On February 2, 1968, Jethro Tull made their worldwide debut as a four-piece blues band at the world-famous Marquee Club. Fifty years later, the music of Jethro Tull has aged and matured like a fine wine. Although the band, as a touring and recording unit, ceased to exist in 2012, singer, songwriter and leader Ian Anderson continues to make records and tour, playing sets filled with Jethro Tull music. When it came to celebrating Tull’s golden anniversary, he decided a proper tour, playing hits and deep cuts from Tull’s stored catalog was the right thing to do. So, with David Goodier (bass), John O’Hara (keyboards), Florian Opahle (guitar), Scott Hammond (drums) and surprise virtual guests in tow, Anderson will spend much of 2018 on the road, bringing Jethro Tull to the masses.
In the following exchange with Ian Anderson, we delve into some historical aspects of Jethro Tull’s evolution, touch on various former band members, and get the skinny on how one of the world’s most famous flautists approached commemorating his fifth decade in the public eye. Of course, along with the 50th anniversary, I asked about another major milestone in the history of Jethro Tull. You’ll have to read what follows to find out more. As always, I felt like I walked away from this, my eighth interview with Ian Anderson, a better, more responsible human being.
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You began your career with Jethro Tull 50 years ago. Could you have ever imagined it would last this long?
At the point of starting of Jethro Tull, probably not. My target then, when I began, was trying to be a musician, not necessarily a successful lifetime performing musician. I thought maybe if I was lucky, I’d have a year or two, maybe even make a record. So that was the immediate goal in February of 1968. After a couple of years, I think I perhaps did feel that maybe this could go on. The music I listened to as a teenager wasn’t the pop charts, one-hit wonders, it was elderly gentlemen playing blues and jazz. So for me the model was more elderly people performing music right through the end of their lives. I guess that didn’t seem too unlikely once we established ourselves. We didn’t make any silly mistakes, or do something that brought us into that rather more volatile world of pop and chart success, which wasn’t something I think I wanted to get too involved with.
I’ve always had a natural reticence anyway not to push for the biggest and best, in terms of numbers of people or what we do. My target’s naturally set a bit lower at a level that’s more likely to sustain. You know, I eat meat once or twice a week, but I don’t want to eat meat four times a day like some people in your country do. And in South America, Australia and a few other places where it’s meat, meat, meat, meat, meat. It’s just not sustainable. It’s not sustainable for your physiology probably and it’s certainly not sustainable for the planet to keep growing our numbers with a view to finding the economical wherewithal to buy more and more meat, with all the environment damage that meat production causes.
So it’s the kind of the same scenario being a musician. You’ve got to stay within your resources as a person, as a human being, and you’ve got to find a level that you think is sustainable. Where you’re not going to burn out and find that everything’s deserted you. For that reason, I clashed a bit with our manager back in the 70s because he, naturally like most people, wanted us to soar to the heavy heights of Madison Square Garden and do that kind of gig. I was very uncomfortable with it. As a general way of working, I didn’t really enjoy playing sports arenas. Those kind of places were not good for the audience and not good for me. My natural hunting ground is a two-thousand-seat theater, with a proscenium arch and wings and dressing rooms with toilets that work, and athletes have not put their grubby bottoms and sweaty bums where you want to go and sit down. Nothing against athletes, but they do tend to get naked a lot together in a room and that does worry me.
The band started out as a blues-based unit, but eventually went into more of a progressive rock direction. What sparked that transformation?
That approach to making rather more progressive music was something that was in me long before we played the Marquee Club as Jethro Tull. Certainly, a couple years before, my own interest in writing songs had been to draw upon other elements — elements of folk music and acoustic music. The entrée into the world of performing, particular in the underground, trendy clubs like the Marquee Club, was to get on the blues bandwagon because that’s what people were doing at least at that point in the later part of ‘67 and early part of ‘68. A more progressive approach, which had been the latter part of ‘66, listening to people like Graham Bond, who had at that point in his band Jack Bruce on bass and Ginger Baker on drums. In many ways, Graham Bond was kind of a precursor of that thing that became progressive rock. And, of course, Cream in its way when those two guys left Graham Bond and set out as Cream, that became something that moved Eric Clapton along from just being a blues guitarist. They, with some of the more creative music they did through ‘68 up until the point they finished, Cream were doing things like “Tales Of Brave Ulysses” and “White Room” and “Sunshine Of Your Love,” which, though they had their roots in blues, they were also going somewhere else.
