Despite their much-vaunted reputation for producing ambitious concept albums of enormous heft, Jethro Tull are bearable only as a singles band. Sure, Tull’s 1971 concept album Aqualung is a classic, but I’d sooner be hit with a brick than listen to the following year’s concept album Thick as a Brick, and the only passionate feelings I can summon up for 1973’s concept album A Passion Play (yes, they hit the trifecta!) can be summed up with the words “Turn it off.” But “Bungle in the Jungle” and “Living in the Past”? Count me in!
Ian Anderson has always been an entertaining and exasperating crank—stand him on one leg like a deranged flamingo and hand him a flute and he will tie your mind into sailors’ knots with his folk-rock swoops, loops, and other assorted paradiddle, that is when he isn’t spouting folksy wisdom and moralistic sermons of the sort you’d expect from the stewed Diogenes permanently welded to the end stool in your local pub.
I disagree with The Village Voice’s Robert Christgau, who wrote of old flamingo leg “Ian Anderson is one of those people who attracts admirers by means of a principled arrogance that has no relation to his actual talents or accomplishments” for the simple reason that Anderson is talented—he has simply misused his talent for evil. Thick as a Brick is ample proof of this fact.
But it takes a real genius to fritter away all of one’s talent, and Anderson isn’t that sort of real genius. Seemingly despite himself he has produced songs that don’t happen to be almost forty-four minutes long. And I’m talking pithy and unique songs, the best of which made seventies FM radio a happier place. But eccentric that he is he didn’t manage to come up with enough radio-ready classics to fill a greatest hits compilation, which is at least in part what makes 1976’s M.U. – The Best of Jethro Tull so interesting.
It’s a hodgepodge of radio staples and excerpts airlifted from the single-song Thick as a Brick and seamless A Passion Play, with a completely off-the-wall number (“Fat Man”) and the previously unreleased “Rainbow Blues” tossed in just to fill the thing out. Add to that the fact that Anderson labors in a variety of genres (hard rock, progressive rock, Ye Olde English folk rock, Amazon boogies) and what you have is one very curious artifact that just so happens to be the only Jethro Tull album besides Aqualung a discerning music fan need own.
An iconoclast Ian Anderson is, and iconoclastic is opening a best-of with “Teacher,” which entered the world as the B-side of the 1970 single “The Witch’s Promise” and can in no way, shape or form be described as a “hit.” It’s a mid-tempo hard rocker about not trusting gurus with a cool repetitive guitar riff that perks up on the choruses, in which poor Ian gets increasingly disgruntled because the teacher’s message (“Jump up, look around/Find yourself some fun/No sense in sitting there/Hating everyone”) turns out to be bunk—the teacher’s the one having the fun, while Ian’s the one footing the bill. Great flute solo too.
“Aqualung” needs no introduction—we’re all familiar (if not sick to death of) its iconic opening heavy metal guitar riff and sleazy subject (“eying little girls with bad intent”), just as we are with Anderson’s distorted vocals later in the song and its sudden transformation into a horse race. It’s one of the defining songs of the early seventies, and the song Jethro Tull will be best remembered for.
The folksy and chipper “Thick as a Brick Edit #1” is of course taken from the very beginning of the album of the same name, and is coincidentally enough as for as I ever get in said album. It’s a pretty rural air that features lots of comely flute, strummed acoustic guitar and piano, whose barn dance opening lines (“Really don’t mind if you sit this one out”) lead directly to a diss (“I may make you feel but I can’t make you think”). And from there to a couplet (“And the sand castle virtues are all swept away/In the tidal destruction, the moral melee”) that should put to rest any notions that our Ian’s a poet.
“Bungle in the Jungle” (from 1974’s War Child) is a whimsical and bouncy and veddy un-English, wot, unless you count The Bonzo Dog Band’s “Tiger Hunting in India.” It’s heavy on the synthesized strings and Anderson’s flighty flute and I love the line “I’ll write on your tombstone, I thank you for dinner” but yawn a bit when Anderson brings God into the song. It’s a fun song, perhaps Jethro Tull’s only fun song, and when push comes to shove I’d say it finishes in a dead heat with Kool and the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie.”
