By Jeb Wright

Recently, on the anniversary of Jethro Tull’s defeat over Metallica for the first ever hard rock/heavy metal Grammy award, I shot off an email to Jethro Tull band leader, Ian Anderson, teasing him about the historic victory. I asked him where he kept his Grammy these days, and after informing him of the anniversary of the lucky day, I stated he should really dust it off and display it.

Ian, having a sharp sense of humor, replied to me. In our discourse, I stated I would love to do a specialty type of Jethro Tull interview. Ian allowed me to pick one song from each Jethro Tull studio release, as well as one song from each of his solo albums.

What follows is an impressive catalog of music with words of wisdom from the man who created it. Enjoy!

Ian: That was certainly one of the first tunes that I wrote in the very early stages of Jethro Tull. We were either about to be, or were just recently, christened ‘Jethro Tull’, which was the last of many names that we had at the end of 1967 and early 1968. We were playing at the Marquee Club at the time. It was a song that I must have written on the guitar.

I wrote it quite intentionally, within the frame of reference, of our then guitarist Mick Abrahams. He could play some things very well, and very confidently, while other things he found really quite difficult, as he indeed did later in ’68, when I was writing songs immediately after the first album. Mick had a lot of difficulty getting his head around these songs and where they were going. “My Sunday Feeling” was a piece for him to play well. It was an easy one for everyone as well, as it was essentially just a 12 bar blues.

Other people have Monday morning blues filled with bad feelings. I just thought, as a song title, Sunday morning was morning of emptiness and loneliness. Especially if you were living like I was at the time and had been playing a pub Friday, and Saturday night, which was full of activity. Sunday morning was a bit of an empty space in my life as I didn’t have any friends where I was living and I was living alone at the time. Sunday morning really was an empty space in my life so I tended to ruminate on that and came up with the song.

Ian: Martin Barre was the guitar player in the band then. It was very much a blues song, but one where we moved on from the traditional American blues motifs, and shapes that were part of the very early days of Jethro Tull. We moved on to something that was very much a Middle Class, British, White version of the blues. We had been in the company of such greats as Eric Clapton, and his time in Cream, and other great British bands that helped evolve blues from its more authentic Black American context, to something that was almost peculiarly British.

I am not sure if Led Zeppelin were on the scene by then, they probably were. They must have been because we were playing with Zeppelin from the summer of ’69 until the album Stand Up was released. I guess we hadn’t met them at that point but we did very soon afterwards. A song like “Dazed and Confused” is a prime example of something that is very much blues but there are notes that join things together that you wouldn’t find in traditional pentatonic blues. There was a little infusion of folk or classical work that was creeping into Zeppelin’s music, which coincidently was creeping into my work because that’s where we were from. We were both Northwester European guys and that’s what we do, folk and classical music.

Many, many years late “New Day” was a song that influenced Joe Bonnamassa. He did that when he was quite a youngster. He played some dates with Jethro Tull about ten years ago. He came to me, almost apologetic, and said that he had been playing songs of mine for years and that he did this one. He breathed some of his own life into that one. As a matter of fact, I played that one on stage with him a few months ago at the Hammersmith Odeon when he was on a British tour.

Ian: That song came from one of our first trips abroad. It was really about that sense of detachment you get when you are in another country and a long way from home. It is very much a song about being displaced in a foreign country. It is very much a riff song.; it came out of a riff that was deliberately put together. Martin and I played that together in the studio, he played one part and I played the other. At that time we had only recently acquired the keyboard services of John Evans, who was supposed to be very temporary, but he ended up staying around a while.

The feelings conveyed are easy to pick up on with the lines like “flying so high, trying to remember, how many cigarettes did I bring along.” These days, it may not be how many cigarettes you have but rather did you remember to pack the Amazon Kindle, or have I got my cell phone recharger? It is about those moments of panic. We’re probably more addicted to our cell phones than we were to our nicotine.

Ian: That is one that I very rarely do. I have not played that in about five years. I should think we never played that one before five years ago, or if we did then I most certainly think it would have been clear back in 1971. Its arrangement has been changed slightly for a different feel.

It is a song complaining about organized religion, and religious dogma, drummed into me as a fourteen-year-old grammar school boy. In a way, it is still my experience today. A few days ago, I was in England for a meeting with two church elders to discuss some charity concerts. I actually found myself, inadvertently, caught up in Holy Communion. As a non-Christian, who usually feels quite comfortably in cathedrals and churches in a non-participatory role, I actually found it to be quite difficult to be sitting there having to go along with the recitals and responses.

