Jethro Tull didn't start out in progressive rock. In fact, for one of the torch-bearing proggers of the early '70s golden age (outside of the holy trinity of Genesis, Yes, and King Crimson, Tull ranks alongside Pink Floyd as the most popular of the era), the band's entrance into the prog rock scene is remarkably sideways.
Jethro Tull's 1968 debut, This Was, is a blues rock album very much in the vein of The Rolling Stones, Cream, Led Zeppelin (though Zep wouldn't release their first album until a few months later in early '69), and any number of late-'60s British groups of the time. The one thing setting This Was apart from its British peers is the unmistakable presence of Ian Anderson in the mix. Anderson, by most accounts the life blood and central creative force of Jethro Tull, is a talented lyricist, songwriter, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist who happens, above all, to be a dedicated flautist known for playing perched just on one leg. So naturally Tull's early blues music is peppered with energetic flute piping, and the effect is a strikingly idiosyncratic, pastoral, almost whimsical flair to the otherwise generic set of songs. It became a key element in Jethro Tull's signature sound, enough so that even decades later, Breaking Bad could have one character excited to learn that another plays flute because it means he can play Jethro Tull, and it makes complete sense why he would think so.
Arguably, Ian Anderson's one-legged fluting sowed the seeds even in this first album for a progressive turn down the line (it was only a year later in 1969 that King Crimson included prominent flute on its genre-defining In the Court of the Crimson King), but prog seemed far from the band's ambitions. In its subsequent albums, Jethro Tull moved away from the blues toward more of a British folk/hard rock fusion, eventually perfecting the alchemy of those genres with their excellent and commercially explosive third and fourth records, Benefit[1] and Aqualung. It's these albums that Jethro Tull's legacy rests more prominently on these days; if you hear the band on your local classic rock radio station (and you probably will), chances are it's going to be one of several smash hits from Aqualung. Not a lot about these albums sounds much like the progressive rock we've heard up to this point in this retrospective—maybe an instrumental interlude here or a baroque flourish there suggest something of the discursive prog spirit, but certainly nothing that would make you mention them in the same breath as, for example, Van der Graaf Generator's wild, bizarre neo-classicism.
The watershed moment, however, came following the release of Aqualung, when critics noticed the way that the record's songs all revolved around the themes of religious hypocrisy and corruption and began proclaiming the LP a concept album—a prog staple. The band apparently had conceived the album as merely a collection of songs and not at all anything with a central, unifying concept and were somewhat amused that critics had read anything like that into the work. So for their next record, their fifth, Ian Anderson decided to have a bit of fun with the critics and show them a real concept album—one so over-the-top and high-concept that it would be unmistakable as a parody of what Anderson saw as an inherently silly concept anyway.
This album would become Thick as a Brick, an album so proggy and conceptual in nature that its entirety consists of just a one-song suite that stretches more than 40 minutes over both sides of the LP. You heard right: one song taking up the entire album. Prog bands like long songs on their albums? Okay, Jethro Tull said, we'll make the longest possible song that the LP format permits. It's the extension of one of prog's foundational values to absurd lengths: not just absurd because of the obvious silliness of a rock song lasting 43 minutes but also for the fact that having a song this long meant that you had to cut out in the middle of the tune when you ran out of room on Side 1 of the record. Duke Ellington had done things like this since the '50s; classical music inherited this problem when trying to figure out how to fit its hours-long compositions onto vinyl recordings. But Jethro Tull is the first rock group to see those issues and then be like, "You know, it'll be so epic it's worth it anyway." And it's a hoot.
It gets better. In setting out to create the concept album to end all concept albums, Ian Anderson comes up with this scenario: The Society for Literary Advancement and Gestation (S.L.A.G.) has held a literary contest for children ages 7 to 16, and 8-year-old Gerald "Little Milton" Bostock has won the prize for his dense, allusive, and sexually precocious epic poem entitled "Thick as a Brick"[2]. The album, then, is this fictitious poem set to music. You can laugh; this is supposed to be hilarious. And it mostly is. Anderson's execution of the concept is both silly and gloriously deadpan in a way that recalls This Is Spinal Tap or Monty Python's Flying Circus, and it's made all the funnier by the album's parody of prog's intricate LP packaging: Thick as a Brick comes wrapped in no less than a full newspaper reporting not just on SLAG's contest but also on equally newsworthy items such as "Mongrel Dog Soils Actor's Foot" and "Roller Skate Champ Passes Through." The level of commitment here is impressive. When I mean full newspaper I mean it: everything from Classifieds to a TV guide to a fully functional crossword puzzle is present. No half measures, I suppose.
In a lot of ways, Thick as a Brick is one of the earliest articulations of the anti-prog sentiments that would eventually energize the punk rock movement later in the '70s. Although critics like Lester Bangs and Robert Christgau had been thumbing their noses at progressive rock since its inception (Christgau's searing and elegant D+ review of King Crimson's debut calls the record "ersatz shit"), there hadn't been anything so galling as an actual musician calling out the genre's pretensions. So here's Jethro Tull.
But the darnedest thing about the record is that Thick as a Brick isn't some novelty song or Weird Al parody; it's actually good at the very things it's making fun of. Really good. I'd go so far as to call it the second-best album I've reviewed yet in this project. Jethro Tull adopts the busy bass, keyboards, and irregular time signatures of progressive rock with remarkable proficiency that somehow never manages to lose the hard rock and folk touches that made Jethro Tull distinct to begin with, and of course Anderson's flute takes to prog like a fish to water. Even more impressive is the strong melodicism that runs throughout most of the album; prog sometimes prioritizes exploration over songcraft, which is fine and often even exhilarating, but man, it's great when both are given equal footing. With the exception of the few minutes that open Side 2 of the song (a weird collection of improvisation and soloing that should have been cut), it's a well-structured, intricate suite of hummable tunes that, edited into pieces, might have made for a handful of additional radio hits for Jethro Tull[3].
It's been said that a good parody can't be made without a healthy amount of affection for what you're skewering, and that's clearly what's going on in Thick as a Brick. The rhythms are too tight, the notes too perfect, the parody too specific, to be of a piece with the bitter punk screeds and dismissive reviews that increasingly plagued prog over the course of the '70s. There's sharp criticism in Thick as a Brick, but it's criticism that comes with the gentle touch of a friend, not the salt-sowing of an enemy, an approach made even clearer by the fact that the band's followup, A Passion Play, returns to this album's prog sounds and single-song structure while entirely ditching the parody—a completely serious progressive rock statement. And although subsequent records didn't dip quite so heavily into the genre as before, most of Tull's remaining '70s output has at least a few progressive nods.
Thick as a Brick is great. It's that rare prog album that's both innovative and playful, literate and funny, experimental and tuneful—sort of a "best of both worlds" distillation of Jethro Tull's discography. And it's now frequently ranked among the best prog albums ever. Parody never was received so rapturously.
Until 1973!
1] My personal favorite of the band's career.
2] Although a "last minute rumpus" later disqualifies Bostock due to the fact that four child psychiatrists have evaluated his mind as "seriously unbalanced." The prize is then given to the runner-up, 12-year-old Mary Whiteyard, for her essay on Christian ethics called, "He Died to Save the Little Children."
3] And in fact, the 3-minute edit of the folk-tinged "Really don't mind..." opening does get radio play from time to time.
No comments:
Post a Comment