlist that representatively reflects the many stages of Tull's history — but Anderson is already expounding on health and, in general, the process of aging in society. He says, "I hate this idea that people are pushed, through cultural and economic pressure, to retire at 65. Older people have appreciably more to give in terms of productivity, and there's the issue of their dignity, as well. I'm 72 years old and still working and fortunate to be in a line of work that enables me to do that. If I was a British Airways pilot, I'd have been given my notice. It's strange. I think we can provide quite a bit of guidance and advice to younger people ..."

Anderson has the well-reasoned logic of a veteran debater, as well as the inclination to pounce on a topic and wrestle it to the ground. The reporter is hopefully wondering how and if this line of thought might suddenly hopscotch into an explanation of Jethro Tull's incredibly creative and innovative approach to arena show staging.

"Mr. Anderson," it would be fun to say, "what about the time you had a silent telephone on a footstool at the lip of the stage for the entire 'Passion Play' concert — something audience members couldn't ever quite NOT notice, which was of course the whole idea — and only, as you'd finished the encore and the house lights went up and people were getting up to leave, only THEN did the phone ring! Loudly over the PA. We were all frozen in shock. And you picked up the reciever, nodded your head and, leaning into the still-live vocal mic, extended the phone towards the crowd and said, 'It's for you!' Who came up with that?"

Unfortunately, Anderson is now expressing hope that the younger generation will "manage our resources — planetary and food supply but also the forces of government because we have so many extremes today. There's Trumpism, of course, and now we have something equally calculated over here (with Boris Johnson): pushy, braggy and devoted to the creation of unnecessary divisions as a means to an end ... well, I have to be careful what I say about Trump or I won't get the visa for that leg of the tour. Same with Putin for when we tour Russia next year ..."

With that, in much the same fashion that, onstage and performing complex compositions like "Velvet Green" or "Living in the Past," Anderson deftly segues between delivering polysyllabic lyrics and blasting into rabid-hare flute runes, the musician smoothly downshifts without a moment's break.

"There IS one Republican I'd have liked to see as President; unfortunately, he died," Anderson says. "His name was Tony Snow. He was a press guy for both Bush administrations and much loved on both sides of the aisle, back when that was still possible. He was a dear friend and, like me, a flute player. That's how we met. He was a dyed-in-the-wool ideological Republican, which has become a very different thing, and he was utterly genuine and a humanitarian ... We argued a lot about a lot of things, but it was in a good spirited way with mutual respect and the sense that we both might learn something ..."

The fact of the matter is that, while there have been no great truths or revelations about Jethro Tull in the "conversation," Anderson IS damned entertaining and intriguing to listen to. It occurs to the reporter than Anderson would have been an excellent teacher or even a politician, which, if just a few musical questions could be dispensed with, might be a fun avenue to pursue —

— but while that thought is percolating, Anderson has somehow managed to seque onto the topic of religion and spirituality. Now, this is in fact something significantly related to many of the themes of both "A Passion Play" and "Aqualung" and other Tull recordings. Anderson is explaining that, while he adheres to the ethical and moral teachings of Christianity, he himself is not a quote/unquote believer.

"I like the idea of not being sure — the mystery, if you will — and there's something very intriguing about not having the total faith but rather a fascination with the possibilty," Anderson says. "I might be a three or even a six in terms of belief — NOT a zero or ten, based on rather pragmatic signs and reality and research into spiritually, and speaking intelligently with people committed one way or another. In a lot of ways, (Jethro Tull's music) is a conduit to people who might not go into the doors of a church but are curious and want to consider the spiritual."

Ah, that IS a bit of a musical allusion, and Anderson follows by explaining he's happy to do benefit concerts for certain of British cathedrals that are on the verge of bankruptcy. (Note: An early Tull album is called "Benefit," though Anderson has long dismissed it as being a remnant of the band's blues-riff origins a la Cream and not reflective of the identity they'd forge. Still, a connection is a connection.)

"I've played two benefits because they're in tremendous trouble," Anderson elaborated. "And, though I don't have the Faith with a capital F, I'm happy to help pay the heating bills because I DO have a sneaking suspicion ..."

Anderson, in fact, is active in a variety of charities and, as he speaks, alludes to a few including the Polyphony Foundation (helping young classical musicians); Shatil (an organization supporting a just, democratic and shared soceity in Israel); Population Matters (helping women across the globe make informed choices); and Scotland's Oak and Furrows Wildlife Fund. He's clearly passionate about all these things.

Suddenly, out of nowhere, Anderson cheerily says, "Well, listen. Did you have a musical question before I go off to supper with my children and grandchildren?"

There are several questions, if fact — the same ones as from the start of the interview. But it HAS been interesting. Somewhat randomly, Anderson is asked if there was a particular text of British folklore — "The Golden Bough," perhaps — that inspired the acoustic/medieval tones of the "Songs From the Wood," "Heavy Horses," "Stormwatch" trilogy.

"Not really, nothing like that," Anderson says, and then somehow twists the answer to "A Passion Play," describing it as a "tongue-in-cheek look at the stereotypes of Good and Bad, and that we should be able to look at the concept of the afterlife with a bit of a smile on our faces, be it good OR bad ... That we should be pleased with where we are without worrying about trying for a speedy boarding pass to the beyond or VIP access at the Pearly Gates." He laughs. "I think I'll just amble up and say, 'Any chance for a room at the inn?' And St. Peter will say, 'Nope. No room right now.' And that's OK."

As he's saying goodbye, Anderson does have a quick thought. "I hope you'll come to the show," he says. "We'll do a nice variety and have a fond, nostalgic look back — but we'll defiitely set it in the culture of the day so as to appeal to a variety of generations."

[JTull 007]

    THE MINSTREL SPEAKS: JETHRO TULL’S IAN ANDERSON   LINK 1 
This interview was conducted in the summer of 2013 and recorded with the help of
  the good people at The Studio, 45 Casco Street in Portland, Maine—Portland’s
number- one resource for all things audio since 1981. Ian Anderson will be performing
           Thick as a Brick and Thick as a Brick 2 together in their entirety on two dates
            this autumn in New England: October 12th at the Wang Theater in Boston,
                                    and October 13th at the State Theater in Portland, Maine.
 TO LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW IN ITS ENTIRETY, CLICK HERE   LINK 2 

 (Please note: it is a large file and will take several seconds to download.)

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www.express.co.uk/entertainment/music/1421663/Ian-anderson-jethro-tull-tour-world-venues-touring

Jethro Tull's legendary Ian Anderson is ready to tour again this year
HE HAS sold more than 60 million albums and played the world's most prestigious venues, but Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson isn't even the biggest star in his own family.
By GARRY BUSHELL
PUBLISHED: 13:44, Sun, Apr 11, 2021 | UPDATED: 13:44, Sun, Apr 11, 2021

“My level of fame is nothing compared to my son-in-law’s,” the progressive rock legend tells me. He means Andrew Lincoln, the English actor best known as Rick Grimes in TV zombie thriller The Walking Dead, who married his daughter Gael in 2006. “I’ve been an interested observer of his career,” Ian continues. “You see how fame affects someone’s life. You’re no longer a private person; in public places, streets and restaurants, you become fair game.

“He’s very patient and friendly with people who want selfies and autographs even when it gets embarrassing. Luckily where they live there’s no intrusion. He doesn’t get zombie fans at his front door.”

Ian, 73 – fondly remembered for wearing a cod-piece on stage and standing on one leg to play the flute – has experienced worse.

“When I’d become reasonably well-known, we had some very undesirable people turning up at our house,” he says. “People with criminal records; they were quite threatening to my wife and our son and daughter. We’re fortunate, our local media don’t draw attention to where we live now, and local folk respect our privacy too.”

Home is “in Wiltshire, not too far from Swindon. My wife lives not too far from Cirencester… It’s the same house, but we refer to it differently.”

Ian married second wife Shona, a former PR and the cousin of the Duchess of Rutland, in 1976.

“My wife doesn’t like towns; she likes Waitrose in Cirencester,” he grins. “I’m a public transport guy, she isn’t. The highlight of our week at the moment is getting masked and gelled and heading to Waitrose for the grocery shopping.”

Jethro Tull, who took their name from a radical 17th-century agricultural pioneer, have released 21 studio albums in their 53-year career, including 1971’s multiplatinum Aqualung. Two of their singles, Living In The Past and The Witch’s Promise, went Top 5.

Ian, the only constant member, still gets mobbed at venues and events.
“I don’t mind selfies as long as people know how to work their cameras. I don’t mind signing either but I draw the line when people turn up with their record collection and expect you to sign the lot in the rain...”

Encounters with the public can be risky. He had a pint of urine tipped over his head – possibly by a flute-ophobe – as he waited to play New York’s Shea Stadium, and had to perform “stinking of another man’s pee”.

Dunfermline-born Ian estimates he has performed fan favourites such as Locomotive Breath live more than 3,800 times.

Tull’s first gig was at London’s Marquee Club in 1968. Ian’s bug-eyed stage persona quickly caught attention. The one-legged flute-playing was unplanned, though. “I used to play the harmonica on one leg and the flute on two, but after a reviewer wrote that I played the flute on one leg, I dutifully started to do it and it stuck,” he chuckles.

“I play naked under the cod-piece... I’ve had to replace it several times. I had a collection but they’ve all gone. They were in a drawer until about 10 years ago and have mysteriously disappeared. My wife denies any involvement...

“My rather sexy stage tights vanished too – and they were designed for me by the costumier of the Royal Ballet.”

He has no memorabilia at home. “I’ve had gold albums and other material demonstrations of your greatness, but they’re not something I need to see every day. They’ve mostly gone to charity auctions.

“I regret not having the old overcoat my father gave me. It was stolen from our dressing room in Detroit on our first US tour in 1969.”

One of his stage outfits is on display in the Rock and Roll Hall Of Fame “on a mannequin of me next to one of Rod Stewart”, he grumbles. “I don’t know if they shrink the clothes when they clean them but we look like two very tiny men! It makes us look shorter than Keith Richards.” At 5ft 10in, Ian is two inches taller.

As a child growing up in Blackpool, Ian wanted to become a fighter pilot “then reality prevailed and I realised I wasn’t made of that heroic stuff, although I did try and enrol as a police cadet.

They were interested until I told them I had O-levels. Just as well, as I have sensitive skin and those rough trousers would have chaffed, and I’d have had to be excused boots.”

He tried journalism too “but the Blackpool Gazette showed me the door”.

Ian accepts the “prog rock” tag reluctantly. “Prog isn’t a term I use, because it became synonymous with bombast and indulgence after 1972 with Peter Gabriel dressed as a giant sunflower... it became a little bit silly. I considered us to be progressive rock.”

His songs are complex with odd time signatures and folky harmonies. Some are self-mocking, others address social issues, but he says “I’m singing as the character, not myself – much as in the thespian world, the singer has to take on roles too. Too many make it all about themselves, we’re supposed to be interested in their grotty lives.”

The fruits of Ian’s labours include an 18th-century estate largely set in 500 rolling acres of woodland.

“We’ve planted 25,000 trees over 15 years and we will plant another 10,000 hardwood trees, mostly oak trees – this was once part of an oak forest.”

His most unusual possession is a handgun from a James Bond film – “a Walther P88 with the serial number 007 and a horrible trigger pull”.

Ian has performed at the world’s most prestigious venues, from Carnegie Hall to historic amphitheatres, and plays fund-raising Christmas shows in churches and cathedrals to help restoration work.

Bradford Cathedral has the best acoustics, he says but “St Paul’s and Liverpool aren’t workable, the architects should have been shot”.

He has 64 concerts scheduled for this year “which could happen – including an outdoor show in summer and a UK tour in September”.

He’s used lockdown to complete his first official lyric book, Silent Singing (out in July) and to play remotely on albums by Yes’s Jon Anderson (no relation) and Marc Almond.

Ian will work with unknown artists too. “If it’s out of my comfort zone I’ll do it. I like to be challenged even if it’s not my cup of tea.

[nonrabbit]

"Home is “in Wiltshire, not too far from Swindon. My wife lives not too far from Cirencester… It’s the same house, but we refer to it differently.”"

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www.ultimate-guitar.com/

Ian Anderson Recalls How Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi Behaved When He Was in Jethro Tull, Talks What He Felt Beating Metallica for Metal Grammy
The frontman also looks back on big Eric Clapton disappointment.
Posted 20 hours ago



During an appearance on BBC Radio, Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson looked back on some of the interesting moments from the band's history, including Black Sabbath guitar master Tony Iommi's brief stint in Tull, the Metallica Grammy fiasco, and more.

Iommi was a member of Jethro Tull for a few weeks in 1968. He performed with the band on The Rolling Stones Rock N' Roll Circus, but only by miming along to the band's studio footage. Tony was replaced by Martin Barre, who ultimately became the band's second-longest-serving member, right after Mr. Anderson.

When the interviewer said, "How did that [Iommi stint] come about and why was that short-lived? To me, it seems obvious because your chalk and cheese of what he then went on to become and the roots you took, but how was that union come about?", Ian replied (transcribed by UG):

"Well, it was chalk and cheese also in terms of what Jethro Tull had been in that first eight months or so of being Jethro Tull when Mick Abrahams was the guitar player in the band, being a great blues guitarist and singer.

"We had been very much put into that pigeon hole of being a little old blues band with a slight quirky oddity of having a flute placed in the middle, and wobble around on one leg.

"But it was definitely chalk-and-cheese with what would have happened if Tony had become a permanent member of the band because his musical style was completely different to mix, and he certainly - you wouldn't call Tony then or now 'a blues guitarist.'

"He didn't do all those licks and play that sort of stuff, he was very monophonic - big single-note things. And the band that he played with, called Earth, who then became subsequently Black Sabbath, he was just so different.

"But it would have radically changed the way Jethro Tull's music had gone, it would have changed the way I wrote songs because the batch of songs that became our second album 'Stand Up' in 1969. I ran through a couple of things with Tony and it seems it was not his cup of tea, the shape of those songs that I was working on.

"But he was a great guy and I was enamored of his guitar playing when Earth played with Jethro Tull at some gig in a university, somewhere around, I think, November of 1968. And I just thought, 'Wow, that that guy might well have something to offer.'

"And indeed he did, he offered it to the world. And he lives not too far away from me. And the scary thing is Tony still looks like Tony! Whereas I don't look like me."

Ian was then asked about the "Metallica Grammy incident," referring to Jethro Tull winning the 1989 Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental, beating Metallica and their "...And Justice for All" album. The musician commented:

"Well, it's an embarrassing thing because the record company had along with probably every act on the label had pushed us forward to be in the nominations for a Grammy that year, and I think people were just so shocked and surprised.

"Nobody really said anything on the Grammys that, 'Oh, well, don't worry, they're not going to win.' And the fact is - if I'd been there to a crazed full house of booze and hisses and 'how dare they,' it would have been interesting.

"I have no idea what I would have said when I walked up there but I did subsequently meet Alice Cooper, who was the guy who was pushed on to accept on our behalf the Grammy [and also co-hosted the award with Lita Ford], that we shouldn't have won.

"And I said, 'What did it feel like?' Alice said, 'It was just the worst moment of my life. As if it was my fault you won the Grammy!'

"But I live in hope that there'll be another new category in the Grammy award system, sooner or later they're bound to bite the bullet, do the obvious thing, and have a new category for the Best One-Legged Flute Player."

And then Metallica will win it.
"Yeah, that would be great, wouldn't it?"

Check out the album Jethro Tull defeated Metallica with here via Amazon.
Jethro Tull is quite a unique name. It's the old agriculturalist, is that right?
"Well, I know all about that now, but when our agent suggested it back in 1968, I thought he made the name up. I thought it was just some funny name.

"But it just so happened we stuck with it. Maybe two or three weeks after that, I then learned to my horror that we've been named after a dead guy who invented a seed drill, which didn't seem like a passport to instant success with the audiences of the day.

"But they, like I, probably didn't do history or that period of history at school, so they were oblivious to it as well."

What were some of the names that fell by the wayside, or even some of the worst names that didn't make it?
"Well, the first time we played at the Marquee was under the John Evan Band name. We might have appeared as Ian Henderson's Bag o' Nails, a misprint of Anderson. Whatever gives us the gig - I'll be whoever you want, even Jethro."

You've chosen a Cream song [to be played live on the radio during the show], and I don't think there's any debate, they had the ultimate grumpy man in [drummer] Ginger Baker in there. Films and documentaries were made about his grumpiness.
"I actually performed with his grumpiness, sadly on one of the very last times, I think, he attached himself to a drum kit, which was at the commemorative tribute concert for Jack Bruce who'd passed on the previous year [in 2014].

"And surprisingly to me, Ginger Baker turned up because, of course, Jack and Ginger were just constantly at loggerheads in Cream. And Eric Clapton, who was the peacemaker, we are told, and seemed to be the guy who steadied the ship, he didn't come along.

"And I was rather disappointed he didn't because I think Jack deserved to have Eric there rather than Ginger, who unfortunately just threw tantrums all the time and stormed often in the finale halfway through 'Sunshine of Your Love.'

"He just got off his drum kit and left. So his grumpiness was in the true to form that day. I didn't know Ginger personally, but I had to go and plead with him to just calm down and come back to the drum kit, which he did at halftime, in the intermission.

"But unfortunately, in the end, he lost it again and threw a big wobbler, and off he went, so it wasn't a great fitting end. But I suppose Jack would have been chuckling in his beard to see Ginger true to form."

link

[JTull 007]

               IAN ANDERSON ON JETHRO TULLS 'ROOTS', BAND NAME,
             TONY IOMMI, GRAMMY AWARDS WITH METALLICA & MORE
   
       IN A NEW INTERVIEW WITH PLANET ROCKS WYATT WENDELS HE CHATS WITH
 IAN ANDERSON OF JETHRO TULL FAME WERE HE TALKS ABOUT JETHRO TULLS ROOTS,
                     BAND NAME , ONY IOMMI, VAN MORRISON, GINGER BAKER,
                                  THE METALLICA GRAMMY AWARDS & MORE.

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Jethro Tull remix deluxe – ‘A’ is for Anderson
Bill DeYoung Published 6 days ago on April 28, 2021By Bill DeYoung

We clicked into Zoom Tuesday to chat with none other than rock singer, songwriter and flute player extraordinaire Ian Anderson, who was on the other side of the Atlantic. The subject was A, the 1980 Jethro Tull album, the latest in the legendary British band’s catalog to receive a sparkling new remix by Steven Wilson.

A was a transitional record for Jethro Tull, at that time one of the highest-grossing touring bands in the world. After a string of platinum albums, from Aqualung and A Passion Play to Songs From the Wood and Heavy Horses, Anderson felt something else was brewing.

“We’d been on the road continuously for 10 years,” says the enigmatic and erudite frontman, “doing multiple tours every year. And if we weren’t on the road, we were in the studio recording a new album. So we were all getting a little frazzled, and wanting to have a bit of time off – to do other things, to be with family. Time off to pursue some hobbies and fanciful projects.”

And so A began life as a side project, a solo album, with Anderson recording with one of his favorite musicians of the day, keyboard, synthesizer and violin player Eddie Jobson (Frank Zappa, Roxy Music, U.K.) Jobson bought in drummer Mark Craney, and the bass position was filed by Dave Pegg, who just joined Tull for touring but hadn’t yet recorded with the band.

At some point during the sessions, someone said “This needs guitar,” and the call went out to Tull stalwart Martin Barre, who at first demurred, then signed on.

Despite Jobson’s swirly keyboards and synthesizers, which along with a lot of fast time changes gave some songs a pronounced “prog” feel, the end result sounded – wouldn’t you know it – like a Jethro Tull album.

The record company, Anderson explains, urged him to call it just that. “They said ‘This is going to be a tough sell. If you want to sell some records – if want us to do what we can do – we need to call it Jethro Tull.’ I allowed myself to be persuaded.”

And then, he says, he had to tell the other three members of the “real” Tull that there was a new gang in town.

Although it wasn’t well-received at the time, critically or commercially, A benefits from Wilson’s “cleaning up, thinking hard and re-assembling” the multi-track tapes.

Also in this interview, Anderson discusses future projects in the Wilson series, including the much-loved album The Broadsword and the Beast, and the controversial Under Wraps. He also ponders when he’ll be able to return to live performance.

See the interview here

[JTull 007]

jethro tull programa shock tv manchete 1988
Over the years Ian has expressed his disapproval of 'Hippies' many times for many reasons.
However this comment in 1988 sounds rather hypocritical by saying he "HATES HIPPIES"

Without 'HIPPIES" TULL would have begun their career with far less notice and popularity.
Perhaps if Ian had looked less like one during the 60's & 70's audiences would be less impressed.

[Equus]

May 9, 2021 16:26:19 GMT JTull 007 said:

jethro tull programa shock tv manchete 1988
Over the years Ian has expressed his disapproval of 'Hippies' many times for many reasons.
However this comment in 1988 sounds rather hypocritical by saying he "HATES HIPPIES"

Without 'HIPPIES" TULL would have begun their career with far less notice and popularity.
Perhaps if Ian had looked less like one during the 60's & 70's audiences would be less impressed.

