DB's Song of the Day (day 362): "WIND UP" (1971) Jethro Tull

Yes, it’s nearly time to “wind up” the year and the series, and we’re still in that “vacation mode” that tends to stretch from Christmas eve to New Year’s Day. And last New Year’s Day was when this Song of the Day marathon began. Reaching “back down the years to the days of my youth,” as the song says, brings me to an album that scored big with me when I was at the age of 12, generally considered an impressionable age.

Jethro Tull’s Aqualung was one of the first albums I encountered that made me think about what it was trying to say. And that had something to do with the fact that, when you got to the end of the album, you heard today’s song as its final track. And, since it’s a song about taking exception with one’s teachers, it gave me pause. Coming to the end of my Catholic schooling—I graduated from it at 13—and having gone through Confirmation, the skeptic in me had about had it with “the faith,” but I wasn’t yet provoked by it. At 12, one is “confirmed” but it’s rather pro forma. Then one begins to think: what if I had just said “I’d rather not.”

Ian Anderson, lead singer and composer and flutist for Jethro Tull, composed a song that says what adolescents generally don’t say when preferring to demur about things their parents seem staunchly to believe but which they can’t say they share. Anderson doesn’t make this “non credam” a cry against parental expectations—he has other songs about that—but rather makes it about one person’s conscience when realizing that, with good conscience, going along with the flow on this religion thing is rather a blow to one’s sense of reality and values and one’s own intelligence.

He begins it with the Great Demur: When I was young and they packed me off to school / And taught me how not to play the game / I didn’t mind if they groomed me for success / Or if they said that I was just a fool / So I left there in the morning / With their God tucked underneath my arm / Their half-assed smiles and the book of rules. These are not cryptic lines and there’s no difficulty in getting his meaning. The attitude is sardonic. “I may be a fool but since those who think me a fool are themselves fools what does it matter?” Twice when singing the verse, Anderson throws in a little sound effect after “success”: the first time it’s a little chuckle, as though success is a silly idea, or at least that the idea of him succeeding in the way his teachers and parents expect is silly; the second time he gives a sound like “yuck” or a minor retching as though such success is a nauseating idea. It adds to the speaker’s comic, clowning attitude toward his younger self but even more so toward those who presumed to instruct him about what the nature of the world and God and his own best interests are.

So I asked this god a question / And by way of firm reply, he said / “I’m not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday” / So to my old headmaster and to anyone who cares / Before I’m through I’d like to say my prayers / I don’t believe you, you had the whole damn thing all wrong / He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday.”

I’ve chosen this song for the last Sunday of 2014 to honor Anderson’s point. The idea of “winding up” God on Sunday looks askance at the whole notion of ritualistic worship, of going to church because it is expected or obligatory, rather than as an act of actual devotion. I don’t know if Anderson wishes to demean organized religion in general, but he does want to make a point about how religious values are inculcated. To me, back then, his point was well-taken. What annoyed me most about church service was how distant it seemed from any sense of valuable “communion” (for lack of a better word) with whatever we conceive ultimate existence or meaning or being to be. God as anything more than a tired concept for a supernatural arbiter of behavior seemed to have fled the precincts of the church. I don't know why Anderson chose to put these ideas into a song at precisely that point in time (Tull's 4th album, released when Anderson turned 24), but it came along at the right time for me.

You can excommunicate me on the way to Sunday school / And have all the bishops harmonize these lines. It’s easy to imagine being drummed out of the congregation for professing one’s animosity toward its attenuated rituals; and it’s invigorating to say that the bishops themselves, if we’re being honest, might agree it’s all a bit of a sham.

Anderson’s singing seems tentative at times, as though he’s not sure how to put this. It’s a very theatrical performance, shading into self-parody for effect, and, it seems to me, stepping lightly around Dylan’s notion that “I became my enemy in the instant that I preached”—if one starts beating the pulpit to sound the battle charge against religion and priests and the like, one is rather tainted by the effort. It’s time for a clean break. Which I appreciated in the little sally, “to my old head-master.” It’s the classic gesture of the student finally wise enough to tell his teachers a thing or two.

The infectious hard rock part of the song finds Anderson taking exception with his own lineage in a manner that might recall Christ himself: How d’you dare to tell me / That I’m my father’s son / When that was just an accident of birth. Christ repudiated his earthly father in favor of his heavenly father. Anderson seems to repudiate genetic ties in favor of something more spiritual or at least affective. I’d rather look around me, compose a better song / ’Cause that’s the honest measure of my worth. Putting all his eggs in his creative bag, so to speak. And, assuming that his father would see devotion to songs and singing as childish, it’s a way of saying that there’s no point of comparison between himself and the old man.

All of which was fairly bracing to me at that age of leaving puberty for adolescence, making a leap into a position—about many things (as anyone who knows me would agree)—that can be summed up by: “I don’t believe you, you had the whole damn thing all wrong.”

Joyce’s Stephen professed his non serviam. Before I ever encountered that, I’d grasped the purpose of a non credam.

DB's Song of the Day (day 222): "SKATING AWAY ON THE THIN ICE OF THE NEW DAY" (1974) Jethro Tull

Today’s birthday boy is Ian Anderson, singer, composer, flutist for Jethro Tull, the band that dominated my listening in my early teen years. 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 in winter 1975 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, by the spring of 1974, was my top album. It suited remarkably well a Hesse and Nietzsche-reading kid, becoming versed in British Romantic poetry 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” play 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.