It was a tiny congregation; there was hardly anybody there. I was there to meet with the priest, who was on duty at the time, so I couldn’t really offend him by not joining in. I wasn’t so much embarrassed as I was angry, and annoyed, that I had to go through that rather dogmatic ritual of a Christian service and take part in prayers because I don’t believe in an interventionist God. I had to do this not to offend the few who were in the service, and the guy that is leading the service, so I was quite angered more than anything else. In order not to be offensive, I went along with it, just as I did when I was fourteen years old. As a song it resonates quite true for me today.

Ian: Thick as a Brick is very much a spoof album written in the wake of Aqualung, which critics portrayed as a concept album. It was not one. It had a couple of songs that dealt with religion, and a couple of songs that dealt with homelessness or prostitution. The rest of the songs were about other topics which were totally unrelated. I decided that the next album would be a concept album that was a parody of Prog Rock, which included bands like Yes, early Genesis and Emerson Lake & Palmer.

The rest of the band were completely bewildered and wondered what it was all about. They put their trust in me as I wrote the songs and we rehearsed the album and got ready to record. It was designed to be a bit of fun but in its own way it exercised a bit of compositional challenge. I look back on it today and feel pretty good about it. Next year, being the anniversary of the album, we will undoubtedly be revisiting more of that material in a live context, at least for a period of time. It works, for me, pretty well as an album.

Thick as a Brick was a bit of a surprise album for me. Aqualung really didn’t really sell huge numbers out of the box. It did pretty well and it certainly established Jethro Tull, internationally, as a meaningful band. Thick as a Brick was the album that really put a seal on it, particularly in the USA, where it went to the top of the Billboard Charts for a couple of weeks. It was very different from anything else that was around. People took it a lot more seriously than I thought they would, as it was supposed to be a spoof. People really did take seriously as if it were a grand work.

The album that followed was one where we took off to record in France. It was beset by enormous problems in the studio. We had a lot of technical problems. A couple of the guys also got really ill with food poisoning. We got halfway through making the album, which had been very difficult to get through, and we decided to just stop. We moved back to England, and rather than rework the stuff that we had already recorded, rather badly, I decided to just start back at the beginning and write a new release, which was Passion Play. It was too deliberate, too grand and too conceptualized. It didn’t have the self-deprecating humor about it. It was too grandiose. If there is one thing I have learned over the years, it is that you have to balance the serious stuff with some lighthearted and whimsical stuff, for the sake of accessibility to the people, as well as accessibility to the performer so I don’t have to stay on the same tack for too many minutes when I am on stage. I get to bring out other kinds of emotions without getting caught up with the same old things, song after song.

Passion Play didn’t succeed in the way that Thick as a Brick did. It is also too dense, musically. There is too much going on. There is too much in the way of instrumentation. It fills every bar with too many notes. It certainly is not a favorite album of mine but it somehow seems to captivate some of the more anal Jethro Tull fans who see it as the ultimate complex piece of Prog Rock. There are lots of good little moments on it but they are stifled by over detailed arrangements all around it.

Ian: That is one of my favorite Jethro Tull songs to listen to, from the perspective that it is radio friendly, conveniently repetitive, and conveniently easy to understand, lyrically. As a listener, I really enjoy it, but as a performer, I never really enjoyed doing it live onstage, as it feels a little too obvious. It was a good performance from everybody and my vocals on it were as good as they ever got. I just don’t find it an enjoyable song to perform. I have a more objective view on it these days. I see it as a casual Jethro Tull fan would see it. It is quite accessible and easy, and it is mercifully over in three and a half minutes.

Ian: That is nearly all good stuff. There are a few bits that were a bit extraneous and really didn’t need to be there. I rather like that. It was just a piece of whimsy surrounding the fact that I lived in a little cottage just off Baker Street in London.

I like to walk around London. Today, I live about 100 miles away from London but when I am there I still enjoy walking around. I walk down the side streets, as I prefer them to the busy, shopping streets. I tend to walk rather fast as well. I have become familiar with certain bits of London and I have found that it has always been a good source for songwriting material, as you can catch a glimpse of somebody that, there and then, becomes the subject for a song. It is kind of inspirational.

