I first heard the music – or first heard it consciously, which is to say that I first listened – in the summer of 1980. I was fifteen, freshly sprung from my ninth-grade year and not yet ready for my tenth. My brother Scott had just graduated and was bound for university. During that pre-college summer, Scott’s friend and soon-to-be roommate J— stowed some of his belongings, mostly books and LPs as I recall, at our place. At that time, J was a sky-gazing, sandal-wearing evangelical with Godspell hair and a penchant for long, roving walks, the very type of the nondenominational Jesus freak. He was older than Scott, and he’d been out of high school for a bit, but he continued to live with his family nearby – until that summer, when his family moved out from under him, maybe as far as out of state. I don’t remember, or didn’t know, the details. Anyway, J needed somewhere to stash his stuff. That was how our garage came to house milk crates and paper sacks full of books (some by Vonnegut, I remember) and how my brother’s closet became the resting place for a crate or two of LPs. These crates held J’s freewheeling, frankly aimless collection of rock and pop, a grab-bag of stuff including, let’s see if I can remember, Sparks, the Motels, Leon Redbone, Trickster, early Electric Light Orchestra (a bunch of those), even Steeleye Span. Lots of others, too, that I can’t remember. Genre-wise, what all those LPs had in common was being slightly left-of-center and not being what we then called “hard rock.” Also in that crate, or crates, were several albums by a band with the improbable – and, as I would later learn, borrowed – name of Jethro Tull.

Packaging must have had something to do with the allure of those Tull albums. This Was, I think, was one of them, probably the least alluring of the bunch, what with its cover photo of shaggy old men and hound dogs:

Then there was Too Old to Rock and Roll, Too Young to Die, with its comic-strip gatefold, and certainly Heavy Horses and Thick as a Brick. Of course Thick as a Brick had for its cover that famous mock-newspaper, the St. Cleve Chronicle: a complete paper it seemed, and an endlessly diverting schoolboy lark, full as it was with tongue-thrusting satire and wiseacre in-jokes. That probably gave it the visual edge, among all the LPs in J’s collection.

I can’t remember whether it was my best friend Steve or I who first suggested that we listen to Brick, but Steve and I were a two-man thinktank anyway, happily joined in a brotherhood of bookishness, fantasy, and growing alienation and misanthropy, albeit of a quiet, unthreatening kind. We cued each other constantly, and shared ideas. Tull was our mutual discovery. “Our” music – a smattering of orchestral music, particularly nineteenth-century Romanticism, followed later by pop and rock with a touch of same – had already been stubbornly different from other teens’, as was our nascent worldview, a nerdy fusion of fantasy, SF, peripatetic day-hiking, and awestruck, look-to-the-skies metaphysical pondering: Romantic revivalism (though we didn’t know it) meets scientific wonkery. I had had a thing for Top 40 pop, which I tuned in via a bedside clock radio and which had me tracing the chart fortunes of certain records, but that moment was short-lived, a mere blip; the tastes Steve and I shared were to last a lot longer. I suppose that’s the period when my imagination began to turn darker, toward an apocalyptic sense of the world’s fragileness and a desire, just maybe, to see it all swept away in a SF-movie scenario (After the Floods was the name of one of our imaginary film projects). As I’ve said, I was fifteen.

I was diverging just then from the shared stories – spy thrillers, superhero tales, SF – that my brother Scott had, in essence, scripted for the two of us to act out in pre-secondary school days. Scott had always been the lodestar to my imagination, but by then we were growing up, and at different rates. I was at last going my own way, or at least a different way. Scott was, after all, crucially older than me: not by so very much, really, but a critical three school years ahead, three all-important years in the social clocking of adolescence. He was thus in a different social world. Once in high school, I didn’t have Scott’s stories to stoke mine. Still, I continued to thrill to a good story, as did Steve. Together we made up a bunch of stories, usually in person rather than in writing, and we had schemes: we would escape the orbit of Earth, and all its problems, in the spacecraft Celebnar (named for Tolkien), which would gradually inch up towards light speed thanks to a revolutionary ion drive; we would make movies, and tell stories, and literally map out new worlds, as in the high-fantasy maps and role-playing dungeon grids we would design together. In short, we were an unselfconscious two-person geekdom. Jethro Tull turned out to be a big rock thrown into our small pond.

When we first put on Thick as a Brick, we were unsure if not skeptical. At the least, we were uncertain about how to declare our enthusiasm for this new music. After all, we didn’t “rock,” at least not uninhibitedly, and some of the lyrics – hell, from the first verse on – posed the threat and the thrill of the illicit, the profane and nasty. At least that’s how it felt to me. This was, for the both of us, an experiment. Its effects on me would prove to be deep and lasting.

That summer, even that very week when we first began listening to Tull, Steve and I were making a tape – an audio letter and mix tape of sorts – for our mutual friend Andy, who was away for the summer. Using the TEAC cassette deck that my father had bought years before, which had sliders and bouncing needles and toggle switches aplenty, we recorded ourselves conversing (the audio letter part) along with some purely musical interludes. I remember that we began by putting Thick as a Brick on in the background and then talking over it for several minutes. We had listened to the album perhaps once or twice by then, or maybe we hadn’t even listened to it all the way through. It was a brand-new find. One of us said, on microphone, over the sound of Tull jamming, that Thick as a Brick “wasn’t the best” but it was interesting. It didn’t take long for Steve and I to decide that Tull was the best.

Of course we couldn’t admit, right away, that we were wholly beguiled by the sound and the attitude of this “rock” band. But we were. Over the next four to five years, Tull would become the index of my adolescence: my favorite band, a source of unending interest and sheer contrarian pride shared with Steve, a major part of the soundtrack of my high school and college days, and my entryway into a lot of other musics, from progressive rock to folk-rock to electrified and eventually more traditional acoustic folk. The irony is that we caught on to Tull just as they were in decline, and, commercially speaking, sputtering. That made no difference to me. Between late 1980, around the time of Tull’s A album, and 1984, the time of their commercially disastrous Under Wraps, I absorbed very nearly all of the Tull canon, despite not being able to afford to buy albums as often as I would have liked and not being able to see the band live. By 1981 I could be counted on to sing by heart, or to fill notebook pages with, Tull lyrics: from Heavy Horses, from War Child, even from the one very popular Tull album that I did not own my own copy of, Aqualung. (I hardly needed a copy of Aqualung, the sounds of which were inescapable back then.) By 1982 I thought of albums like Songs from the Wood as classics, and I waited with frothing eagerness on the new Tull album, The Broadsword and the Beast. By 1983 I had heard most of the Tull albums and knew many of them as well as I knew anything. When I went to college at UC Santa Barbara in late 1983, Steve went too, in fact he was my roommate, and whatever Tull albums I didn’t have he was likely to have, so together we had a fair collection. By then Tull had become an enveloping part of my life. I was a fan.

