Mountains Come Out of the Sky

by Will Romano

  Benefit skillfully negotiates blues, folk, jazz, and hard rock throughout songs such as “With You There to Help Me”; “Teacher”; “Nothing to Say”; “To Cry You a Song”; “Sossity: You’re a Woman,” which, at points, plays like a Bach lute suite with nasally vocals pressed on top; “Son” “A Time for Everything?”; “For Michael Collins, Jeffery and Me” (about the astronaut who orbited the moon as Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took giant leaps to the lunar surface); and “Play in Time.”

  While critics would later despise Anderson for forgetting his blues roots, evolving into something more than a blues singer and flautist seemed the only logical choice for him to make as an artist.

  “The more progressive bands at the time—Yes, the Nice, and King Crimson—stood pretty much outside the world of blues, for the most part,” says Anderson. “They certainly gave me the feeling that I could afford, in a more eclectic and folky way, to follow those rather braver musical directions than to be another middle-class English white blues band. Whilst it’s served Eric Clapton over the years, it wasn’t really what I felt either equipped to do or wished to do, since I am not African American or American. I think it was a bit like me trying to play some Chinese Mandarin music. It just doesn’t fly, really.”

  “THE MOTHER OF ALL CONCEPT RECORDS”

  It wouldn’t be until 1971’s Aqualung that Anderson and Tull fully developed their folk-minstrelsy approach and dove headlong into orchestral accompaniment, with songs such as “Wond’ring Aloud”; “Cheap Day Return”; “Mother Goose”; “Slipstream”; the religious fear-mongering of “Wind-Up” (which addressees the concept of discovering the divine through spirituality, not dogma); and the gothic and ghoulish “My God,” a scathing indictment of organized religion’s power grab, which Anderson calls “an anguished cry, a song of anger derived from my first experiences challenging religion as it was taught to me when I was fourteen years old.”

  Anderson has always fought the notion that Aqualung is a concept record. “I kept saying, ‘It has a title track and is dressed up with a nice, cohesive album title, album artwork, and text on the album cover and so forth’,” says Anderson, “and two or three songs, you could say, hang together loosely on the subject of organized religion. But most of the songs on the record have nothing to do with the others. So it could not possibly be a concept album. However, people persisted in referring to it as a concept album at the time, and some still do.”

  While we can’t rightly call Aqualung autobiographical or even 100 percent conceptual, it seems to be the first serious attempt by Anderson to organize a grand personal and political artistic statement. “Aqualung” is one of the rare cases in rock that raises our consciousness while not preaching to an audience, and yet makes us simultaneously grossed out and sympathetic toward a social plight. We, in a strange way, see ourselves in Aqualung (the subject of the title song, which features lyrics penned by Anderson’s first wife, Jennie).

  “When I sing the song ‘Aqualung’ onstage, I hope homelessness is something that doesn’t leave the forefront of my mind,” says Anderson, who calls the song a “fleshed-out social documentary.” “The day that I’m automatically singing the words and not thinking about them is the day I should stop singing them.”

  Anderson may not have thought of Aqualung as a concept record, but the follow-up, he says, was intended to be “the mother of all concept albums.”

  In pre–Spinal Tap splendor, Tull served up 1972’s Thick as a Brick, a satirical, album-long suite presented with straight-faced conviction. The original LP design replicated a provincial newspaper, The St. Cleve Chronicle, complete with a dozen pages (with “below the fold” flaps tucked into the gate), upon which an award-winning epic poem by a fictional child literary genius, twelve-year-old Gerald “Little Milton” Bostock, was printed.

  However, according to the news report on the “front page,” Bostock was stripped of the stipend given to him by the Society for Literary Advancement and Gestation (SLAG) due to the disturbing nature of the poem.

  Conveniently, the poem serves as the album’s lyrics, containing concepts as varied as young men coming of age in British society, governmental manipulation of young minds, and pre-Christian British paganism.

  “When Jethro Tull made the album Thick as a Brick,” says Anderson, “it was with tongues firmly in cheeks. Thick as a Brick is a spoof album, and it is not to be taken seriously.”