Okay, so Ian doesn’t like hippies… Okay, he hates them… but how exactly does he define a hippie? Is long hair enough? Must drugs be involved? Why exactly doesn’t he like them? Milos Forman, the director, didn’t like hippies, and he said that they were boring… Always smoking the dope cigarette… No energy… Anderson is a man of action… Maybe that’s one of the reasons for his dislike… He did look like them, but he wasn’t one of them… Far from it… The cover of This Was looks like some very stoned musicians… but I’m not sure…

[JTull 007]

May 11, 2021 8:54:06 GMT Equus said:

Okay, so Ian doesn’t like hippies… Okay, he hates them… but how exactly does he define a hippie?
Is long hair enough? Must drugs be involved? Why exactly doesn’t he like them?
Milos Forman, the director, didn’t like hippies, and he said that they were boring…
Always smoking the dope cigarette… No energy… Anderson is a man of action…
Maybe that’s one of the reasons for his dislike… He did look like them, but he wasn’t one of them…
Far from it… The cover of This Was looks like some very stoned musicians… but I’m not sure…

     As he said before.. "I HATE HIPPIES"     This appears as a HUGE STEREOTYPE by Ian himself.
Whether it includes people who party in other ways than he does or not, Ian creates a negative stereotype of all.
Of course in the 'Good Ole Days' 0f the 60's & 70's I'm sure he was bothered by onstage smoke....
                                       
                                                 His dislike of second hand smoke is quite obvious ...

[Equus]

May 11, 2021 10:40:15 GMT JTull 007 said:

May 11, 2021 8:54:06 GMT Equus said:

Okay, so Ian doesn’t like hippies… Okay, he hates them… but how exactly does he define a hippie?
Is long hair enough? Must drugs be involved? Why exactly doesn’t he like them?
Milos Forman, the director, didn’t like hippies, and he said that they were boring…
Always smoking the dope cigarette… No energy… Anderson is a man of action…
Maybe that’s one of the reasons for his dislike… He did look like them, but he wasn’t one of them…
Far from it… The cover of This Was looks like some very stoned musicians… but I’m not sure…

     As he said before.. "I HATE HIPPIES"     This appears as a HUGE STEREOTYPE by Ian himself.
Whether it includes people who party in other ways than he does or not, Ian creates a negative stereotype of all.
Of course in the 'Good Ole Days' 0f the 60's & 70's I'm sure he was bothered by onstage smoke....
                                       
                                                 His dislike of second hand smoke is quite obvious ...

Yes, it's a steriotype... 

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Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson - What Really Happened in His Hotel Suite After Shows
3,187 views•April 30, 2021

Rock History Music

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www.loudersound.com/

Why the early Beatles were dangerous, by Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson
By Ian Anderson (Classic Rock) about 2 hours ago

As young teen, Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson fell in love with the moptop Beatles. But then he dug deeper and discovered something darker, druggier and way more dangerous


The Beatles in Hamburg in 1962. L-R Pete Best, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and George Harrison (Image credit: Sammlung Horst Fascher - K & K/Getty Images)

Like most people my age outside of Liverpool, I had no real inkling of The Beatles until Love Me Do, by which time they had, to some degree, been sanitised by their traditionally showbiz-minded manager, Brian Epstein. No doubt he thought it necessary, to help the band get gigs, to get a record deal, and those first few hits were what you might call pretty songs. From Me To You, I Want To Hold Your Hand; it was all very innocent.

As their fame grew, however, and the back story of their earliest days became wider known, we cottoned on that this wasn’t how they started. We learned about the Cavern Club, and then we learned about their excursions to the seedy nightspots of Germany [in the early 60s]. With hindsight you could say Hamburg was The Beatles’ punk period, their edgy and dangerous days that were hard to square away with the almost chocolate-box pop proposition they became.

When I was schoolboy I was always attracted to John Lennon above the others, by a long way. Paul McCartney seemed to be the cheerful, cherubic, slightly wet character in the line-up, as if the band had had a Cliff Richard transplant. But John had attitude, a sense of disdain when it came to being groomed and made to dress in matching suits.

The first time I saw pictures of The Beatles in Hamburg, it struck me that here was Lennon in his natural habitat; leather-clad, greasy of quiff and with an air of menace. Photographs of that period are arguably more iconic than almost any subsequent images of the band.


Fans outside the Star Club, Hamburg, in 1962 (Image credit: K & K Ulf Kruger OHG/Getty Images)

Hamburg was a rude awakening for many English musicians, a dark place full of aggressive sailors, shifty characters and prostitutes. But in many ways The Beatles were primed for it, coming from a sea port themselves. These weren’t young boys from leafy Surrey, and Lennon in particular, you expect, was already familiar with the wrong side of the tracks in Liverpool.

He would have felt perfectly at home among the dinginess and squalor.In terms of what they faced at the likes of the Star Club or the Kaiserkeller, Lennon, at least, you’d think, was more than able to handle himself, and perhaps act as a protector of the others, the very young George Harrison in particular. It was a rough environment where they feasibly were met with resistance, so like the punks of the following decade they had to be brash and confrontational.

That brashness clearly manifested itself in the music they were playing. Fuelled by booze, and pills to keep them awake during sets that went on well into the early hours, they cut their teeth delivering approximations of Gene Vincent and Eddie Cochran, the moody bad boys whose records they would have bought a few short years earlier. Let’s not forget, however, that it wasn’t just Lennon leading the charge here; Hamburg is where McCartney honed the Little Richard howl he would continue to pull out of a drawer every so often throughout the band’s career.

The part Stuart Sutcliffe played in those fledgling days is a matter for debate, as while his creative contribution to the band’s music was minimal, his presence was helpful to the others. John, in particular, was close to Stuart, and having him around may well have given him more confidence to find himself, for his own character to evolve.



In terms of influencing others, the perception of The Beatles as bad boys in Hamburg is a bit of a misnomer – Lennon was probably the only one who’d be handy in a fight. The Rolling Stones were initially seen as ruffians, but that wasn’t so much an attempt to emulate the grubbiness of the formative Fab Four as it was a calculated reaction to their moptop image. Mick Jagger always looked too self-conscious to be considered a tough guy; he looked like he’d fall over if you blew on him.

Having their time in Hamburg as part of their biography worked well for The Beatles. It was interesting that they had that pedigree of being a bit vulgar, and not just fresh-faced youths who bowed to the Queen at Royal Variety Performances. You had to somehow prove your mettle if you were going to have credibility, and Lennon took that on into future aspects of his career, the bad-biker clone ultimately replaced by what was perceived by many as a mad, dangerous hippie. He never lost that element of dissent.

You could argue that McCartney worked the hardest to distance himself from the prickliness of the Hamburg days to become a more wholesome performer, while Lennon strived to hold on to his venom. That combination was what always appealed to me, though; the velvet glove covering the iron fist is what made The Beatles work so well.

link

[JTull 007]

   Ian Anderson Jethro Tull Interview 1987-11-19 MuchMusic Toronto
   
Laurie Brown from MuchMusic interviews Ian Anderson on November 11, 1987 in Toronto:

    In 1984 Brown had a cameo in the Corey Hart's video for "Sunglasses at Night"
   

[JTull 007]

OMG !!! THE BIG INTERVIEW Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson (2020) - 43 min
     LINK     Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson sits down with Dan Rather
                to talk about his five decades as a progressive rock idol.

[maddogfagin]

britpopnews.com/mick-jagger-called-weak-guy-by-legendary-singer/

Mick Jagger Called ‘Weak Guy’ By Legendary Singer
June 9, 2021 in Classic Rock, News

Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson revealed why Mick Jagger is not a tough guy and is pretty weak in a new Classic Rock interview.

“Mick Jagger always looked too self-conscious to be considered a tough guy – he looked like he’d fall over if you blew on him.

“Having their time in Hamburg as part of their biography worked well for The Beatles. It was interesting that they had that pedigree of being a bit vulgar, and not just fresh-faced youths who bowed to the Queen at Royal Variety Performances.

“You had to somehow prove your mettle if you were going to have credibility, and Lennon took that on into future aspects of his career, the bad-biker clone ultimately replaced by what was perceived by many as a mad, dangerous hippie. He never lost that element of dissent.

“You could argue that McCartney worked the hardest to distance himself from the prickliness of the Hamburg days to become a more wholesome performer, while Lennon strived to hold on to his venom.

“That combination was what always appealed to me, though; the velvet glove covering the iron fist is what made The Beatles work so well.”

[JTull 007]

Jun 10, 2021 6:09:22 GMT maddogfagin said:

britpopnews.com/mick-jagger-called-weak-guy-by-legendary-singer/

Mick Jagger Called ‘Weak Guy’ By Legendary Singer
June 9, 2021 in Classic Rock, News

Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson revealed why Mick Jagger is not a tough guy and is pretty weak in a new Classic Rock interview.

“Mick Jagger always looked too self-conscious to be considered a tough guy – he looked like he’d fall over if you blew on him.”

[maddogfagin]

www.nationalrockreview.com/interviews/jethro-tull-by-ian-anderson

A Few Moments With Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull
Brent Groh 12-Aug-2017 Interviews, Rock, US
On August 4, 2017, National Rock Review had the pleasure of speaking with flutist extraordinaire and lead vocalist Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull

Formed in 1968, British rock group Jethro Tull has released 30 albums, selling more than 60 million copies worldwide. The band has performed more than 3,000 concerts in 40 countries and is now preparing for an upcoming tour in the USA and Canada. Recently, National Rock Review sat down with Ian Anderson to discuss the new album The String Quartets, a collection of 12 reimagined Tull classics, Brexit, and what’s in the pipeline for Jethro Tull and Ian Anderson.

NRR: Good day, Mr. Anderson and welcome to National Rock Review. I’m 52 years old, so I grew up listening to Aqualung and Bungle in the Jungle as my first exposures to Jethro Tull. Can you explain the very unique and ahead of it’s time use of the “telephone burbles effect” on the vocals of Aqualung?
Anderson: Yes, it’s a very old vocals trick. The Beatles used it on Sgt. Peppers and it gives the vocal that megaphone type sound. Basically, you remove the frequencies above three kilohertz and below about 500 hertz, so you end up with a very narrow bandwidth. In the music trade, it’s commonly referred to telephone vocals as it sounds very much like the conversation we are having right now. I’ve used it quite a few times on tracks over the years, but it is just more obvious on the Aqualung song.

NRR: When you beat out Metallica to win the 1989 Grammy for “Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance”, do you feel that the band gained more acceptance from the metal genre after this?
Anderson: I feel Jethro Tull’s music appeals to people across the board. In fact, one of my musical guests on this year’s Christmas Cathedral Show is scheduled to be Joe Elliott, lead singer of Def Leppard, if he can make it. Also, performing with me a few years ago was Bruce Dickerson of Iron Maiden. These are just a couple of examples of people whose music would be considered hard rock or heavy metal. Artist of Soft Soul, grew up listening to Jethro Tull and wanting to be in a progressive rock band, but unfortunately, he just about missed the boat as progressive rock was dying and pop was taking over. Eddie Vedder, I’m told, is a huge Jethro Tull fan, who in 1989, when Pearl Jam were becoming a major band, said that he grew up listening to Jethro Tull and we played a big part in the various influences that he had. I often think that we appeal across the board. We do have songs that are hard rock or heavy metal, but I also have ones that are classical, jazz, blues or even modern folk/acoustic music influenced. I am much more of a broad brush when it comes to music. I don’t have a narrow band of musical genre that I work into the exclusion of everything else.

NRR: Recently, Brits voted to opt out of the European Union, how do you feel this will affect British bands financially on their future European tours
Anderson: Well, we have absolutely no idea, because it could be that Europe decides to punish us. They might start asking for visas like they do when we perform in the USA, New Zealand, Australia. Recently, I’ve been working on visas for Brazil and Argentina. Many countries do impose upon foreign musicians for me to have special work visas for entertainment purposes. That can take many, many days filling out forms and visiting embassies, and it’s a little tiresome.
We used to have free travel within the EU, then we’d have to go through passport control because we’re not a so-called Schengen Agreement member of the EU. But you have to remember, right at this moment, we are still members of the EU. And every time I go through boarder control in Germany or Italy or Spain, or wherever I might be landing, and I look at the customs, the immigration officer through the glass window, and he looks at me, and I’m waiting one day for someone to say to me “Leaving the EU are you?” To which I would reply, “as far as I know we are still members so please let me in.” Right at the moment, nothing has changed and I don’t think anything will in the next 2-4 years.
A lot of people actually think we won’t leave the EU as you know we are a democracy BUT you don’t always get what you vote for in a democracy. The USA got Donald Trump and we got to leave the EU, even though half the voting public wanted Hillary Clinton or to remain in the EU. We are a divided country, so that’s what you get in a divided country. You have to be grown up and accept what you get. You lost and someone else won.
You have to be a big man about it, you have to accept that democracy sometimes brings surprising results that you don’t anticipate and you have to put up with it. Maybe in the next few months or year, we may decide that collectively we don’t want to leave the EU and that maybe in the next 100 days the USA will decide they don’t want Donald Trump and it’s better to impeach him (laughing). Those options do exist as painful as they maybe and as embarrassing as they are.
I know half of us are painfully embarrassed with our European cousins that the other half of us voted to leave the EU. Just as there are USA citizens who aren’t embarrassed about the global effects of Donald Trump, I think that most Americans would agree that it’s not going down very well. He doesn’t seem to have the skills or diplomacy to actually work in an acceptable political way with other political leaders. It’s making America look a little bit silly and I’m sorry for all of them as that is the way it appears. He is lampooned in the media throughout the world just as much as he is on Saturday Night Live.

NRR: Let’s talk about your newest release The String Quartets. What inspired you to redo classic Tull tunes into an, as you like to say, a “reimagined” theme?
Anderson: I wasn’t inspired to redo them, it was more an itch and was amongst a group of things I wanted to do before I’m too old to do any of them. I’ve worked with string quartets going back 49 years ago and something that over the years I’ve done many times. I’ve also worked with symphony orchestras and choirs, but that was rock band plus. Here, I wanted to do something that was a lot more pared down, something that was much more essential, more of the classical format of string quartet where I become the 5th member of the quartet. No drummers, no bass, no electric guitars, none of the traditional rock band stuff. Basically, it was another one of those boxes I wanted to tick while I still held a pen in my hand.

NRR: How did the arrangements come together?
Anderson: Some of the songs were much easier to do than the others because they had already been recorded with an orchestral component in the past. John O’Hara, our keyboard player, and a classically trained musician, worked on the arrangements and came up with some departures from the original structure and original way of presenting the essence of the music. Melody, harmony, and rhythm are the three components of music and I think in that context you will find that a good tune will survive even quite radical reworking in a different genre because melody, harmony, and rhythm are indestructible. It’s kind of like atom particles, you can’t actually destroy them, so you can’t really murder a good tune. You can probably impair it or make it walk with a limp, but on a good day you can take your good tune and (using another metaphor) take it down the street wearing a nice dress and people will say I think I recognize you, you look kind of familiar. I didn’t recognize you in a short cotton dress as usually you are wearing a motorcycle jacket and jeans. So these things can be done. However, it is not true about the rumors flying around that I’m off to Nashville to record Jethro Tull’s Greatest Country Hits (laughing), that is not happening.

NRR: Steven Tyler of Aerosmith did it ….
Anderson: To put it in the all too familiar words of America’s glorious leader….FAKE NEWS !!

NRR: Are there any points in the tracks, where you felt compelled to step back with the flute and allow the strings to go front and center?
Anderson: In the String Quartet album, there are many places where they play entirely on their own and I’m not involved at all. I didn’t, I should do the most obvious thing and use my flute to play all of the melodies and top lines. In fact, a lot of the time, I let the first violin take the melody line and I would play something that was maybe a rhythmically counterpoint or perhaps another harmony that gave the flute a less obvious role, but there are other places where I did play the melody or vocal line. This was a chance to mix it up as it wasn’t a factory production, so we didn’t have to do them all the same way. In fact, I believe it was a great idea not to do them all the same way.

NRR: The current tour is Jethro Tull by Ian Anderson. What most people don’t realize is that this actually refers to a group of songs outlining the history of the actual English agricultural pioneer Jethro Tull and NOT the band. Can you elaborate on your inspiration behind this venture?
Anderson: The Jethro Tull Rock Opera is a set of Jethro Tull songs used to tell an imaginary story about agricultural inventor not set in the 18th century, but set in the present day or near future. I was reimagining the historical Jethro Tull as a bio-chemist working in essentially the modern industry of developing new ways and technologies to grow and feed an ever hungry planet. I think it was a very timely and quite appropriate way of looking at the dilemmas that face us all in factory food production. Are we going to say we will eat that stuff or we are only going to say NO, we only want to eat organic food? We want to go back to eating as before, we don’t want this genetically modified nonsense or highly intensive hybridization of different species and animals, refined breeds. We want it the simple old-fashioned way. The answer being, of course, go right ahead, BUT you are going to have to eliminate 4 billion from planet Earth in order to allow or limit resources to do it the old-fashioned way. So, unless those 4 billion people, volunteer for euthanasia then I’m afraid that factory farming and modern technology are going to ever more required to feed your grandchildren and your great grandchildren. It’s a simple choice we all have to make, we either go hungry or we will have to learn how to accept modern technology with the caveat that we have to bring to bare a lot more responsibility and ethical approach towards food production. Unfortunately, in many countries, this isn’t legally enforced. In today’s paper, I just read about chickens from Holland being contaminated with pesticides which are illegally used to rid them of mites. The contaminants got into their egg production, so millions and millions of eggs had to be destroyed. Something that shouldn’t have been done in the first place, but someone thought they could cut corners and get away with something that won’t be noticed. There is such a thing as the precautionary principal, if you can’t prove that there isn’t a negative effect of your actions then don’t do it.

NRR: If you could travel back in time to experience and write about any other moment in history, what point would you pick and why?
Anderson: Well, I think some people would think it would be nice to eat dinner with Adolph Hitler to see if he was as bad a guy as he is made out to be. Some people might want to travel back to some glorious deed like being the first man on the moon, but if there is one thing I could do. Even though I don’t speak historical Greek, I would have liked to have known Jesus Christ. To be an observer, to see what he was like, a chance to know historically how Christ existed. Christ was a Jewish prophet and I would like to see what he did, how he went about his business and follow in his footsteps for a day and see what kind of a person he was.

NRR: Your current setlist features a few numbers from Johann Sebastian Bach, would this be another time period that would interest you?
Anderson: No, not really. Bach, Beethoven and all the greats classists have very much left their legacy alive for all of us to enjoy and, in a way, I think the truth of those people was in their personality. Thank God, Bach, Beethoven, and in particular Mozart didn’t have Facebook or Twitter accounts or otherwise we probably would have learned that they weren’t necessarily nice people. We know comparably very little about them and therefore we can try to reveal them through their music rather than their meanderings, pleadings, and complaining on social media.

NRR: Would you go back in time and reconsider your decision to skip Woodstock?
Anderson: I was so glad I didn’t do that. Nothing against Woodstock, we were just a rookie band and it was way too early for us to perform in front of such a huge audience. The problem is they might have loved us, they might have thought it was great, but in either case, we would have been tarnished with the idea of being the hippy breakthrough band. This happened to our stable mates, Ten Years After. We had the same record and management companies. They went to Woodstock and forever more they were “the Woodstock band”. I remember seeing their bass player Leo Lyons at a festival a few years ago and I wondered what he was going to be playing that night as I noticed his set list taped to his bass. I leaned over and asked him about it and he said, ”that setlist has been on my bass since Woodstock (laughing).”

NRR: With almost five decades of gigs under your belt, you are known as one of the cleanest musicians to ever tour. What is your take on the recent self-inflicted deaths of some of music’s biggest names?
Anderson: I went to art school before I became a musician and the guy that sat next to me in life drawing class had needle marks all down his arms because he was a heroin addict. It’s been quite obvious to me since an early age that drugs were a potentially extremely damaging form of self-indulgence and it didn’t seem to me to be a good thing to do that. Then, probably by the time I was in my first year or two as a musician, people I knew and had performed with started dying. Some of those were my heroes and some of those that didn’t die, Jack Bruce, Eric Clapton and Ginger Baker. Jackie is no longer with us more from alcoholism than his drug taking, but certainly the last 20 years of his life he was a very unwell man, which is rather sad. Many of the people I’ve known and worked with, Jimi Hendrix being a very obvious one whose life became increasingly in the grip of mechanicals that he took and also to the beetle that feed them to him. He fell prey not only to the drugs but his need to be in a mix of people who frankly were bad company. I think this is very often the case with musicians, who are crippled enough to not enjoy their own company and feel desperate where they have to have people around them all the time. They can’t stand to be alone, they can’t stand to be reflective and stable. They need people around them and they need the constant party atmosphere. I don’t have a moral perspective on people who take drugs, it’s up to them what they do. My advice is that if you can manage without them, it’s probably a safer bet.

NRR: What music do you want played at your funeral as your musical eulogy?
Anderson: Hmmm….it would probably be “A Wonderful World” by Louis Armstrong because I am an optimist and I am extremely grateful for my opportunity to be working, traveling, meeting people in different countries and experiencing different cultures around the world. In the end of it all, it seems like a wonderful world. I hope my great great grandchildren can enjoy it as much as I have.

