by Will Romano
The proof is in the pudding. “Eleventh Earl of Mar” captures the same wispy musical atmosphere of “The Fountain of Salmacis” while presenting a luminescence all its own, complete with bass synth tones that percolate under the high-register melodic lead line.
When a wash of Collins’s hi-hat and Banks’s Mellotron scrubs the sonic foreground, we enter into a completely different world, one of concrete rock grooves and Hammond organ. We’re later swept away by a chorus of acoustic guitars (of different string qualities) and the gentle flicking of a kalimba, which send us through a musical and mystical fog as dense as the mist shrouding the field in the cover artwork (by Hipgnosis). It’s hard to think of a more gentle and “open” Genesis passage that’s as musically layered.
“I think the density of the track is something that comes from having multiple writers on a majority of the tunes,” says Hentschel. “Even when it came to the overdub stage, one person is adding his take to the song. That adds to the complexity or depth of the track. Everyone’s a contributor, basically. It makes for a very interesting end result.”
The second song, the ten-minute Banks-penned “One for the Vine,” is an epic meditation on entitlement, the ruling classes, and their “divine right” to lead—and how this illusion is shattered.
“One for the Vine” is a great example of why Genesis is a “progressive” band: Aside from the fact that not much else in the rock universe sounds like it (try assigning a genre to the yo-yo-ing sonic interplay between Banks’s piano and Hackett’s whiny guitar tone), the track develops from one musical idea to the next without a hitch. (Banks’s keyboard lines also become more complicated as the tune progresses, as if he were storing his energy for the later stanzas of the song.) The song is really seven rolled up into one, and yet it’s as smooth as a three-minute pop tune.
“Wind & Wuthering is generally perceived as their finest hour,” says Hentschel. “It might be the purest representation of what Genesis was about as a band. There are longer tracks, generally, and the tracks develop. The whole album has a very distinct atmosphere that sets it apart from many of the other records they recorded.”
Despite this accomplishment, Hackett was dissatisfied with the song choice: He’s even cited the song “Pigeons” and his own “Please Don’t Touch” (which wound up on one of his solo records of the same title) as better candidates than the music that was chosen for the final track listing.
It’s no surprise that Hackett, increasingly frustrated, and who’d tasted solo success with his 1975 record Voyage of the Acolyte (a Top 30 British hit), decided to leave Genesis during the mix stages of the 1977 live double record, Seconds Out.
Hackett would continue following his own experimental-muso path, pushing his personal limits with such releases as the hard-won acoustic album Bay of Pigs, Please Don’t Touch! (featuring Kansas’s Steve Walsh and Phil Ehart), the stylistically diverse Spectral Mornings (containing bits of reggae/Caribbean, classical, and old-timey Americana à la U.K.’s 1970s dance hall/jazz big band, the popular Pasadena Roof Orchestra), Cured (prominently featuring keyboardist Nick Magnus and Hackett’s brother John, as well as keyboard technology and an ever-present LinnDrum rhythm machine), Highly Strung (containing the U.K. hit “Cell 151”), Till We Have Faces (a veritable smorgasbord of musical styles, from classical—as in the burst of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto felt in “Myopia”—to Latin/Brazilian double and Japanese pattern drumming), and Defector.
Hackett was one of the few progressive rock guitarists who could be inspired by C. S. Lewis and speak of wizards and goblins while maintaining an audience willing to overlook these transgressions because of the music’s beautiful melodic core.
“Steve gets away with it for two reasons,” says former Hackett keyboardist Nick Magnus. “Firstly, the lyrics are more sophisticated than [on] average, being more like poetry than prose. A certain amount of interpretation and imagination is required on the part of the listener. With tasteful use of metaphors, euphemisms and ambiguity, the hobbits and virgins aren’t rubbed directly in your face. Though some may be disappointed about that. Secondly, the music has that unique Hackett personality. Many contemporary prog bands that do the ‘fantasy’ thing tend to follow the same old formulae, and consequently sound not only cheesy, but the same as each other.”
