The guitarist Ian Anderson called a one trick pony: “He wasn’t unique”
From the minute that Jethro Tull started to gain traction, Ian Anderson was looking for something more out of rock and roll.
Anyone could try their hand at copying everyone from Chuck Berry to Elvis Presley, but The Beatles and Pink Floyd had opened up the possibilities for what rock and roll could be about. The genre was Anderson’s oyster in many ways, but it’s not like he was the only one hitting on the idea of making progressive music every single time he kicked up that leg with a flute in hand.
He may have been one of the more unique frontmen in prog rock when he first started, but the whole point was about making something different for the times. As much as all of these bands fit under the prog rock banner, Tull, Rush, Yes, and King Crimson aren’t really known for having that much in common stylistically. Each of them defied conventions in their own way, and in Anderson’s case, it was about constructing the best musical movements that he could to entertain people.
And when I say entertainment, it wasn’t necessarily all about blowing people away with a song. ‘Aqualung’ demonstrated that they could certainly make a great tune, but Thick as a Brick is both the most ambitious and hilarious album that anyone could have made at the time. The band already knew their status as a prog-rock outfit, so why not use those tropes against themselves by making the whole album one song featuring glorified Monty Python sketches in the live show?
After all, all that mattered was that they were having fun, but Anderson’s sophisticated side was only matched by Frank Zappa’s fusion-based music. Zappa was basically the antithesis to rock and roll in a lot of ways, and when you listen to a lot of what he was doing on albums like Hot Rats or even later masterpieces like Joe’s Garage, he seemed to dismantle every single thing that made rock interesting and go in another direction.
It was a spectacle to watch, but Anderson could tell when Zappa had used up his schtick, saying, “The first album by him that I bought was Hot Rats, and I found that a rather irritating album of not very evolved guitar playing. Frank was a bit of a one-trick pony as a guitarist, but as a musician, arranger and bandleader of the traditional sort, he was at the top of the tree, although he wasn’t unique as a bandleader.”
That might sound insane coming from the same mind that made albums like Freak Out and We’re Only In It for the Money, but it’s easy to see where he’s coming from as well. Zappa was a contrarian if there ever was one, and while that can be interesting to see someone finding new pieces of brilliance by going in the opposite direction, it can get a bit monotonous seeing someone march to the beat of their own drum and refusing to budge for an inch.
Then again, it’s not like he doesn’t make those guitar freakouts entertaining. There might be the occasional tune that calls back to the kind of lyrical style that Jeff Beck was known for, but the whole point behind many Zappa guitar solos is never knowing where they’re going to be going. He was practically in a street fight with his instrument a lot of the time, and a lot of the solos he played are him barely escaping with his life by the time the song is over.
So while taking a deep dive into Zappa’s music can leave people with a few auditory bruises along the day, it’s not like he was ever overtly boring by any stretch. He was someone willing to do whatever it took to hear the sounds in his head, and even if that sound wasn’t always that pleasant, you had to appreciate the audacity to even think of it in the first place.