Some of the friends I’ve made in the second half of my life are flummoxed by this fact. I’m sometimes mystified by it myself. Over the years, though, I’ve had time to puzzle out what it was about this music and the persona of this band that drew me in. A big part of the draw, I know, was simply that Tull was something I shared: the fact that Steve and I were both Tullites strengthened our friendship, which had already been cemented by shared likes and dislikes and by Steve’s smarts, which I admired, and his appetite for books, which I envied. Tull was the kind of music you could believe was made solely for you, alone, but that you wanted to share with some other like-minded misfit. It was perfect for the kind of contrarian stance-taking that Steve and I had been rehearsing (though we wouldn’t have put it that way) as we teetered on the cusp of high school. Tull was about the souring of a certain kind of childhood, but in a most beguiling way.

The music helped. Genre-wise, Tull was/is a difficult act to pigeonhole, but its prog-rock dynamism and swerving changes in style and mood were right up my street. It was tricky music that rewarded the patience and flattered the intelligence of fans, but it never failed to deliver a wicked visceral jolt by way of surprising lunges and reversals. Spinning, shifting, swooping, with a drastic, freewheeling eclecticism – that was Tull, a stitchwork of acoustic delicacy and sudden, pouncing electric mayhem, a mix, sometimes subtle, sometimes cheerfully vulgar, of “rock” and “folk” and “jazz” and “classical” elements.

Over the years I would learn about the history of the band and its stylistic wanderings, and about the irony of discovering Tull when I did, at the moment when their arena-frontrunner status was petering out. I was a latecomer, after all. At the outset, circa 1968, Tull had been basically a jazz-inflected electric blues band, on the heels of Clapton and Cream: a relative latecomer in that British blues subculture that had blossomed into unexpected mainstream popularity in the latter sixties. They came a few steps behind the Rolling Stones, whose smart, slashing rock ’n’ roll and R&B set the standard, and hard on the heels of Cream and of course the Jimi Hendrix Experience, psychedelic-era bands that favored stretched-out, indulgent live soloing and a big, muscular, concert hall-filling sound. Cream was, for Tull, the obvious reference point; Tull’s first album, This Was, even included a loud Claptonesque cover of “Cat’s Squirrel,” a traditional blues instrumental worked up by Cream for their first album. What set Tull apart was their eccentric, shambling manner: not only a yen for country blues to leaven the hard-rocking, Chicago-inspired electric stuff (after all, the Stones had done this too), but also a winking humor and a taste for odd musical flourishes, abetted by original guitarist Mick Abraham’s easy-going, ambling character and a loping, loose-limbed, jazz-loving rhythm section – a brilliant rhythm section, I should say, consisting of Glenn Cornick’s sauntering bass and Clive Bunker’s spry, drolly inventive drumming. Though Tull were a blues band, they seemed game to try anything, and determined to have fun while doing it, the fun of British blues having not yet been entirely replaced by the lowering menace of hard rock (a road that Tull would eventually go down, throttle wide open).

What most set Jethro Tull apart, though – besides their absurd name, nicked from an eighteenth-century agriculturalist and inventor – was their attention-getting front man, lead singer and songwriter, and de facto spokesman, the capering, posturing, eye-rolling, coattail-trailing, gloriously unkempt Scotsman Ian Anderson, whose vocals were ragged, nasal, and sometimes difficult to make out, and who, improbably, played the flute more often than he played anything else.

Ian Anderson as he appeared in 1971, by Carter Tomassi. One of many excellent photos viewable at Tomassi's site, www.messyoptics.com (which contains photoessays documenting his time as a photographer for Atlanta's underground press).

In 1968, from a strict business point of view, Anderson the flautist must have seemed the one dispensable member of the band, but, despite his lack of musical virtuosity and polish, he dominated Tull by virtue of his sheer will and his writing. His flute-playing style, rough, growling, and spluttery – at times he seemed to talk or bark or mew into the instrument – was learned quickly, by dint of desperation and with the influence of American jazzman Roland Kirk (later Rahsaan Roland Kirk), whose “Serenade to a Cuckoo” was reportedly the first full piece Anderson learned to play. (It shows up on This Was.) The wild-eyed, somewhat seedy-looking Anderson, fronting a noisy electric blues band and competing for attention, ran with Kirk’s technique, exaggerating it with mad onstage antics: diddling the flute like a make-believe phallus, hopping around, standing on one leg while playing – source of the iconic Tull logo used in later years – and even strumming the damn flute like a mock guitar while the real guitarists took solos. He gave Tull not only a unique “sound” but an endearingly weird onstage persona. He also made it impossible for others in the band to grab the spotlight for too long. Abrahams, his only rival for band leadership, got the sack in short order, and right away Anderson, perhaps embarrassed by his mimicry of black American blues singers and certainly eager to do something more decidedly “British,” began to nudge Tull away from the orbit of pure blues. He also began trying to bootstrap himself up to a better standard of playing.

The difference can be felt immediately on the band’s second album, Stand Up (which, back in 1980, I was not to hear for several years). That marvelous album, as good as any by Tull, pushes the once-bluesy band in two directions. On the one hand, the blues get amped up and driven into starker hard rock territory, without the easy lilt of the first record but with a sharper attack. If Tull’s blues had already been a bit fractured – take for example “Beggar’s Farm,” a song from This Was, with its patchwork structure and tempo shifts – Stand Up leans hard away from the traditional. Its opening cut, “A New Day Yesterday,” a mournful blues, has a stuttering riff that climbs, then falls, then shoots upward again. The song marks one of the few times after 1968 that Anderson would play harmonica on record; in later years, sans harmonica, it would become a Tull concert staple and an excuse for lengthy flute-soloing. The closing track, the angry “For a Thousand Mothers,” again takes a snarling blues-based riff in a tricky direction, rising up one-two-three, then descending in a mad flurry of notes. Decorated with skirling flute, the song has an abrupt, hiccoughing quality, trumping “Beggar’s Farm”: it stops and starts again in what would become a Tull trademark. “For a Thousand Mothers” doesn’t swing – a common complaint about Tull – but it does rock, hard enough.