Hackett later formed the dual-guitar supergroup GTR with Yes’s Steve Howe, tapping guitar synthesizer technology (something Hackett had began experimenting with in his solo material), and released its self-titled debut record in 1986.
“When you listen to Hackett’s solo material, you really hear what an important part of the band’s sound he was,” says Laser’s Edge record label founder Ken Golden. “Of course, Genesis moved on and wrote different material when he left. So, if I had to guess, if Hackett was still in the band, I think it would have carried on in the style of Wind & Wutbering and maybe had a few more radio-friendly songs like ‘Your Own Special Way.’ But I think they would have hung onto that basic sound, for a while at least.”
Now a trio (augmented in live situations by Zappa alumnus drum Chester Thompson, and studio and jazz-rock ace guitarist/bassist Daryl Stuermer, both of whom made contact with the band through bassist Alphonso Johnson), Genesis were trimming away the musical fat, as it were.
Collins emerged as the singer of the 1980s, and Rutherford slowly got over his trepidation about having to “replace” Hackett and mastered the art of being a lead guitarist, while Banks went with the flow, cutting down his epics to bite-size pieces. As a collective unit, the band also warmed up to elements of R&B and soul—some of Collins’s favorite styles of music—Introducing them into the Genesis lexicon.
Trespass (1970)
Live (1973)
Voyage of the Acolyte (1975)
A Trick of the Tail (1976)
Seconds Out (1977)
Duke (1980)
Foxtrot (1972)
Nineteen seventy-eight’s appropriately titled . . . And Then There Were Three was the beginning of the band’s evolution away from progressive rock. Though songs such as “Down and Out” and Banks’s “Burning Rope” hark back to Genesis’s early 1970s material, the old days were gone.
“A lot of people say . . .And Then There Were Three was when the band were starting to go commercial or trying to write three-minute songs,” says Hentschel. “It was a conscious decision to do that. The record company said, ‘Let’s have a few shorter songs.’ I think it worked very well, actually.”
The record spawned the romantic single “Follow You, Follow Me,” a Top 30 U.K. hit (Top 30 in the U.S.), which reached a new demographic of fan.
Subsequent studio albums such as Duke, Abacab, Genesis, and Invisible Touch brought even bigger changes and would simultaneously expand and rip apart the Genesis fan base in ways that no one could have foreseen. Genesis would become one of the hottest pop bands of the 1980s, selling millions of records. Suddenly, women were interested in this band called Genesis; they were no longer the exclusively cultural property of hairy, outcast male college students.
Genesis: Nursery Cryme (1971)
(Richard E. Aaron/Getty Images)
JETHRO TULL
Minstrels in the Gallery
JETHRO TULL HAD BEEN WORKING IN FOLK MUSIC IN ONE or another since the band’s inception. Tull mainstay and front man Ian Anderson had been messing around with guitar and harmonica from an early age, having been seduced by Elvis and the country blues of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.
“I soon discovered that the blues scale had a quality that marked it out very much from the church music and folk music that I grew up with in Scotland,” says Anderson, who was born in Fife, Scotland, but later moved to Blackpool, England. “The rogue element of that blues scale was certainly a revelation to me as a . . . teenager learning to play guitar and set me off down that route of working on music that was in part improvisational and based on the blues scale.”
Anderson realized he could stand apart from the crowd by abandoning
the guitar and learning to play an eclectic instrument like the flute. The wind instrument was a symbol of Anderson’s rebellion. And before long, his wheezing, aggressive flute style—a combination of bluesy licks and impromptu vocalizations informed by the style of Rahsaan Roland Kirk—would become his, and his internationally successful band Jethro Tull’s, trademark.
Prior to forming Jethro Tull, Anderson was the front man of the John Evan’s Smash (so called “because the one piece of expensive equipment that the band needed was a Hammond organ,” says onetime band booker and Tull manager Terry Ellis, “and they didn’t have the money to buy one. John Evans’s mother had put up the money for the deposit, and in order to thank her, they called the band after her son. But it was Ian’s band.”)
