Today’s birthday boy is Ian Anderson, singer, composer,
flutist for Jethro Tull, the band that dominated my listening in my teen years,
1971-75. In that period, Tull released some of their top-selling LPs—Aqualung (1971), Thick
as a Brick (1972), Living in the Past (1972), A Passion Play (1973), War Child
(1974), and Minstrel in the Gallery (1975). My first ever rock show was a concert on the tour in support of War Child, though I’ve always
regretted that I didn’t get to see the much maligned tour in support of A
Passion Play, which, in the summer of 1973, was my top album. It suited remarkably
well a Hesse and Nietzsche-reading kid, newly versed in British Romantic verse
as well as Paradise Lost and Goethe’s Faust. Odd and arcane as the album might
seem to some, it felt completely au courant to me. In fact, it may be that
Anderson’s back-to-back “album-length tracks,” Thick as a Brick and A Passion
Play, stimulated me to be more literary than I might otherwise have been at
that age.
Today’s song comes from War Child and was almost a radio
song. The real radio song from the LP was “Bungle in the Jungle” and it was
something like “the end” of my ideal of Tull that they should be on the radio.
Even though, by then, I was only listening to FM I didn’t like the fact that
you might hear the song just anywhere. Music to me, at the height of prog-rock,
was supposed to be fairly idiosyncratic and obscure stuff. We used to think of
hits as “for philistines,” and stuff like that. Ian’s music lent itself well
to such attitudes. Rarely did he write a song about a woman or about his poor,
lovesick heart. For someone of my disposition back then, there was little more
tedious than hearing grown men pine for women or praise women or pretend to be
over women. Dylan I tolerated because he found ways to make love seem
imaginatively inspiring. Mostly though, love songs struck me as Hallmark
material.
Anderson seemed much more willing to engage intellectually
with the world-at-large. This wasn’t political stuff that told you what was
right and wrong; it was more metaphysical, having to do with one’s orientation
toward existence itself and the swindle of being a mere mortal. We all were
educated to know about “gods” and “the one God” and, no matter how you entered
that sweepstakes, you were drawing the short stick. Anderson liked pouring
scorn on sacred cows and on the kinds of intellectual posturing that passes
for “insight” in things like the music press or the media. Of course, his
attitude earned him scorn for his own intellectual pretensions, but to a teen
like me there wasn’t much comparison between writing for some rag and being
able to stage and play the kinds of inventive and original tunes Ian came up
with. Tull could be bluesy, and were very much so at first, then they became
more folksy, then they evolved a heavier sound with jazzy arabesques and orchestral
colorings, all led by Anderson’s trademark flute-playing and his whimsical
vocals. He liked to add vowels to draw out words, stringing out the lyrics for
effect, using cutting and ironic intonations that were pretty much beyond the
means of any American vocalist and but rarely encountered—Ray Davies comes
to mind—among British singers. If you cottoned to what Ian was on about you
could feel his vocal performance as intimate and thrilling. If not, it sounded
very off-putting, lacking in the typical sincerity of the pop performance.
Ironic toward most every “given” in life in those years, I
loved Tull more than anything.
“Skating Away” is a good example, beginning with an
observation like “You didn’t stand a chance, son, if your pants were undone.”
Both vulgar in intent and cultured in delivery, the line was saying you have to
be presentable at all costs, then remarks about being “bred for humanity and
sold to society” plays upon a teen’s conviction that “humanity” was pretty
awful company to keep and “society” merely the self-congratulatory name for the
parts that try to distance us from animality. It was all a sham.
It’s hard to say what the “new day” means exactly, but its “thin
ice” was clear enough. Whatever we might hope is changing with that “new,” we
know that we’re lucky if we can glide along and not fall through.
Then there are little asides—Ian used asides almost like a
Shakespearean clown at times—“As you push off from the shore / Won’t you turn
your head once more / And make your peace with everyone?” The lines sounded
almost conciliatory, like, maybe, in leaving, one could let bygones be bygones,
then: “For those who choose to stay / Will live just one more day / To do the
things they should’ve done.” At the time of this song, I had a read a lot about
characters who regretted not doing something or not facing life with the right
attitude. The idea of reconciliation here meets reappraisal and reckoning: one last chance to
get it right.
Then Ian sort of sneers at prayer, and jests about the “Universal
Mind” and references his own “Passion Play”—an album very much about the last
things in a man’s life, or, more properly, the testing of the soul’s status
after death. In other words, we’re hoping there’s some kind of plan for us
after this farce is over. A Passion Play, besides taking its name from the
dramatic re-enactments of the death of Christ and, sometimes, the harrowing of
Hell—popular in the Middle Ages—is conceived as a mock-play (perhaps giving
credence to the idea of a “rock opera” which was made popular by Jesus Christ
Superstar), and Ian pays tribute to the concept with the concluding verse of “Skating
Away”: “Well, do you ever get the feeling / That the story’s too damn real and
/ In the present tense / Or that everybody’s on the stage / And you’re the only
person / Sitting in the audience?”
That sense of being both in the play and watching it did
wonders for me, personally. Life was a pageant you couldn’t help but watch and
couldn’t help being stuck in. And however much we might try to amuse ourselves
at life’s expense—via literature and poetry and song—it’s still “too damn real.”
Ian sings all this with his usual tongue-in-cheek flourishes,
and the music uses that lovely Olde English style acoustic sound that Tull
exploited so well when wanted, making it all feel sort of quaint and
accommodating. The song opens Side Two of the album with an extended bit of Ian
making himself a spot of tea, rattling spoon on saucer and sipping and the
like, in answer to the question closing Side One, “would you like another cup
of tea, dear?” The instrumentation of the song is sparse but Barrie Barlowe’s
percussion, and John Evan’s accordion especially, add much to the dynamic, with
occasional power chords from Martin Barre. Anderson lets the flute add emphatic background coloring rather than any
of his breathless solos, so that the general feel is genial to mask how probing
the song aims to be, a kind of dark night of the soul set to a courtly dance
measure.
One day you’ll wake up in the present day.
No comments:
Post a Comment