On the other hand, Stand Up explores other genres and sounds, firing off in several directions at once. “Bourée,” a syncopated take on Bach, nods to the band’s jazz influences, propelled as much by Glenn Cornick’s nimble walking bass as by Anderson’s flute (this too became a concert staple). Several songs sidle in the direction of folk, not only the droll “Jeffrey Goes to Leicester Square” and “Fat Man,” both with drummer Clive Bunker on hand drums, but also two ballads, “Look Into the Sun” and “Reasons for Waiting.” The latter is a very tender song, underscored by an almost-churchly organ and graced with ravishing strings courtesy of orchestral arranger David Palmer, which nonetheless speeds up and slows down in right Tullish fashion, with sudden frantic passages of flute. The whole album, then, has a willfully eclectic, sample-case quality, the more so because Anderson tries his hand at other instruments including not only acoustic guitar (this would become his other signature instrument) and organ but also piano and, in “Fat Man,” balalaika. New lead guitarist Martin Barre, forever after Anderson’s right-hand man, also doubles on flute somewhere. In short, Stand Up has about it an air of inspiring fooling around.

What happened to Tull after Stand Up was that the schizoid split between driving rock and gentle “folk” became more obvious, with the rock growing harder and less light-footed and the folk stuff growing edgier and gloomier, showing more plainly the influence of radical singer-songwriter and flatpicker Roy Harper, an idol of Anderson’s. That’s my take on Benefit, Tull’s third album – the last with Cornick – by which point Tull were in step with harbingers of hard rock and heavy metal like Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, Mountain, Free, etc. Then, one step further along, the rock and folk would be reconciled, or decisively jammed together anyway, in songs of jigsaw puzzle-like complexity: that’s the stuff of Aqualung, Tull’s fourth and most famous LP. Aqualung’s notorious title track has by my count seven discrete sections, with dynamic shifts so exaggerated that after the transitions my ears, still ringing from the heavy stuff, can barely make out the quieter acoustic passages. This is true of every anthemic staple on Aqualung, including “Locomotive Breath,” with its coy piano prelude, courtesy of new keyboardist John Evan; “Cross-Eyed Mary,” with its eerie, flute-driven buildup to the riff-driven main event; “My God,” with its vague, tempo-less flatpicking acoustic intro and mock-choral middle (a duet for flute and Mellotron, of all things); and “Wind Up,” with, again, plaintive piano, and, like “Aqualung,” a stuttering, multisectional structure, with lots of stopping, starting, and shifting. Between these jigsawing anthems are brief, Harper-influenced acoustic solo or near-solo numbers such as “Cheap Day Return,” which are more pensive or regretful than whimsical, as well as at least one song that defies easy categorization, “Mother Goose,” which, bedecked with schoolboyish recorder parts and echoing old nursery rhymes, somehow manages to be whimsical and ominous at the same time. But it’s the grand-standing, convulsive, electro-acoustic anthems that lord it over the rest. Underneath all this stuff, the old, hand-me-down blues can just barely be heard, like a memory, the bluesy guitar licks now tricked out as nervy, baroque riffs. In short, as of Aqualung, the Tull sound had become so restless, exaggeration-prone, and magniloquent as to qualify as prog rock.

Steve and I liked prog rock, as it turned out.

If Aqualung represents the culmination and end of something, it also was the launchpoint of something else. The most popular Tull record, it is also the last one – and, besides Benefit, the only one – that belongs so thoroughly to the hard rock genre and the so-called album-oriented rock (AOR) radio format that coiled around said genre during the early seventies, the progenitor of what later came to be called (my, aren’t we old) “classic rock.” In hindsight, it seems obvious that working strictly within that genre was not something Anderson and Co., or at least Anderson, wanted to keep on doing; in fact by 1971 Tull were doing all they could to push, or exhaust, the hard rock formula. The long, heavy numbers on Benefit and especially Aqualung show Anderson trying to treat rock as a compositional art, as something that could be sustained over longer and longer forms. In short, after 1970 Tull was absolutely an “album” as opposed to a singles band, working toward tighter, more thematically unified LPs. If this sounds overweening, it was.

In hindsight, it’s clear that Tull were simply following, albeit in grand form, a trend that rock in general followed after the mid-sixties: away from occasional music toward music that demanded its own occasions, from the social drives of dance music to a different imperative, that of vaulting ambition and would-be autonomy from everything but the worship of “rock” as an ideal. As rock became, more and more, music of the outsized gesture and punishingly loud volume, Tull was there, riding and helping spur that trend. To say that this was no longer dance music would be crushingly obvious. Certainly Tull’s music demanded attention on other terms; the aim was to overawe the audience with loudness and force, while giving license to Anderson’s melodic gifts. As critics sometime observed, you could often hum Tull but not dance to it. The band became album-oriented despite the fact that some of its best early records were concise and economical singles: “Life’s a Long Song,” “Sweet Dream,” and “Witch’s Promise” (all collected on Living in the Past, a lavish compilation released shortly after Aqualung as if to document and lay to rest the band’s first four years). Tull chafed even at the success of Aqualung, as if they found the album-oriented hard rock label too straitjacketing. Remarkably, the band’s popularity in America peaked with the follow-up to Aqualung – that is, Thick as a Brick, the first of their undisputed prog-rock albums, which became a Billboard number-one album in the U.S. in June 1972.