Tull came together when club owners began searching for blues acts and asked Ellis and his partner, Chris Wright, of the Ellis-Wright booking agency based in London, if they had any bands the venues could put on their calendars.
Wright had seen the Smash in Manchester and remembered that they sprinkled in blues tunes among their R&B/soul repertoire. He contacted Anderson to see if there was interest in pursuing a career as a blues musician. There was, but there was one hitch: Unlike many of the blues bands of the era, the Smash didn’t have a showstopping guitarist.
Meanwhile, Anderson’s friend Mick Abrahams, who had been in the Luton-based outfit McGregor’s Engine with future Tull drummer Clive Bunker, was watching his band fall apart around him. The band’s bassist, Andy Pyle, later of the Kinks and Wishbone Ash, announced he was leaving, and it appeared as though the band was finished.
“Andy had gone off to get a drink or something, and literally three or four minutes later Clive went into the toilet, so I was left in the dressing room on my own,” remembers Mick Abrahams. “In walk Ian Anderson and bassist Glenn Cornick, and they said, ‘We’ve listened to you play and our band needs a kind of guitar player like you, because our guitar player is leaving.... We have quite a lot of work lined up. Would you be interested in joining us?’ I had already heard the band and thought they were quite good. I said, ‘Well, my band has just folded up, so, yeah.’”
Abrahams trekked to Lippinsonham, just outside Blackpool in northwestern England, and rehearsed in an old church. Soon after rehearsals, the band moved their base to Luton, which was nearer to London.
In the move, some members fell away (including drummer Barriemore Barlow and Evan, both of whom would become part of the Tull story again) as the band was being booked under a variance of names: John Evan’s Smash, John Evan Blues Band, the John Evan Soul/Blues Band, Navy Blue, Ian Anderson’s Blues Band, Ian Anderson’s Bag of Blues, Ian Anderson’s Bag of Nails.
“I even suggested ‘Ian Anderson’s Bag of Shit,’ but that didn’t go down too well,” says Abrahams with a laugh. “Lastly, a booker in the [Ellis-Wright] office had just done a thesis in history, and one of the people whose name . . . he’d come across was a guy called Jethro Tull.”
“Jethro Tull was a nineteenth-century agriculturalist, an inventor of the seed drill and also a musician, and we all said, ‘Why not?’” explains Ellis. “It was certainly better than a lot of the other names we’d tried.”
“But after that, everyone thought we were a bunch of druggies, out of our heads, because of the agricultural angle,” says Abrahams. “But we were the furthest thing removed from that. I don’t think anybody in the band was a heavy drinker, even. But of course we played a very odd form of blues.”
Thanks to some fancy financial maneuvering by Ellis, Tull had the support it needed in order to make a name for itself with its eclectic blues style and Anderson’s wild-eyed stage persona. In the 1970s, Anderson’s stage dress would become more elaborate, with a slight taste of the satirical, as the front man became notorious for his codpiece, earring, Mephisto beard, and knee-high boots, placing him somewhere between court jester, American hobo, wannabe pirate and English nobility, not to mention his Pan-like one-legged, flute-playing balancing act, which was the perfect counterpart for the amalgam of dirty blues, Renaissance, Elizabethan, and medieval musical flourishes the band would eventually incorporate into their folk-rock style.
A type had the band originally recording under the moniker Jethro Toe for the MGM label (for the single “Sunshine Day”/“Aeroplane”). That was of little consequence: The band, featuring Anderson, Abrahams, Cornick, and new drummer Bunker, soon struck a deal with Island in 1968. The label released Tull’s full-length debut, This Was.
This Was is a rich blend of styles, featuring songs such as the traditional and guitar showpiece “Catsquirrel”; “Dharma for One”; the Delta-by-way-of-British-blues “A Song for Jeffrey” (based, as are all of Anderson’s “Jeffrey” songs, on future Tull bassist and fashion plate Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond); “Some Day the Sun Won’t Shine for You”; Abrahams’s swingin’ blues “Move on Alone”; and a cover of the Roland Kirk tune “Serenade to a Cuckoo.”
