JETHRO TULL
When Elvis Presley summoned you, you came. It was August 1969, and the King Of Rock’N’Roll was in the midst of a lucrative four-week run of shows at Vegas’ International Hotel, where he received a stream of awestruck visitors before and after his sets. No one said no to an audience with Elvis. No one except Ian Anderson.
“We were playing in Las Vegas around the time of the Stand Up record, and we were dragged by the scruff of the neck to some casino where he was appearing,” says Anderson, 50 years on. “I was never really a big Elvis fan but I suppose the first couple of songs that he ever recorded were part of my childhood fascination with music.“
Anderson wasn’t impressed with what he saw. “I was just appalled by the commerciality and the triteness of it all. And he was clearly out of his box. He was slurring his words, he didn’t know where he was, he would stop the band halfway through his song. It just wasn’t the way to see Elvis.”
But the King had heard that this hotshot new Limey band with the crazy hair and the flute were in the audience, and he wanted to meet them. Or at least that was the message Anderson got from the Elvis camp.
“They said, ‘Elvis would like to see you in his dressing room.’ I replied, ‘Tell Mr Elvis that it is a really great honour to have been here tonight, but we’ve got a show tomorrow, we’re a bit tired and we need an early night.’ And they said ‘No, you’re not listening – Elvis will see you backstage in the dressing room.’ I thought, ‘This is not this is not an invitation, it’s a fucking instruction.’”
Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson is many things, but bulliable isn’t one of them. His heels were dug in so deep that not even the Memphis Mafia could strong-arm him into meeting the King in his court.
“I’ve always said that the biggest driving force behind prog rock is boredom. That’s the thing that pushes people – they get bored with three chords.”
“I think a couple of bandmembers were miffed,” he says. “But I felt so embarrassed for him and I didn’t want to make things even worse. And obviously he would have had absolutely no idea who we were, no matter what they said.”
It was a typically Ian Anderson-ish reaction. He has built a career on confounding expectations, turning left rather than right, marching to no beat other than his own. It’s an approach has served him well during his band’s 50-plus year career. And never more so than on their second album, Stand Up: a transformative record and a key point in Jethro Tull’s half-century-long journey – one that marked the beginning of the band as we know them now.
We’re a long way from Las Vegas today. It’s a crisp winter morning, and Anderson and Prog are sitting in a lounge room in the grand Wiltshire pile that he and his wife, Shona, have called home for decades.
2019 doesn’t quite mark Tull’s 50th anniversary. The band formed in 1967 and their debut album, the blues rockindebted This Was, followed in 1968. Anderson grudgingly marked the latter with an anniversary tour that began last year and extends into this. “I did think about hiding under the bed and not coming out for 12 months,” he groans.
But the fact remains that 2019 is a milestone year, if only because it marks the half-centenary of one of their most pivotal albums. Released in July 1969, Stand Up was a watershed for the band, one that put them in vanguard of the burgeoning progressive rock movement and turned them into ascendant stars in their own right.
In late 1968, Jethro Tull had seemingly little need to change anything. This Was had positioned them in the midst of the Brit-blues pack, alongside Savoy Brown, Chicken Shack and Fleetwood Mac. Titling their debut This Was was a sly indication on Anderson’s part that Jethro Tull had moved on from their initial sound before the album had even hit the shelves. The singer was already itching to broaden the band’s horizons.
“At that time I was going to see, at the Marquee Club, King Crimson, and the very first concerts by Yes,” says Anderson. “They gave me confidence that I could be more adventurous, at least if I had the musical chops to do it. Of course, I didn’t have the musical chops. I had to spend a bit more time learning to play a bit better and write songs that were a little bit more evolved.”
Anderson was writing songs for the follow-up that fitted his new brief before This Was had even come out. He ran through some of these ideas with guitarist Mick Abrahams, who was unimpressed.
“It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested and it wasn’t that he was incapable,” says Anderson. “It was just out of his comfort zone. Mick was a dyed-inthe-wool blues and R&B guy. He wanted to do more of the standard
“Stand Up is the first album that I felt creatively responsible for. It was a first wet dream involving somebody else at the same time.”
blues kind of thing. He wanted to make This Was Pt II.”
Anderson persuaded Abrahams to record a new song, Love Story, for a single. The track swapped earthy
R&B for galloping folk rock. The
B-side, A Christmas Song, was an even greater departure: a knockabout Yuletide ditty complete with mandolin, jingle and tart festive ambience, it was a marker of Abrahams’ disinterest that he didn’t even play on the latter.
“It was I who had to have the showdown with Mick,” says Anderson. “He got a bit puffed up and made some veiled threat. At which point I put down my flute and guitar and said, ‘Right, let’s have it out, man to man,’ knowing that Mick was a big bluffer and of course he would back down. Which was just as well, as he was twice my size.”
Fisticuffs averted, Abrahams left the room and the band. Jethro Tull might have lost their best musician, but they’d gained a future.