Of course I didn’t know any of this when Brick introduced me to Tull some eight years later, in the summer of ’80. What I did know was that the music was outrageous and startling, from the sudden instrumental jab at the word shout, to the way (new) drummer Barrie Barlow’s rapid-fire fills doubled the stammering, fourteen-note riff during the first full-blown electric section, to the repeated recapping of the piece’s opening acoustic guitar figure, to the odd segues between sections – those transitions, some smooth, some jagged, that stitched together the whole crazy thing. I couldn’t have described the music clearly at the time (even now it’s difficult, since I am not a musicologist) but it was exciting on a gut level, and even then I knew that it was brainy. I also knew that Tull had attitude, as evinced by the effrontery of the opening lines, Really don’t mind if you sit this one out…, and the outrage, sarcasm, and occasional hermetic inscrutability that followed. And then, of course, there was the album cover, that great satirical folly, in tune with but also leavening, even mocking, the spirit of the music. That cover was a great timewaster, with its absurd news copy, mock ads and features, repeated nonsense phrases, and, up front, the story and likeness of the fictive Gerald Bostock, a.k.a. “Little Milton,” the schoolboy pedant, said to be the author of “Thick as a Brick,” an “epic poem” censored for its untoward snottiness and unwholesome contempt for God and country. We just ate this stuff up, Steve and I. What a hoot! Though at first I was, as I’ve said, careful to keep my distance from this dangerous stuff, it didn’t take long for Thick as a Brick to become a talisman to me – some eight years after it had hit the top of the charts.

To this day I continue to wonder, why Tull? Why did it turn out to be Tull, exactly, and not some other act, that swept me headlong into hard rock and prog rock and all the rest? Apart from the sheer bracing lunatic force of the music, where was the appeal? This is a question I’ll approach in my next installment, partly for its autobiographical value and partly because I believe it has implications for the understanding of prog rock in general.

To be continued…

…for bringing to life for me so many performers and bands I would otherwise not be able to visualize.

I have a talent for unhipness. I seem to alight on performers and bands who are either woefully inaccessible from where I’m living or, to put it plainly, defunct, or past their reputed glory days (or rock star days, if they ever had them). Many of my favorite rock performers, for example, are strictly phonograph records to me. In some cases I can more readily conjure album artwork (have you read the wonderful For the Love of Vinyl, the Hipgnosis story?) than I can the faces or personae of singers and band members.

After many years’ hiatus, it’s odd to be able to put names and faces together in a way that I never could during my undergrad years, when I was steeped in art rock and other forms of musical esoterica. The source of this pleasant oddness is YouTube and other online video-sharing sources (but YouTube mainly). Here are some examples of what I mean:

Of uncertain provenance and uneven technical quality, and in many cases perhaps uploaded in violation of copyright, these are still gems to me. Welcome home, you total strangers.

Kate Bush, The Dreaming (1982)

Caravan, If I Could Do It All Over Again, I'd Do It All Over You (1970)

Curved Air, Second Album (1971)

Jade Warrior, Kites (1976)

Jethro Tull, Minstrel in the Gallery (1975)

Peter Hammill, Fool's Mate (1971)

King Crimson, Discipline (1981)

Premiata Forneria Marconi (PFM), Storia di un minuto (1972)

The Strawbs, Grave New World (1972)

Van der Graaf Generator, Still Life (1976)

Pending: an analysis-cum-memoir about Jethro Tull…

But for their excellence, Gentle Giant could be the quintessential prog band. They were British, of course, and absolutely of the 1970s. They were just successful enough commercially to eke out a decade-long career, while never successful enough to do more than bounce briefly (once, in the mid-seventies) off the windscreen of the Top 40. Their following, though ardent, never mushroomed into the arena-sized audiences enjoyed by standard-bearers like Jethro Tull, Yes, Pink Floyd, or Genesis. In all this they were probably typical, if we grant that genres are defined not by their reigning examples but by the aspirations of their more poignantly obscure practitioners. What the Giant had was devoted geek-fans, insiders, especially in Europe (Italy and Germany in particular). Today the situation isn’t so very different; though remembered avidly by a certain fandom, the band remains comparatively obscure…

… and yet, surprisingly, not so obscure, for a group that, after all, hasn’t performed for well more than a quarter of a century. Compared to other second-tier prog acts of the seventies, the Giant has proved to be a lasting draw.

As evidence, consider the recent remastering and reissue of most of their back catalog on CD. Or the fact that said CDs are now appearing even in the most prosaic of retail outlets. Or a fairly recent (2005) in-store signing in New York City by two former band members, an event that apparently drew a healthy crowd. The Giant, then, still has a following. This devout sect includes some fans too young to have actually seen them perform, such as this author, and reportedly even some who first learned of the band much, much later, via the ’Net. The official Gentle Giant website, founded in 1994 and still maintained by überfan Dan Barrett, has played a major part in this, and is a great place to start learning about the band. Thanks in part to that website, it may be that the Giant actually has more loyalists now than ever.

Gentle Giant lasted long enough, through slightly shifting lineups and several labels, to leave behind a diverse menu of albums. Stylistically, they were often compared to Yes and Tull, with both of whom they toured (in the case of Tull extensively, in ’72). However, they never drew a mainstream audience to match. Like many other prog bands – Genesis comes to mind – the Giant garnered fans in Europe early on and later tried to court the USA; unlike Genesis, though, they never won top-of-the-marquee status in America. It’s true that they did drum up what, in hindsight, could be called a decent American following: over the years they managed to sell a reported three million-plus records in North America. Yet they were seldom headliners. And they didn’t last long enough to fade and then resurge for a bit, à la Yes or Tull. I presume AOR radio missed them almost completely.

The Giant’s career perfectly spanned the seventies, from their eponymous debut album in 1970 to their final, last-ditch offering in the drastically changed climate of 1980. In all, they recorded eleven studio albums of original material, plus that staple of late-seventies AOR, a double live album (Playing the Fool, 1977). There were plentiful live bootlegs too, of course, and some official compilations, including the usual confusing mix of “foreign” collections. But the band’s writing is summed up by those eleven studio releases:

Gentle Giant (1970)
Acquiring the Taste (1971)
Three Friends (1972)
Octopus (1972)
In a Glass House (1973)
The Power and the Glory (1974)
Free Hand (1975)
Interview (1976)
The Missing Piece (1977)
Giant for a Day (1978)
Civilian (1980)

A six, later five-piece, band, the Giant grew out of a late-60s R&B-oriented pop group called Simon Dupree and the Big Sound, who in the late sixties scored a few hits in the UK (most notably with a psychedelic ballad titled “Kites”). In fact the Big Sound had been spearheaded by the brothers Phil, Ray, and Derek (“Simon”) Shulman, who, near decade’s end, unceremoniously pulled the plug on what had been a pretty successful operation. Reportedly, they were musically fed-up. Circa 1970, the Shulman brothers struck up a partnership with classically-trained keyboardist, in fact multi-instrumentalist, Kerry Minnear; thence came Gentle Giant. From the start, the group’s writing was, almost without exception, jointly credited to the Shulmans and Minnear.

