Jethro Tull
The Making Of “A Song For Jeffrey”
“Jeffrey just looked the part,” remembers Ian Anderson today. “He always had that rather enigmatic, strange, slightly detached, rather arty aspiration. There was sometimes a little bit of play-acting, of studied eccentricity about him.”
The charismatic Jeffrey Hammond would eventually join Jethro Tull on bass in 1970, but before that he was, in Anderson’s words, their “unofficial mascot”, and the inspiration behind one of their earliest songs, fan favourite “A Song for Jeffrey”. “If you saw someone reading a newspaper at the back of the crowded Marquee club,” laughs Anderson, “that would be Jeffrey. It was all designed to be a little mysterious and a bit odd – and he was!”
The song, the swaggering first single from the band’s 1968 debut This Was, sonically bridged the gap between their r&B roots and their quirkier, progressive leanings. However, blues purist guitarist Mick Abrahams wasn’t pleased, and ended up departing before the group performed the track on The rolling Stones’
Rock And Roll Circus in December 1968. future Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi was instead drafted in to mime the cut.
“you had to progress pretty damn quick in those days,” explains drummer Clive Bunker, “because every other band was getting good by the week. Within a couple of years we were topping the bill in America – it was stupid times, really.”
Despite barely performing it live since the end of the ’60s, Anderson and the modern-day Tull have been rehearsing “A Song for Jeffrey” in preparation for their 50th Anniversary Tour this year, which the songwriter confirms will focus heavily on their ’60s and ’70s work.
“Of course the key word in the title is ‘for’,” muses Hammond, who left Jethro Tull in 1975, and now dedicates himself to painting. “I’ve always thought that the song was meant as a rather lovely gift or dedication, more than it having anything lyrically to do with me. What is so pleasing to this day is being associated vicariously with that edginess of the opening bars, the sparseness of it, the breathy flute, rhythmic bass and drums and almost elegant guitar.” TOM PINNOCK
IAN ANDERSON: I first came across Jeffrey at Blackpool Grammar School. He, like I, had an interest in painting, and in music. We didn’t strike up an immediate bond, but when I got it into my head that it might be fun to form a band [The Blades], I went to John evan, who had become the owner of a drumkit – and to Jeffrey, who didn’t play anything at all, so I said, “right, you’re the bass player!”
JEFFREY HAMMOND: To someone with no musical ability, both John and Ian seemed incredibly talented in their different ways. It was Ian who held everything together without exerting a sense of leadership. The overriding feeling was a desire to be different yet without needing to say how or why or to define it in any way.
TERRY ELLIS: Almost every band of that
era, like Pink floyd and the Stones, started off playing blues. Then they would graduate from blues into something that was different and more personal.
ANDERSON: Because he was at art college in London [after The Blades split], Jeffrey was the unofficial mascot of the early [ Jethro Tull]. He would come along sometimes to the Marquee Club and hover about in the background, studiously avoiding looking at the band, and reading whatever newspaper he fancied at the time.
CLIVE BUNKER: In the winter he would grow his hair very long and look beatnik-y, and he would always stand at the lefthand side of the stage, from my view. He would never look at the stage, but at the audience, so there was always nobody around him, because no-one dared go near him! And then in the summer, he’d shave his head completely and grow a big beard and do exactly the same thing. He was great.
HAMMOND: yes, I was the male groupie who was fortunate to travel to gigs in the London area in the Transit. It was especially exciting to see their following grow from barely a hundred or so at their first Marquee gig to packing the place out within a very short period of time.
ANDERSON: “A Song for Jeffrey”, it’s not very clever lyrically, but it’s really about Jeffrey being a slightly wayward lad who wasn’t quite sure where he was headed in life. He knew that he loved painting, but he seemed sometimes without direction and rather lonely. So I thought, ‘Well, I shall write a song with his name in it.’
HAMMOND: I think that Ian must have played it to me rather than being so straightforward as saying, “Hey, this is for you.” I do remember the striking instrumental introduction which defines the song for me.
BUNKER: In those days, when Ian had a rough idea of a song, we would all go round to his place and he’d play it on acoustic guitar and either hum or sing the basic melody. I was tapping my knees trying to come up with a drum part, but I just didn’t know what to do. So I said to Ian, “Have you got any ideas?” And he sang that shuffle beat, and that’s what I played.
ANDERSON: There was a Nice song called “Diamond Hard Blue Apples Of The Moon”, which had this wonderful rhythmic feel that I really liked. I remember saying to Clive, “Try something like Blinky Davison played.” It was difficult writing music – impossible, towards the end of 1968 – that was in Mick Abrahams’ comfort zone. The more I felt I was progressing as a musician, as a songwriter, the further I seemed to be stretching Mick’s potential, because he was very much a died-in-thewool British r&B blues player. But luckily, “A Song for Jeffrey” just about came into his comfort zone.
ELLIS: We chose Sound Techniques because it was cheap. This was the very early days of independent recording companies or even groups recording themselves.
ANDERSON: Sound Techniques was best known for recording folk music, but we went there because it was the cheapest place Terry and Chris [Wright, Ellis’
business partner] could find. It was a fourtrack, and luckily of course the tapes they were using then were industrial, so the oxide is still on them to this day.
ELLIS: I booked a four-hour session, which was all we could really afford. They had this funny engineer called Victor Gamm – he got the band’s humour, so he made us feel very comfortable. In that first four-hour session we did three tracks – recorded, overdubbed and mixed.
BUNKER: We would be working live virtually every night of the week – I remember one time having a three-day holiday, it was amazing!
ELLIS: I took the first recordings back to Chris Wright and said, “Do you think I
“Yes, I was the male groupie who was fortunate to travel to gigs in the London area in the Transit” JEFFREY HAMMOND