The one band Ian Anderson called 100 times better than him: “Magic”
It takes a lot more than a rocket scientist to truly understand the mind of Ian Anderson.
Although Jethro Tull never claimed to be one of the most high-brow bands in the world by any stretch, Anderson was always looking for ways to twist rock and roll on its head to the point where most people had to wonder what the hell he was even doing on some of his biggest albums. But even if he had his handful of great hooks in his arsenal, Anderson knew that there were always going to be better musical translators than him whenever he got into the studio.
Then again, it’s hard to say that Tull was supposed to be one of the biggest bands of all time, either. The pop sphere didn’t really have time for some of their more experimental music, and even though Anderson did fit in well with the other singer-songwriters of his time, he wasn’t going to play the game of making more stripped-down music for the masses, either. What you saw was what you got with them, and what we got was actually pretty interesting for its time.
‘Aqualung’ might still be one of the stranger rock and roll epics to come out of the 1970s, but Anderson did have more than a few great moments throughout his magnum opus as well. Most people weren’t quite ready for him to make something that sounded as complicated as Thick as a Brick just yet, but a lot of the biggest pieces of his career weren’t always about being totally serious, either.
He was willing to make something that had a bit of tongue-in-cheek humour to it, but not every band that they toured with seemed to be the best fit. Getting a band that perfectly fit Tull’s aesthetic in the 1970s was bound to be a lost cause, but when looking at the way that the Eagles ended up pinching one of their chord progressions for ‘Hotel California’, Tull was a little bit sceptical of what the California rockers had done.
To be fair, Don Henley’s musical masterpiece was miles away from the themes that Anderson had talked about in Tull’s songs, and when you listen to both ‘Hotel California’ and Tull’s ‘We Used to Know’ back to back, there aren’t that many similarities, but Anderson was a little bit jealous of what he heard in the Eagles. He knew that he had written something fairly powerful with his original tune, but he also understood that Henley and Glenn Frey had completely outmatched him whenever they sang.
Tull’s songs were for a specific audience, and Henley’s voice and songwriting power were miles above everything that Anderson did in his mind, saying, “The Eagles song is a 20 times, 100 times better song than my song. So credit to them wherever they got the chord sequence from. A monkey banging on a piano key would have come up with it sooner or later.”
Adding, “So credit to them, they had a great song. It’s not my kind of song, but it’s a very well-written song lyrically and musically. It really is very skilful, so it made them a ton of money. But it is really a little piece of magic, it goes on forever.”
That’s not to say that what Anderson has done was terrible, either. He had a very idiosyncratic way of writing many of his songs, and while Henley had a way with words that spoke to the people more directly, he wasn’t about to chastise him for taking the bones of what he did and making it a classic.
Anyone else would have done the same thing if they were in Henley’s shoes, and while Anderson was still searching to find that one strange chord progression throughout the rest of his career, he was more than happy to see how his legacy carried on in other artists. Because even if he didn’t reach the heights that he wanted to, the best thing that you can hope to do as a musician is to inspire people to do something greater with their music.