NRR: Looking ahead, are you still on track to release a new studio album and live DVD in 2018?
Anderson: Well, that work is a work in progress and the problem is I am on tour a lot. For today, as an example, I am sitting in the office all day. As much as I would like to clear the decks and carry on with working on one of the new songs, it most likely won’t happen until next week or even when I get back from the USA. I occasionally have the better part of 2 weeks where I can work on the recording projects, but the fact is I am often on tour and can’t do them as one continuous block of work.

NRR: Are there going to be any new surprises we can look forward to on the new album?
Anderson: Well, one surprise is that as a 70-year-old, I’m still alive and kicking. There won’t be a new studio album until at least next April. In fact, I have just spent the last 24 hours looking at the various releases for next year, as we have a whole lot of things in the pipeline like re-releases, box sets, and live material. In the next few days, I will be listing to hundreds of hours of live tapes from various years going all the way back to the 70s. These all come from a huge collection I own and we are toying with the idea of putting out an album of basically VERY live sounding music. It will be like owning your own bootleg. There is a lot of terrible live recordings out there on places like YouTube and elsewhere, but I think the ones I have are technically much better. We have recorded shows off the front of the house mixer on tape, cassette and digital recorder going back through the years, so there is lots to go through.

NRR: On behalf of National Rock Review, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to chat with us this morning and we all look forward to seeing you live on August 20th at Caesar’s Casino Windsor along with the other various stops along the tour!!
Anderson: Well the fans can expect about 90 minutes of rock music without a string quartet to be heard.

[maddogfagin]

music-illuminati.com/interview-ian-anderson-2018/

Interview: Ian Anderson 2018
BY ADMIN ⋅ MAY 28, 2018

Ian Anderson is the frontman / singer / songwriter / flautist / acoustic guitarist / musical mastermind for Jethro Tull, which is celebrating its 50th year. Anderson is the only member who has been with the band since its beginnings.

Next up was Jethro Tull’s classic album Aqualung, released in 1971 and regarded by many to be the band’s best. This included the signature tunes “Aqualung”, “Locomotive Breath”, and “Cross-Eyed Mary”.

Jethro Tull followed with two concept albums, both of which reached No. 1 in the US charts: 1972’s Thick as a Brick, and 1973’s A Passion Play. They released many more albums, notable ones including the compilation Living in the Past (1972), War Child (1974), Minstrel in the Gallery (1975), Songs from the Wood (1977), and Crest of a Knave (1987) which somewhat controversially beat out Metallica for the Grammy Award for Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Performance.

This interview was for a preview article for noozhawk.com for Jethro Tull’s concert at Vina Robles Amphitheatre in Paso Robles, CA on 6/3/18. It was done by phone on 5/1/18.

Jeff Moehlis: What are some of memories you have of Jethro Tull’s first tour of America?

Ian Anderson: Well, good and bad. I think the first show was either at the Fillmore East or maybe the Boston Tea Party. It was an important gig, the first thing we ever did, so it was pretty nerve-racking. There was no kind of warm-up of maybe playing in a few Midwestern towns in a pub or a club somewhere. It was straight into the deep end playing two of the most iconic venues in that period of time – the Boston Tea Party where Dan Law was the promoter, and Bill Graham, of course, at the Fillmore East. So these were pretty scary places. You were in at the deep end, straightaway you were going to be judged by a very savvy audience and by two of the biggest promoters that have ever been in the USA.

I guess it went OK, otherwise we would’ve been on the next flight home. But there was a lot of hanging around. We didn’t really have a lot of work, so there were days when we were just sitting in some terrible, terrible hotel sharing rooms and waiting for our manager to tells us we had another gig somewhere. So it was 13 weeks of being away from the UK to play maybe three weeks worth of shows [laughs]. It was a toughie.

I think actually on that tour we supported Led Zeppelin in a couple of places, and memorably we played in Seattle with a band we were warned not to go anywhere near, not to talk to them because they were very violent and aggressive and scary. Quite nervously we did our soundcheck and waiting to go on before the MC5. You know, there were pretty scary onstage, but a couple of months later we were playing again in the USA and some of the guys from the MC5 came to see us in Detroit and were real pussycats, really friendly. They remembered us, and we were getting a bit more well-known and playing in bigger venues, and they came backstage to say “Hi”.

And I met people like Mountain – Leslie West and Felix Pappalardi from the band Mountain. They subsequently went on to tour with Jethro Tull a couple of times. You know, there were lots of opportunities, I suppose, to see some of the great bands, sometimes to work with them, sometimes just being in the same hotel [laughs]. It was memorable, but as I say, good memories and bad memories.

JM: The tour eventually found its way to California. What were your initial impressions of California when you came?

IA: Generally speaking – I suppose it’s partly geographical – there’s an easier affinity between us Brits and, perhaps, New England. It’s partly geographic, but it’s also, I guess, because of a bigger concentration of immigration from England, Scotland, and Ireland, into what became the New England states and Nova Scotia, and even down the Eastern Seaboard, too. So that’s always seemed an easier fit.

Once we got to the West Coast, everyone said, “You’ll love California. You’ll love San Francisco. You’ll love Los Angeles.” I suppose because it was talked up as being so great – fabulous weather, everything’s kind of laid back, and a lot of fun and palm trees and stuff – but I’m afraid I didn’t really take to it at all. I just hid in my hotel room for the first few years when I was in California [laughs]. I mean, of course we made the odd excursion out to Fisherman’s Wharf out in San Francisco, or to some club – I think the Whisky – in L.A. We sort of had a little bit of a look at things. We sort of sniffed the air. But I never felt very comfortable, particularly in Los Angeles.

There were other parts of California I was more charmed by. I quite liked San Diego. I quite liked San Francisco, except for the experience of playing there in the early days, because it was the end of the hippie era and everybody was just out of their brains on whatever it was they were smoking or taking. I felt really outside all of that. I didn’t enjoy playing at the Fillmore West, for example. I really hated that. It was a very uncomfortable experience. I just felt like I was from Mars, you know, having nothing in common with the people in the audience who were there for a different kind of a celebration. Whereas playing at the Fillmore East was a little easier because it was a New York crowd, and they seemed a bit more awake and a bit more alert, and a bit more intent on listening to and judging the music. So I always found the West Coast to be difficult.

But later on, it sort of changed around a bit. These days I don’t even stay in New York. If we have a show in New York we stay out of town, drive in for soundcheck, play the show, drive out of town as soon as we leave the theater, and stay somewhere 30, 40, 50 miles away in order to get away from New York. I feel claustrophobic and trapped in New York City, whereas I’m much more at ease now in California than I was. There’s little more sense of space. I still wouldn’t like to be stuck on any of the major freeways around Los Angeles at rush hour [laughs]. But it’s kind of easier.

Your perspective changes a little bit as you repeatedly go to places. Several places I used to like I don’t like anymore, and some places that I really felt uncomfortable in now I quite enjoy going there. It just changes around.

JM: I have a music question for you next. What inspired you to incorporate the flute into the music of Jethro Tull?

IA: Well, desperation, really. I was a not very good guitar player when I was in my teens, and when I was about 18 years old I heard Eric Clapton for the first time, when he joined John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers. I realized that this guy was so far ahead of the pack, there was no point in trying to catch up. I was never going to be that good. Of course, then I heard about Jimmy Page and Jeff Beck and Ritchie Blackmore and other hotshots down in London who were doing sessions. It seemed the world was getting pretty crowded with very innovative and exciting guitar players. And then, of course, along came Jimi Hendrix, too, to make it impossible.

So I looked around for something else to play. I suppose for reasons of practicality I had a harmonica, and learned to play a blues harmonica. And I bought a flute. I traded in my Fender Stratocaster for a cheap student-model flute and a Shure Unidyne III microphone, and armed with these two new things set off the South of England to try and give at least a year to be a professional musician

I didn’t do anything with the flute for the first few months, until around December of ’67, because we were approaching Christmas. I got the flute out and managed to get a few notes out of it, and then a few more. By the end of January, when Jethro Tull became Jethro Tull, I was playing the flute in quite a few pieces of music during the show. And then improvising. I tried to translate what I did on the guitar into the flute. It was just a different technique, different instrument, and by the time we recorded our first album, which I think from memory was about July of ’68, I mean I’d only been playing for about 7 months. At the time Jethro Tull became noticed, and there was a bit of a buzz about the band, I’d only been playing the flute, I suppose, for about 2 or 3 months. I made my name and reputation as a flute player really under totally false pretenses, because I never had a lesson in my life, and I really knew nothing about the flute, including for sure where to put my fingers on the keys or anything about it at all. It was just being self-taught, and fumbling around to try to find some things to do with it.

There weren’t a lot of flute players around in those days. It wasn’t unheard of in pop music or in jazz or in folk music, of course. But it certainly wasn’t featured in any blues bands who were playing around at the time. I was the only flute player in terms of rock music until rock music developed, particularly in ’69, when the term “progressive rock” was first coined by the British music press. I had it pretty much to myself. There was a flute player in the Moody Blues, and Chris Wood in Traffic played flute a bit onstage. He was a saxophone player, really. And somebody in King Crimson, I think, also played a flute. And then, of course, along came Genesis, and Peter Gabriel played a flute, although I think wisely he decided not to continue with that. So for all of that period of time during the late ’60’s and early ’70’s I wasn’t having a lot of competition out there. So it seemed like a very wise choice to get away from the guitar and take up an instrument that was not very common in that musical genre.

JM: One of my favorite Jethro Tull albums is Benefit, which I think has been overshadowed by the one that came next. Incidentally, Benefit came out in the U.S. exactly 48 years ago today. When you look back at that particular album, what are your reflections on it and its role in the evolution of the Jethro Tull sound?

IA: There have been lots of albums that, I think, in their different periods have kind of set the bar for a change of genre in a different peak in the band’s career. Most notably, I suppose for me personally, probably the second album Stand Up is the one that marks the departure from the imitative kind of simple blues thing that we began with to finding more influences, more eclectic musical settings for simple songs that I was writing.

By the time we got to Aqualung, another album that certainly made a big change for the band’s fortunes… It wasn’t instantly a huge hit out of the box, but it progressively sold over the next couple of years, particularly, but then to this day I suppose it is the biggest selling Jethro Tull album. And Thick as a Brick, which followed it, was the scary one, because after Aqualung what do you do? It seemed necessary to try something a bit braver, and Thick as a Brick was not something that I think our record company or our management were very comfortable with. They thought this was maybe a step to far, but I thought let’s push the boundaries a bit, and see if we can drag our fans down that rather more elaborate direction.

And by putting it in a slightly comedic context, a slightly surreal humor environment, that I think was the wise and forgiving way of embarking upon that music. It was serious, but yet it was lighthearted and a bit of fun. So hopefully I wouldn’t be accused of being too deadpan, because bands like Yes and the early Genesis were incredibly serious. There was no humor attached to any of that, all of it was sort of showing off them being terribly serious about their music, whereas we were just having fun with the idea. We weren’t such good musicians as them, but we could put it in a more theatrical setting and have a little fun with putting an album and then a tour together which was not something that everybody else was doing at that point. I think maybe Alice Cooper had just begun, and that was the only other really theatrical act around at the time. That was a good thing to be part of, the feeling, particularly in live performance, that you were bringing elements in to make it more of a show, more of an experience that involved other elements, not just standing onstage playing your music.

JM: Speaking of bringing humor into the music, I read that you were a big fan of Monty Python, and that Jethro Tull even helped to finance the Holy Grail movie. Could you tell us more about your Monty Python connection, and how they influenced what you were doing?

IA: I think Monty Python were what you might argue were the third generation of British humor. They were the TV generation. Prior to that there’d been the radio generation of British humor, which really was the surreal humor that came out of a number of precursors. Some of the guys from Monty Python were into radio before they managed to get onto TV. It has a tradition, you see, that kind of slightly weird, surreal humor. It’s something very British, and goes back into some elements of humor that began even to the ’20’s and 30’s in music, and transferred into that kind of slightly wacky, weird radio stuff through programs like The Goon Show and Round the Horne, and other radio things of the ’50’s and ’60’s.

And then Python came along, and of course after they’d had their run at it essentially in the early ’70’s, it evolved into other British humor, into a number of rather surreal and weird camp kind of performances from different musical troupes, who in the tradition of Monty Python took TV by storm, at least for a while. So it’s something very British. It’s something that I think influenced us – when I say us, I mean we British musicians, not just me or Jethro Tull. It was something that I think we all kind of tuned into. We felt it was ours. We felt it was a very national form of humor. We felt it was British. Of course, it was making fun of the British most of the time, but we’re good at making fun of ourselves. So we all rather liked that.

When Monty Python were making their Holy Grail movie, and the word was no one would fund them, no one would put up they money, we in music industry – a few bands including members of Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, and me, and the managers, and folks who were involved in some of the record companies back then – we put up money to fund making the movie. To this day, I get a royalty check, which is nice to have from something that you were a part of getting it to happen.

My only regret is that Life of Brian, which was I think a bigger, more important movie than Holy Grail, we didn’t get the opportunity to invest in, because somebody told a little fib to Pythons and put up all the money, and we were excluded from the funding of Life of Brian. Traditionally in the theater, the term “angel” is the one that’s used for coming to the rescue and putting up the money for a production, and if that production is successful then traditionally you get offered the follow-up. You know, you become an investor is somebody’s life and career and commercial and artistic success, and you’re invited to participate again if it’s successful. And unfortunately we were not able to do that, so I, for one, was a bit pissed off about it. But I know for a fact that the Pythons were told a fib, because I spoke to John Cleese about it some years later and he was quite surprised that he’d been told that none of the original investors wanted to participate again. When I asked him who told him, then it became clear that a bit of subterfuge had gone on.

JM: You’re being very coy – I assume you don’t want to name who told the fib?

IA: Well, if he was alive today then I certainly would mention his name, because I feel angry about it. But I think we’ll leave the dead to their own memories that we prefer to have about them.

JM: Fair enough. As something that I perceive as humor in the music of Jethro Tull, on Passion Play there is “The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles”. I have a friend who calls that “Winnie-the-Pooh on acid”. What inspired that story, and that music?

IA: That, I have to say, was largely to do with Jeffrey Hammond. I just wanted some surreal moment… There were two sides, because we’re talking about vinyl records back then, and I wanted something that would be the end of Part 1 and the beginning of Part 2, something a little different that would separate the music in a way that gave this little hiatus between the two sides, that it would have its own rather curious and surreal identity. So Jeffrey came up with “The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles”, wrote the words, and the idea was it would be a spoken word piece and John Evans and I came up with some musical ideas and we put that together. It was Jeffrey’s baby, really. He was the one who came up with not only the words, but actually performed it, and of course when we then came to make a video that we used onstage when we did the Passion Play tours, Jeffrey was very much at the center of that as a performer.

You know, Jeffrey was one of those guys who if you met him in private life he was incredibly shy, really the antithesis of a performer. He liked to really just have a quiet life away from the glamor and the pizazz. He was embarrassed to talk to fans or strangers. I mean, he was not exactly a recluse, but just a very shy and private person. But when he walked onto the stage, he became ten times larger than life. And that was always the very exciting thing about having a guy like that in the band, who went through this metamorphosis every night [laughs]. Five minutes before he walked on he became this completely different person for the next couple of hours, which was great.

Jeffrey came to one of the shows three or four weeks ago, when we started the UK tour. He had been quite ill for the last few years. It was great to see him out of the house. He looked pretty well. I think he enjoyed the rare occasion of going out of his house and doing something, and being with other people. So I think he probably found it exhilarating, but exhausting, too. He tires quickly. But it was good to see him, and he was in good form. He contributed a little bit to the show in ways that people will see when they come to the show.

JM: I interviewed to you about two years ago, and we were talking about similarities between songs, like [Jethro Tull’s] “We Used to Know” and “Hotel California”. I mentioned to you a song by Country Joe and The Fish called “Love Machine”, which reminds me a bit of “Locomotive Breath”. Did you ever get a chance to listen to that?

IA: I think I did, because I remember you telling me about it, but I don’t recall what my conclusion was. It’s, of course, the case that people, without being directly plagiaristic… You know, you hear stuff on the radio and you’re aware of other things going on in your musical world, and you kind of half-remember little things. They all sit there somewhere in your head.

When The Eagles were on tour with Jethro Tull, actually as an opening act back in the early part of 1972, we were still at that point playing some of the music from previous albums, including the song “We Used to Know”. I guess The Eagles probably heard us playing it onstage. They may well have heard it on the radio, anyway. But I’ve never accused The Eagles of plagiarism. You know, I can see the similarities, particularly in terms of the chord sequence, the actual harmonic nature of it. But the time signature is completely different, the melody is substantially different, and the lyrics, of course, are totally different. So, for my money, The Eagles came out with one of the best and most classic pop-rock songs ever. I mean, who would not liked to have written “Hotel California”? If there’s a little bit of my song kind of in there, then I am flattered. I’m certainly not someone who would accuse them of plagiarism. I never have. Other people have continued to make that comparison to this day.

JM: My last question for you is kind of obscure. There’s a song called “Left Right” which was finally released on the Nightcap album. To my knowledge it was never recorded again, although pieces of it perhaps figured into “Baker St. Muse”. What’s the story behind that song?

IA: Well, it’s just one of those pieces. There’s lots of them over the years, particularly in the ’70’s – you know, outtakes, things that were tried, demos that were made and half-recorded in the studio. You know, a few of those were found for the Songs From the Wood album and for the 40th anniversary remix that Steven Wilson did of Heavy Horses earlier this year. So some of this stuff does find its way out there eventually, and in various states of repair, because quite often they were unfinished studio recordings.

They’re of interest, I suppose, to the fans who just simply want to hear everything, but I’m pretty guarded about it because somewhere along the line I had taken the decision as a record producer not to go further with that idea. So, whatever my reasons were at the time, it was something that you could consider as not being up to the standard, or certainly not fitting for a particular album. So I’m a little wary of going back and saying, “Oh well, we’ll release that anyway.”

It’s just something I’m told some of the fans at least are really interested in. But I have a bit of a reticence about doing this, and certainly there are things that have been put in front of me, old tapes that have been discovered, and I’ve said, “Listen, I’m sorry, but that absolutely is not something that I want people to hear.” Sometimes it’s because it’s a crap song, but it could also be because maybe somebody’s performance is really not up to the mark, and I would be embarrassed for them if that was made public. Bearing in mind, we’re talking about things quite often that are just demos, just fooling around it a preparatory state in the studio. I don’t think it’d be very fair to some people if they got to hear somebody trying out some ideas in an arrangement that didn’t work.

[maddogfagin]

www.aceshowbiz.com/news/view/00168140.html

Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson Admits He Would Have Recorded One 'Aqualung' Song Differently
March 22, 2021

When Celebrating The 50th Release Anniversary Of His Band's Classic Album, The Folk-Rock Frontman Acknowledges That 'Cross-Eyed Mary' Was 'Not Really A Politically Correct Kind Of Song.'

AceShowbiz - Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson would have tweaked songs he wrote for the band's classic album "Aqualung" if he knew how politically correct the world was set to become 50 years later.

The folk-rocker celebrated the 50th anniversary of the release by talking about the songs during a YouTube chat with fans over the weekend, and admitted there are a number of tunes on the album he would have recorded differently if he could go back in time, including the second track, "Cross-Eyed Mary", about an unappealing prostitute.

"I have no personal experience of ladies of the night...," Ian said. "This particular one was an imaginary woman, probably flawed in some people's eyes by being cross-eyed, but nonetheless, I suppose, attractive in some way to men who wanted to pay for her favors."

"It draws together a lot of stereotypes. It's probably not really a politically correct kind of song. There are quite a few of those on the 'Aqualung' album... If I was to write those today I might just moderate some of the descriptive nature, titles, names, just to soften it a little bit."

In another interview, Anderson opened up about the inspiration behind the album's title track. Speaking to Grammy.com, he revealed that he and his then-wife Jennie Franks were compelled to write the about a homeless person because of "a photograph [of homeless people in the south of London] that she had taken."

"One particular one caught my eye and I said, 'Let's write a song about this guy.' Not trying to imagine much about his life, but more in terms of our reaction to the homeless," he detailed. "I felt it had a degree of poignancy because of the very mixed emotions we feel - compassion, fear, embarrassment."

[JTull 007]

                   Ian Anderson on Studio 4 with Host Fanny Kiefer 

   
   

[maddogfagin]

www.sandiegouniontribune.com/entertainment/music/sdut-ian-anderson-talks-jethro-tull-and-thick-bricks-2012oct13-htmlstory.html

GEORGE VARGA
OCT. 13, 2012

To hear Ian Anderson tell it, first in 1988 and again this week, the aural teddy bear known as Jethro Tull endures.

True, that “bear” may now look a bit worse for wear, but its music — a fusion of rock, blues, jazz, folk and classical that helped fuel the progressive-rock movement of the late 1960s — still strikes a major chord with fans who came of age with this pioneering English band.

“Jethro Tull was like the Muppets; it was just always there, to a certain generation of people,” Anderson said in a 1988 U-T San Diego interview. “We are the teddy bear they didn’t throw away.”

Reminded of his cuddly analogy during a Wednesday interview, Anderson chuckled.

“We’re still a cuddly teddy bear,” he said. “Only now, an ear might be missing. And an arm and a leg!”

Speaking from his office in Wiltshire, England, near Stonehenge, Anderson grew more serious.