Maybe it would have been the same if I had been living in New York City, perhaps I would have been inspired in a different, but not too dissimilar way, by people there. Other people have been inspired by things that can only happen in Urban life. When the MC5 sang, “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers” they weren’t living London. They were living in downtown Detroit and they were pissed off. I think our surroundings are very much a part of what drives us in songwriting terms.

Ian: The title of the song came out of a particularly turbulent and unpleasant airplane journey. It was put to one side as a title for a song. It came to me when I was in a state of complete panic on a very bad flight. A short time later, I started to wonder what that title was going to be about.

I had started writing some music that could be glamorized as a staged musical theater production. I came up with an old rocker, who is clinging to life with people with similar interests, who are wearing similar clothing. He gets caught up in that past culture and he can’t escape it and it becomes a sort of refuge for him. A lot of people are kind of like that today. They cling to the culture, and the lifestyle, of a period of their youth that anchors them and gives them a sense of identity. Other people happily leave it behind but there are others who don’t or cant. The song is about a man who is stuck in the young adult part of his life and he can’t escape it.

Ian: That was from a period of time when I was living outside of London in the countryside. We lived in a place where we used to have quite a lot of people coming past our house, recreationally, on horseback. You often saw these folks who were appropriately clad in traditional English wear, riding crops and tight britches. I put a kind of sadomasochistic sort of look at some dangerous person on horseback.

In real life, this is not something that appeals to me one tiny bit. I actually find things like that so contrived and deliberate that they are not at all titillating. It was amusing to write that song but that is all it was. As a song it was contrived as well. It is not something that I can particularly identify with, and sing, with authority, when compared with others songs where I have more in touch, emotionally, with what I am singing about. This is just some sort of unlikely whimsy and fantasy that has nothing to do with my personal experience. I don’t find this is one that I find easy to do. I played it live quite often in years gone by but I was sort of self-conscious about it. It is a bit of a pantomime, dressing up sort of a song.

Ian: It was inspired by a Robert Burns poem called “Ode to a Mouse.” It was a tip of the cap to Robert Burns but it was also very much based on my childhood memories of having a pet mouse when I was six or seven years old. When you are very small, and you have that relationship with animals, and you realize how fragile they really are, and you think it is almost rather unpleasant to incarcerate them in the way that you keep a mouse in a little cage. I often have thought about that little mouse. I think I may have actually helped him to escape. He may very well have spent his final days foraging around in the garden.

Ian: That one comes from a rural background as well. This time it is about the Western Isles of Scotland. It is very much about a place and that kind of strange, dark spirituality of ancient monuments, and Neolithic, and post Neolithic tribal people and their buildings, burial mounds and fortifications. The song swells with the darkness of Hebridian intrusions by the Viking hordes that swept in from Norway and Denmark and did bad things. They probably had bad things done to them as well as the local inhabitants weren’t exactly pushovers. The song is based on these little hill forts, some of which still stand on a rocky little corner on the Isle of Skye. I tried to bring that spiritual, ghostly awakening of people who lived, and died there.

Ian: “Crossfire” is very much born out of real events. It was a time when we were undergoing some difficult periods with terrorism. One of our more clandestine military wings, the SAS, our Special Air Service, were brought into the streets of London to liberate hostages from an embassy. We had been, in recent times, suffering terrorist bombings from the IRA but this was something darker, as it was a foreign power, and it was coming home to roost in our own backyard.

It was very much inspired by the news stories and television broadcasts at the time. Everything was short, sharp, brief, punchy and dramatic. We were watching real life. This was not an Arnold Swarchenegger, or Sylvester Stallone, type of romanticism. There were very real people who were being shot at. It was very much written from the rolling television news of the day. I was trying to put myself in the place of one of those guys who actually has to go out there and put his life on the line trying to rescue those hostages. It is not one of my greatest songs but it is about something very real, and that appeals to me. Sometimes, in a piece of music, you can actually paint a picture of a real life event. I don’t do that very often but that was one of them. It was a real life event that was actually happening.

Ian: We are back in the same territory of “Dun Ringill.” We are back into the defense of the community and the defense of your woman and kinfolk. It has a very Scottish feel to it. I suppose you would have to call it folk rock. It is a very theatrical piece, and most bands would not have done that in that sort of way. I think it is rather well done, if you can forgive the rather Pirates of the Caribbean feel about it. Johnny Depp could have done this as well as I did it.