Ray Shulman on violin and bass. The Volkshaus, Zürich, Switzerland, 7 October 1977. Photo courtesy of Ueli Frey (www.drjazz.ch).

Derek Shulman. Maple Leaf Gardens, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, 22 February 1977. Photo courtesy of Bob Elliott.

Kerry Minnear plays the recorder. The Volkshaus, Zürich, Switzerland, 27 November 1975. Photo courtesy of Ueli Frey (www.drjazz.ch).

To fill out the lineup, the band adopted guitarist Gary Green and what turned out to be a succession of drummers, the last (and definitive) being bash-master John “Pugwash” Weathers, who joined the Giant with the fourth album, Octopus (1972). That album was also the last to feature Phil, the oldest of the Shulmans by a wide margin, whose departure brought the Giant to its enduring, never-again-altered five-piece lineup: Derek and Ray, Minnear, Green, and Weathers (1973-80).

Octopus is the band’s pivot point. The album’s importance to the band was later acknowledged by the self-referential lyrics to “Interview,” the title song of their 1976 release: “At the beginning had no direction… / After the fourth one, realization, / Finding our road….” While it seems off the mark to claim that the band’s first three albums “had no direction,” it is certainly true that Octopus, the “fourth one,” was a leap forward, which is probably why that album is so well-loved among fans. Octopus represents the distillation of the band’s sound while at the same time capturing the Giant at their most recklessly experimental. It prepared the way for the thematically darker follow-up In a Glass House (1973), which was not released stateside due to the label’s loss of nerve, and, further on, the rather cynical, politically-minded The Power and the Glory (1974), both of which show off the band at, musically, its most fractured and dissonant – though, paradoxically, also its most cohesive and determined and hard-rocking. Free Hand (1975), though no less restless, found the Giant consolidating and polishing their approach, and became their most commercially successful disc. It’s slicker, but still full of fragmentary and startling stuff.

By common consent, the Gentle Giant of 1972-76 is the peak, while the band’s final three releases (1977-80), prodded as they were by ever-more-insistent commercial pressures, served to dissipate if not betray the group’s special character. For the sake of context, let’s remember that this was the waning period of high prog, during which Genesis recorded …And Then There Were Three (’78) and Duke (’80), Yes did Tormato (’78) and Drama (’80), ELP did the risible Love Beach (’78), and so on. The last three Giant albums are in that less-than-estimable company (though let’s not be too hard on Duke).

This is not to say that the Giant’s last albums have no strong moments; each of them does. And, to be honest, this final period was, for me and surely for others, the first Gentle Giant we heard. The Missing Piece (1977), in particular, has some good songs that strike a balance between the musical adventuring of the earlier albums and the more yielding spirit of the final two. But there is an undeniable falling-off in the late records, a sense of compromise if not outright surrender (as the band’s members, in hindsight, have acknowledged).

Gentle Giant’s last release, Civilian, was certainly made with conquering the USA in mind. It was sometime during the Civilian tour that the members of the band, reportedly always prone to stern self-criticism, looked across the table at each other and agreed to pack it in. I imagine that, again, they were fed-up.

Were I to put together a mix CD or playlist of Gentle Giant for uninitiated friends, I would opt to focus on the Giant of 1970 to 1976. The first eight albums, from my perspective, are a remarkably strong, undiluted musical testament, and that’s what I prefer to remember.

A plethora of posthumous yet official releases have appeared since the mid-nineties, including live sets (which are legion) and a pair of archival, behind-the-scenes compilations, Under Construction and Scraping the Barrel, assembled by fan Dan Bornemark from hours of studio masters and demos. These two compilations are sponsored, and in fact retailed, by the band through Kerry Minnear’s company Alucard Music (www.gentlegiantmusic.com). I confess I’m not yet familiar with them. In any case, the official releases of the seventies are the core catalog.

As an aside, the members of the Giant are active in preserving their legacy. Alucard has fed the appetites of loyal collectors, while Derek Shulman’s company DRT Entertainment has supervised the aforementioned remastering of (most of) the core catalog, in so-called 35th Anniversary Editions. That’s why Gentle Giant is at my local Best Buy. Derek Shulman, BTW, has had a long, happy career in music management – at Polygram, ATCO, and Roadrunner Records – and, among other things, can boast of being the guy who signed Bon Jovi and Cinderella. Huh. Now his DRT label hosts Grand Guignol death-metalheads GWAR among others (double-huh). For the record, both Alucard and DRT have released some Giant concert footage on DVD. I haven’t seen it. YouTube, of course, has some video boots.

With regard to the Giant’s “sound,” or sounds rather, I won’t attempt much musical analysis here. I’ll just observe that the band’s music epitomizes the lunatic eclecticism and fragmentation of art rock. There’s a lot of ping-ponging between sounds, moods, and genres in their catalog, the result being, IMO, a more-than-usually successful mashup.

Gary Green on guitar, Ray Shulman on violin, Kerry Minnear on cello (drummer John Weathers can barely be glimpsed in the background). The Volkshaus, Zürich, Switzerland, 27 November 1975. Photo courtesy of Ueli Frey (www.drjazz.ch).