“I’m happy for us be a cuddly teddy bear for people, in terms of providing music from their past that gives them a warm feeling or nostalgia, like a favorite blanket that comforts them when they go to sleep at night,” he elaborated. “But I’d like to think that teddy bear can also snap at people and even draw blood. I’m happy to have us be that cuddly bear, but I also want to get people out of their comfort zone and take them somewhere else, to somewhere new.”

Anderson accomplishes both goals with his ongoing “Jethro Tull’s Ian Anderson Plays ‘Thick As A Brick’ 1 & 2” world concert tour.

The tour, which includes a sold-out show here Wednesday at downtown’s Balboa Theatre, is one of his most ambitious undertakings of his career. He and his current band — Tull is on hiatus until next year — open the concert by playing 1972’s “Thick As a Brick” album, more or less in its entirety. The second half of the concert is devoted to this year’s ambitious sequel album, the 17-song “Thick As a Brick 2.”

Then and now, the first “Brick” album consists of one 44-minute song. It was composed and arranged by Anderson, in part, as a parody of the sprawling “concept albums” in vogue with other progressive rock bands back then.

Off-target musical satire?

The fact that “Brick” became the first (and, so far, only) Tull album to top the U.S. album charts suggests many record-buyers may not have been in on the joke. Was Anderson amused or annoyed at the time that his attempt at satire seemed to fall flat?

“No, that’s not something you could be annoyed about,” he replied. “It was a gentle mocking of the concept albums at the time by bands like Yes, Genesis, King Crimson and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. ‘Thick As a Brick’ was 50 percent a sendup, 50 percent deeply musical. And I think that’s how it worked out. Half the people got the joke. Half of them took the album very seriously.”

Amusingly (or not), “Thick As a Brick” was inspired by some people — myopic music critics, in particular — failing to grasp that Tull’s previous album, 1971’s classic “Aqualung,” was not a concept album.

True, it contained a few songs that took sharp aim at organized religion, most notably “Hymn 43” and “My God,” but its other songs addressed unrelated topics. Regardless, many reviewers hailed “Aqualung” as an epic concept album, much to Anderson’s frustration.

Perhaps as a result, the first lyrics he sings on side one of the original “Brick” album appear to be directed at those reviewers: “Really don’t mind if you sit this one out.” Then there is the tongue-firmly-in-cheek concept of “Brick” itself, which Anderson attributed to a precocious (and wholly fictitious) English schoolboy named Gerald Bostock, age 10.

And who could forget the album’s sometimes nonsensical couplets? A personal favorite is: “God is an overwhelming responsibility / We walked through the maternity ward and saw 218 babies wearing nylons / Cats are on the upgrade,” or something like that.

So, then, did Anderson name “Thick As a Brick” after clueless music critics?

He laughed.

“It was inspired by Gerald Bostock being academically ahead of his classmates and by the English colloquialism for someone (not very bright) being ‘thick as a brick,” he said. “It was not inspired by anyone in the music business or by any music critics.”

Now 65, Anderson cofounded Jethro Tull in 1967, when (as he put it in his 1988 U-T San Diego interview): “I was not-very-good singer in a not-very-good blues band. And so I started also to play not-very-good harmonica, and ended up playing not-very-good flute. I did it largely because it was different, and because it was there.”

Not really a ‘Fat Man’

Within a few months of Jethro Tull’s debut, Anderson and guitarist Mick Abrahams were embroiled in a power struggle to assume control of the band. Anderson prevailed, and Abrahams left in late 1968 to launch his own group, Bloodwyn Pig. Today, as in the late 1960s, many fans still think the group Anderson has devoted his life to is led by a flute-playing singer named “Jethro Tull.”

Then and now, when writing song lyrics Anderson likes to strive for a ratio of 20 percent autobiographical and 80 percent imagined and poetic license.

“It has to have some autobiographical basis for the songs to sound real and have conviction,” he noted. “But the rest is imagination and creating characters and scenarios. I’m always alarmed by songwriters whose work is very autobiographical (because) they’re giving too much away. I never use the real names of people in my songs.”

But didn’t he write the distinctly unflattering song, “Fat Man,” which appeared on Tull’s 1969 album, “Stand Up,” about soon-to-be-former Tull guitarist Abrahams?

“Well, yes, but that was sort of a joke,” Anderson replied.

“We were on a ferry coming back to England from a tour in Scandinavia and we were sharing a room. I had my first mandolin and was tuning it up as he fell asleep, and the first song I wrote on the mandolin (that night) was ‘Fat Man.’ But Mick wasn’t fat. He was just a bit large and he was sensitive about it. So this was just a little in-joke, although the final version of the song didn’t come out until after he’d left the band.”

By the time “Thick As a Brick” came out in 1972, Anderson was the sole original member left in Tull. He has led the band ever since, persevering through numerous lineup changes along the way.

Now, with “Thick As a Brick 2,” he imagines what the fictitious Gerald Bostock’s life might be like today at the age of 50. By performing the new album and the original back-to-back in concert, Anderson’s dual goal of being a cuddly bear and bringing his audience forward is neatly realized.

“Absolutely, it is the best of both worlds,” he affirmed.

“We’re revisiting something we did in 1972 and then performing the new album. We like to challenge our listeners.”

[maddogfagin]

www.spokesman.com/stories/2016/oct/27/jethro-tull-the-band-meets-jethro-tull-the-man-in-/

Jethro Tull the band meets Jethro Tull the man in stage show
Thu., Oct. 27, 2016


British musician Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull performs during a concert in Nicosia, Cyprus, Saturday Feb. 19, 2011. (Petros Karadjias / Associated Press)
By Nathan Weinbender

It turns out that the British prog rock band Jethro Tull and the 18th-century agriculturalist Jethro Tull have more in common than just a name.

Ian Anderson, the group’s longtime frontman, says he didn’t know much about Tull when his band was formed (the name was actually suggested by a booking agent in the late ’60s). And while those similarities are relatively minor, there are quite a few of them.

For instance, Tull had musical ambitions when he was young, but his parents made him attend law school. The song “Wind-Up,” which closes Jethro Tull’s 1971 album “Aqualung,” begins with the lyrics, “When I was young and they packed me off to school.”

Here’s another: Anderson says Tull suffered from bronchitis as a teenager, which is unintentionally echoed in the band’s signature song, “Aqualung.” And Anderson has frequently explored themes of agriculture and farming in songs like “Farm on the Freeway” and “Heavy Horses,” which obviously lines up with Tull’s work.

“In many cases, it’s a little uncanny,” Anderson said during a recent phone interview. “It seemed like a good opportunity to come up with a theme for a live concert that would embrace the use of modern technology with videos and special guests, make it more of a theatrical event.”

Anderson’s research into the life of Jethro Tull inspired the musician’s current stage show, which he’s bringing to Northern Quest this weekend. The set list features some of the best-known tunes in Jethro Tull’s catalog, but those songs are structured and paced in a way that serves as a musical biography of the real Jethro Tull.

“It’s essentially a best of Jethro Tull show, the mainstream Jethro Tull repertoire that most of our fans will recognize,” Anderson said. “I’m really telling (Tull’s) story through the songs I’ve written over the years.”

Anderson has written a handful of new songs specifically for the live show, many of which serve as transitions in the story. They also touch on 21st-century political, religious and sociological issues, especially GMOs and corporate agribusiness. While much of Jethro Tull’s music was concerned with such socially relevant themes, Anderson is clear that he’s not out to lecture anybody.

“I think the trick is you’ve always got to give them a popular appeal,” Anderson said. “There’s no point in using (songs) to hector an unwilling audience. You’ve got to make it musically entertaining. If you can’t get people tapping their feet and nodding their heads in time to the music, you’re not going to seduce them into paying attention to the subtlety of lyrics.”

Jethro Tull went through numerous lineup changes over the years, officially calling it quits in 2012. Anderson has a full schedule outside of touring as a solo act: He’s finalizing an album of string quartet arrangements of Jethro Tull songs, and he plans to start work on a new studio album soon.

“It’s nice to keep busy at my age,” he said. “You don’t want to fall off the bicycle, best to keep pedaling. The danger is if you fall off the bicycle you won’t be able to get back on and pedal off into the sunset, which, of course, I’d like to do.”

Anderson’s stage persona remains the same as it was back at Jethro Tull’s creative peak: He bounds about the stage, often with his flute, and tears into the songs with a crazed zeal. Although he’s the only member to remain with Jethro Tull during its entire four-decade career, Anderson says he doesn’t think of the band as his own.

“There have been 26 different members of Jethro Tull over the years, and I think that’s, in a way, part of our strength,” Anderson said. “I tend not to think about Jethro Tull as a band identity, because you can’t encapsulate all 26 members in your head. It’s like this big extended family.

“It’s rather like your favorite football team. The people who are kicking the ball about and whatever they do in American football, which I can never understand, they’re not the same guys who were there 20 years ago. So it’s an ever-changing rotation of talent, and that’s the way I think of Jethro Tull.”

[maddogfagin]

asapjournal.com/on-the-intersection-of-many-lines-an-interview-with-ian-anderson-jonathan-p-eburne/

On the Intersection of Many Lines: An Interview with Ian Anderson / Jonathan P. Eburne
February 16, 2021 Jonathan Eburne


Image courtesy of Ian Anderson

Ian Anderson, singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, flautist, and bandleader of the British rock band Jethro Tull, has been giving interviews for nearly as long as he has been playing music. Jethro Tull marked its fiftieth anniversary in 2018. Released in 1968, the band’s first album, This Was, features on its cover a quartet of very young British musicians dressed up as old geezers, proleptically introducing a brand-new band in the past tense. Under Anderson’s leadership, the (imperfect) past tense of this claim to musical existence has remained continuous, and very much in the present, for over half a century. I’ll spare you the many titular ironies of the band’s musical history, except to note that an early compendium of Jethro Tull’s live performances, hits, rarities, and B-sides was titled Living in the Past. That album, released in 1972, was already the band’s sixth album in five years, and its title track, composed in a 5/4 time signature, was a hit in its own right—suggesting that Anderson’s songwriting, like the music of Jethro Tull, voices its relationship to time with no small degree of wit.

On the basis of Anderson’s gift as a songwriter and the sterling musicianship of Jethro Tull, this wit has fueled enduring popularity on a virtually world-historical scale. But it has also kindled the suspicion, if not the downright antagonism, of many in the musical press. To wit: a 2018 essay by R.C. Baker in The Village Voice presents a welcome rejoinder to the magazine’s fifty-year history of hostility toward the British band. The Village Voice is hardly the only mainstream periodical to harbor longstanding antipathy toward a band like Jethro Tull, particularly those in the genre of “progressive rock.”1 In 1989, when Jethro Tull received the inaugural Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Grammy Award for their 1987 Crest of a Knave album, the music-world cognoscenti were not so much flabbergasted as outraged. How dare a flute-driven group of nearly forty-year-old musicians beat out more recognizably “hard” contenders such as Metallica, Iggy Pop, and Jane’s Addiction! The award was enough of a surprise, in fact, that the band neither attended the ceremony nor even prepared an acceptance video to be broadcast in absentia. Their record label instead published a full-page press release affirming that “the flute is a heavy, metal instrument.” In spite of Jethro Tull’s own modesty toward the award, there was enough simmering resentment in the metal world, apparently, that the late chef-author Anthony Bourdain cemented his bromance with rocker Josh Homme by shooting hunting arrows through Jethro Tull’s 1969 Stand Up record on an episode of No Reservations. That was in 2009 (n.b. scroll to 17:50 in the video to see how the scene unfolds, as an unsettlingly violent “settling of an old score”).

Ian Anderson is fully mindful of such hostility and misperception, yet his policy toward the media remains defiantly open-handed, if carefully tended. On the band’s website, which Anderson and his management team oversee, press kits and high-resolution photographs are freely available for download. The site also features Anderson’s readymade, anticipatory responses to “All Too Frequently Asked Questions,” such as “How did you get the name ‘Jethro Tull’” and “You are now one of the old men of rock […] How long do you plan to go on performing and recording?”—the stated intention being, in this case, to save interview time for more interesting topics of conversation. Nonetheless, many journalists seem content to cut and paste Anderson’s responses, a gesture that likely reveals more about the material constraints on contemporary journalism than it does about journalistic attitudes toward flute-driven rock music.

I spoke with Ian Anderson for over an hour via Zoom during the COVID-19 shutdown in mid-October 2020. As we spoke, the world was grappling with the dire realities of the coronavirus pandemic, while, at the same time, the US was gearing up for a major election. Our conversation thus necessarily reflected these conditions, which have accelerated rather than abated in the months since we spoke. As I type this introduction in early January 2021, pro-Trump rioters have just stormed the US Capitol building in Washington DC, disrupting the formal congressional hearing to certify the country’s next elected president. And whereas a COVID-19 vaccination campaign is now underway, infection rates continue to surge worldwide, with spiking mortality rates in the US and an alarming new strain of the virus sending the now officially post-Brexit UK into another lockdown. My primary intentions in interviewing Ian Anderson for ASAP/J were to reflect on the intersections between his songwriting and his centrality to the artistic, administrative, and fiscal management of Jethro Tull’s, and his own, musical careers. It was far from surprising, therefore, that the immanent conditions of global emergency—the conditions of possibility for touring and performing music under COVID conditions, as well as the accelerating conditions of political authoritarianism in the anglophone world and worldwide—were never far from his mind, as our conversation confirms.

Ian Anderson has been managing and producing Jethro Tull since 1978, in addition to recording and producing seven solo albums of his own, along with numerous other musical and nonmusical projects. Such workaholic tendencies reveal much about the complex ecology of labor and expertise at work in Anderson’s career, which is as much a career in artistic self-administration as it is a career in rock music. Anderson’s place in the technical and managerial aspects of arts administration is, of course, fundamentally tethered to the marketplace, given that rock music is a heavily commodified popular art form. Neither Jethro Tull nor the four incorporated companies Anderson directs are nonprofit corporations; to my knowledge, very few rock bands occupy the third sector—at least, not on purpose. What renders Anderson’s attention to the corporate minutiae of artistic self-management so significant to the Arts of the Present, I propose, is the extent to which this fastidiousness is continuous with his creative process, as well as his ethics, as a songwriter and musician. Anderson’s career as a musician and manager is grounded in the worldly; he is mindful of the cultural as well as the political and ecological demands of the present, even if he tends to present himself as an impartial observer. Anderson has been writing songs about climate change since the early 1970s, for instance, and both Heavy Horses (1978) and especially Stormwatch (1979), Jethro Tull’s eleventh and twelfth studio albums, address the phenomenon of Peak Oil. Other compositions dwell on rural economics and “the plight of the middle American farmer,” as Anderson once put it; let us not forget that the band’s most famous song, “Aqualung,” is an ode to a dying homeless man, snatching his “rattling last breaths/ With deep-sea diver sounds.”

Anderson’s career is, again, grounded in the worldly. Yet as a songwriter and businessman alike, he is attentive not only to the ideological diversity of his fan base, but also to the fundamentally otherworldly pull of ideology, religious and political belief, subjective and personal difference, gender and sexual fluidity, and even the importance of doubt and non-knowledge. To write songs, or to make a living in the arts, is never a sure thing. Nor, he maintains, can collaboration, ecological thinking, or love ever be predicated on de facto certainty. Certainty has to be questioned, attended to, left perpetually open-ended. Anderson puts this in self-depreciating terms: “I’m a professional fence-straddler,” he says. Yet the fence Anderson straddles is not the artificial sawhorse of neoliberal “both-siderism,” but the very real line of demarcation between the known and the unknown, between belief and doubt—which, as Anderson later notes, are joined at the hip. “You can’t just have faith without sometimes having doubt as well.”

What follows is a (very) lightly edited transcription of our Zoom conversation in mid-October. As Anderson notes in closing the interview, “I’m quite careful about what I say.” This doesn’t just mean that he speaks guardedly or in measured phrases. Rather, the intellectual generosity of this care reveals itself in the depth and breadth of Anderson’s attention to the knowable, as well as to the unknowable and undecided. His conversation, like his songwriting, is about “stuff,” as he puts it: whether the minutiae of safety protocols and tour scheduling, the material and cultural specificity of the British landscape, or, perhaps most of all, the irreducibility of difference.

—Jonathan P. Eburne

Jonathan Paul Eburne: I thought it would be exciting to talk with you about the managerial side of what you do, as well as the musical side. And so, just to get things started: you recently published a statement, more like a proposal, for how touring musicians and audiences might safely return to live performance during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s something that a lot of responsible artists are concerned with and which a lot of irresponsible performers, including many politicians, have ignored to everybody’s peril. Could you say a little bit about how your thinking about this proposal evolved? You mention, for example, conducting your own tests on airborne particles. I feel as though this says much about the way you think as a bandleader and manager.

Ian Anderson: Well, yes. First of all, the proposal you mentioned was not really very recent. It was done several months ago. My last concerts this year (2020)—my only two concerts this year—took place at the end of February 2020 in Spain, in Barcelona and Madrid. Shortly after that we went to do a tour in Finland and got off the plane, went to the hotel, and an hour later were given the news by the promoter that the Finnish government had met that afternoon and decided to stop any public gatherings, due to the spread of the virus. At that point, we’re talking about 30 people in all of Finland; relatively speaking, they were pretty concerned about it. Luckily we were able to fly back to the UK the next day, but it cost me a lot of money because I had to pay for flights and pay my band and crew and travel costs. It was an expensive non-event. And so, being aware that things were kicking off in a number of countries, I started to think about what would happen next: if we were able to tour again in April, or May, or into the summer, then what were the provisos that I would have to consider for my band and crew, both in terms of travel and performance? What protocols we would have to put into place to try and minimize the risk of being infected? My thinking about all of this goes back, really, to the month of March, and particularly April, when I was really beginning to consider the inevitability that we would not be able to perform this year—as it turns out, anywhere. But certainly, back in April, it became pretty obvious that we couldn’t undertake to do a UK tour in September, which was booked, and for which, you know, essentially, I am the promoter. The buck stops with me. So it became incredibly important to try to establish what we could and couldn’t do. And to that end I spent a lot of time researching not only COVID-19 but also the precursors to it, which, of course, were the original SARS epidemic and, going back to other pandemics, the so-called Spanish flu of 100 years ago—during which, it should be pointed out, everybody was wearing face masks.

It shouldn’t come as a great surprise to anybody. I mean, the face mask: covering the face goes back to the Great Plague. Kind of a long time ago. So the lack of clarity from our respective governments, regarding their assertion that face coverings or face masks were ineffective against coronavirus, is complete nonsense. What they were panicking about is the shortage of PPE supplies to hospitals and professional medics, and they thought, well, we can’t have the members of the public buying face masks. And so for a long time they persevered with this downright lie about face masks being ineffective and not protecting anybody. That went on for a while. It became obvious to me pretty early that the coronavirus was being spread not only by large aerosol droplets from coughing or sneezing—which of course is exactly the same mechanism by which you catch the common cold or influenza—but also by touching surfaces that have contaminated droplets from other people wiping their noses or their eyes, and then touching the elevator button or the door handle in your hotel room or wherever it might be. All of these things seemed patently obvious to me, and I decided to do some tests to see just what the effect was of singing and playing the flute, in particular, in terms of projecting small aerosol droplets around the size of one micron or smaller. And that, you know, didn’t take very long to work out how to do.

This was something that went on for a while, and we were presented with the inevitability of our culture minister, a member of the government, reacting to the protests coming from the entertainment industry that theaters were being shut down and losing money and facing financial ruin. I wrote my piece to the culture minister back then. When I didn’t get a reply, I wrote again to his sidekick, and again didn’t receive a reply. Or at least, I received an acknowledgement of receipt of the email, but that was it. I’m sure that they were getting lots of people writing letters to them. I thought that what I was saying was kind of obvious and would allow at least some of us to get back to work, albeit in a restricted way. I don’t think you can have—then, now, or next year—unrestricted social gatherings, particularly unseated outdoor concerts or unseated indoor concerts. I don’t think these could take place safely. Because people will not obey the rules. They will gather together. They will push to the front. We’ve seen it happen on countless occasions.

And it isn’t really fair to an audience to think otherwise, let alone fair to performers to risk anybody’s health by holding a concert where you can’t have very strict control measures to keep people safely distanced from each other. And in my view, not only safely distanced, but if they’re indoor concerts, also with everyone wearing face masks. I use the word “mask” rather than “face coverings,” which is popular over here in the UK, because a mask is considered to be something like an N95 mask, which currently cost about two and a half dollars—absolutely widely available without disrupting PPE supplies to hospitals; you buy it on Amazon, your local chemists—but it gives you a much higher level of protection and protects other people much more efficiently from you if it’s a well-fitting N95 mask. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t all be wearing those instead of these flimsy cotton coverings which do very, very little to stop small aerosol droplets coming in or going out. It’s better than nothing, but it isn’t good enough for me. And I would much prefer that everybody take a little bit more care of themselves and other people by wearing more efficient masks.

As I say, they are widely available. Go to amazon.com and type in “N95” and you will be greeted with many possibilities to buy them online. None of this is rocket science. And I think this is what we should all be doing.

