where is the love for JETHRO TULL?

I guess I like those early albums OK. I always kinda liked "Cross-Eyed Mary" from the "Aqualung" LP. I don't remember liking those concept albums. I like the later, crasser hits like "Bungle in the Jungle."

i remember someone arriving at age 15 - ie after all the decisions were made - and being able to winkle rush into the local canon

So mediocre

Quite a good band, I think, who did a lot of things well (proggish, folkish, bluesy, jazzy, poppy enough to have big hits and showy enough to be genuine arena monsters) and had a broad streak of goofiness. Lester be damned, I say classic.

i mean, there's no reason why there shd be some seamless prog monolith (esp.as prog wz largely defined in retrospect anyway, by its foes), but they were def totally off the map for the prog-niks i knew when i wz a teen

(the one guy i did know who loved them wz also at this school but a total odd loner, by his choice and everyone else's worried agreement)

(actually he reminds me of some ilxors come to think of it, but back in 1975 he seemed a strange fellow)

It added to my lack of love for Tull.

Whoah, I say. And on the Eddie Jobson-assisted A tour, no less.

I saw them several times myself, the best close up on the Rock Island tour, where the BJ song "Kissing Willie" featured Ian behind a screen with some chick going down on him, sillouette-style. Classy stuff.

Still, was and remain a fan of Aqualung, Songs From the Wood, Minstrel and the Living In the Past comp -- all hold up quite well, as do many of Ian's gentle acoustic songs. I think many people instinctively got ish with the flute.

!!

this may have been madey-uppey i spose but it does kinda capture the way IA wz perceived back then (late 70s) eg as a monumentally up-himself fella

Lester Bangs is not cool. The buck stops here. Didn't you see Almost Famous?

Hi, mark s! So glad you're back, you bring out the best in ILX.

http://www.stjohns-edinburgh.org.uk/uploads/images/mural_dec03.jpg

Tull is very very great

one of my best friends in high school was a huge Tull fan and I never really got it or made an attempt to. but a few years ago I heard "Thick As A Brick" on the radio and it just blew me away, I love that album now. need to start checking out some other ones.

I always thought I hated them, but I couldn't resist the Living In The Past comp for £3 in Fopp, and...it's ok really. I picked up Benefit and Stand Up too, and they were a reallyy imaginative blues band for those early albums. I suspect they started disappearing up Ian Anderson's arse from Aqualung onwards though. Maybe Under Wraps is considered to be a synth rock classic these days though?

This thread is kind of weird since I've always thought of Jethro Tull as a classic rock staple. I have definitely known some big fans, although I suppose I don't know many people who rank them as their single favourite band ever. Do like them though. Search: Allan Moore's writing on them. (The musicologist not the comic book guy.)

Thick As A Brick was right after Aqualung, so I guess I like the inside of Ian Anderson's arse.

Knocking Tull music for being "I'm all high and mighty better than you" really only extends to their lyrics being cocky in that they are occasionally tongue-in-cheek and purposely atypical. The music doesn't show any other signs of cockyness imo. No more than prog music or jazz

So what if Ian acts pompous? The music is what matters. Every album from their first one to Heavy Horses has some great material on it (I never tried to get into their later stuff). Their albums may be a little scatterd but there's so much good stuff. One time I made a 80 minute soft rock mix using only pretty ballads like Wonderin' Aloud, Moths and Summerday Sands.

Btw the cuts that were taken off of Passion Play for Best of Jethro Tull volume 1 & 2 are amazing songs.

One of the Best of cds sneaks in an amazing song called "Rainbow Blues" that was never released with their standard albums

could never get past the totally obnoxious performance on Rock n Roll Circus w/these guys.

also RR Kirk hated them and I'm kinda inclined to take his side

have you uh given their albums a chance?

I still listen to the song-form ren-prog trilogy of Songs From The Wood/Heavy Horses/Stormwatch with total admiration and, esp in the case of SftW, wonder.

Heavy Horses is way 2 fonkay

i can never get into "This Was" though

A Passion Play is beyond redonkulous

Passion Play is too much. But Minstrel In The Gallery fits with the abovementioned run, tho not as concise and song-y.

Hmmm if there's fonkay trax on Heavy Horses I might have deleted them... the song to the lil mouse is so cute!

And your little sister's immaculate virginity wings away on the bony
shoulders of a young horse named George who stole surreptitiously
into her geography revision.
(The examining body examined her body).