In the summer of ’67, we had the Beatles release Sgt. Pepper, which was a prog pop album if you like. And we first heard of Pink Floyd, with two singles, “Arnold Lane” and “See Emily Play,” and The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn, the album they released shortly after Sgt. Pepper was released. The summer of ’67 really was the beginning of what I think did lead everybody toward progressive rock music. As a musician and songwriter, I had to put that on hold for a while because, as I said, the entrée into getting noticed at all was to play blues. We did partly that because we signed up to work with Mick Abrahams. I mean not contractually, just in the sense of making a commitment to work with Mick, who was a blues guitarist. That was the strength, I think, of early Jethro Tull was that we had fully formed, experienced and confident blues guitarist and singer in the shape of Mick Abrahams.
That was something that got us off to a good start, but by the summer of ’68, once Jethro Tull had been in action for four or five months, I was writing the music that became the material on the Stand Up album, which was a big change in as much as it didn’t abandon blues-based music completely, but it certainly reduced it to appearing in the context of a song or two. And the rest of the music on Stand Up was definitely…well…it was described by the British press as being “progressive rock” music. That was the first time I heard that term coined by a music journalist in the U.K. That seemed to me a very apt description of my ambition to bring together elements of classical music and folk music and world music…music from other ethnic cultures, and pull that all together in a way that was something that I felt I could call my own as a hybridized music form. So there were lofty moments right after Jethro Tull began. Those ambitions, unfortunately, couldn’t include Mick Abrahams because he didn’t really respond well to the music I was writing, which went too far away from his love of blues and R&B. He wasn’t very comfortable with the way the music was going. The last thing he played on was a song called “Love Story,” which is getting away from the blues. You know — mandolin, some odd chords that wouldn’t be natural chords for a guitar player to come up with. That was the way we were headed.
You brought in Tony Iommi briefly. What happened with him?
Tony was one of the guitar players who we’d seen and knew a little about in the latter part of 1968 when Mick left the band. Amongst a few others, I spoke to Tony and he came down and did a few days of fooling around with us in rehearsal. Just to see if it clicked between us. Tony was a lovely guy, but I think musically speaking he had a very defined style, somewhat as a result of the industrial accident that resulted in the loss of part of two fingers, which meant that he couldn’t really play conventional chords very easily because of the prosthetic ends to his fingers. So his musical style, which of course defined Black Sabbath, was dependent on a physical restriction. Perhaps the same way, Django Reinhardt was able to do what he did with two fingers because that’s all he had. So, he had to develop a quirky way of playing jazz guitar and he did exactly that. That was Tony’s position too. So we tried a few things together, but it didn’t work out. It actually resulted in Tony joining us for two days — a rehearsal day and a recording day — at the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus at the end of the year. By then, I think Martin Barre had auditioned. He had some commitments in the band he was in, which means Martin didn’t join the band technically until the start of Christmas.
Martin didn’t really have any defined style; he wasn’t really a polished and experienced guitar player. He was quite early on in his development of guitar technique. That made him a great guy to work with because we could work together, learning our trade side-by-side, and learning it by learning new songs and finding ways to play them. That’s what made the relationship between me as a songwriter and Martin Barre as a guitar player such a strong one for many of the years that we worked together. He and I did our learning together. I suppose you get well into the late 80s, and we were still learning together. We were still looking for ways to expand our technique and our approach to working with a new song. It’s something that lasted quite a number of years that we continued to develop as individuals, but largely side-by-side.
I know your perspective of Jethro Tull has more to do with the music than the members. That being said, is there any chance former members of Jethro Tull would be invited to play at any of the 50th anniversary shows or be part of any event commemorating the 50th anniversary?
It’s a tricky one when you remember there are actually 37 other members of Jethro Tull, apart from me, over the years. If you consider the number of people who have done tours or played on an album, it’s 37 musicians. Some of them played for perhaps a few years, some of them did a couple tours or played on one record. It’s very difficult to prioritize and say someone’s more important than somebody else. Quite clearly, even if those 37 people were alive and well, which, unfortunately, they’re not. They’re neither alive in three cases, or very well in several more cases, in terms of ability to play, perform music and travel around. We have a number of reasons why it is utterly impossible, even if I did want to spend the money on 37 hotels room every night for musicians, per diems, and flights and visas and all the other things. It would be utterly impossible to do that.