That’s basically what I what I wrote about, and I don’t think in the months since I wrote that, which I guess was back in May, that really anything has happened to change my opinion. And here we are well and truly in the so-called second wave—although, in my opinion, the first wave never really went away; it just was tamed for a little while by very strict lockdown measures here in Europe and in pretty much every country. And it has come back with a vengeance—not in the winter, which was what was being discussed, but at the end of summer. By July, August, we saw that we saw cases beginning to rise all over Europe, and by the end of September it was crazy time.

Here we are well into October, and now I don’t think anybody would consider that people like me can go back to work anytime in the next six to eight months. That’s just not going to happen. You have to be realistic, and those of us who chose to be musicians shouldn’t expect people to feel sorry for us. We chose a risky profession even at the best of times, and if you chose to be a musician or a dancer opera singer, whatever it might be, in the classical world or in the popular world, you know you were taking a risk. And if you didn’t have a plan B and plan C, some kind of professional safety net, or a career safety net, then you probably weren’t being realistic and that’s the way it is now, you know.

I’m at the end of my professional life as a musician anyway, so don’t feel sorry for me. I do feel sorry for all the others, but I guess you have to be thinking, now, can you manage to last for maybe two years, until hopefully there’s a vaccine available with sufficient efficacy to protect the majority of people, most of the time? Although if it follows other forms of vaccines, like the flu vaccine, then it’s not terribly effective for older people, who are the most vulnerable and the most easily affected with COVID-19. That, combined with the young freely mixing and carrying on doing what they’re doing anyway and not really giving a toss about anybody else, may, in a couple of years’ time, give us effectively a degree of so-called herd immunity, which would put the virus into—not make it disappear—but it would put it more in the realm of influenza, something that might come back but could at least be coped with by hospitals.

JPE: I teach on a college campus, so I very much know what you mean.

IA: But now it’s hospitals being overwhelmed, and not having enough beds; they’re not having protection for particularly vulnerable people. And not just the old, since there are those who die from coronavirus before they even get to be teenagers, and those that are teenagers very often have some terrible long-term effects. But the majority don’t; the majority are just going to go out there as if it doesn’t matter. You’d have to bring in the National Guard to every city in America to stop young people ultimately just carrying on, party time. We shouldn’t be kidding ourselves: they won’t be tamed. They’re not that way in my country; they’re partying wildly this weekend in anticipation of further lockdowns and, you know, that’s just the way people are, I’m afraid. Most people are pretty selfish and they’re in denial about the severity of this disease. Perhaps it necessarily afflict them directly—especially if they are, let’s say, under the age of 13, 14 years old—but we of course know that even those people will spread the disease to others who are far more vulnerable. And that is the is the personal moral decision that people have to make: are you going to risk killing Granny?

JPE: There are so many things that you’ve said along the along the way here, which I’ve been thinking about as part of your optic. For instance, the idea of moving the myth of personal responsibility toward more structural and systematic questions. These things need to be dealt with on a broader scale than according to individual responsibility alone. That strikes me as really consistent with your optic as a manager, as a manager of people. I’d like to ask you if you could talk a little bit about this. I think it’s almost hyperbolically valuable for artists and scholars—not only musicians, but anybody involved in the arts—to learn from your example. Not just from your example as a bandleader and producer and songwriter, but also, as you say, as the promoter, the manager, and as somebody who’s really paying attention to the dispersion of risk around the entire operation of the arts.

You mentioned that the arts are precarious, and something that one is individually responsible for. Could you say a little about that? I mean, there are a lot of people interested in how artists can manage themselves, how they can be autonomous, how they can survive. And I really feel like your example is sterling on that front.

IA: Well, it does seem to be a little unusual because, of course, we typically hear about people in the entertainment business as saying, “well, I’ll leave that up to my manager. I don’t know about that stuff.” Particularly when young musicians become in any way successful, they often quickly absolve themselves of all responsibility for their actions, so that managers, agents, tour managers take over the operation. I mean, that’s fine. But I’m a person of a naturally inquiring mind. When I was 20 years old, and Jethro Tull had just begun, I wanted to know how it all worked. I wanted to know about producing records and how to engineer records or how to deal with the technology, primitive though it may have been back in those days. I wanted to understand how deals were made, what the relationship was between promoters or venue operators and bands. I am just curious; I didn’t want someone else just to tell me to turn up at 4pm for sound check at some place and there’ll be some money, you know, hopefully, in your bank account in a few months’ time. That didn’t seem enough for me. I wanted to know how it worked.

So I’ve always been interested in music as a business. And I’ve always been interested in the idea that, without being a control freak, you shouldn’t feel guilty by trying to be a jack of all trades and extending your ability from being a songwriter or singer or performer to actually taking charge of your own life. And so that’s the way it’s always been. By 1974, we’d not exactly dispensed with management as such—that continued in the background—but the effective running of the band was taken over by me and my company. Financially, you know, with accountants in tow; and practically speaking, with me organizing the schedules for touring and particularly for recording. That extended so that by 1978 it was pretty much more autonomous in terms of me and my company operating things.

1978 was also the year that also I spread out from being simply a musician or a music business figure to have an interest in agriculture and aquaculture. So I developed those interests over the next few years, which gave me, I suppose, the outlet for some kind of greater intellectual capacity to understand how things worked, whether it was working out water flow in meters per second or figuring out how to arrange something for a string quartet. You know, it’s just using your brain. I get a little, you know, a little bored if I don’t have stuff that taxes me and makes me try to figure out solutions. It’s just the person I am.

But of course, we shouldn’t expect other people to be the same. And indeed not even to have any interest, necessarily. They’re quite happy—if they’re successful, they’re quite happy to make money and hopefully they’ll have decent people representing them financially and in terms of creative and artistic management, and things go okay. But, you know, we’re all aware of the many occasions when things don’t go okay, and many young musicians are taken advantage of. And they very often end up with nothing.

JPE: What you say here suggests something I was going to ask you about anyway, which is the sense in which the economic circumstances of the music business form part of a much broader picture. As you’ve said, both now and elsewhere, everything around the work of musicianship also participates in economic as well as environmental and ecological considerations. I can see a progression from the economic aspects of music production—the mechanical, technological aspects—toward the ecological, that is, extending into the environmental as well. This, you might say, is part of the DNA of your work with Jethro Tull: the way that culture, history, environmentalism, and even agriculture have so much to do with the material aspects as well as the creative or thematic aspects of your career.2

I have so many splinters of questions to pose on this front, but perhaps I can start with this: I notice that you’ve cited Jo Lustig, a well-known promoter and agent in the British folk world, as a transitional figure in your management as well as in your songwriting.3 I believe the story is that he presented you with a copy of Alfred Watkins’s The Old Straight Track (1925). And I love this idea—

IA: He gave me a copy of a book that was about the folklore of different regions of the United Kingdom, which was a really good book. And in a way, it gave me the confidence to write contemporary folk-based rock. It was not that I had no interest in folk music—I did, but I knew I didn’t want to try to write things that sounded like they were traditional British or English or Scottish or Irish folk music. I wanted a way into the ideas that spawn traditional music and perhaps to take some of those ideas into a more contemporary rock setting. So that that that was the book that Jo gave me one Christmas. But The Old Straight Track was something I came across, I think separately, following that moment.

It was actually because of where I lived at the time, which was in farmhouse or a manor house that was built over the site of a destroyed monastery which Cromwell’s troops razed—to the ground—and presumably raped and pillaged and generally messed things up. But that particular house always had a bit of a spiritual, weird kind of thing going on, which I wasn’t the only person to notice. And when I came to look at the National Ordnance Survey maps of the region, having heard about the ley lines, I then started drawing lines on my map and found to my amusement and horror that in fact our house lay on the intersection of many lines that extended maybe fifty miles in either direction—if you join together historically spiritual sites, whether they were churches or graveyards or places that had something connected. Whether ley lines proceeded the creation of ancient church sites, or whether the church sites themselves created this sense of some spiritual joining, is for others to decide. But it was an interesting coincidence, that where I lived sat on the intersection of five ley lines, each of which stretched a long way into the distance.

So it made it seem as if it was rather a crossing of ley lines, sort of a double, triple, or multiple whammy, in the sense of the spiritual forces that are said to flow along those lines. It should be said: I don’t believe in this stuff, but I don’t disbelieve in it either. I am a curious skeptic when it comes to matters of that sort. I don’t discount them, but I’m not going to be sucked into it and become a slave to some beliefs, which it’s a bit dangerous to do. Believe me, I’ve known so many people who’ve gotten caught up in in that in that kind of belief; it overtakes all common sense and all discipline and they become enslaved to it. So I’m not a disbeliever but I don’t expound any huge belief. It’s an ongoing interest that I have in all matters spiritual.

Sometimes when people ask me, “What do you do for a living,” I scratch my head. I don’t want to say, well, I play flute in a rock band, because it sounds a bit, you know, unbelievable. I usually say I work for the church, which is quite true. Usually for a few days here in the UK—except this year because everything is closed down because of COVID—I do fundraising concerts at my own expense for the Church of England, and sometimes also for the Catholic Church in one or two countries where I can sneak under the radar of Frank—that is, Pope Francis—since by edict of the Vatican, Catholic churches are not supposed to hold paying concerts. It’s the same in your country. In fact, they’re even more strict in America than they are in in Italy, but I’ve done a few fundraisers for churches in Italy. And everybody goes around nervously whispering “help” everywhere.

And I do it not necessarily as a Christian. I don’t call myself a Christian. I call myself a person who supports the very positive and huge benefits of religious belief, and indeed the structures in which we exercise that belief in the company of other people. So I’m a huge supporter of the church: the fabric of the Church, the buildings, the house of God. And, you know, if they would let me into a mosque or a Jewish temple to play music, I’d be there as well. It’s just that the Church of England is the place that usually has its doors open to people like me trying to help. And once in a while the Catholic Church, too, as I’ve said. But in certain other religions, it’s not possible to bring in music for the soul, let alone for the wallet. They manage or seem to want to manage without that input.

I do feel people like me should try to be supportive of great traditions and history. So, with me being born in Western Europe under the umbrella of the Christian church, although as I said I don’t call myself a Christian, it’s my honor to serve the church for a few days a year. And so I do. So yes, I work for the church.

JPE: This has so much to do with the vernacular, folkloric landscape that you’re talking about as well. Much like ley lines, it’s not a question of belief, but of the fact that these elements of the landscape are there. It’s part of the world—literally the physical environment around you. And so to honor it as part of this cultural landscape as part of the vernacular tradition and history that you live in: that seems consistent with your songwriting overall.

IA: It certainly is. It infuses some of my songs. It’s the stuff of which songs are made. I’ve always found that if you like songs that are heart-on-the-sleeve, emotional outpourings—you know, the world of Alanis Morissette, let’s say, if that’s what you like, or even 99% of songs that you might say belong in the blues idiom. It’s all about feelings and emotions, whether it’s simple and direct and heartfelt as it is usually in blues, or more constructed, careful wordings of love and being out of love—either way, I’m not your man, if that’s what you like in in song lyrics, because I rarely write that kind of a song.

I most often am an observer of other people in an environment. Perhaps that comes from my art school background, along with many of my peers in the world of British music. We didn’t go to music college. We went to art school. We learned about line and form and tone and color, the descriptive words of the painterly arts, just as they are in the in the musical arts. I think we made the convenient switch. Having done a bit of art college, we then thought, music is not really so far apart. It’s just an oral rather than a visual expression of line and form and tone and color. But it has the added advantage of being so immediate: you know, you don’t have to wait for the paint to dry, to walk on a stage and entertain people. So that became quickly my direction in life, rather than being a painter and probably ending up as an art teacher in some ladies’ college in some Southern county of England. It wouldn’t have been terribly fulfilling, so music was the biggie.

But I continued to work with the same thought processes. I was interested in people in an environment. I’m not really interested in pure landscapes. And I’m not really interested in portraits. I’m interested in seeing people standing back a little bit, almost as you see people on a stage in a theatrical play. They are in an environment, in a stage set. There is a context for what you get to hear. And very often, it’s a storyline. Sometimes it’s more abstracted and it doesn’t really have a beginning and an end. I mean, Waiting for Godot is a kind of mystery that you are positioned in the middle of, trying to make sense of something that is kind of timeless, and whilst a series of episodes, it doesn’t actually join together with a beginning and an end and a story. You’re left to work it out, wondering what it was all about, and in that way the curiosity factor is not delivering the punch line.

I think that is so often attractive to me as a songwriter: that you don’t have to consider the end of the story. You leave it hanging, and that’s so much more intriguing for an audience, who can then put some of themselves into the evolution of verse and chorus, verse and chorus. You, then, are forced to make your own beginning and end, as a listener. That appeals to me as a way of expressing. I tend to write about people in a landscape.

Sometimes I write about people in the landscape, and it’s not in the third person; it’s delivered in the first person, which gives it a kind of authority. And it gives it a kind of power that maybe would not be so obvious if you were just standing back, describing something. You know, something that’s a little more objective: on the end of the outstretched arm, on the end of your paintbrush. That’s okay, but I quite like the idea of expressing this from a very personal point of view. Sometimes. But I’m not that person. I’m singing—I am like an actor singing lines. I take on a character. And sometimes—I would be quick to defend anybody who thought my lyrics on those occasions were untoward. Come on, you know? I’m playing. I’m acting out a role here. I’m playing a part. I’m trying to give you the understanding of what this person thinks, but it’s not me. The things that I could be saying might be very, very far away from my own beliefs and my own thoughts, my own morals, ethics, whatever you want to call them. But it shouldn’t be excluded from songwriting. I think it’s perfectly legitimate to take on a role which of course is evident in opera. It’s evident in dramatic plays, TV dramas, you know.

I mean, my son-in-law has spent the last ten years of his life hacking the heads off zombies as officer Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead. And like me, he is out of work at the moment; he hasn’t worked now for over a year because of COVID and the fact that he was waiting to do some movies that had to be shelved. No one would expect my son-in-law, if they met him in the street, to be that man who hacks the heads off zombies. You accept it if it’s an actor. But why shouldn’t you accept it if it’s a musician or a singer? It’s carrying out the same kind of a role, delivering ideas, delivering messages, which means that sometimes it’s necessary to take on that character and pretend to step out of your own true self, and take on the mantle of responsibility of speaking for some imagined figure. Because again, they’re imagined. I don’t usually, or ever, write songs about actual—No, no, no, that’s not true. I did once write a song about a true historical character and I spoke in his voice, and with his imagined sentiments…

So that’s what I do. And I think we’ve always got to be careful to try to let people understand that. And that may be behind perhaps some of the ways in which I perform things on stage. I do. I try to make it look as if I’m acting the role, not just doing it deadpan. I try to give it the expression that gives it makes it, I hope, a bit more obviously a theatrical position to be taking rather than heart-on-sleeve. In other words, I wouldn’t be doing a duet album with Alanis Morissette—

JPE: Fair enough. But that would be interesting to hear, nonetheless.

IA: —unless she’s a classical flute player, in which case I’d be very happy to do it. As a songwriter as an artist, I really do love Alanis Morissette. It’s just not my kind of songwriting, personally speaking.

JPE: Part of what you’re describing here, and part of what you’ve narrated so beautifully is how much your songwriting involves a kind of impersonation, but it’s not a radical impersonation—it’s not identity theft. I mean, you can sing about whaling in a song like The Whaler’s Dues (1991), but nobody’s ever going to suddenly confuse you for a whaler. Nonetheless, your work is, as you say, observational. One of the things that you’ve discussed before on a number of occasions, and which I think is really important and impressive and perhaps also misunderstood, is your evolution from a (white, British) blues musician into something else, and of Jethro Tull’s similar evolution from a blues band to something more eclectic but also distinctly British. You’ve talked before about how much this shift took place on account of the fact that blues is based on the vernacular and historical experience of African American musicians. This idea of really thinking about who and where you are, and about the kinds of milieus that you occupy, however theatrically, however much in the third person, is something that’s important to you ethically as well as musically.

I’d love to hear how this shift sounded to you. You’ve talked about songwriting and lyrics, but I’m also interested in the sound of this evolution. A lovely exercise for me is to trace the “Jeffrey” songs, starting with “A Song for Jeffrey” (from This Was, 1968), which is very much a jazzy blues tune, but then, in the very next album, you go to Leicester Square (“Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square,” from Stand Up, 1969). After that you go to outer space—to the moon, at least through the TV—with “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me” (from Benefit, 1970), and then Jeffrey Hammond joined the band and you see the Englishness of the Jethro Tull coming fully to fruition. But how did this sound to you; what’s your version of that? I’ve just described my own obsessional little version…

IA: Well, you’re quite right. The origins of our music, particularly on the on the first album, was to utilize elements of essentially blues and Jazz, but it was Black American music for the most part. Of course there are zillions of wonderful white boys who have been incredible jazz musicians all over Europe and of course in the USA, as well as some amazing white guitar players, you know, Eric Clapton stands up there, obviously, at the top of the list. And in slightly more recent days, Joe Bonamassa: another great guy. When I first met Joe, in fact, he was doing something that was much more raucous and he became over the years more evolved—not just restrained, but he broadened his dimensions, just as Eric Clapton began as a straight-ahead blues guitarist having borrowed many of the phrasings and stylings of Black American guitarists, but then he took it into something else, particularly in the evolution of Cream and his solo work since.

And I suppose if I had not gone my own way back in 1969 and started to adopt much broader musical influences, I too may have stuck with that essentially blues format and just broadened it a little bit. But there’s one landmark event, I suppose, that changed my perception of my right, if you like, to play blues—which was seeing, first of all, when I was about 17, an artist on tour with a group of other people playing around Europe. His name was J.B. Lenoir. And J.B. Lenoir was, I have to say, pretty much the only guy who really tackled big political subjects. I mean, he wrote about Vietnam being new conscription. He wrote about race riots and the Freedom March and Governor Wallace, things that were powerful expressions of a Black America trying to stand up for equal rights. And for me he was a very important musician, who’s almost unknown to most people. J.B. Lenoir is not like Muddy Waters, or many of the other musicians touring the UK in the 1960s. Chuck Berry, for example, who, you know, was pretty shameless in the exploitation of his birthright. I think J.B. Lenoir was so important. A German promoter, Fritz Rau, who became a good friend over the years, was one of the people who brought these Black American artists over to Europe, usually with about ten different artists on the bill. They would come over and do the circuit; he would make sure they got gigs in the UK and in different countries of Europe. And for many of them this was the first time they’d been out of the South Side of Chicago, and suddenly they found themselves, not just playing in a club with smoke and booze, but in Europe’s finest concert halls with the dignity of being such an important influence on a generation of not just young musicians, but on people generally, and bringing Black music to a much wider public. And not just a male public either; it was a concert. It was an important experience to see that in the flesh, but it was even more important when Fritz Rau gave me an album of one of those early blues tours, which featured quite a few pieces by J.B. Lenoir, which then gave me the chance to listen to it more objectively rather than just once-off at a concert. And I think at that point I just decided that, you know, this wasn’t something I should carry on trying to exploit, because that the bottom line. That’s what it felt like doing.

I have such huge respect and admiration for the musicians and music that gave me my start. But I think there’s a time when you’ve got to let it go. Maybe not let it go completely, but you just have to somehow push it away as being sacred ground on which you are not really worthy of walking. Perhaps in the same way as, as I said before, I’m for the Church of England and occasionally for the Roman Catholic church, but I don’t go into mosques and try and to strut my stuff, you know. That’s sacred ground of a difference and very material sort. Some things you just have to stand back and show your respect for, and your feeling of support for, but you know, that’s where I kind of left that that musical format behind.

So little reprises to different “Songs for Jeffrey” along the way, but they were influenced by different music. “Jeffrey goes to Leicester Square” you mentioned. That was only a year later and it begins with a with a Greek folk instrument called a balalaika. That’s a little bit more eccentric and very much more eclectic.

Over the years I guess my musical influences have gone through different branches of folk music, including American blues, because it is Black American folk music. And that’s essentially what it is today. But you know, that’s what I do: I borrow a little bit here and there. I try and find ways to incorporate some of those ideas and the essence of that music. Whether I’m successful or not, I don’t know. But I think that’s what we always should be doing, trying to bring together ideas and putting our own spin on them because to be truly 100% totally creative and stand-alone is pretty impossible to do. There are only twelve notes in the musical scale that we use.

And I guess, if my cat were to walk up and down the piano for a couple of hours, he would have managed to play all of them in many different orders and come out with something not too unlike Captain Beefheart in Trout Mask Replica. Because Don Van Vliet, Captain Beefheart, could not play the piano. But he wrote a lot of the music by banging away on a piano and would then turn to Bill Harkleroad, whose stage name was Zoot Horn Rollo, saying “write that down,” and Bill would spend hours trying to transcribe the meanderings of the good and the bad Captain. And then Don would come back in and sing words over it, which of course no one had heard until he actually did the master vocal take. Sometimes that randomization of musical notes can be very endearing and startlingly original and crazy. It’s naive painting; it’s naive art coming to life as music.

There have been a lot of those folks over the years. And I have to say, I can think of at least three who I would describe as engaging charlatans, because they pull the wool over our eyes and we manage to swallow the sugary pill, pretending we enjoyed it and loved it and understood, whereas of course we were just being conned. Politicians often do the same, as I’m sure you’ve experienced.

