The 1969 prog-rock album that cost Jethro Tull their guitarist
Any great rock and roll should be about making compromises every now and again.
No one can play the same riffs forever, and there has to be some kind of growth every single time you go into the studio, but when in a band like Jethro Tull, that meant having to grow up a lot faster than normal, and not everyone was as on board as Ian Anderson.
Granted, it’s not like Anderson didn’t have good reason to want to move on. He had started out as a bluesy player when he started, but when he saw what Eric Clapton was doing, there was no point in beating them. It was time for a change anyway, and hearing him do an interpretation of Bach on ‘Bouree’ was the first indication that some new melodic pieces were going to make their way into the group.
Then again, no one can make that kind of transition overnight. Even The Beatles waited a few years to finally evolve into the kind of band that they wanted to be, and while Anderson could make his flute sing whenever he played it, he knew that there were some moments where he would be stepping on some people’s toes if he wasn’t careful. He wrote most of the tunes, but bringing in songs that had complex sections to them was going to be a lot for everyone to digest.
Anderson was on the fringes of prog rock at this time, but when they first debuted, that genre didn’t have a name yet. King Crimson were busy founding the genre on their first handful of releases, and while that practically dared the next generation to start working on complex tunes, that wasn’t going to work out with a band that had originated by being a blend of a few complicated tunes with blues.
And since Mick Abrahams didn’t sign up for writing conceptual masterpieces, Anderson remembered him leaving the minute that he heard what was expected out of him for the album Stand Up, saying, “There were lofty moments right after Jethro Tull began. Those ambitions, unfortunately, couldn’t include Mick Abrahams because he didn’t really respond well to the music I was writing, which went too far away from his love of blues and R&B. He wasn’t very comfortable with the way the music was going. The last thing he played on was a song called ‘Love Story,’ which is getting away from the blues.”
But at this point, Abrahams wasn’t even signing up to deliver the concertos yet. A lot of the songs on Stand Up might not be what people traditionally think of as blues by any stretch, but asking someone who’s spent their entire lives learning the likes of Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson to suddenly pick up a mandolin and start writing was always going to be a bit of a sore spot.
Even after Abrahams departed, Anderson never looked back toward becoming a straightforward blues act again. Instead, each subsequent release pushed Jethro Tull further into their own peculiar corner of rock music, where folk melodies, medieval imagery and progressive ambition all collided together. It was a risky move at a time when most successful bands were still relying on familiar formulas, but Anderson seemed more interested in confusing audiences than comforting them.
That stubborn creative streak became the very thing that kept Jethro Tull relevant throughout the 1970s. While many progressive bands became trapped by excess and self-indulgence, Anderson always retained enough eccentricity and humour to stop the music collapsing under its own weight. Whether standing on one leg with a flute in hand or writing albums built around sprawling concepts, he approached rock music like someone determined to prove there were still unexplored roads left to travel.
It may have been complicated, but it wasn’t any less successful, either. Anderson did have some strange ideas for what he wanted Jethro Tull to be, but ‘Aqualung’ is among the greatest riffs of all time for a reason, and even if you don’t care for something as grandiose as Thick as a Brick, it’s easy to admire the sheer audacity of a band to make an entire album based around one song.
That kind of direction may have been disheartening for some born and bred in the blues, but this was about more than serving one band member’s tastes. Jethro Tull needed to be something bigger, and throughout their storied run, that rewrote the rulebook on what could be expected out of a prog-rock group.