ProgArchives.com offers a handful of Giant MP3s (full songs) for your listening pleasure. Or try this concert video off YouTube, circa 1974, originally broadcast on the German TV station ZDF:

The piece in question is the signature “Funny Ways,” which pretty well describes the band’s approach. Or take this fragment of an Italian film, date unknown:

Or this later concert clip, from 1978:

It’s hard for me to pinpoint influences on the Giant. Jazz, especially of the fractured modernist type, seems to be one point of reference: I think of Monk’s gnarled, jagged quality. Some of the Giant’s riffs are pure bebop. This dovetails with nods to classical modernism: its fragmentation and dissonance, if not atonality. Fans have located echoes of Barber, Schoenberg, and Stravinksy in the Giant. Stomping, bluesy rock is another touchstone, though it’s often twisted out of shape. The jumbling-together of rock, jazz, and avant-garde classicism often results in riffs and melodies that sound as if they were broken up with a hammer, then imperfectly put back together. And yet the band could still find a wicked groove and ride the hell out of it. And then there’s the frequent baroque contrapoint (cogs in cogs, as one song title aptly puts it), the polyvocal complexity of madrigals, the occasional medievalism. Hell, even sea shanties find their way in. Online critic Sylvan Migdal says it well in a sharply written if uncharitable review: the music

often seems to be the work of hyperactive precocious children, or possibly fragile man-children, given a studio full of musical instruments and all the time they need to record whatever they want. And yet the playing is tight as fuck, the many contrapuntal instruments and vocal parts precisely interlocked, the neurotic rhythms laid down with great care.

Actually, Migdal gets at exactly what I like about prog: the experimental, laboratory- or workshop-bred feel of it, the sense that the musicians have been given license to write in the studio by, basically, tooling around. Virtuosity in itself is not what matters, though being “tight” and precise is part of the draw. What really matters is a willingness to play everything within reach. For example, check out the “Funny Ways” video above. (Some of the early PFM has this same exploratory quality, or early Curved Air.) There’s a certain playhouse quality to it all. Gentle Giant was certainly playhouse music, and they took that quality into their live performances, which were logical departures from their records: Minnear and the Shulmans were not only round-robin vocalists but also fidgety multi-instrumentalists, and the band was known to break up concerts with, for instance, five-man percussion workouts. Violin, cello, and mallet percussion were staples.

Despite this concerted musical tomfoolery, lyrically and emotionally I’ve always found Gentle Giant refreshingly direct, in contrast to the fuzzyheaded abstruseness of Yes or the portentous gloom of early King Crimson. The lyrics and lead vocals may have lacked the flavor and prepossessing personality of Jethro Tull, but at least pompousness was not usually on the menu. Granted that the Giant was not light and pillowy; few rock bands have both Rabelais and R.D. Laing in their songwriting lexicon! But, what the hell, these guys seem to have wanted to communicate viscerally, powerfully, to their listeners. I’ll always be grateful for the feeling I got when first I heard Octopus, bought from a cutout bin somewhere in Los Angeles, oh, more than 25 years ago: nervous, giddy laughter from the sheer mad changeability and energy of it all.

Already more than fifteen years old – man, time does march, eh? – Jethro Tull’s Nightcap was one of several “25th Anniversary” Tull packages released in 1993. A curious anniversary gift, it serves as efficient and dispiriting confirmation, if such were needed, of the protracted wilting of a once-lively band.

A compilation of (mostly) previously unreleased tracks fitfully spanning the years 1973 to 1991, Nightcap, while throwing a sop to completists, inadvertently does the work of contrasting early mid-seventies Tull with the band’s later, eighties-into-nineties incarnations. To say that this contrast is unflattering would be a knockout punch of an understatement. Ditto the observation that Nightcap is far from cohesive: if not for the anchoring presence of Ian Anderson’s singing (and even that comes in drastically different styles and timbres here), Nightcap would sound like the work of at least two, maybe three or four, different bands.

The album consists of two discs. The first of them, a baker’s dozen tracks from the abortive runup to what would eventually be remade as the much-reviled A Passion Play (1973), is the more interesting by a country mile. This is mid-seventies Tull, the same band that recorded the beloved Thick as a Brick (1972), and one of Tull’s tightest, most stable and yet also most winningly eccentric lineups: Anderson and Martin Barre, of course, but also John Evan, Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond, and Barrie Barlow. Granted, the material representing them here is uneven, as the band (or Anderson) chose to abandon these tracks in favor of rebooting the whole shebang in a different studio, in a different country. Much of what’s here qualifies as rough drafts for A Passion Play, without quite the clarity and attack of the finished version. Still, this stuff is way more exciting than any new Tull after 1980. It’s prime art rock: preening, antic, alternately whimsical and overwrought, at times naggingly cryptic, at time acidly funny, and, always, animated by an exaggerated dynamism, every few minutes lunging full-tilt into some new surprise: a tasty flourish, jagged transition, or burst of foolishness.

The second disc is comprised of eighteen cuts of mixed vintage. Four of them are from essentially the same lineup (sometimes with the addition of David Palmer) circa 1974-75, around the time of the albums War Child and Minstrel in the Gallery: art-rock with tighter song structures, curbing in the long-form excess of A Passion Play. Of the remaining cuts, one is from 1978, circa Heavy Horses; six hail from 1981, during the runup to The Broadsword and the Beast; and seven date to the saggy period circa 1988-91, that is, post Crest of a Knave, around the time of Rock Island to Catfish Rising: mostly generic, riff-driven rock. There’s a jigsaw quality to the disc. To put it bluntly, 1974 is better than 1981 and 1981 is mostly better than 1989. “Better” in the sense of livelier, wittier, more inventive, less easy to pigeonhole, and more fun. Almost none of disc 2, though, is up to the standard of craziness and ambition found on disc 1.

Disc 2 has few highpoints. They include 1975’s “A Small Cigar,” a piece of acoustic drollery by Anderson and Palmer (sans band) that calls to mind moments of Minstrel’s “Baker Street Muse”; 1978’s “Broadford Bazaar,” a delicate solo turn by Anderson, folksy in the manner of Heavy Horses; and 1974’s instrumental “Quartet,” actually more of a sextet but fine. Of the later material, the Broadsword-era stuff is consistent with that album’s stolid, to my ears blunted sound: over-slick and deliberate, presumably polished up from Anderson’s demos. Some of these recall Broadsword’s would-be mini-epics, while others are closer in feel to the unjelled outtakes now available on the remastered Broadsword: experiments driven by sounds rather than songs. Only one cut, the jaunty, mandolin-driven “Commons Brawl” – typical of Anderson’s politically satirical streak of the time – comes to vivid, stomping life (Dave Pegg doubles on mando here, to good effect).