JPE: Not to be a charlatan is a project that seems worth chewing on. We’ve talked about the sacred, and of honoring the blues as a Black vernacular tradition and developing something else instead. That parallel gives you not just, say, the playfulness that you get in experimentation; it also yields some of the most powerful songs that you’ve written. My current personal favorites on this front, I can say, would be North Sea Oil (from Stormwatch, 1979), not just because the song is a catchy tune in 5/4 time, but really because of the way it thinks about the North Sea oil industry and the environmental impact as well as economic precarity of that situation. And then there’s a song that turns to the legacy of British colonialism, “Pax Britannica” from your Homo Erraticus solo album (2014), a song that reflects the whole history of your songwriting as well.4 I mean, you talked about J.B. Lenoir and his political charge, and these two songs are examples of kind of parallel (British) vision, it seems to me, of this commitment—a commitment not just to play and eclecticism, but also to saying something very serious about these spaces and environments that you occupy.

IA: I try to write about stuff, not just emotions. So sometimes I write about things that are inspired by the world around us, whether it’s the natural world or the unnatural world. I’m moved often to write things because, being a bit of a news junkie, I’m always reading and seeing what goes on. If I’m in the USA ever again, then you’ll find me switching channels back and forth between Fox News and CNN, because I want to see both sides of the story. And when I read the newspapers, I read one that would be considered to be a pretty left-wing journal, a very good newspaper called The Guardian in the UK. And I also read its opposite cousin, The Daily Telegraph, which is perhaps a bastion of traditional right-wing beliefs. And I read some of the stuff that’s in between. But to me it is rather important to never just read from one place. I think that a lot of people are dedicated to having one view and they want to reinforce that idea they already have, because that makes life easier. But I always want my perceptions to be challenged by listening to the opposite argument or, if not the opposite, then at least a different one.

That enters into some of my songwriting, too—I mean, you mentioned “The Whaler’s Dues,” where I’m singing in the first person as if I were a whaler on the high seas killing whales for oil and other products. Perhaps in Iceland or on the Faroe Islands somewhere, that would be seen to be a very noble pursuit, and maybe one would think I secretly want to be out there on the high seas killing whales. Whereas other people would be horrified if I was to do such a thing. And so I’m singing it not to make an excuse or to apologize but just to try to explain that some people have those beliefs, and it is their wherewithal to survive; perhaps it is one of the few things they can do to put food on the table and to provide for a family. And so we always have to think about things in a slightly broader way and try to present the counterargument, even if, ultimately, when you’re writing the song, you know which side you’re on—and it ain’t the one that you’re putting forward in the song.

But it’s important, I think, to try and present that, and so that’s part of what I do. I mean, what I’m talking about makes me sound like a very complicated person who straddles the fence and is never prepared to actually go out in a radical way to try and persuade you to my set of beliefs. That’s a fair enough analysis of what I do: I’m a professional fence-straddler. But that’s a more fun way to be than just to have a dyed-in-the-wool, set view.

It’s the same thing with political leaders in the in different parts of the world. I want to hear what they’ve got to say, you know? It’s hard to imagine that they are all truly bad people, but we have to listen to what they have to say. I mean, I’m sure I have people that I know in the USA who are Republican voters and Republican supporters, but it’s not to say that I would expect them necessarily to be overtly partisan when it comes to finally casting their vote in the next election. I had a friend—not a dear friend, but a kind of close friend, spiritually speaking—a man called Tony Snow, who worked as the White House Press Secretary under George Bush, Jr. and sadly died of colon cancer a few years ago. He was an absolute, through-and-through Republican, and he was a really nice man. And he had the respect and support of people over on the Democrat side as well, both in the press, in the media, and elsewhere. He was a good guy. He had his beliefs, but he would listen; he would consider. In my mind, he would have made an excellent American President round about now, had he lived long enough and had he been persuaded to enter that world. He was a political commentator for Fox News prior to getting the White House gig, which is when I knew him. I knew him when he was still working for Fox. And then, of course, he was at the White House. But there are people like that, people who you can talk to and argue with, and to whom you can present a contrary view and they won’t shoot you down. They’ll have a good old listen and make their own minds up.

I would be intrigued to know what Tony Snow would have made of the current Republican Party and its president; it’s sad he’s no longer with us. But you know, he’s an example of someone you might think would have been partisan, but behind it was someone who would, I think, always consider the alternatives. And I know that’s the case with politicians in the UK, a few of whom I know. The good guys will always look and consider the other side and begrudgingly, perhaps, accept that once in a while there are words of—not infinite wisdom, but of some degree of wisdom—coming from your opposing benches in the Houses of Parliament.

JPE: That seems consistent with the artistic position you described earlier, when you mentioned the painterly observations that form the basis for much of your songwriting. It’s not as if you can suddenly just blot out part of the landscape. But it does feel as though the worrisome situation is when that ability to disagree, that ability to have conversations, becomes violently foreclosed—when there’s no longer the possibility of having chat after work or finding some kind of common ground on which to disagree. That seems to be a worry, pretty much everywhere, that there’s little possibility of dialogue.

IA: And leaving politics outside of that, with religious belief this is absolutely rampant. There are theological arguments to be presented based on considerable analysis of historical events. But there are those people who just simply will not face an opposing argument. It just doesn’t chime with what they want to believe. It’s what Al Gore once aptly named in his movie work, An Inconvenient Truth. And that is, in a way, our excuse for not going along with anything: it’s inconvenient. You know, right now it’s inconvenient to have to endure some degree of lockdown, to not socialize with our friends, to not socialize even with members of our family. It’s inconvenient. Climate change is obviously inconvenient, as Al Gore put it back then, and it still is today. It’s inconvenient for us not to guzzle gas, and to fly around the world to do things when it’s not strictly necessary. And I think I think that’s a very useful, very gentle way of showing that we are lazy, selfish, and unbending, and have closed minds to things that cause inconvenience. And that obviously applies to religious beliefs as well.

It’s a subject I think that, carefully, you might choose to touch upon in song lyrics, but with your heart in your mouth because you’re going to upset people.

JPE: I’m aware that we’re running short on time and that you have another engagement right after this. I am also very aware that the Jethro Tull website provides answers to many of the questions you’ve tended get asked on a regular basis over the past fifty years. Thus to conclude, I am wondering if there are any questions that you would ask yourself if you had the opportunity—you know, questions that you don’t normally get asked and about which you might ask, “why doesn’t anybody ask me about that?”

IA: I’ve always thought it rather odd, especially my profession, that no one—well, that’s not quite true. It did once happen in 1972, on one singular occasion, the only time I was ever asked: “Are you gay?” It was Sydney airport in 1972 on our first trip there, with some fairly hostile Australian press. The first question at the press conference was, “Are you guys homosexuals?” It was an intriguing sort of blunt question to have to respond to, and I responded by saying, “Wow, you know, I’m not really sure.” Which of course was me sitting on the fence. But it’s a question that I’ve never been asked. And you know the answer is, I don’t think so. But I wouldn’t necessarily—well, I probably would rule it out at this point in my life because I’m not, you know, I’m no longer firm of buttock and taut of stomach, so I don’t think I’d be a very attractive catch to anybody. But it’s something that, again: I would never close the door on any possibility. I like to understand. Because, of course, in my profession, particularly, you know lots of people who are gay, and you work with people who are gay, and you work with people from different backgrounds, with different ethnicities. And I think that’s just part of life, you know? You get used to being around people without questioning it in that way. Obviously, no one’s going to say to me, “are you Black, or are you Asian?” It’s a good thing that people don’t ask me that, but I often wonder if they are curious, because we still tend to judge people by things like that. And I really don’t. Because I grew up—as a teenager, you know, you met people, got used to things, you just didn’t question it and you don’t judge people by those criteria, that in the way that some folks do and still do in certain parts of society.

JPE: I’ve always thought of you as an ally. I’m the parent of a 14-year-old trans kid, and this matters. Your former bandmate Dee Palmer, who, well before her transition later in life, was best man at your wedding. At home we’ve followed the story of Dee Palmer and her transition and the fact that you and your wife were supportive of her during and since her transition. I mean, what you’ve just been talking about isn’t an abstraction, or even a matter of sexual preference alone, but just simply a matter of being a decent person. To be an ally is not necessary an obvious thing for all people these days, alas.

IA: It’s important to say that I don’t believe that I was supportive, in the sense that I was necessarily agreeing with what she decided to do. I felt that she should question it very, very carefully, especially at that age. To have a very physical, complete sex change. I wasn’t unsupportive. I was trying to be understanding and to some degree helpful. But I can’t say that I supported her in the sense of giving obvious approval, saying, “hey, yes, you’re doing the right thing, Dave.” And you know, to this day I hope she does feel still that she made the right decision and that she’s happy in her new self and identity.

I think a lot of those things are the same: it’s not an unquestioning support; it’s something you have to consider. It’s a bit like meeting young, aspiring musicians and being asked to impart a few words of wisdom and support to them. I’m afraid I usually come up with something along the lines of—and I’m talking about people who are in their pre-teens or early teens, usually flute players—I say, “Listen. The important thing to get out of music is the love and the enjoyment that comes from being an amateur musician, amateur coming from the Latin word amo, I love.” And that, that’s what I do.

I do it full time, now. I’m an amateur musician being paid for it. But, you know, in a typical year, probably roughly half of my days I am an amateur musician. I play music just for fun. No one’s paying me to do it. I just do it because I’m practicing or just having fun playing something just for the sake of it. Even those of us who are lucky enough to have a career, or get well paid for it, we still should never lose sight of the joy of being an amateur. That is what I advise young students—not necessarily to be content with being an amateur, but not to lose sight of that as being potentially what you might achieve out of music. Because few will go on to become well paid professionals who survive happily out of being musicians for the rest of their lives. A very few will, but it will be very few. The percentage is quite small. So you’ve got to have a plan B. And that’s what I always tell them: just have a plan B. And if you can have a plan C as well. You know, if your plan B is to be an astronaut on the first Mars mission, then that’s probably not a very good plan B. You need a plan C as well.

So that’s kind of what I think about the role that you might play in being supportive. It doesn’t necessarily sound as if it’s being very supportive. But it’s supportive because it’s caring; it’s supportive because it’s asking the difficult question, “are you sure?” And that’s a good question to apply if you’re talking in theological terms. Are you sure? You may come back with a very cogent argument as to exactly why you’re sure and why you believe what you believe, but that’s still a question I think you have to ask yourself, very often: am I really sure?

Priests have said to me that they have days when they wake up in the morning—because I’ve asked them the question, and they readily volunteer—there are days when you wake up and you’ve lost your faith. And I’ve heard them answer, embarrassed though they may be: “Yes. And I have to just kind of go through it all, and get it in my head, and then turn up for work on Sunday.”

It’s an important thing. It’s far better to be beset by doubt, than to have blind belief. One priest I know said, though he may not have been the author of the expression, that faith and doubt are joined at the hip. They kind of belong together if they’re going to result in a more powerful set of beliefs and arguments. You can’t just have faith without sometimes having doubt as well, and reconsidering all these things. That applies in the arts as well. If you’re a songwriter, whatever you do, you don’t necessarily always believe in your own work. There must be times when you think, “this is actually rubbish,” you know, or “it’s just not that great.” Having total faith and confidence in yourself is a dangerous thing, whether you’re a songwriter or a President of the United States.

JPE: This is why being a being an amateur and being a workaholic are not opposites; they come together, they enable each other, because you have to keep on working in order to enable the love to carry you through the periods of doubt, and through the possibility of doubt.

IA: I think that’s right. I think there are actors or comedians who are people who take what they do on stage as a performance, and then they take it into the other world, that private world, just because it’s a way of practicing and rehearsing. If you’re a comedian, you try out gags and ideas on people around you to see how it goes over, constantly trying things out. It can be a bit tedious.

I know from one comedian friend, that it’s a bit tedious for him to feel that he’s still on stage and you’re the only person in the audience, and you can’t escape while he tries out some new line. It’s the only way some people have of doing it, if you’re an actor. You’ve actually got to do a bit of that sometimes, in the way that you talk to people and behave. You find yourself speaking in tongues, adopting weird accidents, and carrying out characters that you’re sort of rehearsing. I think these things happen. Particularly in music, of course, you don’t always have an audience in front of you. You take yourself into a private space and you practice and try all the things that are really egg-on-the-face, you know, play all the wrong notes, and by elimination, you try to find the right one.

JPE: I realize we are well over our allotted time, so thank you very much. I’m really grateful for the opportunity to chat. Just quickly, for the sake of logistics: I don’t believe in publishing something without having you have a chance to look at it so—

IA: Absolutely not necessarily. I’m more than content, whether you want to paraphrase for the sake of brevity, or whether you want to just put things literally, surrounded by inverted commas. I’m quite careful about what I say. I do try, you know, to bring things to verbal fruition. That is the result of kind of split-second thinking, and not just being too off the wall. I’m usually a constructive person when comes to interviews. I’ve made a few mistakes in my life, saying things without modifying them or realizing how they will come across to other people. And of course we all do that in our daily lives, in the way we talk to other people, friends, family, whatever else. We all tend sometimes to be just a little too unguarded in our expressions, and so doing interviews is rather like making political speeches.

You’ve got to stay away from Twitter. Rule number one.

Ian Anderson, known throughout the world of rock music as the flute and voice behind the legendary rock band Jethro Tull, celebrates his 53rd year as a recording and performing musician in 2021. Ian was born in 1947 in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland. After attending primary school in Edinburgh, his family relocated to Blackpool in the north of England in 1959. Following a traditional Grammar school education, he moved on to Art college to study fine art before deciding on an attempt at a musical career. Jethro Tull formed in 1968 out of the amalgamation of the John Evan Band and McGregor’s Engine, two blues-based local UK groups. After a lengthy career, Jethro Tull has released 30 studio and live albums, selling more than 60 million copies since the band first performed at London’s famous Marquee Club in February 1968.

Anderson has so far recorded seven solo albums in his career: 1983’s Walk Into Light, the flute instrumental Divinitiesalbum for EMI’s Classical Music Division in 1995, the acoustic collections of songs, The Secret Language of Birds and Rupi’s Dance. In a more progressive rock context he recorded Thick As A Brick 2 in 2012 and Homo Erraticus in 2014. Released in 2017, the classically inspired album Jethro Tull—The String Quartets with the Carducci Quartet reached number one in the Billboard Classical Charts.

Anderson lives on a farm in the southwest of England where he has a recording studio and office. He has been married for 44 years to Shona, who is also an active director of their music and other companies. In 2006, Anderson was awarded a Doctorate in Literature from Heriot Watt University in Edinburgh, the Ivor Award for International Achievement in Music and, in the New Years Honours List 2008, an MBE for services to music. In 2011, he received another Doctorate in Literature from Dundee University.

Endnotes
See, for instance, James Parker’s vituperative 2017 essay in The Atlantic, “The Whitest Music Ever: Prog rock was audacious, innovative—and awful.” The Atlantic, September 2017. www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-whitest-music-ever/534174/. This is not the place to elaborate on the generic definitions of “progressive rock” that have proliferated over the past half century, other than to flag the extent to which definitions of the genre tend to demarcate it by sovereign exception: since prog rock “died” with punk, surely Kate Bush can’t be called “progressive,” nor Fishbone, nor Joanna Newsom or Mastodon, nor KBB or Kikagaku Moyo; Frank Zappa, the Plastic People of the Universe, and Soft Machine are “art rock.” And so forth. For a refreshing reconfiguration of the cultural and political coordinates of such generic boundary-drawing, see Tamara Levitz’s dialogue with Benjamin Piekut here in ASAP/J. See also Rob Young’s magnificent cultural history of British visionary music of the 1950s-1970s, Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011.

The band Jethro Tull is named after the English agriculturalist Jethro Tull (1674-1741) (see the All-too-frequently-asked question, “How did you get the name Jethro Tull?” at jethrotull.com/press. Anderson himself became a salmon farmer in 1978, when he purchased and restored the Strathaird Estate in Scotland and oversaw the Strathaird Salmon corporation through the early 1990s. This part of Jethro Tull’s and Anderson’s history is the subject of a 1987 documentary, Fish and Sheep and Rock n’ Roll.
 On Jo Lustig and the political and cultural imaginary of British folk music revival, see Rob Young, Electric Eden. Lustig managed the experimental folk supergroup Pentangle along with Steeleye Span, whose 1974 album Now We Are Six was produced by Anderson.

“Pax Britannica” is sung as a love-note from Prince Albert to Queen Victoria waxing about the treasures of colonialism, ironically downplaying the violence of colonial occupation as administrivia: “See, we offer contracts clear in/ English, plain as it appears/ In small print, some trifling matters:/ Not important, never fear.” The song’s piano fanfare, moreover, is a direct allusion to the piano fanfare in the “man of power” section of Jethro Tull’s 1972 album, Thick as a Brick.

[maddogfagin]

www.thetapesarchive.com/ian-anderson-2/

Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull 1993
Marc Allan

I was a devoted Jethro Tull fan growing up, so I relished every chance I had to speak to founder and leader Ian Anderson.

In this conversation, which took place during the 1993 tour celebrating the band’s 25th anniversary, Anderson, then 46 years old, talked about Tull’s legacy (“almost an important band”), the best Tull albums (Stand Up, Songs From The Wood and Crest of a Knave, because they contain “the right balance of serious, humorous, complex and simple stuff”) and an event that brought together 16 of the first 22 members of Tull (there have been many more members since).

Anderson is consistently erudite and witty—very much a reflection of the music he’s made over the past fifty-plus years. And sometimes, as you’ll see when he gets to talking about Metallica and Guns ’N Roses, he also can be very wrong.

One note: In this interview, he refers to an upcoming Jethro Tull album that the band recorded in 1972 but never released because the recording sessions “foundered in technical disarray.” That record was “Nightcap,” and it is, indeed, a mess.

For more information about Jethro Tull, visit jethrotull.com.

And if you want to listen to the best of Tull, I recommend: “For A Thousand Mothers,” “To Cry You a Song,” “My God,” “Dharma for One” and “Cold Wind to Valhalla.” Anderson also has released several solo albums, the best of which are “Divinities: Twelve Dances With God” and “The Secret Language of Birds.”



Ian Anderson Interview Transcription:

Ian Anderson: Hello, Marc Allan please.

Marc Allan: This is Marc.

Ian Anderson: Hi Marc, this is Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull.

Marc Allan: Hi Ian, how are you?

Ian Anderson: I’m very well, I’ve just been speaking repeatedly to a young lady, I mean quite a young lady from apparently on a phone number that’s 663-9398, that I’ve been calling for the last 10 minutes.

Marc Allan: Oh wow.

Ian Anderson: And finally had to explain what I was trying to do and that her mom looked up your telephone number and I’d got the, well, whoever gave me the phone number had got it wrong. So somewhere out there in a suburb not too far from you is a young lady who is very bemused by the fact that some strange English person from a rock band called Jethro Tull, which she’d obviously never heard, trying to reach her to talk to her about our forthcoming tour.

Marc Allan: Gee, would’ve been kind of exciting if you had reached a fan, you know, and then somebody was really thrilled and kept you on the phone.



Ian Anderson: Actually, I think the girl had heard of us, but when she said to her mom, she said, “What’s that, a delivery service?” ‘Cause I thought it was gonna be like she was gonna get through to her mom, I said mom, Mom said, “What, let me speak to him.” But no, Mom hadn’t heard of us but little girly had, maybe little girly wasn’t so little but she was, you know, we’re talking teenage. But then a lot of our fans are these days, and who’s complaining.

Marc Allan: Really, you’re finding you’re getting a young audience?

Ian Anderson: Well, I mean, yes, in the same ways a lot of young people go to museums and art galleries, the sort of things-that were way back, sure.

Marc Allan: Don’t say that. I was thinking it was 20 years ago this month that I saw Jethro Tull for the first time, saw on the Passion Play Tour so, yeah it’s a long time, 25 years now overall, as you look back on it you’ve had some incredible highs, a few things maybe that are being considered lows, is there anything you’d change?

Ian Anderson: Well, I’m sure there are lots and lots and lots of little things that I would change, I don’t think I’d change any of the big things but, you know, lots of little things, sure. I mean, like trying to remember to play an F natural as opposed to an F sharp in some particular songs somewhere but yeah, I mean I suppose it’s not been a disastrous series of events, it’s been interesting. But, you know, we are amongst those few people who are still around from the earlier days of rock music, as it took off in the big sort of era of the late ’60s, early ’70s into the arenas and the stadiums of the USA. I mean, we’re one of those surviving bands who still has an audience of a few thousand people, and, you know, we’re not the biggest band in town, but we have a meaningful following. Considering the nature of our predominantly uncommercial music, I suppose we’re lucky to have anybody coming to see us at all, because we don’t do the straightforward stuff, we kind of fool around a little bit. On reflection, we’re very lucky to have an audience given that we are that sort of a band that did the stuff that other bands didn’t do rather than follow the mainstream of rock.

Marc Allan: You had mentioned having this audience coming out to see you and it seems to me that groups from the ’60s, ’70s and so on seem to have the biggest followings today. Concert tours by groups that have been long established are doing very well, whereas newer groups are having a harder time attracting concert audience. I’m wondering if you think that’s any kind of comment on the state of music now?