To pick and choose just a few of them is also a bit of a tricky one. There might be some guys who say, “Yeah, I can do that show,” or “I can do that little section of a tour because I’m not doing something else.” It would be stop, go, stop, start, stop, start all the way through in terms of trying to work with another person in. You also have to remember that I would have to kick out somebody else. I can’t really do that to the guys I’ve been working with for the last 12 years. “Dave Pegg’s available to do a couple weeks. Would you mind staying at home Dave Goodier, and Dave Pegg will come and play the bass.” Do you think that is something I can do? I don’t think I can do that. I think that’s a bit like, “My first wife’s just called me and wants me to take her on a date. Perhaps stay overnight in a hotel in the west end of London afterwards. Is that OK? I’ll be back a couple of days later.” Do you think I could tell my current wife that? Of course I couldn’t. It’s not something you can possibly work in.
Therefore to even ask the question, forgive me for saying so, is incredibly naïve in the sense of any expectation of fans and people in the media that somehow we can bring people back in. It’s a fanciful thought and one that was given due consideration by me a few months ago when I decided, “Yes, indeed, I’ll do a commemorative, nostalgic 50th anniversary tour,’ which, if you asked me this time last year I would have said, “No way.” During the course of last year, I thought, “Well, why be a party pooper? I’ll try to get into the spirit of it. It’s only for 10 months.” Once I did, I became quite enamored with the prospect of playing some old music I haven’t played in ages, and in a couple cases, I’ve never played them live on stager before. It began to have its attractions.
When I looked at Martin Barre’s date sheet, It became very obvious that while it would have been nice to have him come along and get up and play a couple songs or a few songs at the Royal Albert Hall in April, he’s away on tour that month in Europe. And like me, you have to make your commitments quite a long time in advance to put tours together, especially when it involves, as it does in the USA, getting visas, clearances from the IRS, and all of the things that go into preplanning. You just can’t drop it and go, “Oh, I’ll go do this instead.” That was never going to be a working scenario having looked at Martin’s date sheet. And for some of the other guys who still do play a bit, it would have been a very big mountain to climb for most of them to try to get back to performance level. In the case, Jeffrey Hammond, for example, that would be utterly impossible because he’s not a well person. He hasn’t played the bass guitar since 1976. I think we would be asking the impossible to ask Jeffery to get up on the stage and perform music.
John Evan is another player from that era who is afflicted by damage to both hands quite a few years ago, and had to give up playing piano as a result. He regards himself a piano player more than anything else. These days he’s a singer in a Welsh choir in Melbourne, Australia. Although he does tinker a bit on the piano, working out arrangements for the Welsh choir. It’s not the same as banging away and actually performing on the piano because I don’t think from what he’s told me that his hands are capable of sustaining that jarring degree of activity as a result of the impact injuries he caused himself of over many years.
Barrie Barlow, the drummer in the early part of the 70s, did get up and play with us about 10 years ago and he hadn’t played in a long time (laughs). I remember when he came off stage, he said to me, “I had no idea that this was going to be so physically demanding.” He was exhausted, just doing two songs. I think you do forget the amount of commitment and stamina and preparation that goes into playing for two hours on stage. These things, they might sound fanciful. There comes a point where people have gone beyond the time when they could possibly get that back together again. Black Sabbath had a difficult decision to make in regard to their old drummer Bill Ward. It’s happened with quite a few drummers in other bands in recent years where they had to regretfully say, “It’s not going to work out. Our old drummer is old and he can’t do this anymore.”
So fans of the Stranglers will deeply miss Jet Black, for whom it’s all over, as it was for other people of similar ilk. These are realities of growing older and growing apart from the world of music. For a lot people who played with us over the years, they did their stint as musicians but gave up being performing musicians. And either had a completely change of life to do something totally different, as in the case of Jeffrey and John, or within the broad world of music, but not as performing artists, like Barrie Barlow or Eddie Jobson or Peter Vettesse or quite a few people I can conjure up names and come up with similar references of that sort.
But having said all of that, yes, there will be a few people who will be making their presence felt during the course of the evening, but as virtual guests, not there in person. It will be nice to see them and to make those references to their contributions to Jethro Tull in the years that they were active and in a way, I suppose, to pay homage, as we do to all 37 musicians. You will see their faces and references to them during the show, or if you buy the theater program. I don’t know what you call those things in America; we call it a “program.” You probably call it something else…a book. Not a big deal actually in America. You don’t really buy these things the way they do in Europe — a program where you have pictures and text and stuff about the band. That’s what people will go spend another $15 on.