  Anderson had spent some time apart from the music press after the release of Aqualung, declining requests for interviews. So it’s ironic (or is it appropriate?) that he created his own alternate world (one he had complete control of) and distributed this newspaper (which even includes a review of the record) to fans as if ignoring the reality of critical commentary and inevitable prejudice by members of the British music press and, perhaps, even the public at large.

  The record is all over the map, bouncing from jazz (Anderson plays sax, violin, and trumpet on the record, though he now calls brass instruments “rather rude and shocking”) to some strange mixture of Celtic/Eastern European gypsy/Middle Eastern scales to orchestral percussion timbres; symphonic themes; baroque rock; a mess of odd times, military marches, and melodies; medieval-tinged lute passages; and Celtic and Old English–styled folk.

  Musical concepts repeat (sometimes with variation), while the interaction between drummer Barriemore Barlow (who makes his first appearance on a Tull record), bassist Hammond-Hammond, flautist Anderson, guitarist Barre, and keyboardist Evan is fluid, making the music dense without being tedious or boring.

  Thick as a Brick went to number one in the U.S., to the Top 5 in the U.K., and motivated Chrysalis to release the highly acclaimed best-of package, Living in the Past, in fall of 1972.

  It seems Anderson and the boys just couldn’t get enough of a good thing. Next, Tull aimed for a proper concept album that wasn’t overtly satirical like Thick, but would continue in a similar vein of absurd English humor.

  The band had recorded three sides of what was planned to be a double album, but circumstances conspired to keep the record from ever seeing the light of day. “It floundered in the process of making it, mainly because of illness and production problems,” says Anderson. “We were working in France and abandoned that idea, and started from square one. We came back to London and wrote and recorded an album in a relatively short space of time.”

  The time crunch and the band’s misfortune helped to produce a cynical and darker record, titled A Passion Play, centering on the subjects of life, death, and rebirth, following (as far as we can surmise) the journey of character Ronnie Pilgrim’s soul. (The “passion play’s” four acts are listed in a mock theater program, which was printed in the original LP.)

  It’s rock as art, clearly steering away from Anderson’s own onetime admission that popular music is muzak. Whatever your opinion of A Passion Play, it demands dissection and analysis, and is another example of rock music having evolved.

  Though A Passion Play was not as successful as Thick as a Brick (it has too many shifting tempos and moods, and as soon as we are introduced to one musical idea, it doesn’t last long enough to be fully developed and allow for the music to breathe and groove), the album is as extreme an artistic statement as Tull would ever make.

  “It’s always fun—and I have to stress the word fun—to get into areas that are a bit unusual and a bit untrodden, bits of turf that other people haven’t gone near,” says Anderson. “I find that enjoyable to do because you know straight away from the title and the subject material onward you are kind of doing something that other folks haven’t done, or that they may have done but perhaps not in the field of contemporary pop or rock music.”

  “The Passion Play was the first tour I’d ever seen of the band,” says guitarist Guy Manning (Manning, Parallel or 90 Degrees, the Tangent). “They played in the U.K. two nights, doing A Passion Play, but the album hadn’t come out yet. I just thought it was the most marvelous thing I had ever heard. I didn’t want it t
o end. It was a very complicated, full presentation. It started out with a white dot pulsating on a screen. Then you saw a ballerina get up off the floor and start dancing around, and she starts to run down a corridor and dive through a window, smashing the window and the glass as the band jumps out from behind the amplifiers with a pyrotechnic puff of smoke. We felt that this was brilliant, and would put Tull right to the top of their game.”

  Not everyone agreed. Critics hated the indecipherable plot and (what they deemed) unnecessary elaborate multimedia stage production, which included a live-action film shown during the concert, based on the album’s calculatedly mad interlude, titled “The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles,” narrated by John Evan, who donned devil horns.

  Evan’s—or we should say, Satan’s—sophistication, the Lewis Carrolllike fantasy setting, the incidental string arrangement, a prancing giant newt (and other human-sized creatures), and dancing ballerinas are more creepy than amusing, instilling a fear in us as though we’ve left our own bodies and have entered into a kind of hell—the exact state of mind some critics surmised they in after witnessing the stage production of A Passion Play.