Ian Anderson: I think it’s more of a comment on the state of the economy really, because people are concerned about value for money and if you feel that you’re gonna get value for money by going to see a band that is, or an artist, that’s been around for many many years, that seems to have deliver the goods and promised some kind of a payoff in, perhaps not spectacular but acceptable, terms then, you know, value for money seems to be an important part of persuading people to part with their ticket price. I also have a sneaking suspicion that maybe the glory days of the big production kind of shows might be coming to an end, I think that if you’re at the forefront of that large-scale touring event, you know, the U2 tour, or the Guns N’ Roses, or the Metallica, then you can do very well, but a lot of the time it doesn’t do too well, or it doesn’t do too well two years in succession. I know that the bands like Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, have probably not enjoy the same success second time around in some of their appearances in the last few months than they did a year or so ago. It’s somehow satisfying to be around in a kind of echelon that depends upon enough 2000, 3000, 4000 willing punters coming to see something that is a musical performance rather than the state of the art, or the state of the month, in the sense of being current, the popular thing to see, the popular thing to do.

Marc Allan: But, I think about it now and I’ve seen you about 10 times maybe a little more over the years, and I can’t remember a crowd of less than 10,000 people and I’ve never seen you in a place other than an arena.

Ian Anderson: Really?

Marc Allan: Yeah

Ian Anderson: Well, because we’ve been playing theaters since we’ve started, and it’s also been a very important part of Jethro Tull concert going activities to try and make sure that we play in a variety of scales of events, and indeed the 2000 seater theaters are sort of something I very much have tried to keep a hold on over the years and in the sense of keeping that as a viable thing. I mean, sure we play the arenas and the festivals and all the rest of it but, you know, we also try and fit in theater tours as well. Where have you been seeing us play?

Marc Allan: Madison Square Garden.

Ian Anderson: Okay. Well we don’t, you know, I mean–

Marc Allan: And Boston Garden.

Ian Anderson: We’ve got a couple of shows in New York next month,

Marc Allan: Right.

Ian Anderson: Or later this month, whenever it might be. Kind of, I don’t know, 10, 20,000 places that may or may not be full, I think they probably will be full, but we’re also playing the places where we’ll probably only play to, you know, 3 or 4,000 people and some of our concerts you know, we play for, I mean this last European tour, we played for maybe 30, 40,000 people one night and maybe 2,000 people the next night in some village square in the middle of the Austrian out. That for me is really exciting, you know you don’t get sucked into this kind of one level of performance where you’re dealing only with big crowds and big, sort of, big events, big gestures. I think it’s very important to try and keep this contact with smaller groups of people as well. I mean, I much prefer playing to, I mean, it’s much easier as a performer to deal with people when it’s kind of a couple of fans and folks, then you really feel you’re kind of reaching to all of them. But it’s very hard, when it gets more than about 5,000 people, you know, some people are getting short-changed, no doubt about it. I know that, because I’ve been in the audience and I would rather go and see an act play, you know, in a smaller venue anytime, anywhere.

Marc Allan: Well, maybe that’s the drawback of growing up on the East Coast where you were enormously popular. Until maybe fix, six years ago I think I remember seeing that you’re playing in a theater in St. Louis and that was probably the first time that I ever knew of Jethro Tull playing a theater in the United States.

Ian Anderson: Hm, well I was actually looking through some dates the other day, and I was astonished to see we were playing theaters fairly consistently, not every day, but I mean here and there, all the way through our career in the USA. There were quite a few theater dates and I know because, having seen them written down, I remember them, and I can remember those more readily than I remember, you know, the kind of arena or stadium type dates which sort of blur a little bit. Whereas those theater dates tend to have something about them that causes you to remember the actual time and place and who was on and what you did.

Marc Allan: Let me go back and talk about some of the material over the years you, especially early on, sung a lot about God and religion. When you look back on that material now, how do you feel about it? Have you changed your mind?

Ian Anderson: Yes, but only a little bit. And most of it I’ve changed back again to how I felt then. I think that one of the reassuring things about growing older is that a lot of those childhood philosophies and views that you form in the midst of puberty and the conflicting emotions of the hormonal disturbance are not flashes in the pan, one off things, I think they’re actually very formant and very important emotions, some of which probably stay with you for life. And a lot of those things that I was thinking and singing about a few years later, I’m still fairly comfortable with in terms of opinion and thought, now looking back on them. There may have been times where I might have changed my views or at least entertained alternatives during my life but I think, pretty much, I go along with the Ian Anderson of, you know, 1970, ’71, ’72. I mean, I’m sort of not such a different guy, I don’t have as much hair, but I still have the same waist dimensions and maybe marginally more saggy of buttock. But basically I’m pretty much the same guy.

Marc Allan: No more codpieces.

Ian Anderson: I mean that is very reassuring, when those things come back to you, you know you think well, wait a minute that’s kind of what I used to think. It’s surprising, in a way, that you don’t change more than you do. But I’m sure it’s not just me, I’m sure it’s everybody, or at least a lot of people who find that those really formative years are very crucial in the sense that they put those sort of strong building blocks of your opinion, of your sort, you know, the way you weigh things up. They provide a foundation for your later life. You may change a little bit, but it still builds on that foundation of the exciting and dangerous years of puberty.

Marc Allan: I think that if you talk to some of your contemporaries that they would probably cringe about some of the things that they wrote when they were young though, so it’s kind of reassuring to know that you stand by what you wrote then.

Ian Anderson: Well, I certainly cringe about some of them, but only some of them.

Marc Allan: Can you give me an example?

Ian Anderson: Well, there are things that I, I mean, if you want to take that period of time, say 1970, if you take the Aqualung album, there are songs like Aqualung which I think are thoroughly relevant and good songs in a sense they’re about very real, contemporary, and social realities. They were songs about then, they’re songs about now, they’re songs about 20 years from now, there will always be people living in cardboard boxes and about whom we have ambivalent feelings and find it difficult to relate. But there are other songs on that same album that I think are a little heavy handed and a bit awkward. I guess I would say that probably 50, 60, 70% of the things I’ve written I’m not too embarrassed about. And probably about 25% of them I’m quite proud of having written. But I mean out of 250 songs, we’re probably talking 50, 60 songs that I’m really very, very pleased with. You know 50 or 60 songs, you know we’re talking about 10 symphonies. I mean Beethoven only managed nine and a half, so I think I’m in with a chance,

Marc Allan: Okay.

Ian Anderson: by my own evaluation. Not that I’m saying what I do is as important, but just in terms of self satisfaction I think there’s quite a body of material in the stuff that I’ve done that I’m not only not embarrassed about, I’m actually quite proud of. And then there’s that bunch of stuff that I wish I’d never seen before but, you know, you have to accept that you did it.

Marc Allan: How does My God stand up?

Ian Anderson: Oh, that’s okay, that’s okay. Yeah, I mean, that’s not a difficult one to deal with, no, that’s okay.

Marc Allan: And what about Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play?

Ian Anderson: Well, Thick as a Brick is a sort of an amusing thing because it was a response to the critics who saw Aqualung as being some kind of concept album. So we tongue in cheek and with good humor, delivered duly a concept album which was deliberately overblown with kind of a crazy way over the top almost Monty Python-esque parody of what a concept album is supposed to be. But it was done with a sense of humor and warmth that I don’t think alienated the critics or the public. It kind of hit the spot. The difficulty was in following that up, we then went to do an album which sounded in technical disarray, because we were working in a studio in France where things just went horribly wrong and we kind of struggled for some months to get something completed which didn’t really work out. Although, strangely it will in fact be released in December this year as a part of a two CD set, the missing 1972 Jethro Tull album will, in fact, nearly all of it, be heard probably by you and a few others. And it’s kinda good fun, again it has a sort of warmth and humor about it, it’s not the best music in the world, but it’s sort of amusing as a piece of early ’70s stuff. It’s a historical document. Passion Play was the follow after that when we went back to England and had to kinda start again and largely new material and a new approach. Imagine if you spent three months of your life working on an album and it had all gone horribly wrong and you had to then pick up the pieces and kind of get a record delivered. Then it was, I don’t know, some of the humor went out of it. And that for me is the only problem with Passion Play, is that it is a rather a humorless, it’s just a little bit too serious and deadpan. It therefore sounds pompous and totally grandiose where it wasn’t supposed to be that way, it was supposed to be more, or a bit more, kind of tongue in cheek, but I’m afraid the levity got lost in the foundering attempts from the Chateau D’Herouville in Paris in 1972, so that’s my excuse.

Marc Allan: Well,

Ian Anderson: What King Crimsons or Emerson Lake and Palmers, or Yeses or Deep Purples, what have they got to say for themselves?

Marc Allan: I don’t know though don’t trash Passion Play too completely, because really, it’s one of my favorite all time albums.

Ian Anderson: I’m not trashing it, it’s just a little bit short on the kind of warmth, it just missed that thing, you know, it just didn’t quite convey something which was supposed to be a little bit of fun, it was too deadpan, you know, there’s a kind of tiredness about the recording process at that moment, it just somehow didn’t convey the thing that was supposed to be there which was a little bit of tongue in cheek and warmth and fun, which was certainly there with Thick as a Brick and indeed was there with the album that didn’t get completed. But hey, Passion Play is not, I don’t look back on it and think, oh god, what a terrible record, I just think it was a record that was lacking an ingredient that could so easily have been there if we hadn’t been a little bit jaded through the dislocation geographically of taking to another country to make a record being tax exiles and you know, having the problems with girlfriends and family and wives being in a strange place. It weighed heavily upon us, and, you know, in a soulful sense we got a little bit too pedantic about it. But hell, that was 1973.

Marc Allan: Yeah.

Ian Anderson: A lot worse things happened, I can’t remember what but I’m sure they did.

Marc Allan: Well, if it makes you feel any better, I think that album stands up remarkably well. I was listening to it today, and I listen to it pretty frequently because it’s one of my favorite records and, I don’t know, I think there’s enough spots of humor in there and certainly enough that people can read into it or not read into it as they see fit. And I think it’s–

Ian Anderson: Good, well, it’s okay.

Marc Allan: Yeah.

Ian Anderson: It’s kind of a seven and a half out of ten one, because there have been worse but there’s been many better.

Marc Allan: Okay, your more recent albums, A Catfish Rising, Rock Island, how are those going to sound in 20 years do you think?

Ian Anderson: A seven and a half out of ten.

Marc Allan: Yeah.

Ian Anderson: They’re kind of, you know, they have their moments too. I think that, I mean, the one before that,

Marc Allan: Crest of a Knave.

Ian Anderson: Crest of a Knave. Crest of a Knave was a good kind of balance. Crest of a Knave is a sort of 1980s version of standup. It has a good, eclectic mix. That has a good balance of material on it, and so, strange thing, you only see this kind of after the fact obviously, otherwise you wouldn’t complete them the way you do, but Crest of a Knave had a good balance to it. And some good songs, for me it’s kind of like standup. A middle period Jethro Tull album like Songs from the Wood, again, are put in the same vein of having a sort of right balance of kind of serious stuff, humorous stuff, you know, complex, simple, they’re kind of balanced records that seem like the product of a sane and comfortable individual with at least two or three major credit cards to his name. So, I mean I would always recommend those. But if I had to stop and recommend any particular album to anybody, the tedious but truthful response would be that I would go for one of the best of albums, probably particularly the one that’s out at the moment, the two CD set and digital remasters, which are, truly, genuinely original mixes. But they do, I think in every case, sound better than they would do on their original albums as they sound today. But the digitally remastered best of of whatever it is,

Marc Allan: I have those, yeah.

Ian Anderson: 30 odd songs, whatever they are. I mean that’s the kind of thing that I would say well, if you were a first time Jethro Tull buyer then probably a good thing to go for. Similarly, if you were someone who bought a lot of Jethro Tull albums on vinyl in the past and wanted to buy, you know, replicate them all in CDs then I would say that something like that is a good cross section of the things that, you know, it is just that, a cross section. It’s not including everything, but it’s a bit of this a bit of that, and it gives you an overall picture. So, particularly for the younger fans, you know, people maybe coming along seeing Jethro Tull for the first time, or buying their first, second or third Jethro Tull album, then those best of things are a pretty good deal if you’re looking for an answer to the whole picture, I mean, I speak as one whose recent purchases include sort of Stranglers’ best of and box set and things from those, the Ramones. ‘Cause I go for that, you know, I’m not gonna go and buy all their bloody records ’cause the chances are that eight out of 10 songs are a pile of $h1t. You know, I’m gonna go for the box set on the grounds that they are the proven track record things over a career of some, you know, well whatever it might be, 10 years or 20 years or five years depending on your status. But, you know, the compilation is not a dirty word, I think it’s a pretty good way of getting an overall picture fairly quickly and then if you like what you hear you might then start investigating it and going back into the minutiae of detail surrounding some particular album. But, you know, I kinda like those compilations, box sets. I buy ’em all the time. I mean I’ve finished staring at a Muddy Waters compilation actually on my study desk as I sit. You know, I’m a compilation kind of guy. Ain’t nothing wrong with those. And they’re usually cheaper.

Marc Allan: Yeah, well, in the overall scheme of things it’s certainly cheaper than buying every Stranglers record, or something like that. I guess if you’re gonna divide Jethro Tull records into periods, as you seem to have done, it seemed to me that after Songs from the Wood, you had, and I’m probably wrong about this, but it seemed like you had a harder time coming up with ideas of things that you wanted to write about that were really personal and affected you. And I’m wondering if I’m just reading something into it, or if there is any truth to that.

Ian Anderson: No, I don’t have any problem writing things that reflect my feelings and emotions and interests at all, but I, you know, obviously have more of a problem when I have to accommodate the kind of musical aspirations and interests of other members of the group, so you know the problem for Jethro Tull has always been that there have been, first of all, a lot of different members in the band, each of whom have come with their own idiosyncratic expressions regarding sort of the way they play music, their preferences for different kinds of music, their personalities as they affect the music, and, you know, first of all you write for yourself, and second and fairly closely as a second, you tend to think about the people you’re working with, and you hope to impress them, and make them feel good about what you’re offering up to them to play. So, I mean, is there a difficulty that tends to be…

Marc Allan: Well, you were in the middle of a sentence and then you weren’t there anymore.

Ian Anderson: Yeah, well, that’s right. I got to the end of the sentence and you weren’t there anymore.

Marc Allan: Anyway, so can you continue that thought, you were saying you were writing to impress other members of the band?

Ian Anderson: Sure, I mean that’s a big part of it, that you’re aware of other people’s preferences and their wishes to express a certain thing and you find yourself either consciously or subconsciously working with that in mind and it’s the way that it is, you know, I don’t think anyone is a true solo performer. I think you’re always however out on a limb you might seem to be, you’re always kinda working with somebody, even if it’s just the recording engineer or the tape operator, there’s more than one viewpoint at work.

Marc Allan: Did becoming successful in terms of audiences and making money and all that change your perspective about what you wrote and sang about, you know, does it become difficult to write about the church or religion or whatever when you’ve been so fortunate to be as successful as you’ve been?

Ian Anderson: I don’t think it’s difficult to write about the church or religion, but certainly there are some subject areas that do become more problematic, because you’re dealing with simple ideals and sort of universal kind of street sort of values. Then it is difficult if you got a few million in the bank it must be difficult if you’re in U2, for example, to be a preaching kind of a band, when, you know, the most of people you’re preaching to are you know, compared to yourself, extremely poor. It must be difficult if you’re talking about certain values and you’re Michael Jackson and you own half the known universe. Of course it’s difficult but at the end of it all we have our pride but areas of conflict with our own world with all verses that sort of universal guilt that we must all feel that there are people who are much less fortunate than us, and maybe we address it and maybe we don’t. I mean, I do but the way in which I do is probably quite different to the way in which Michael Jackson does. We’re talking different also in quantitative terms as well. So I think the answer is obviously a dilemma at work there as soon as you become monetarily successful as a musician, you immediately tread on very, very thin ice when it comes to the some of the subject material and some of the sentiments that you might have expressed when you were a poor, penniless, struggling musician. That’s one of the things you have to cope with. And at that point it’s best to get rid of the limos and the dark glasses, it’s best to shed the trappings of show biz, and you know, kind of just be one of the guys as much as you can. I mean, it’s easier to deal with Phil Collins making a lot of money, than it is to deal with Michael Jackson or Madonna making a lot of money because Phil Collins doesn’t seem too show biz, that he’s gonna upset you. Whereas Madonna is sort of archetypal Hollywood show biz power crazy, sort of over the top. I mean I don’t think anybody really likes Madonna, that’s the sad thing, and yet there’s a lot of talent and, you know, character there. It’s just that, you can’t like this woman, you know, it’s so sad, isn’t it?

Marc Allan: Yeah.

Ian Anderson: I’m sure some people like dear old Phil.

Marc Allan: Eh, throw Phil in there with ’em. Give the money to somebody else, let’s not give it to Phil either. Let me see what else I wanted to ask you about, it said in one of the bios, and some of the bio material that have been sent that there was a reunion not long ago of former and current Tull members, is this correct?

Ian Anderson: That’s right.

Marc Allan: Well, what was that like, when was it?

Ian Anderson: It was pretty weird at the beginning, because it wasn’t our idea, I mean any current or ex Jethro Tull member’s idea, it was the idea of the director of a video that EMI wanted to make of sort of 25 years of Jethro Tull. He wanted to get everybody together and we all kind of cringed a bit. And so in the end, then I thought, well you know, we’re either going to end up with a halfhearted response that will be really embarrassing or we’d better try and get really everybody there in which case I have to get on the phone and call people. So I did, and there was a lot of resistance among some members but as soon as they felt that there was a sort of genuine will to see each other again, you know, it kind of snowballed into, I mean really every single person would have been there, except that two or three of them were on tour. One, his new wife was having a baby that day, you know, 5000 miles away and you know, one was dead. And I mean apart from that, everybody turned up so it was I think 16 out of 22 people, and it was surprising because all these people, some of whom had never met each other before which is really interesting thing, I mean they were kind of, “Oh, you were the guy who was there in ’74.” And it was quite extraordinary. But there were a few people you expected to have tense moments exhibited, but they weren’t, but some of the people you thought were kinda gonna be really awkward in each other’s company were actually okay and then, strangely, there was a little tension between people you didn’t expect there to be tension between. And for the most part, people really got on, it was a very friendly and civilized affair. And remarkable for one thing which was that at no point during the day did I hear anybody talking about old times. You know, what people talked about was today or tomorrow in the sense of, “Well how old are your children now?” and “Where are they going to school?” and “Where are you going to holiday next year?” and people would kind of, no one was interested in the past or reminiscing, you know, that was kind of like definitely not what anybody was there for. It was quite extraordinary that they couldn’t get anyone to talk about old times. Not readily, anyway.

Marc Allan: Well, one of the things that I find kind of amazing is that 22 is a few more than I thought there were, but once people left Jethro Tull, they really never did anything, I mean they certainly never did anything of note. I mean, you look back starting from the days of Mick Abraham’s leaving, I never heard a word about Barry Barlow after he left, I never heard a word of John Evan after he left, and it’s kind of curious that–

Ian Anderson: Well then, but most of them sort of opted out of music, I mean John Evan’s left Jethro Tull and went into the building industry. And he runs a quite successful building firm who does most of the renovations on buildings around Heathrow airport. Jeffrey Hammond left Jethro Tull to become a painter, which is what he was before he joined Jethro Tull and he’s done nothing but stay at home and paint pictures since then. Barry Barlow went off into the sort of risky world of record production and management, and, you know, has had mixed fortune since, I think, which you could say. Clive Bunker went up to set up an engineering factory in dog kennels. And Mick Abrahams became a lifeguard but he couldn’t swim. So, hang on a sec

Marc Allan: Sure.

Ian Anderson: Hi Gam, where are you? At the hotel? Hi, sorry, got my daughter en route somewhere in the far part of the country.

Marc Allan: Okay.

Ian Anderson: Yeah, that’s it, okay.

Marc Allan: All right, well I’m hoping I can keep you just a few more minutes, I wanted to ask you a few other things.

Ian Anderson: Yeah, have to be a few, because I’m actually, I should have had a six o’clocker that I’ve gotta ring through right now so we’re not to get too far behind schedule.

Marc Allan: All right, okay then just a couple other things. You’ve touched on this a little bit already, but what’s Jethro Tull’s place in the history of rock gonna be?

Ian Anderson: Well, probably not that important a place, but I imagine Jethro Tull is always gonna be seen as one of those quaint, sort of idiosyncratic bands of the sort of ’70s that sort of, kind of did the stuff that was you know, kind of not the norm and had its brief connection with commercial success but overall was a sort of band that kind of did things that weren’t quite mainstream. I suppose at the end of it all I think I’d rather be in Jethro Tull than be in Guns N’ Roses because, you know, Guns N’ Roses, if they are remembered in 100 years from now in the sort of music books or the history books, they’re gonna be remembered as a band who kind of were a second recycle of a kind of Rolling Stones phenomenon. Just as Metallica will be remembered as a kind of second recycle of the Black Sabbath phenomenon. I mean, Jethro Tull, along with the Emerson Lake and Palmers and Yes, and all of these kind of progressive rock bands of the early ’70s are sort of seen as being slightly kitsch, slightly you know bombastic, overblown, whatever. But at least some people remember our names, and some of us are remembered as musicians, not just as images. I mean you’re gonna remember Keith Emerson was actually a very good keyboard player, you’re gonna remember that guys in Pink Floyd or Yes or whoever, you know, actually had some real command of their instruments, whereas a lot of the bands have really just been kind of imagery, and some pretty faces or around at the right time with the occasional hit record. And I’m not unhappy with the status of Jethro Tull but I don’t think, you know, I wouldn’t place it as being kind of a landmark in the history of rock music, we’re just kind of one of those bands that did some of the stuff that was a little bit on the edge of that more conventional and satisfying mainstream of rock music, which I, as a listener enjoy immensely when it’s good, but you know it’s very very hard to work in that genre and come out with anything original. And these days even harder than ever.

