The three bands that took prog rock too far, according to Ian Anderson
What do you get when so-called ‘progressive rock’ progresses too far? Well, according to Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull, you get groups like Yes, Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Genesis.
In fact, during a 2017 conversation with Indeflagration, Anderson discussed how an album which was released in the same year that he got his own group together, 1967, was really the foundational record in the early days of what went on to become prog rock, saying: “Although I wasn’t a Beatles fan, I guess I learnt something from Sgt. Pepper’s in terms of variety, of the rather surreal nature of it, that was quite laudable”.
Having come up in the 1960s, Jethro Tull were heavily influenced by the blues-rock which was so dominant at the time, and particularly by British artists like Cream, King Crimson and Led Zeppelin. Though there were plenty of more authentic American bands out there, those groups, like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and later The Electric Flag or Creedence Cleerwater Revival, seemed to be more interested in making new music out of their old forms and structures, while the British bands seemed to be striving to move on to something more radically different, more expansive and experimental. More far out.
At the same time, The Beatles were recording Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Pink Floyd were in a studio across the corridor creating The Piper at the Gates of Dawn, and it wasn’t long before Jethro Tull would begin to tinker around with and drift away from their own early blues and folk-rock roots. Following the departure of their founding guitarist Mick Abrahams, who had wanted to progress down the more traditional rock route, the group became more and more experimental, subversive and yet, at times, satirical of the scene that they increasingly found themselves in amongst.
Another one of the British bands on the scene with them drew a similar faint and reluctant praise from Anderson as The Beatles had, when he said, “I was never a fan of Genesis, but their musicianship is amazing”. But despite that amazing musicianship, or maybe even because of it, Anderson believed that groups like Genesis, as well as Emerson, Lake & Palmer and Yes were quickly “becoming rather self-indulgent. Musically great but self-indulgent and perhaps pompously setting themselves apart from rank and file musicians like the rest of us who were still learning to play our instruments”. A point that even Phil Collins might later have come to agree with.
To counter the indulgences, excesses and extravagance of these groups around him, Anderson added that “I think that’s why Jethro Tull always cultivated and kept a degree of looseness and more improvisation, which sort of kept us a little bit away from that structured and more musically refined kind of performance, ‘Progressive rock’”.
Of course, there is nothing self-indulgent or pompous at all about a 43-minute-long jazz-folk-blues fusion song featuring extended organ, guitar and flute solos created by a band who took their name from a 17th century British agriculturist, now, is there?
