‘Freezing Steel’: the classic rock song that Ian Anderson threw away
Playing music by the book never fully satisfied someone like Ian Anderson.
There were a lot of musical avenues one could go down with rock and roll, so why limit themselves to only the blues as a reference point? Surely there was a lot more for people to explore if they opened up their ears a little bit more, but even by the strange format that Jethro Tull worked in, Anderson did admit that he was far from the greatest judge when it came to picking classic tracks for their own repertoire.
Granted, there was bound to be a little bit of a clash between Tull and the blues bands when they first started. If there are people in a bar that are ready to listen to some guttural blues for the entire night, they’re going to be more than a little bit pissy when they see a man standing on one leg not playing the blues and absolutely destroying a flute the same way that Eric Clapton would demolish a guitar solo.
When looking at the music scene at the time, though, there was already more out there than blues. Even though pop acts like The Beatles had started to transform rock and roll into what we now know as prog on records like Sgt Pepper, it’s not like the folk scene had gone anywhere, either. Bob Dylan had gone electric, but there was a wealth of kids out there with acoustic guitars of their own trying their best to say something worthwhile about the state of the world.
And it’s not like Anderson wasn’t one of them, either. Although he practically gave up trying to be the best guitarist in the world when he saw Clapton play, he figured there was still room for him as a frontman to break it out every now and again, and when listening to the breakdown section of ‘Aqualung’, he was still definitely drawing from the same cowboy chords everyone else was using.
He was far from a James Taylor or anything whenever he played, but his style at least fit in well enough with the more mellow side of rock and roll. But when looking at the up and coming artists that had masterpieces of their own, Anderson admitted to rejecting a Cat Stevens classic before he even realised who it was.
Admittedly, Anderson was a medium-sized fan of Stevens’s music, but after rescuing a lyric sheet to his song ‘Freezing Steel’, he figured it wasn’t worth keeping around, saying, “He’d been in the studio before and obviously recorded this song, and he had the lyrics on the music stand and was reading it, and in the end [I] threw it in the bin. I wish I’d kept it because it would be a nice thing to have kept, but the reason I didn’t keep it is I didn’t think it was one of his best songs. Maybe, if it would have been a different song, I would have flattened it out and put it in a frame, and kept it.”
Then again, it would have been a huge find given where Stevens was at the time. This was him right in the middle of his rise with tunes like ‘Peace Train’ and ‘Father and Son’, and even if it was far from one of the greatest pieces that he ever made, any piece of music could have served as possible inspiration if someone has the right idea.
But by this point, Anderson didn’t have time to worry about the goings-on of other music legends. He was in the middle of steering his own band through the most outlandish records imaginable, and the last thing he wanted to do was make songs that were simply a singer with their guitar.
