“It was a missing part”: the genius Ian Anderson said threw away his potential
Part of the beauty of being a musician is being able to control anything that comes out of your instrument. Even if the label is heavily encouraging you to put out something that sounds exactly like your last hit, the only person responsible for putting together the next song that will either boost your career or tank it is you. And while that kind of creative gamble is a bit harder in today’s world when everything gets to be too homogenised, Ian Anderson was pushing the boundaries of what music could sound like on the charts with Jethro Tull.
Because listening to their music for more than two minutes, there’s a clear reason why it would not fly today in rock and roll. The whole point is supposed to make songs that are snappy and to-the-point, and since Anderson was known to stretch songs out for as long as they would go or add in classical interludes played on the flute, there was no reason to think they were going to be the best-selling band in the world.
But Anderson wasn’t always worried about the raw sales of his music. Half of the battle was being able to poke fun at what music was supposed to be, and listening to Thick as a Brick is one of the most intentionally hilarious rock albums ever made. Being a huge send-up of prog-rock, this is the kind of storyline pulled right out of a Monty Python sketch, complete with joke newspaper articles on the vinyl.
Although there was room for a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour behind the scenes, Frank Zappa was really the king of incorporating some funny moments into his music. Considering how niche some of his jokes could be, some of the lighthearted tunes could be perceived as the kind of cynical humour you’d find on the darker sides of the Internet today, but Zappa spared no expense regarding the music behind it.
Despite not taking every song he made seriously from a writing perspective, the music itself will usually go for broke on every track. On the one hand, there are tunes like ‘Muffin Man’ that have the greatest riffs of his career and manage to sound closer to hard rock and even metal in a few places. On the other hand, THE DAMN SONG IS CALLED ‘MUFFIN MAN’.
Of all his peers, Anderson felt that Zappa was almost kneecapping himself by being too funny, saying, “Frank Zappa was, worryingly, a writer who hid behind the mask of a comedic lyric. And, much as I love Frank Zappa and a lot of his work – and I mean no disrespect for him – I did feel it was a missing part of the jigsaw puzzle, that he just didn’t ever go there. And I think it was because he was a little bit emotionally repressed in some way.”
There may have been a lot he was keeping at bay, but there’s a good chance that everything would have come apart if he decided to write “normal” lyrics. Every one of his classic albums pulls from everything from jazz to rock and roll to doo-wop to create that zany atmosphere, so putting serious lyrics on top of ‘Don’t Eat the Yellow Snow’ would have only felt wrong.
It could have been a fault of Zappa’s for not going far enough with his lyrical approach, but that showed everyone the kind of artist he was. He knew that people only wanted to listen to music that had words in it, and if he had to write them, he might as well have used them to entertain himself.