The post-Knave, late-eighties stuff does little for me, with the exception of the raffish “Truck Stop Runner” (circa Catfish), a trucker’s dream decorated with some sprightly tin whistle. This good-humored roadside idyll is one from Anderson’s seemingly bottomless fund of sex fantasies. The slightly earlier “Rosa on the Factory Floor” works similar turf, but in that mode of ambivalent sexual détente that seemed to fascinate Anderson for so long (compare the Cold War romances on Under Wraps or Crest, for example “Said She Was a Dancer”). This time it’s about a lady factory worker who, I think, hails from some far-off place. Groan.

To give credit where due, there’s some experimenting with sounds and moods here, and I don’t suppose every track could be easily pegged to its era. But overall it’s wan stuff. Anderson’s vocals by the late eighties are thin and lacking in warmth; the occasional clipped, deadpan irony is still there, of course, but he can’t manage the same offsetting mix of qualities, that flavorful hash of Irish-shanachie nasality and melismatic romanticism that made his mid-seventies singing so charming. The generic rockers here, such as “Hard Liner” and “Piece of Cake,” are rote and flat, the dullest things by Tull I’ve heard. The leap from 1974’s “Sealion II” to “Piece of Cake” is a rude, fender-crumpling shock, capturing too well Tull’s descent from full-time working band to intermittent project (or, if you like, from overweening but vital art-rockers to hard-rock day-jobbers).

No, disc 1 is where the action is. Listening to these not-quite-Passion Play tracks, I’m amazed that Anderson & Co. thought they were going to get anything popular out of such inspired craziness. They aimed suicidally high in those days, and, for all the troubles alluded to in Anderson’s brief liner notes, many of the cuts are exciting. Admittedly they have a sketchy, aimless quality, dredged up as they’ve been from the archive of the unfinished, but even the cuts that don’t work as finished pieces have flair and energy.

For ardent fans, there’s the appeal of archaeology to boot: though Anderson’s notes refer to the eventual Passion Play as “a virtually new work,” there’s an awful lot of musical material here that would end up, albeit re-recorded, revised, and in new context, on that album. It’s startling at first to hear this foreshadowing: “Critique Oblique” and “Post Last” rehearse much of what would become the Play’s first side, while “Tiger Toon” and “Law of The Bungle” include stabs at the Play’s opening instrumental section (DUM-de-DUM-de-dumdumdum-DUM-de-DUM). There are interesting differences: more acoustic guitar here, less sax there, and far fewer lyrics; arrangements that are perhaps less dense; drumming that, while awesome, doesn’t quite hit the peak of musicality that Barlow reaches in the finished Play. But it’s the same root material.

There are lyrical foreshadowings, too, of both of A Passion Play and its follow-up, War Child. In fact the songs exhumed here are like a thematic melding of those two albums.

For example, the latter’s “Only Solitaire” (a dig at critics) shows up here, woven into a different context, and, of course, “Law of the Bungle” anticipates War Child’s hit “Bungle in the Jungle,” with the same obvious irony: clearly, the jungle animals are us. There are several animal-themed numbers, one of which, “Look at the Animals,” has a scenario about critters standing in line that calls to mind Passion Play’s lyric about “Animals queuing at the gate…” Theatrical metaphors are rife, resonating with A Passion Play’s reigning idea, and there are scattered lines that would be well at home in the Play’s mock-religious and diabolical context, such as,

You have an angel on your shoulder
but you wear the old god’s horns.
And you dance around the maypole
while the vicar makes a toast
to the pagan celebration
and extends an invitation to us all
so he can save us when we fall.

In “Scenario,” God is “the director,” again tying together the theatrical conceit and Anderson’s twitting of religion. How all this would have tied into the animal metaphor of the first few tracks (or would it have?) is anyone’s guess – again, there’s the lure of archaeology.

In sum, Nightcap has an unintended effect. By showcasing cast-off or failed, in some cases unfinished, music, it may do a better job of charting Tull’s changes – from their dizzy, prog-rock high, just after Thick as a Brick, to later years – than any “best of” compilation would. It’s a schizoid package that is surely only for Tull fans but has a certain historical value. For me, it had the added bonus of showing off the mid-seventies incarnation of Tull one more time. Insert a long, nostalgic sigh here…

Speaking of living in the past, I bought Nightcap used at Hollywood’s incredible Amoeba Music as part of what seems to be an annual yuletide Tull nostalgia-fest for me. I’ve associated Tull with Christmas since my grandparents got Heavy Horses for me as a Christmas present back in 1980 (it was only the second Tull album I owned), and each year I unpack The Jethro Tull Christmas Album (2003) from out of our seasonal holiday things and give it several indulgent listens. I also associate Tull with old friendships from the high school and college days, and that too is a part of life I get some leisure time to rekindle during the holidays. So, with a tip of the cap to longtime friend and sometime roommate and fellow Tullite Steve McKinney, I say thanks. Nightcap may not be a great collection overall, but it reminds me of things fondly remembered and it has some rousing prog-rock on it that appeals to the unassimilated geek in me. If it also happens to remind me of why I stopped buying new Tull albums for many years starting in 1989, so?

For some time I’ve been toying with the idea of writing about art rock, a genre that I’ve got a love-hate relationship with. Jethro Tull was/is the pivotal art rock band of my adolescent (15 to 20) years, and being a Tullite was once one of the ways I identified myself. I learned much by listening intently to and hunting after all things Jethro Tull for a few years. That band meant a lot to me, and I suppose still does. With that in mind, I here begin an occasional blog about music in general and Tull in particular (with a tip of the hat to college chums and good friends Steve and Dio).

