The 1970 song Ian Anderson will always regret Jethro Tull releasing: “Generic pop”
The only people without regrets are liars, and Ian Anderson is no liar. Unfortunately, some of his regrets gave been so painfully public that he still laments them to this day.
Any band that has been playing for years is likely to have unleashed a few duds. There are always going to be shows they could have played better, albums that could have been produced, and at the expense of many diehard fans who love everything their favourite acts have done, songs that could have been written better.
Although Anderson usually had a great way of looking at the bigger picture whenever he made a Jethro Tull album, he had enough judgment to realise when some of his tunes didn’t hit the mark. He once said, “I think it’s really the job of the composer, the artist, the painter, the writer to present people with options. I’m just really reflecting the thoughts and actions around me.” And he has always lived and died by the sword of that blase attitude,
Because of this liberal outlook, even in the glory days of progressive music, Jethro Tull was always going to be an acquired taste. They never even pretended to want to be in the same conversation as pop-rockers, and while they had mixed feelings about being lumped in with the same crowd that played masturbatory musical passages, they at least leaned into it when making albums like Thick as a Brick.
Even when they were having their first major “hits”, though, the band were always going to be a touch different than their contemporaries. ‘Aqualung’ may have fit in the same neighbourhood as episodic songs like ‘Hotel California’ and ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ from their time, but no one in their right mind would have thought that a song all about the existential crisis of a dirty homeless man would ever do major numbers the charts, no matter how badass the guitar riff was.
And considering what else was happening on the charts at the time, having something this cerebral on the album charts made the pop sphere look a lot more eclectic than it was. This was still the era where The Osmonds were slowly becoming one of the biggest acts in the world, and despite how temporarily badass they proved themselves to be on Crazy Horses, Anderson was far more interested in testing the limits of where his music could go than trying to compete with them commercially. That didn’t mean he couldn’t still write a pop song, though.
If he was going to make something for the masses, though, ‘Teacher’ was a strange way of going about it. The song itself is fairly simple compared to the band’s usual material, but the lyrics about someone taking one of their friends on vacation and watching them live it up are pretty much toothless, coming from the same band that had been making tunes like ‘Living in the Past’.
While the song does have its moments, Anderson wasn’t even going to pretend he knew what he was doing, saying, “It was the need to come up with a pop song format that might get us some radio play or be in the singles charts. It was a deliberate attempt to write a piece of more generic pop/rock music.”
Still pained by the song decades later, he lamented, “Which is probably why I don’t really like it very much. It just seemed a bit forced, a bit too structured in that kind of vein. It’s not one that I’m comfortable with at all.” He’s never let this rest, despite all the classics he has mustered; he still frequently brings up ‘Teacher’ as a sore point in his extensive back catalogue. Fundamentally, it went against what he stood for as a musician.
He explained, “Most of what I’ve written songs about are things that come out of the confusing emotional, spiritual and psychological period of time when you’re going through puberty.” This felt like the sham version of that typical trait.
Even in his vocal delivery, you can tell that this is very much outside of Anderson’s normal wheelhouse. A lot of the appeal behind Thick as a Brick was his ability to twist his voice into different tones to suit what was going on in the bonkers story, but hearing him on here is something that was probably meant to be goofy but comes off even dumber than it was trying to be.
But despite still being one of the biggest names in prog music, Anderson’s failure on this tune should really be a lesson for anyone who’s trying to make a living as a musician. A song might be at the top of the charts because it’s catchy, but catch doesn’t always mean good, so it’s better to make something that you enjoy first before going with whatever the new trendy sound is.