Ian: That one was marked by the new technology of digital sampling. It actually contains some of the first digital samples. There were keyboards that were able to reproduce orchestral sounds. There was one such device called The Emulator. Many of the samples we used were recorded by me in my studio. I don’t play violin but I played the notes. The album, as a whole, was an experiment with this new technology. This was a time when that type of stuff was first available, so I wanted to see how I could use it, and where it would take me. On that album, there were still elements of acoustic guitar, and flute, so it was a mixture of what was, then, new and advanced technology, and older, orchestral instruments. I thought it worked quite well. “Fly By Night,” as the title suggests, is a little bit of a womanizer that is a one-night stand merchant.

Ian: It is one that was contrived as a more commercial track. It is one of my least favorite songs on the album. It doesn’t seem too evolved, either lyrically, or musically. It is not one that I am particularly proud of. There are quite a few other songs on the album that I quite like but I just wish, with hindsight, that we had recorded those in real time, with all real instruments.

You couldn’t just turn your back on the new tools that were there to make music with. I had to fiddle around with it. It resulted in some good songs. The best I ever sang was on that album. I stretched my limits on that album, which was indeed a dangerous thing to so, especially when trying to do that live onstage. I think the album had its good moments but “Lap of Luxury” is not one of those. It is pretty easy to see what it is about, and it has no layers of meaning, or any depth to it. You can like it if you like, that’s okay.

Ian: You’re spot on with that one, as that is one of my all-time favorite songs. It succeeds, partly because it brings together lots of elements of different musical elements, from rock to blues to folk to classical, it has a whole lot of things going on. Some of it was deliberately arranged, some of it was quite loose and some of it was improvised.

Lyrically, I think it works for me, although on the face of it, it is quite sexist. It is actually quite a respectful song. It says all the kinds of erotic things about a young female body. The whole point of the song is to respect that, and not doing anything about it. It is a song of respect for naïve, youthful adolescents in the female form. It is a song of respect and appreciation for the sanctity of growing up, and not to be trifled with. I think it is an important songs for me. On the one hand, people think it is an erotic, and manipulative piece, with a younger female, but when you read the song lyrics, and follow them to their conclusion, then, it is actually quite the opposite. It really works on two levels for me.

Ian: It is not one of my favorite songs but it was set out to be a little bit of fun. At the time, there was that kind of gung ho, naughty attitude towards woman. Don’t blame me; blame ZZ Top, as they are the ones who started it. Also, Robert Palmer started using little dolly birds in his videos. “Kissing Willie” was in that era. The way we did it was to make it almost like a Benny Hill spoof. We did a video for that one with a very well-known video maker who wanted to do a costume drama rendition. It was all very Benny Hill and really very embarrassing. In terms of the music, and video, it is not something that I am happy to be reminded of. It is not something I should be running off to show my three-year-old granddaughter.

Ian: That album was a return to the British motif. “Rocks on the Road” is a pretty good song. How many songs can you write about being on the road as a traveling musician, or for that matter, a traveling salesman selling insurance, or a small arms dealer selling arms to third world countries? Being stuck in hotels and being out on the road is sometimes charmless. It is kind of obvious, as many people have written that kind of song before. I was not the first to do it, and I won’t be the last. It did have a lot of little motifs in it that people who spend a lot of time inhabiting hotels will recall, such a moments of mini-bar madness, when the bar closed an hour ago and there is nothing left to do but to open that dreaded mini-bar and pay through the nose for a miniature scotch whiskey. We’ve all been there and done it, and lived to regret it when we saw the bill that next morning.

Ian: There can’t be a capital city anywhere that doesn’t have a Harry’s Bar. Why Harry? Who is this guy named Harry and how did he get around so much? Whenever there is a bar called Harry’s, then the chances are that Harry is dead and gone and that he has moved on.

My moment of fancy was that whoever Harry was, is gone and now there is another bartender, and a new owner, who never even goes into work unless he is going in to help drink them dry. It is just another sleazy bar that has absolutely nothing going for it other than it is, for a moment, a port in the storm. If it is wet and windy outside then it is a place to go into and have a drink and wait for it to pass.

I have to say that I am not a person who frequents bars. I have never found them very enjoyable. The only bars I have tended to be in are in the hotel, where it is relatively safe and your room is not far away. The idea of going into a bar in an American city, or in London, is something I very rarely do. I can count the number of times that I have been alone in a bar on the fingers on one hand. In sixty-three years, I have probably been alone in a bar three times, or something like that. You only have to go once, however, to write a song like “Another Harry’s Bar.”