Love Story managed to sneak into the Top 30, justifying Anderson’s bold new vision, but there was still the matter of recruiting a new guitarist. One of
these was Davy O’List, until recently a member of proto-prog trailblazers The Nice. Anderson was a fan and invited O’List to his North London bedsit to try a few ideas.
“We went through a few ideas and thoughts, but he was at least as odd a character as I probably appeared to him. We weren’t really making contact. He seemed to be very ethereal and weird and not really capable of a punchy conversation. I don’t think he was comfortable with me and vice versa.”
Slightly more successful was an unassuming young guitarist from Birmingham named Tony Iommi, who was a member of a heavy blues band named Earth. Anderson liked Iommi, and he seemed to be more broadminded than Mick Abrahams.
“He was much more open to different ideas,” says Anderson, “I didn’t realise that he had lost the tips of several of his fingers in an industrial accident, and he did have a little physical difficulty in playing some of the things that I outlined to him. He had to simplify it in a way that might not have been a bad thing for some of the songs but it just wasn’t right for others.”
Iommi was briefly a member of Tull, long enough to appear in the Rolling Stones’ Rock And Roll Circus concert movie, where the band played their 1968 single A Song For Jeffrey and a new number, Fat Man. But by midDecember, he returned to Birmingham, and to his old band, Earth, who would soon change their name to Black Sabbath. “He did alright for himself, did Tony,” says Anderson warmly.
One guitarist who had auditioned at the same time as Iommi was Martin Barre, whose band Gethsemane had played with Tull at a gig in Portsmouth. Barre’s audition had been a disaster: his amp didn’t work properly and the guitarist was a bundle of nerves. Yet Anderson had spotted a glimmer of potential amid the technical and personal snafus. “I invited him back for a more private, less pressured little get together,” he says.
The pair crammed into the singer’s bedsit. Barre began playing once more, this time without an amplifier. Afterwards the two of them went for food at a greasy spoon café on nearby Highgate Road. “I seem to remember thinking, ‘He’s a good guy, he seems interested in a lot of the same sort of things as me and he’s probably about as unformed as a musician as I am, so we could sit down and learn together,’” says Anderson.
It helped that, temperamentally, Barre was a world away from his predecessor, Mick Abrahams. “Mick was a strong character, but he was terribly insecure,” says Anderson.
“He would needle people, test them out. He was a tricky guy to be around. Martin wasn’t like that at all. He just wanted to be on his own most of the time. His idea of rock’n’roll was retiring early with a sandwich and an Agatha Christie book, which wasn’t a million miles away from mine.”
By the time 1968 turned into 1969, Barre was the band’s new guitarist.
The reimagining of Tull was underway.
If Barre was hoping for a gentle entry into the world of Tull, he was in for a shock. The first few months of 1969 were a whirlwind. In January, the band played a three-week UK tour, then flew to the US, where they’d spend the best part of the next three months, sharing stages with everyone from to Detroit firebrands the MC5 to Led Zeppelin.
“You knew that was a pretty racy lifestyle going on,” says Anderson of the latter. “At least in some parts of the band. Of course, there was quite clearly a difference between the behaviour of the rather remote and calm John Paul Jones and Jimmy Page, that boyish, smily, fun-loving guy who always wanted to share his photos with you. Photos usually involving soft fruit…”
It was in the US that Jethro Tull wrote and recorded the song that would become a key stepping stone in their transition from blues rock eccentrics into full-blown prog pioneers.
Anderson remembers being in a hotel somewhere in the Midwest when the band’s manager, Terry Ellis, collared him in the lobby and told him he needed to write a hit single. “So I said, ‘Right, so you want me to pop back to my hotel room and write a hit single?’ and he said, ‘Yes!’”
Challenge accepted, Anderson returned to his hotel room to knuckle down. Awkward bugger that he was, he opted to write it in 5/4 time – emphatically not the tempo hit singles are made of. Despite this deliberate cussedness, Living In The Past gave
Tull their first proper hit single, reaching the Top 3 in June 1969.
By then, Jethro Tull had already begun recording Stand Up at Morgan Studios in North London. They had road-tested a handful of new songs on their US tour, among them Back To The Family, For A Thousand Mothers and the muscular A New Day Yesterday. They sounded little like anything Tull had recorded on This Was.
“I’ve always said that the biggest driving force behind prog rock is boredom,” Anderson says now. “That’s the thing that pushes people – they get bored with three chords or repetitive things, they go looking for something else. Your threshold can become quite low and you can end up feeling a little been-there-done-that. You do need to stretch out a bit.”
Jethro Tull certainly stretched out on Stand Up. The folk influence that had always buzzed away in the background was brought front and centre on Back To The Family, the gauzy Look Into The Sun shimmered with the faintest psychedelic haze, while Reasons For Waiting possessed what Anderson today describes as “something there that was evocative of a very quiet, more spiritual, almost church music.
The kind of thing that I grew up with as a child in Edinburgh.”