The 1970 song Ian Anderson couldn’t stand playing live: “Awkward and difficult”
As seriously as the genre might take itself at times, prog rock is nearly always fun for the bands that specialise in it to play.
Usually comprising of accomplished musicians, prog groups relish the opportunity to play these complex and challenging compositions for their audiences, and when you’re a band like Jethro Tull, whose leader Ian Anderson liked to throw a bit of humour into his work, it’s likely that live performances would be a riot to get up and do.
Prog rock isn’t always the most enjoyable genre from which to bring out a stage show. The content may be more whimsical and musically proficient than its rock counterparts, but the bands had a tendency to take themselves quite seriously. This could quite easily result in below par shows that, outside of the huge events Pink Floyd would aim to create in their latter years, would leave their audience with mouths wide open… to yawn.
While their musical abilities were frighteningly proficient, Jethro Tull weren’t quite as po-faced as some of their contemporaries in the prog scene. Unlike King Crimson, whose members suffered under the tyrannical rule of Robert Fripp wanting everything to be played precisely as he intended for it to be, things in Jethro Tull were a lot more laid back. That’s not to say that there weren’t disputes or tricky moments, but things were seemingly a lot more pleasant for members of Anderson’s group.
However, that doesn’t mean that Anderson was exactly happy with all of the work that the group ever put out. One Jethro Tull song from 1970 remains one of his least favourite works, and one that he refuses to perform live to this day. Most of their best-known hits receive the opportunity to find their way into setlists, with ‘Aqualung’ and ‘Locomotive Breath’ being two that Anderson cites as nearly always making the cut, but in the case of ‘Teacher’, it’s been absent pretty much since its creation.
“I always found it an awkward and difficult piece to play — because of the subject material and because of my own sort of feeling about the song. I just didn’t enjoy it.”
Ian Anderson
Originally released as a B-side to ‘Witch’s Promise’, the song found its way onto the US release of their third studio album, Benefit, and became a radio hit in the country. However, despite its success, Anderson has never found himself enjoying the song in the slightest, and gave his reasons in an interview with Songfacts as being down to its origins and subject matter.
“I always found it an awkward and difficult piece to play,” Anderson explained, “because of the subject material and because of my own sort of feeling about the song. I just didn’t enjoy it.” The track itself sees the narrator bemoaning his travelling companion having all the fun from a plane ticket that he bought him, which was intended as an allegory for freeloaders taking hard-earned money without doing much to warrant it.
Referring to how other songs in their repertoire have failed to suffer the same fate as ‘Teacher’, Anderson explained: “They’re exactly the way that they were when I wrote the songs. I don’t have a different interpretation of them just because some years have gone by.” With ‘Teacher’, he has seemingly never warmed to the track.
Anderson doesn’t just have complaints about the song’s themes, but he was never pleased with the composition of the track either. “It was a deliberate attempt to write a piece of more generic pop/rock music,” the songwriter confessed. “Which is probably why I don’t really like it very much. It just seemed a bit forced, a bit too structured in that kind of vein.”
While Jethro Tull have arguably had more successful and equally commercially geared songs in their career, this one remains an absolute no-go as far as Anderson is concerned: “It’s not one that I’m comfortable with at all.”
Considering Anderson has spent the majority of his career open to all new avenues opening up to him musically, it feels somewhat strange that he might close one off. But, when you have such a depth of songs as Jethro Tull do, I guess it is easy to shut them down once in a while.