The lyrics are fun!

haha i'm half kidding, but honestly "journey man" is sorta funky in a tull way, i could totally see parts of it being chopped into a good hip hop beat:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YorEAVz4gkQ

There WERE like two tracks that I deleted from Heavy Horses, should figure out what they were.

'No Lullaby' is totally essential heavy-stadium Tull.

Tull were one of the first album / prog bands I LOVED, so I always stan for them.

Yeah SftW was my first 'favorite album'.

I remember being a stoner in high school and going off in the woods with my friend, finding a clearing, and building a fire at midnight while we played that album on my boombox. One of my favorite memories

Haha love it!

Tull were one of my favorite bands when I was 12 and only listened to 12 bands, and spent a lot of time rolling 12 sided dice. I think the AMG entry rates the albums about right. Except for Stand Up. For a while, Stand Up was my favorite album, period. Not really prog yet, very much a 60s record. There's a huge drop-off after Heavy Horses, where they don't seem to know what kind of band they want to be. The synths are so tempting, but anti-pastoral. Even as the records get weak, there's still decent songs like "Fallen on Hard Times".

That's it really: Tull is remembered for making overblown, overly filagreed music, but Anderson generally added in enough concise songs to string you along between the 15 minute suites. Those suites certainly require a certain mood.

I've been thinking about Tull a lot lately, because in the 29 subsequent years since I found music beyond what was on FM Rock Radio (Last scene of SLC Punk was so true to life) I haven't liked anything with that overblown, overly filagreed sorta-classical sound (Maybe Foetus). But I'm really into Sigh's Scenes From Hell. Like Tull, Sigh don't come across as classically trained musos trying to make fretboard challenges to keep themselves interested. Anderson's jumbles have a learning-on-the-job quality, if one's job was to make folk rock bombastic.

A few years ago Dead Man did a great nine minute Tullish jazz-folk-metal suite, "Rest in Peace."

Looking back, when I dropped prog for three chords and some lies, Anderson's scolding sense of humor has totally prepared me for Lydon, Biafra and MacKaye.

Digging into Heavy Horses for the first time in, god, 20 years probably. This may be their last album where Anderson had much to add. I never had spent much time w it before, finding it to be a bit of a sub-Songs From the Wood. But after eyeballing some reviews on ProgArchives, I gave it a whirl whilst at my parents' place in Massachusetts as the kids nap. And I like it -- less self-consciously Elizabethan than SFTW, his voice is gruffer, but it suits the "country living (for better or worse)" vibe of the record. Songs about mice, cats pursuing mice, the beauty of moths. But there's also two off-color epics -- one about terrorizing young children ("No Lullaby") and a post-apocalyptic dirge about horses, tractors, technology and values (the title track), as well as possibly the world's only celtic disco song ("Acres Wild").

All in all, an odd, interesting record -- made by a guy who was all of thirty when it was recorded.

Btw the cuts that were taken off of Passion Play for Best of Jethro Tull volume 1 & 2 are amazing songs.

One of the Best of cds sneaks in an amazing song called "Rainbow Blues" that was never released with their standard albums

Digging these cuts quite a bit. Also, delving into A Passion Play for the first time really. Good summary of the concept on Wikipedia: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Passion_Play

most of my favorite stuff is 69-70; Aqualung, Cross Eyed Mary, Sweet Dreams, Locomotive Breath...but that stuff is great

This may come from the Department of the Obscenely Obvious, but it's entirely possible that Aqualung is the greatest riff record of all time. Whatever you think of the songs, the lyrics or aesthetic--and after all this time I'm still a little unsure of whether I really connect w the *heavy* aspects of Tull--every riff on this record, from the title track to "Cross-Eyed Mary" to "My God" to "Hymn 43" to "Locomotive Breath," is just completely killer.

OTM. The lack of a top 40 rap single swiping 'Locomotive Breath' truly confounds me.

I have a lot of time for Aqualung and Thick As A Brick (which is my favourite), and select moments from their discography throughout the first half of the '70s.

A Passion Play has some decent ideas on it, but I think it lacks the tongue-in-cheek nature that Thick As A Brick has and it also sounds a lot more laboured over, which sinks the album for me. I think it plods a bit in places and seems very pieced-together too, whereas Thick As A Brick is very seamless and all the different 'movements' are perfectly sequenced.

would gladly go the rest of my life w/o hearing those classic tracks from Aqualung ever again. that said, Benefit is a good just-post-hippie rock LP.