Ian: It is an instrumental album that was supposed to evoke the spiritual residencies of the religious organizations we know, and also the lesser religions, such as paganism. “In the Grip of Stronger Stuff” is primitive. It is ritual, and it is about induced excitement from drugs, drinks or whatever it might be. It is a tune that before it was named, or before it was rewritten for that album, I has played with Dave Pegg in the context of a musical medley.

When it came time to do the Divinities album, I thought of that tune. I was thinking of Dave Pegg, who was an avid drinker. It seemed an apt title. It is meant to evoke something that is really more to do with ceremony, and primitive religion, where people get stirred up from eating, drinking or smoking something that they probably shouldn’t have.

Ian: That is one of the four, or five songs, in my life, that I have written about cats. If you have more than one of them, then you know they tend to like to persecute small animals, and be in a little sort of gang while doing it. It is not uncommon to see three or four of them tormenting the same small mouse. We think of cats as very lonely, and solitary creatures, which hunt alone. When there are there two or three of them and a mouse, then it is literally a game, the cat and mouse game. Apparently it makes it even more fun. We like to think that our cuddly little pussycats are so sweet and innocent, yet they’re manically destructive, and deeply unpleasant souls underneath their soft, furry exterior.

Ian: A lot of the songs on that album were drawn from artwork, from either pieces that I own, or that I have seen. The water carrier theme was often depicted in Late Victorian, and early 20^th century art. Woman were often seen carrying a pot of water, or a jar of something, on their head, balancing it. We see that today, except it is often small children carrying a plastic fertilizer barrel, or whatever it might be. They carry it to the local well and then carry it back to the village. It is a time honored role that usually centers around females in tribal societies. The guys never seem to do that. The young girls seem to get that job and it is rather heavy and difficult to carry water.

I turn it around to fit the modern age by having somebody sell bottled mineral water to tourists on a beach somewhere. As we all know, sometimes that bottled water is not exactly what is said to be. It is often refilled at the local village septic pump and sold to the unwary tourist who doesn’t realize that the screw cap has already been off several times. I just took a contemporary twist on carrying water for consumption.

Ian: It was exactly that. I was in Berlin for a concert that night and I took a walk through Berlin Zoo, as I have done many times as a musician playing in Germany. As I was walking through the zoo, looking at animals being iron bars, and barbed wire, I was struck by this lone pigeon. He flew kind of low over the zoo, almost as if he was looking at the animals inside the zoo. This animal was free. He was not incarcerated in this zoo, even if it is a quite nice zoo. I thought, “Hang on, there might be more to this. The pigeon might be looking down thinking that the zoo looks a whole lot nicer than being out there on busy streets of Berlin trying to find something to eat. Maybe life in the Berlin Zoo looks better to him. I thought I could twist that initial thought around, and that the pigeon would quite like being incarcerated in the zoo, and fed by attendants, and given a cushy life.” As I was walking to an Indian restaurant, I had most of the song in my head. When I got back to my hotel I scribbled it down so I could work on it at a later time and make a song about it.

Ian: There are a few songs that I have written over the years that are from the Christmas perspective, or just from that special time of the year that we all gravitate too in our Western culture because it is part of our society, and at some level, we all enjoy that. Christmas is kind of open for everybody.

The kind of branch of Christianity that I am associated with, although I am not a practicing Christian, I still feel comfortable being affiliated with an Anglican, Christian religion. It is kind of a tea and cakes sort of Christianity. It is a cozy, and easy, version of Christianity and it is open for business. I think what I like and respect about it is that it is open to everybody, even begrudgingly to gay and lesbian people. Even Philistines and Heathens, such as myself, are welcomed into the house of the Anglican Lord to perform concerts.

I do things in benefit of the Christian Church. Even though I am not a Christian, I am very much a supporter of Christianity. I think anything that I can do that allows people to rub shoulders with the Anglican Christianity is good. If they find solace, a spiritual outlet, or community worship, then that is great. I am very happy to be able to help people take part in that rewarding scenario, if that is what they want to do, even though I am not a Christian.

I think the same way about homosexuality. I believe myself to be a strong supporter of Gay and Lesbian rights, but I have not yet had a gay or lesbian experience. I don’t have to actually be gay, to be pro-gay rights, and I don’t have to be a Christian, to be pro Christianity. If I were a paleontologist, then I would not have to have sharp teeth, or a long scaly tail, to talk as an expert on dinosaurs. For me, there is no contradiction in any of this, and I find it quite easy to be part, and parcel, of that world without being a fully paid up member of that community.

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