  Because of the horrid reviews, Tull threatened to stay off the road permanently, reportedly to work on a feature-length film dubbed War Child (though Anderson later stated that this was a story concocted to, in part, help garner front-page news in the music magazines work schedule). Anderson and the band were committed to the music and, on more than one occasion, called it the best work they’d done up to that point.

  Grabbing a (cod)piece of the progrock action: Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull. (Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

  “We waited for the write-ups in the papers, and we were looking at the New Musical Express, the Melody Maker, Sounds in the U.K. and it was absolutely slated,” says Manning. “We thought, ‘We were there. How could this be? We were there.’ That was a moment in time when the journalistic world had been turned, in my opinion. No longer did journalists have to be deferent to an artistic temperament. They said whatever they thought. Even if it was provocative.”

  Rolling Stone magazine called A Passion Play “vapid,” “all play and no passion,” and “tedious nonsense.” In a particularly damning review, Melody Maker quipped that the album “rattles with emptiness.” Due to its opinion-leader status in the U.K., Melody Maker reviews were sent over the wires and replicated by newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic.

  “It’s rather downbeat and not very satisfying,” says Anderson of A Passion Play after all these years. “It has its moments, but it’s missing the kind of rather careless humor, the careless sort of silliness of Thick as a Brick. It remains the firm favorite of the most dedicated and obsessive of Jethro Tull fans. It is something of a badge of honor if you have managed to listen to A Passion Play twice all the way through. You deserve a purple heart and elevation to a record listener’s hall of fame, or something. That kind of marks the end of that period for Jethro Tull.”

  What followed was 1974’s Warchild, a major turning point in the band’s career. While some of the progressive elements of the previous three albums were present, Warchild, undoubtedly, was the result of the critical reaction to A Passion Play, and the streak of conceptual (or near-conceptual) rock the band had been writing and recording since Aqualung.

  Though the band made use of British folk motifs and symphonic arrangements by David Palmer, who’d studied at both the Royal Military School of Music and the Royal Academy of Music (and who brought to the band the scholarly world of classical and medieval music as well as musical history and theory), the songs were more accessible and shorter than they’d been in the past three years. Featuring “Skating Away (on the Thin Ice of the New Day)” and “Bungle in the Jungle,” Warchild, having drawn on material from the ill-fated, pre–Passion Play double album, boasted FM radio hits and reached number two on the Billboard album chart in America.

  “We happened to be considered progressive rock with a couple of our more convoluted and intricate pieces of music of the time,” says Anderson. “It was the right thing for the time, but by 1974, it wasn’t. We kind of went back to doing generally shorter songs with more traditional shape and form.”

  “I think A Passion Play was one too many,” says Ellis. “Ian had done the over-the-top concept album with Thick as a Brick, and that was enough. Then he went back to writing songs.”

  Tull didn’t completely refrain from self-indulgence: Nineteen seventy-five’s baroque/hard rock/orchestral/folk album, Minstrel in the Gallery, plays like a medieval Sgt. Pepper’s. It’s really an Anderson autobiography, covering his loves, lusts, pains, regrets, shortcomings, and beliefs (such as those put forth in “Cold Wind to Valhalla”—an admission by Anderson that he’s no hero, in this or any time—and the nearly seventeen-minute suite “Baker St. Muse,” regarding Anderson feeling like an ordinary citizen, being squeezed by the tax man, rejected by a woman, pissed off at the press).

  Yet, very much like the Fab Four, who had cloaked themselves as the Lonely Hearts Club Band, Anderson was masked by the persona of a traveling minstrel.

  “I think the thing to keep in mind about the Minstrel in the Gallery album is that it’s rather like Aqualung: an album of contrasts,” says Anderson, who sequestered himself for a month between December 1974 and January 1975 to write the material for the record. “It is not on the same level or harping on about the same things. But Minstrel in the Gallery is an album of dynamic changes marked by the use of small orchestral ensembles and a lot of acoustic instruments. I think Aqualung and Minstrel, though separated by four of five years, share a bond.”