“After we appeared at the Sunbury Jazz and Blues Festival and released the record, we just started to tear shit up,” says Abrahams. This Was reached number ten in Britain.
“I remember standing at the side the stage during some shows and just thinking, ‘My God. “It was a good feeling to know I was working and representing people of enormous talent.”
But despite the album’s success, trouble was brewing behind the scenes. Abrahams was not very happy with the creative direction the band was taking, nor was Anderson (or presumably Ellis) content with Abrahams’s desire for Tull to remain a hard blues-based rock band. Friction was inevitable.
“When they first started, it was kind of Ian and Mick’s band,” says Ellis. “So you had two focal points, because Ian was the singer and flute player, and Mick was the guitar player—and a hell of a guitar player. Really, really good. When Ian began writing his own songs, that took the focus away from Mick. So Mick got more and more unhappy. Everybody knew that they would have to kick Mick out, because he was making life unbearable for them.”
“I had a falling-out with Ian and it was a bit of an emotional time,” says Abrahams, who formed the legendary blues band Blodwyn Pig. “Ian went in the direction he did and was right to do it, and I went in the direction I did, and was right to do it. Never the twain should meet.”
“If you look at the bands that were playing the same circuit, and playing the same rooms above pubs that we were, a band like Fleetwood Mac,” says Ellis, “they were a blues band, but they progressed. Ian just didn’t want to play the same kind of music anymore.”
“By 1969 our music had become more eclectic with the departure of Mick Abrahams,” says Anderson. “Jethro Tull became an eclectic band by the summer of 1968 when I was writing the next lot of songs that became the second Jethro Tull album [Stand Up]. Then, of course, things like balalaikas, bouzoukis, and mandolins had come into the mix alongside some keyboards and a more eclectic view of the musical world. It made Jethro Tull stand out from the crowd, somewhat, because we had our own various elements of world music influences and classical music creeping into the thing at that point. We were certainly not just a blues band by the end of 1968.”
In the wake of Abrahams’s exit, future Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi temporarily filled in, though he never played a live date. (Iommi appears in the Rolling Stones’ “documentary” Rock and Roll Circus, but only mimes to backing tracks.) Along with Iommi, reportedly, Roxy Music/Nice guitarist Davy O’List also was tapped for a very brief time. Neither really worked out.
“We auditioned for guitarists, and Tony Iommi had come to the audition and he got the gig,” remembers Ellis. “But then he wasn’t comfortable with the whole Jethro Tull setting. He just couldn’t get into the art rock.”
A guitarist by the name of Martin Lancelot Barre had appeared during the auditions but was turned away when Tull invited Iommi to join. “Ian remembered Martin, and he was the guy who had almost made it, but not quite,” says Ellis. “You know, ‘Come back and all is forgiven.’”
B
arre, a guitarist of great taste, passion, and (in a rare combination) restraint, was (and has always seemed to be) a musician without a giant ego, which has allowed the wild-eyed minstrel of the gallery Anderson to lead his merry musical circus through whatever artsy adventures took his fancy.
The band released the popular singles “Love Story” and “Living in the Past,” a flute-heavy slice of pop-jazz in 5/4, and their sophomore effort, the aforementioned Stand Up, featuring “A New Day Yesterday,” “Nothing Is Easy,” a version of Bach’s “Bourée in E Minor,” and “Fat Man.”
After Island rejected the band’s single “Sweet Dream,” Ellis and Wright decided to form their own record label specifically to release Tull’s single, naming the record company Chrysalis (a name created by joining the two words “Chris-Ellis”), which would be the home of Tull for the next three decades.
“I think Jethro Tull was important to Chrysalis, and Chrysalis was important to the development of Jethro Tull,” says Ellis. “Jethro Tull was certainly a unique musical talent that enhanced the reputation of the company, but Chrysalis was cutting-edge and Ian could feel comfortable in being involved with it.”
Tull would continue to appear on Island, and in 1970 Benefit, the band’s third album, emerged featuring former bandmate John Evan on piano and organ, adding still more texture to Tull’s gradually growing and layered sound.