That’s typically what I will buy at a show. I’m a big program collector.
Oh good, then you’ll like the recent one because I signed off on it a week ago. It took about three weeks of my life writing, editing and re-editing. Getting all that material together was a pretty big task for 36 pages of hard work.
For this tour, you said you’re going to play some older stuff, some stuff you haven’t played live. Are you pretty much covering every era of Jethro Tull’s career?
No, I’m not doing that. Why I’m not doing that is simply explained by two or three hours of what I did yesterday — working on the Warner Brothers release…it’s called 50 For 50, a 50-track, three-CD compilation of Jethro Tull’s work over the years. To pick 50 songs out of 250 songs is not that easy. There were several people involved in making those choices. Remarkably, probably 90 percent, we were coming up with the same material. We finally compromised where we found 50 tracks everyone felt good about. They seemed, in their ways, to express what the band was about all the way through, from ’68 through to the last official Jethro Tull album, which was The Jethro Tull Christmas Album from a few years back. That was tricky, sequencing and putting all that together, to make sense of a whole period of time that would you express at least 40 of those years would be encapsulated by the material. To try and do that in a two-hour rock concert would not be satisfying, if we were try to somehow give all that material an equal level of attention.
So I decided it was probably much more relevant to really focus on the first 10 years, not exclusively but largely on the first 10 years of Jethro Tull recordings. That’s the period where we went from a standing start to reaching our really across the world. That means reaching across the world to India, to other parts of Asia, to Russia, to Latin America, to countries where I suppose during the span broadly of the 70s and through to the early 80s, Western rock music was a sub-culture, sometimes very forbidden, and indeed, some countries, you went jail or worse for owning copies of rock music, whether it was the Rolling Stones and, for that matter, Jethro Tull. That, to me, is the era where we were becoming known to the largest number of people over a period of time that I could concentrate on. Working with that brief, it was easier to find live material that would reasonably sort of present the different musical styles, the different lyrical styles, the different eras of Jethro Tull music. It’s largely…you know 80 percent probably is the music of the late 60s to the end of the 70s. That’s what most people who know Jethro Tull today — who were alive and listening to music at that time — that’s the music they will remember as being the first things they heard from Jethro Tull. Which I think for me is rather important if you’re going to do an unashamed, nostalgic trip back through time that is going to work for most of the audience. Yes, there are younger fans who come to concerts. Many of them weren’t born when we were originally playing. They still will already have gravitated to that earlier period of their finding out about Jethro Tull because that’s when that stuff was happening. I think that’s probably the easiest way for me to approach doing this tour is to focus, not exclusively but largely, on that first decade.
That makes sense. When I spoke to you before about the Steven Wilson box sets, you said he (Wilson) would pretty much cover it through the 70s and that would be that. So, with that in mind, the Heavy Horses box just dropped, and the next box would be Stormwatch, which would presumably be the next and final box set. Has that changed? Do you seeing it going beyond Stormwatch and into the 80s? What are your thoughts on that?
When I last spoke to Steven Wilson about that a few weeks ago, he seemed to suggest he might do a couple more beyond that. He seemed to express some interest in doing more than he originally seemed prepared to do. Steven is very successful in his own right, particularly this year when he has a very, very full year of touring. We’ve already done another album to include among the Steve Wilson remixes apart from Heavy Horses, and they are indeed a couple that we’ve talked about doing beyond that.
But, “Steven,” as I’ve always said to him, “there comes a time when you’ve got to do your stuff. You’ve got to prioritize and not feel that you’re obligated to keep working on music” that’s possibly less relevant to him any ways because once we get into the 80s, Steven Wilson was up and running as a musician. Perhaps at that point, the music that inspired him as a child or a teenager, that music is done and dusted as far as he’s concerned. That’s the music that brought him into the world of music as a musician and a producer and all that rest of it. So I can see why he has an affinity for that. Whether it’s Jethro Tull or King Crimson or Yes or Gentle Giant, I think he’s doing one of. You can see why he’s moved to work with that material. That’s part of his founding days as a young, wanna-be musician. Once he was up and running and an active musician himself, I guess he was much more interested, as we all are, in the music we are making, rather than the revered influences that we may have had when we were pre-teen or teen-age. The attraction is obviously no going to be there in the same way.