  With Minstrel, Tull had morphed into something more reminiscent of Fairport Convention, Renaissance, and Steeleye Span than King Crimson. The band would pursue this direction with more frequency and depth with 1976’s Too Old to Rock ’n’ Roll, Too Young to Die! (even though it was very much a concept record, recounting the exploits of an older greaser/a never-has-been veteran rocker who gains notoriety by appearing on a TV quiz show) and 1977’s Songs from the Wood, a strange hybrid of classical and Celtic, and the pinnacle of this particular artistic vein. Songs from the Wood truly feels as though it comes from nowhere. Perhaps it does. In order to write this material, Anderson had settled into a state of mind he’d rarely visited, let alone lived, in his earlier years. Living in the English countryside with his new wife, Shona Learoyd, who was expecting the couple’s first child at the time, gave Anderson new perspective on life.

  Nothing in the Tull catalog matches the musical balance achieved with Songs from the Wood, which compiles hard-rock licks, traditional folk odd tempos, church music in the counterpoint style of Giovanni Pierluigi Palestrina, baroque trills, moments of lush orchestration (most of which were written by David Palmer), medieval minstrelsy, Renaissance dance tunes, thunderous drums (the kind found in Scottish folk music), electric blues guitar riffs, and pagan imagery that speaks directly to the past.

  What we have in Songs from the Wood is practically a history of British popular music over the last thousand years, including the unexpected British holiday hit from December 1976, “Ring Out, Solstice Bells” (mostly played in 7/8 time).

  Aqualung (1971)

  A Passion Play (1973)

  Songs from the Wood (1977)

  A (1980)

  Crest of a Knave (1987)

  Roots to Branches (1995)

  “I think Ian looked back to his Scottish upbringing and Scottish folk songs,” Martin Barre told the author in 2003. “We were not a unit, and we never have been. And we aren’t now. We are very much five different thinking people with very different tastes in music....We get on well enough musically to throw ideas around . . . and produce something that’s very much [enjoyed by] all of us.”

  “Ian is a very sophisticated mind and a formidable intellect,” says Dee (formerly David) Palmer (Palmer underwent a sex-change operation in 2004). “He could read a book and give a lecture on it the next day. The development of our s
tyle, from 1968 to 1980, was a slow but measured tread of development. In his quiet moments he used to turn things over in his mind. For instance, he never had the time for Zappa. But then suddenly he did. Captain Beefheart went on the road with us and changed his mind. When he spoke with them, he realized that they were just as intelligent as he was. At that time, in the ’70s, when we all were still quite young, we were still on that learning curve. Ian would take things on and they would become part of him.”

  “I play only by ear: I don’t read music,” says Anderson. “I don’t have any formal musical training whatsoever. I learned from David Palmer some things that I couldn’t put a name to or couldn’t quite put my finger on, and that’s important.”

  Nineteen seventy-eight’s Heavy Horses wasn’t as dense as Songs from the Wood, nor was it as intense. In an era of revolving disco balls and punk’s fuck-all energy, the appearance of Anderson and the boys in the photograph on the back cover of the LP, all decked out tuxes, lounging around in a carpeted room of the finest wood, leisurely sipping wine from dainty glasses, coupled with the fact that the album had been dedicated to the various indigenous breeds of horses and ponies of Britain, made Heavy Horses the furthest thing from hip an album by a rock band could be in the late 1970s. One wonders if this were not all some form of joke again—the band’s jab at themselves for being comfortable middle-class rockers.

  “He and I had some words over some of, well, what I called the ‘country’ material,” says Ellis. “Heavy Horses, specifically. I was not happy about that. My thoughts are, ‘You’re a musician, you’re writer. I understand you need inspiration.’ Ian, at a certain point, did what most people in England do: He went out to the country and bought a house, and that became his inspiration. I said to him, ‘I don’t think a kid in the projects in Detroit can relate to hunting foxes, Ian.”’