I first saw Scott Allen Nollen’s book Jethro Tull: A History of the Band, 1968-2001 in the book dealer’s room at an academic conference. I later got hold of it at my local branch of the Los Angeles County Public Library, and dug in. Here are my thoughts on this, one of several extant books about Tull:

Jethro Tull: A History of the Band, 1968-2001, by Scott Allen Nollen (McFarland, 2002)

Though a gift to Tullites, Nollen’s book is frankly a disappointment. In fact sometimes it’s irritating, due to its polite dancing around the more troubling facets of the band’s history, including Tull leader Ian Anderson’s seeming prickliness and arbitrariness. There are distressing events in the band’s history that are palmed off by Nollen with a frustrating lack of authorial judgment, feeling, or even, apparently, curiosity. Anderson, who wrote the book’s brief foreword, seems content to have these less-than-flattering elements recounted (good), but the silent bargain here seems to have been that Nollen not pursue any difficult threads too determinedly (bad, from my POV).

The main problem may be that only a diehard fan of Tull, past and present, could muster the energy and gain the access needed to write a book like this, yet, at the same time, a diehard fan past and present is at risk of plunging full-on into uncritical backstage chumminess. Indeed “chummy” is the reigning quality of Nollen’s text, epitomized by a grating autobiographical preface that establishes the author’s personal history with the band at the cost of his credibility as a critic.

Nollen’s text consists mostly of descriptions of every Tull album and tour to 2001. This takes up about 270 of the book’s 360-ish pages. Players’ credits are duly rehearsed, some details are given about the recording process and critical response, and the occasional tour anecdotes are bizarre and enlivening (hoorah), but the analytical dimension of the book is easily summed up by Nollen’s overuse of the word “masterpiece” and his too-easy praise of derivative or second-string material.

I would love to see a considered take on Tull’s genre-shifting and changing commercial fortunes, from an outsider as well as an insider perspective. I would love to see a cultural as well as aesthetic take on progressive rock, with Tull as a central example at once confirming and challenging the conventions of that genre. I would love to read an in-depth ethnography of Tull’s fandom and a sober consideration of the band’s musical and generic influence. But none of that is here. Rather, what we get is an expanded version of the sort of potted history one often gets in conference programs. This book just isn’t independent-minded enough.

What I wouldn’t give for a book on Tull that could rub elbows with Michael Bracewell’s Re-Make/Re-Model: Becoming Roxy Music (2008) or even Stephen Davis’s recently dusted-off and updated Zeppelin bio Hammer of the Gods (1985, 2008).

I’ll admit that reading Nollen has made me more curious to hear some of the Tull albums of the past twenty years that I’ve neglected. Frankly, I’ve given most of them after Crest of a Knave (1987) the skip and have only recently thought about catching up. Reading Nollen rekindled my interest, proving to me that Tull retains some of its hold on me despite the band’s series of debilitating losses. As I see it, Anderson cashiered his best, most cohesive band (the mid-to-late ’70s edition) in 1980, then lost several other things too, including, one, the live-in-studio feel of the band’s better sides (much of what I’ve heard from 1981 on sounds canned and airless); two, his ambition and edge as a writer; and three, his formerly expressive voice, once among the loveliest, quirkiest ones in rock. Despite these losses, Anderson remains to my mind a charming presence, though I get the impression that he is hemmed in by a certain inflexibility and sometimes-stifling precisionism.

Ouch! I sound here as if I’m about to start rehashing hoary old complaints about Anderson from the rock press, which, by the time of my teen years, was ideologically averse to all things Tull (I recall how the Rolling Stone album guide once referred to Anderson a “dictatorial pharisee”). Lest I sound crusty and ungrateful, let me hasten to add that prime Tull, which to me includes most every full-fledged new album release between 1968 (their start) and 1980, was a splendid thing: absurd, romantic, and, somehow, freeing. I got a lot from Tull, a band that, temperamentally, seemed a good mirror for me, and, ideologically, probably influenced me in no small measure.

As I see it, the spectacle of Tull’s early stardom had to do with seeing Anderson, a man of arguably conservative temperament — not in the partisan political sense, mind you, but culturally — turned into the unwilling spokesman of a fractious, wayward generation. Becoming a rock star, though that was surely what he wanted, must have spun his head round. He responding by rebuilding his band around him, filling it up with old friends, and chasing a lot of crazy musical ideas before settling into the folksy latter-seventies persona that defined him from then on. The nearly decade-long arc between two of my favorite Tull albums, the seminal grabbag Stand Up (1969) and the beautiful, folk-leaning Heavy Horses (1978), shows Anderson growing into the woolly traditionalist role always implied by the band’s 18th-century namesake (farmer and inventor Jethro Tull, dubbed the Father of British agriculture). As original Tull bassist Glenn Cornick remarks in Nollen’s book (58-59), there seems to be a strong streak of Scottish Presbyterian moralism running through Anderson (despite his early rejection of institutionalized religion). That’s one of the charming things about Anderson, actually: his rigorous purism and righteous intensity. It can also be off-putting, as indeed it was to much of the rock press from the early seventies onward. Yet, as Anderson and the Tull brand have aged, he’s grown into a kind of guarded civility and gentlemanliness that come from observing the limitations of one’s craft and fencing with them in the most professional manner possible. A secret to his professional survival, perhaps?

The Nollen book gets only so close to that carefully guarded sensibility. One inadvertent revelation here is how difficult it is for anyone, including other members of the band, to get to know Ian Anderson on any level other than the strictly circumscribed one of musical colleagueship. I take it this distancing too is a survival strategy, one cultivated very early on when Anderson became the band’s leader and songwriting mill. Nowadays, his persona is that of an affable elder statesman of rock: if expectations for Tull are lower, personal edges have become less jagged too.

I won’t say I’ve learned much more from the book than I did over years of simply soaking in random news stories about Tull. Certainly, I would have liked more on the old stories that trouble me, such as the breakup of the band’s ’70s edition. As ever, Anderson’s own (ever-changing) views of the music, cited by Nollen here and there, call for a grain of NaCl: his comments about the old records, or rather his ambitions for the old records, sometimes seem revisionist or just plain out of tune with the records themselves. After all, as a working performer he has to continually remake the band’s history into something that he can use, something that feels alive and useful and not burdensome to him.

Nollen often touts the band’s longevity and professionalism, and I admit that reading this selective history has enhanced my appreciation of those qualities. More than anything, though, reading this book made me want to kick up dust by starting my own arguments about what I consider the heart of the Tull catalog, from 1968 to at least 1978. That ruefully underrated run is one of the great arcs in rock.