“Locomotive Breath” opens with John Evan playing a piano that can’t decide whether it wants to go classical or jazz while Martin Barre tosses off stray guitar riffs before the song kicks into gear with Barre’s massive guitar riff, which is joined by some great chukka-chukka guitar. It’s all about a runaway train either literal or metaphorical, kind of a “Casey Jones” for the sons and daughters of England’s green and pleasant. But it rocks a lot harder than the Dead ever did, and I love the way Anderson, during his lengthy flute solo, pauses to grunt “uh.” Very unprofessional of him.
The appearance of the very Indian-flavored “Fat Man” (from the band’s sophomore LP Stand Up) on the comp is a real shocker—it’s an odd bird for sure, with its frantic percussion and Anderson playing speed balalaika while singing whimsically (I think—given Anderson’s oracular pretensions there could be a real “deep” philosophical message in there) about not wanting to be a fat man because “People would think that I was just good fun, man.” But he has to be joshing when he delivers the song’s closing line (“Roll us both down a mountain and I’m sure the fat man would win.”)
“Living in the Past” (a 1969 UK single) is one of the band’s best, what with its lively sweep and Anderson’s ever-present flute—it’s as bucolic as a cavorting heifer, but faster on its hooves, a real pastoral about ignoring all the talk about war and revolution and remaining stubbornly in the Middle Ages or whenever, although it’s hard to tell if that’s Anderson’s real sentiment or he’s being snide.
“A Passion Play Edit #8″ is the album’s low point—this is Tull at their progressive rock worst, with rapid fire twists and turns and shifts in time signatures and a portentous synthesizer. It has no get up and go, can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be a minotaur or a unicorn, and in general gives off the same fetid reek as your average Emerson, Lake & Palmer composition.
Fortunately it’s followed by “Skating Away (On the Thin Ice of a New Day)” from War Child. Like “Living in the Past” it bops along very pretty and folksy like, thanks in large part to John Evan’s accordion, although it also boasts an exotic and non-English feel gratis drummer Barriemore Barlow’s glockenspiel and marimba. Anderson’s at the top of his game on flute, and I love the pause when he sings “Well, do you ever get the feeling that the story’s too damn real/And in the present…/Tense?” This one may as well be the National Anthem of acute anxiety sufferers like yours truly… the ice is indeed precariously thin when I wake up in the morning.
Tossing a previously unreleased song in the form of “Rainbow Blues” onto a best-of is never a good sign, and hard to explain to boot given the LP inexplicably ignores 1970’s Benefit, which was a disappointment for sure but included several potential candidates in “Inside” and “Son.” It doesn’t help that “Rainbow Blues” is nothing special—just a Jethrofied blues with strings that dilute it and lines like “Oh, but the rain wasn’t made of water/And the snow didn’t have a place in the sun,” which should be enough to put a stake in the heart of the risible notion of Anderson as deep thinker. “Nothing Is Easy” from Stand Up is more like it, a driving number with jazzy drumming, lots of heavy-duty blues guitar wank and Anderson pushing his flute into every nook and cranny.
People tend to forget that Jethro Tull were one of the most phenomenal success stories of the early seventies, and I for one find it inexplicable. Granted Aqualung is an undisputed triumph, and their live shows—which were carefully choreographed and entertaining spectacles—were enormously popular with the kids, but how dense concept albums like Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play not only won hearts and minds but made mucho financial hay is beyond me.
But then again Emerson, Lake & Palmer were huge too. And I would write them off like I do ELP were it not for the simple fact that the pre-1976 Jethro Tull produced enough great songs to (almost) fill a greatest hits album. The incurably over-ambitious Ian Anderson is capable of producing both great riffs and catchy melodies, but like Pete Townshend (another musical auteur with incurable delusions of grandeur) his Flamingoness seems to consider doing so slumming. Which is a pity. Why, we’re lucky to have M.U. – The Best of Jethro Tull at all. Let us thank the pompous for small mercies.
GRADED ON A CURVE:
B+
