“It was very unforgiving”: The one album Ian Anderson called painful to make
It’s not exactly a walk in the park trying to recreate anything Ian Anderson did with Jethro Tull.
As much as the band didn’t want to label themselves as a true progressive rock outfit, their musicianship and abnormal approach to song structure made them fit right in alongside the likes of Yes or Genesis when they first started to make a dent in the music business. But even for all of the great, complex songs that they have made throughout the years, Anderson admitted that some records were a lot more fun for him to make than others.
Granted, Anderson’s standards were a bit higher than most whenever he began working on any of Jethro Tull’s records. He had grown up listening to much more than rock and roll, and when he did end up listening to something that charted, a lot of his favourites came from bands that were taking a few more chances, like The Beatles or the Syd Barrett-era of what Pink Floyd were doing.
They were making the scope wider for what rock and roll could be, and Anderson was ready to widen it even more when the band first started. There were definitely pieces of their sound that were left over from the days of blues rock and jam bands, but no one would have had the kind of bravery to reinterpret a Bach piece whenever they started working on some of their new projects or make something as daring as Thick as a Brick that ran for two sides of vinyl while only having one actual song.
But when they are set in stone, chances are the band is always going to be known for the guy with the perched leg playing the flute and singing ‘Aqualung’. The song is practically a piece of 1970s culture at this point, and while the song itself is a tour de force, the album was a bit more complicated for them to get off the ground than the usual mix of genres that they would start to implement on their later records.
The band weren’t exactly at each other’s throats by any stretch, but you could tell that they were still trying to find out what their sound was going to be on the rest of the record. ‘My God’ is still one of the best rock and roll tunes they have ever made, but when looking back on how the record was mixed, Anderson could also remember all of the long hours that it took to get everything in good shape.
Having people like Jimmy Page visiting the studio was bound to be a plus, but Anderson remembered that the studio they were working in just wasn’t doing justice to what they wanted to sound like, saying, “Aqualung actually wasn’t an easy one to do. We were working in what was then Island Records’ brand-new studio, which was a converted church in West London, and there were lots of issues with acoustics. It was very unforgiving, harsh and hard. Zeppelin was in Island’s basement studio, and they had a much better sound. It was not an enjoyable period of recording at all for us.”
Every band can only work with what they have at any given time, but it’s not like this is a garage-rock take on prog by any means. Everything sounds clean where it should, and while some parts of it do end up sounding a bit too thin compared to what they would do next, the performances are what survive the most, especially when they began working on some of their more ambitious tunes.
It was going to take a lot before they really sank their teeth into the studio, but for a band that had yet to work out all the bugs, Anderson was thinking about something much more ambitious than a bunch of blues licks. He was already thinking three steps ahead of what their resources could produce, and it was only a matter of time before they reached the kind of studio environment they were comfortable with.
