The singer Ian Anderson called the “unsung hero” of the 1960s
Because of the sudden influx of new musical innovations during the decade, there are probably more unsung musical heroes to have been active during the 1960s than in any other decade.
You might want to make an argument that every decade has its share, and that the current climate we find ourselves in produces more music than ever before, but the sheer ease with which you can discover new music in the modern world means that it’s far harder to go completely unnoticed. The 1960s was a decade where you had to physically go out of your way to find your new favourite artists if you weren’t beholden to following the charts or listening to what was played on the radio and in traditional media; something which doesn’t exist to the same degree today.
Jethro Tull may not be able to claim that they were the most popular act of their era when they reached their peak in the 1970s, nor were they even the most successful progressive rock band of their generation, but they’ve certainly not been forgotten about and lost to the depths of time. What they managed to do was find a way to appeal to an audience who were looking for something more cerebral and musically challenging, and offered up something that stood out from the rest of the crowd.
Prior to being in a band together, they would have spent the ‘60s discovering their musical tastes as youngsters, but considering how different their approach was to many of their contemporaries, they wouldn’t necessarily have been influenced by all of the regular names that one might immediately associate with the decade.
Frontman Ian Anderson, who, while firmly rooted in jazz, folk and classical influences, had one particular artist whom he looked up to as an inspiration, and who never quite got his flowers due to the tragedy of his life. Graham Bond enjoyed an active decade during the 1960s, performing with a variety of different rhythm and blues outfits as an organist, a roaring lead vocalist in his own group, the Graham Bond Organisation, and was known for collaborating with some of the most notable names in the field. But, if you were to mention his name in the modern day, only a select few people would be able to acknowledge just how pivotal his work was.
“Graham Bond was another of those relatively unsung heroes of the mid-1960s,” Anderson claimed in an interview with Guitar Player. “Together with his bandmates Jack Bruce, Ginger Baker, and Dick Heckstall-Smith, [he] played the R&B circuit venues in the UK with original songs and reworked blues classics. I went to see them and subsequently met Graham a couple of times when he was going through a bad spell before committing suicide on the London Underground. His organ playing greatly influenced our own John Evan, and we covered some songs from this album in our early days.”
While multiple members of Jethro Tull may have understood just how important Bond’s output was, it’s a massive shame that there aren’t a greater number of people who recognise just how much his style greatly influenced the sound that other groups and vocalists would adopt later in the ‘60s and into the ‘70s.