We’ll see what he wants to do. He’s done it so many times that it’s a well-worn prospect. He’s so familiar with my work to the point that he gets the master tape and pushes up the faders. He listens to the album, looks at the stereo picture, gets the balances of things right, and then works on the EQ, cleaning up all the nasty hums and buzzes and clicks and clackers and noises that are on the master tapes that we couldn’t do back in the days on non-automation and in the analog domain. Digitally, you can be quite radical in the way that you clean things up and get a much more transparent sound by what you’re listening to. You adjust the music without all the hisses and buzzes and other extraneous noises that litter the tracks.
Back then, the only way you could clean up the space between vocal lines or between different instrumental passages was to put your machine in “record” and delete that section of not-quite silence, which is a very scary and dangerous thing to do. You’ve almost got to get it wrong by a fraction, and you’ve wiped the master. It was kind of tricky to do the thing that became more possible with automated, analog mixing consoles. And then, of course, in the digital era, it became something that’s really quite easy to do because you can just see the wave form on your computer screen and you can just get rid of it. Or if you don’t want to delete it, you can put in some information just to reduce the output of that track at that point to zero. So it’s essentially digital silence until you want to hear it again.
That’s what Steven knows how to do. He’s very familiar with my work, and I guess he finds it a lot easier working my material now then when he first started, I think with the Aqualung album, a good many years ago.
One of the things I love about the box sets is the amount of unreleased material that is there. A lot of it is live, but you’ve just written so much music that was never released. And you are continually writing. Are you working on a new Ian Anderson solo venture?
This time last year, we were supposed to be in the studio recording, and a couple of us got quite ill through the usual cold and flu kinds of things, so we postponed it until March, and then we did record seven new songs. But it was around April, May, I began to think that maybe I better do this 50th anniversary thing and started to move towards that. In had hoped I would finish the album during the course of 2017, but there then seemed little point because there was no way I was going to release that album in 2018 given it’s the anniversary year of Jethro Tull. It would be just too much to introduce a brand new album in that year. So it will have to wait until 2019, which means that I want to put as far from my mind as I possibly can until I get back to working on it later this year and then turn my full attention to that. In a way, fiddling around with something on and off, here and there, it’s just not a great idea. It’s bad enough having to stop halfway through something. When I do pick it up, I really, really want to focus on that and crack on with it. We’ll see, during the latter part of this year, between tours, I shall be getting back into that again, finishing up in time for a March/April release of 2019. It’s all written and half of it’s recorded. Had to put it on hold for a while.
We’re talking about the 50th anniversary this year, but something very unique happened 29 years ago and that was when Jethro Tull won a Grammy Award for Best Heavy Metal Album. I know you’ve talked about this time and time again, but I have to ask: Do you wish you would have attended and got that Grammy in your hand that night?
The devil in me wishes I had been there, if only to walk out on the stage and confront all the people booing and hissing and generally being deeply unpleasant about it, rather than putting poor Alice Cooper through the ordeal of having to accept the award on our behalf. That’s the devil in me. But in reality, I think it would have been unfitting, or in any way to gloat or visibly be “Wow we won a Grammy,” because it was such an absurd category to be winning a Grammy in. Jethro Tull can’t be classified as a heavy metal band. Some of the music, for sure, you would call some of it hard rock, but it’s hard rock interspersed with a lot of acoustic elements and things that are far more eclectic and fall outside of that potentially simplistic category of “hard rock” oblique stroke “metal,” which was the way it was described. So, of course, it was an unlikely thing and it was the first year that they had introduced this new category and for some weird reason, we were nominated, I suppose by the record company. And that was picked up by the voting members of the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. Bless them in their infinite wisdom. A suitable majority I guess of the 5,000 members decided that Jethro Tull should be the recipient of that Grammy in this new category.
Frankly, I suppose it’s something you can’t sneer at because it would be a bit churlish to receive some peer group award. The voting members are, after all, producers and musicians — creative people in the American recording industry. So, to somehow refuse it or reject it or make light of it wouldn’t be very civilized, not very gentlemanly. You have to take the view — “Thank you very much. That’s very nice of you to do that. Very much appreciated that you thought of us.” It’s just a little bit unfortunate that it worked out in an embarrassing way for the Grammy organizers, and for Alice Cooper, and, of course, for Metallica who didn’t win the Grammy that they thought was well within their clutches. But as I said at the time: “Don’t worry Metallica, you’ll win it next year.” And I believe they did. When they did win that Grammy, they thanked, amongst their producer, their record company, their wives, their girlfriends — they thanked Jethro Tull for not putting out a new album that year. It just goes to show there’s a little bit humor, even in the darkest of metal musicians.