Marc Allan: Bet you’ll be happy with that designation, then.

Ian Anderson: Well, I’m pretty happy with the idea that we were one of those almost, I mean yeah, almost an important band.

Marc Allan: All right, and finally I was hoping that you would look into your crystal ball and tell me what you think music is gonna be like in the year 2000?

Ian Anderson: Ooh, well, I wish I could say that there was gonna be any, I mean we’re only talking, after all, you know, seven years away. It really is not gonna be very different. I mean, rock music as a genre is really changed very very little over the last 20, 30 years. I mean we’re still talking the same essential rhythms, the same tempos, the same fairly simple harmonic relationships. Nothing is really set down to be changed, we’ve had technological changes, but we haven’t had really musical changes. You know, rock is a pretty finite form, it can deal in a currency which is, you know, fairly universal and fairly simple. I don’t think we’re gonna see any great changes, we will see, I mean, for sure for the next 10 years, all we’re gonna see is more recycling of fairly established formats that have been introduced in the last 30 years. I mean we’ve seen revivals of you know, kind of ’60s stuff, and we’ve seen, you know, kinda a lot like we said the Guns N’ Roses, you know, are not 1,000,000 miles away from early Stones and Metallica for Black Sabbath, and you know you look at some of the kinda grungy, sort of post-hippie type bands from Seattle or what have you, I mean they owe a lot to a peculiar mixture of kind of ’60s ideology and MC5 anarchism. We’re kind of recycling all these sort of notions and then patching them together in slightly varied ways. I mean, eclecticism these days is not about the true eclecticism of the perhaps the late ’60s or the early ’70s when people looked at world music as it has now become known, though eclecticism now is just kind of from a very narrow band of proven commercial formulae, which conspire every so often to produce a new hit band that sounds different on first inspection, but in reality is probably just, you know, a careful amalgam of a few proven formulaic approaches to rock music. There’s nothing wrong with that, I mean you know we’re recycling corn flake packets and bottles of nuclear fuel, we might as well recycle rock music as well. Let’s be friendly to the environment.

Marc Allan: If not the ears, yeah. It just seemed to me in asking that question, and I’ll let you go after this, I’m 34 years old and everybody who’s my age or maybe a little older who grew up on rock music probably knows the song Bungle in the Jungle. But now, if Bungle in the Jungle came along it would be a hit on a narrow radio station where you know, lots of kids would never hear it. It would appeal to a certain audience and it seemed to me that the audience of rock has fractured to the point where you can be in a very narrow scope of things and a lot of people will never know what you do.

Ian Anderson: Hmm, which is rather sad when you think of all the bands that there must be out there in any point in time who have some genuine talent and some genuine creative and perhaps even new approach to music who just are not going to be heard. And that is a worrying thing, you know, that we’re talking about recycling a lot of proven ideas because they are sufficiently familiar to those people who operate the media, you know the record companies, the press, the radio stations and TV, you know, we’re dealing with things that sound familiar and proven, they have a track record. They’ve got to sound familiar to the guys who pull the pro strings and you know, allocate time and energy towards specific projects. But, you know there must be a whole bunch of things out there that none of us ever get to hear. And that is very sad, very frightening, but it’s the age in which we live, and music, I think as always, just reflects a lot of other things about the society that we live in at the moment and there is a need to plan to be not too adventurous, to be slightly conservative, slightly right wing, and stay with the things that we know work, you know, the great uncertainty about the planet at the moment and combined with the dangerous forces of nationalism, flag waving extremism, you know, rock music has also, or popular music has also kinda been trenched in staying within the things that are mainstream, things that sound familiar, reassuring, and don’t pose too many big question marks. But the most radical music around, for me, is not you know, rude, rap or you know, funkadelia, or acid, or you know, techno, rave, or any of these sort of absurd definitions that get thrown around, I mean for me I just see just the dying embers of what began in Tamla Motown as sort of a final degradation really for me of what black music was and should still be about. But I don’t hear anything too radical or exciting, and if there is anything radical, exciting, and innovative then it ain’t getting released on record. Or at least not any record label that I know about. And that’s a scary thought, that we’re all having to play a little bit safe these days. But, you know, we’re in the post-Thatcher years, the post-Reagan years, and just everybody’s a little bit nervous right now.

Marc Allan: Very true.

Ian Anderson: With probably very good reason.

Marc Allan: Maybe so. All right I appreciate all your time, I’m looking forward to seeing you, and I hope everything works out the way you like.

Ian Anderson: Well, even if half of it does I wouldn’t have a bad time.

Marc Allan: That’s true, take care Ian.

Ian Anderson: Thank you, bye now.

[JTull 007]

 Jeff Woods in conversation with Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull  Corus Radio
   
   
   
   
   
   

[maddogfagin]

www.scotsman.com/whats-on/arts-and-entertainment/interview-ian-anderson-frontman-jethro-tull-playing-his-own-tune-2480857



Interview: Ian Anderson - Frontman of Jethro Tull is playing his own tune
Scot Ian Anderson, the frontman of Jethro Tull since the band was formed in 1968, gets his kicks from cultivating hot chilli peppers, studying wildcats and following politics. Aidan Smith talks to an extraordinary man of rock
By The Newsroom
Wednesday, 16th November 2011, 12:00 am

Scot Ian Anderson, the frontman of Jethro Tull since the band was formed in 1968, gets his kicks from cultivating hot chilli peppers, studying wildcats and following politics. Aidan Smith talks to an extraordinary man of rock

I CONGRATULATE Ian Anderson for this being, in my experience, the earliest that anyone in rock’n’roll has ever roused himself to speak and he displays the grumpiness you might expect – but not for the obvious reasons. “Actually,” he says, “it’s 8:47am which means I’m two minutes late. Sorry, but I had to put on some washing.”

What was he washing? The tweeds with which he’d ape a batty Brigadoon laird some years before running salmon farms with a £20 million turnover? The off-white tights in which he’d stand on one leg for epic flute solos which, in mythology, lasted days? Or the codpieces which completed the look of Anderson as the leering, bawdy master of ceremonies for the band Jethro Tull, who sang of “eyeing little girls with bad intent”?

Well, he dresses more conservatively these days, but after all that the fates could throw at Tull – ridicule, indifference, sex changes – they’re still going. Indeed, the 40th anniversary re-release of their best-known album Aqualung has co-incided with a surprise renaissance for the music his band and their kind played, prog-rock.

Anderson, 64, is one of those notable Scots – the actor David McCallum is another – for whom the old country is a long, long time ago. But prod them in the right places and the reminisces will flow.

“I was dux of Roseburn Primary School in Edinburgh,” Anderson says, and I feel the honour is not far behind those 60 million album sales. “My prize was a book called 20 Scottish Tales and Legends. I’ll never forget my very last day – the qually dance. The bonniest lass by far was Linda Nelson. Every boy thought every other boy was going to ask her and so didn’t bother; as a result no-one had until I did. But I have to tell you that I sold the last waltz for the princely sum of sixpence to David Bendelow – an English lad who was teased relentlessly about his accent and also his name – so he got to walk her home. Benders, I think, went into films. What became of the lovely Linda? Bizarrely she was living on Skye when I farmed there, but I never found out if she still had her blonde ponytails.”

That sixpenny deal was probably the first evidence of Anderson’s sound head for business. Not long after, when other musicians were happy to delegate and get ripped off, he took control of Tull’s affairs.

“I simply didn’t believe in tour managers, trying to justify their wages. I’ve always loved organising and was happy to do it myself.” Maybe you won’t be surprised to learn that Anderson has never touched drugs. “I was around them from a young age – at art school I sat next to a chap in life drawing with heroin needle pricks on his arm who’d done time in jail. Then I encountered the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and Led Zeppelin who were out on the edge but drugs never seemed like a great plan. Probably being a loner helped me keep off them. I’ve never been a man’s man who drinks beer and talks about football – how grim! – or much a social animal, really. At the end of the day I just want to be on my own, and on tour you’ll most likely find me in my hotel room, naked on the bed and watching CNN.”

Anderson isn’t quite a solo act away from Tull. He shares his rock mansion in Wiltshire with his second wife of 35 years, Shona, and is a grandfather. How does he get his kicks? By cultivating hot chilli peppers, studying wildcats and a far from casual interest in politics: “I’ve been courted by the Lib Dems among others, and in Barbados earlier this year my holiday reading was all the party manifestos.” A science-fiction devotee in boyhood, he’s maintained his interest in space and rocketry. “Earlier this year I loaned one of my flutes to an International Space Station astronaut, Cady Coleman, and we duetted – me in Perm, Russia, and she 220 miles above Earth. Fantastically thrilling.”

The mansion was the setting for the wedding of his daughter, Gael, to This Life and Teachers actor Andrew Lincoln, and the night before our chat, Anderson broke off from his rigorous diet of telly news to watch his son-in-law in The Walking Dead. “I’m not a fan of zombie thrillers but I’ve just loaned Andrew some money to buy a country house so I was kind of checking on my investment.”

Gwyneth Paltrow’s daughter Apple was a flower-girl at the ceremony, Gael having been the Hollywood star’s PA, and the latter’s husband, Coldplay’s Chris Martin, came in useful in the church when the organist lost his way. “Being a public schoolboy he was able to pick up the tune of Jerusalem while the rest of us were floundering.” Later, Anderson dug out his flute before retiring early to bed. “I knew I’d have to get up at 2am to chuck out the freeloaders and booze-looters,” he laughs.

Back to Edinburgh, where the family business was the RSA Boiler Fluid Company. “My grandfather invented a whizzo solution for descaling steam engines, but I don’t think he and my dad were really onto a winner there.”

The old man was very methodical and Anderson picked up this from him, if little else. “He walked with a stoop, never said much, in that dour Scottish way, and was old before his time when I came along rather late.” Both his parents quickly became addicted to the then-new Coronation Street; young Anderson thought there must be more to life.

“The diet was terrible, everything fried, but I thought I might like vegetables. I remember asking my mum if I could try spinach; she said it tasted of dirt.” His grandmother, at least, possessed eccentricity and curiosity and he was similarly impressed by dotty Aunt Molly who’d gone to university late. The “smelly sea” around Leith Docks seemed to promise adventure and new experiences and eventually delivered when one of his two much older brothers, a marine engineer, sent back a Bill Haley LP from Canada.

Anderson immediately saved up 22s/6d for a mail-ordered Elvis Presley plastic ukulele. The family moved to Blackpool where it was his turn to be taunted for his accent, and issues of nationhood continue to intrigue him.

“I hate being mistaken for English but have lived down south for most of my life and these days probably regard myself as British. Would I want an independent Scotland? Possibly not, although some degree of separation where you can still metaphorically poke each other with sticks is healthy. But there is a pronounced, indeed extreme and anarchistic streak in my family. The black sheep was Uncle Gerry, dropped behind enemy lines during the war and forgotten about after repatriation, who plotted something dastardly against the Sassenachs in government.”

For 20 years until the turn of the century, Anderson had one foot back in Scotland as the salmon laird of Strathaird on Skye. Initially he was greeted with hostility.

“The West Highland Free Press stated, quite rightly: ‘His only qualification for owning a large chunk of Scotland is that he made rather a lot of money from playing the flute.’ But I became qualified in that I spent a lot of time up there, got to know the people and their concerns, warned some of my prog-rock chums with sharp accountants that exploiting wilderness Scotland would only bring them trouble – and ran a good-going estate providing jobs for 400 before deciding to sell up and get back to music.” Anderson and guitarist Martin Barre are the only Jethro Tull ever-presents, with keyboardist David Palmer deciding a few years ago to put the band behind him, also his identity as a man.

“David is now Dee. He was a bearded, pipe-smoking, curry-loving man’s man until his wife died. We had our suspicions; at a fan convention our bass player thought he was wearing a bra. After I was doorstepped by the News of the World, who thought I’d had the sex change, he came clean: ‘There’s something I have to get off my increasingly ample chest … ’”

Tull, with Anderson having grown up with The Goons, always possessed the madcap humour that was missing in other proggers preoccupied with playing longer and more complicatedly than anyone else. The songs on Aqualung voiced anxiety about homelessness and the environment, and questioned religion to such an extent that copies were burned in the US. All that was forgotten when punk swept prog aside, but recently Johnny Rotten confessed to Anderson a secret love of Tull.

“He told me Aqualung had been a big influence on him and who knows, maybe he stole from the tramp on the cover for his hunched, scowling persona.” He chuckles at this, but now he really must be getting back to his washing.

[maddogfagin]

Another from the archives, this from a couple of tears ago.



In 1976, at the zenith of the group’s popularity, Jethro Tull released Too Old to Rock ’n’ Roll: Too Young to Die! — a concept album about an aging rocker who discovers that music is cyclical, and those who stick around long enough inevitably come back into fashion. More than four decades later, the theme has proved both prophetic and more than a bit ironic.

At 71, Ian Anderson — the group’s main songwriter, bandleader and frontman — is touring in celebration of Jethro Tull’s 50th anniversary. The U.S. leg of the six-month jaunt kicks off Friday, July 5th at Fantasy Springs Resort Casino. Calling from a production office somewhere in the U.K., rock’s most famous lead flutist talked about the band’s bluesy early days, Grammy backlash and why what is old is indeed new again.

Let’s start at the beginning. Tell us about your original vision for the group and how it evolved into Jethro Tull.

ANDERSON: In the early days we were essentially a blues band, but we quickly — within a year or so — had become known for being termed a “progressive rock band.” That was a term that was coined in the U.K. back in 1969 in the music press for the first time. And I was very pleased to be thought of as a progressive rock musician along with Yes, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, and King Crimson, who started in that year. And so there were some pretty illustrious peer group characters. You know, we were in some pretty good company, and that continues to the present day. Sometimes we’re referred to as a folk rock band, but I don’t mind whatever they want to call us as long as they have a valid ticket and they keep their cell phones in their pocket when we’re trying to perform for them.

What do you recall about your participation in the Rolling Stones’ Rock ’N’ Roll Circus, which is now being released on Blu-ray for the first time?

ANDERSON: Well, it was recorded at the end of 1968, the Rolling Stones had a new album out, or about to come out, an album called Beggars Banquet. Which was a return to a kind of bluesier, rougher-edge Rolling Stones after their experiments with pop and psychedelia, and imitations of perhaps the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album. So the Rolling Stones were back on form and they were doing this TV show, which we were asked to participate in, along with the Who, John Lennon, Eric Clapton, and a few other worthies. It took a long time for it to materialize as a commercially available product because poor Brian Jones died shortly afterwards, and the Rolling Stones shelved the whole idea. It was only much later that they discovered that Allen Klein had got the rights to the project and had sought the permission of the other artists to release it before going to the Rolling Stones and putting a bit of pressure on them. Saying well, “Eric wants to do it, John wants to do it. Jethro Tull wants to do it.” Finally they caved in and released it. But it wasn’t a great homage to Brian Jones, who by that time was not doing terribly well, medically speaking. You know, he was a nice enough guy but he didn’t seem to be on the same planet as the rest of us. It was rather sad to see him marginalized within the band that he had been a founding member of.

You performed “A Song for Jeffrey” with a then-unknown Tony Iommi on guitar. How did that come to be?

Tony and I got together a few weeks before to rehearse and try things out with a view to him possibly joining Jethro Tull. But for a number of reasons that was never going to be satisfactory for him or us. He went back to Birmingham and we asked would he come back just to do this one-off show, the Rolling Stones’ TV show. And we reassured him that he wouldn’t actually have to play live because he didn’t do that kind of playing, it wasn’t his thing, bottleneck guitar. So he came down and mimed to the track and I was live — the rest was a backing track. So Tony just did that one-off performance with Jethro Tull, which is encapsulated in one, maybe two photographs that show him performing with us. He had a white hat on that he pulled down over his eyes. I don’t think he wanted his bandmates to know what he was doing, because of course they were at the time known as Earth. A few weeks later changed their name to Black Sabbath. So I think he was trying to be incognito.

Aqualung was the album that really broke you in the United States. Why do you think it resonated with American audiences?

The Aqualung album was a bit of a sleeper. It wasn’t huge right out of the box. It took a while to catch on with people all over the world. But over the next year or two, or 10 or 20, it penetrated really many, many countries in the world and became the best-selling Jethro Tull album. Aside from the obvious two or three songs like “Aqualung,” “Locomotive Breath” and “Cross-eyed Mary,” which I think was always popular in the USA, there are quite a few singer-songwriter acoustic pieces, which I recorded on my own in the studio, and then we overdubbed judiciously some little elements from the other guys. Or perhaps a string quartet or whatever it might be. But it was something that we did with not huge expectations. I do remember talking to John Evans, the keyboard player at the time, thinking, wow, we’re finished — but what are people going to make of this? Are they going to like it or not like it? Is this the beginning of a new era of Jethro Tull? Or is it the end of our brief bit of popularity that we enjoyed for the first three albums? Was it downhill from here? I wasn’t really sure, I wasn’t confident in the audio quality on the album. Because we had considerable problems trying to record it in a brand new studio, you know, not really sounding that great. But it turned out OK, and obviously people rather took to it, although it took several months before it really caught on I think.

“Locomotive Breath” has been your encore since 1972. Thematically it’s a very heavy song.

Some songs are bit darker, more foreboding, like “Locomotive Breath.” Which is really talking about population growth, a runaway train of globalization and at that time that was not really a topic that people touched upon really. It was a dark song. It remains a dark song, even more so since the population of planet earth as doubled since I wrote it. In fact, we have three times as many people on the earth than we did the day I was born. That can certainly give pause for thought that we have population growth that is really not that sustainable. And although we have a population growth that has largely been arrested in Europe, it’s still increasing in the USA, and dramatically increasing in particularly the African continent. So we can see trouble on the horizon. Immigration, that Donald Trump is desperately afraid of, has become a world condition for our children and grandchildren, who will grow up with enormous pressures to accept the huge numbers of people from far away, who combined with climate change and the inevitable difficulty of food production, it’s going to get pretty scary out there. All the Trumpian walls will not prevent people from finding their way in desperation to try to seek some kind of ne life or survival in countries that are those that they were born in. So when I play “Locomotive Breath” on stage every night, these thoughts go through my head. I am a performer, I take on characters, the subject material, I take on the nature of the lyrics. These are the dark and foreboding thoughts that I am harboring every time I perform it. Albeit 48 years later, or whatever it is.

It’s been 30 years since Jethro Tull received the first-ever Grammy for Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal album, beating out Metallica and others. What do you remember of the ensuing controversy?

We knew we’d been nominated, and it was nice to have been nominated for a Grammy. The record company said, “the chances of you winning this category are virtually nonexistent and we have other artists that are up for a Grammy, and we want to spend the money for hotels and transport for people who have more of a shot at winning. So we don’t want to pay for you to come to Los Angeles and sit in the audience just on the off chance that somehow you might win.” So that was fine, I was in the middle of recording album at that point. We were busy in the studio when I got a phone call in the middle of the night saying, “congratulations you won the Grammy.” So I turned to the other guys and said, “we’ve won the Grammy — isn’t that nice.” And we carried on working on what we were doing. But the controversy really erupted with the media the following day, and quite clearly it was a very unpopular win. Poor Alice Cooper had to go up and accept it in our place to a torrent of boos and catcalls. But these are the things that happen. As you can understand, hard rock/metal was the new category that year and Metallica were the hot favorites to win with a couple of others. I think Iggy Pop was in it, Jane’s Addiction is a band that comes to mind. Jethro Tull was never really considered hard rock or a heavy metal band. And that’s why it was unpopular. But on the other hand, if it was a Grammy for a bunch of nice guys who never won a Grammy before, we would have been very happy with that. Or for best one-legged flute player, we’d pick that up every year.

Tell us about the 50th anniversary tour and what your fans can expect July 5th at Fantasy Springs.

Well, it’s retrospective that focuses strongly on the first 15 years of Jethro Tull. It starts off with the very earliest days of our beginnings as a blues band. We feature a number of songs that we played at the Marquee Club, early 1968, and moving on through the years, highlighting, I suppose, some of the key tracks — the iconic tracks that Jethro Tull fans would, in most cases, know. But even younger fans, who perhaps weren’t alive then, have always tended to gravitate back to those years when things were shiny and new. With the benefit of the Internet and easy research, you can quickly find the origin of the band, how they started, what their first album and so on. That obviously intrigues people who were never alive then, who are going back to discover and hear an era of music that perhaps attracts them, even if maybe they don’t know why. But it clearly does, so a lot of classic rock bands like Jethro Tull, Led Zeppelin, the Who, and so on, the bands that continue to endure with two generations further on who simply never knew them. Maybe their parents or their grandparents listen to it and they rediscover it as if it was something brand new. Which it is, of course, for them.