Jethro Tull: Classic or Dud?

Thanks for the link, I really appreciate these shows you’ve been hooking us up with

Was talking upthread about Tull-related band Carmen, the debut album Fandangos In Space is seriously fucking amazing. Don't let it slip past you. The way they incorporated dancing into the music is so cool.

I'm placing them alongside Comus and Jacula as a great 70s band that never got very big at all. They were very well liked by some of the biggest bands of the time and toured with or were slotted to tour with them and everything could have went great if not for a series of shit events that destroyed them.

Still, there's 4 albums and I think Visconti produced them all?

Just got the second Carmen double pack, you can get all 4 albums in 2 double packs, first one is slightly scarcer. Trying to think why prog fans haven't embraced them more because there is enough of that in them.

I'm interested

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/m2ub0m/i_am_ian_anderson_founder_musician_singer_and/

Q&A with Ian Anderson from a couple days ago, not a lot there but some good (and funny) answers to various questions

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

50th Anniversary special about Aqualung... Ian breaks down each song and then it plays in full, very nice.

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/484A9Ju4F8g/maxresdefault.jpg

Forgot about that

I don't know Carmen at all, but the wiki features some nutty stuff:

David Clark Allen continued to pursue a music career after Carmen disbanded. He played guitar on Michelle Phillip's solo album produced by Jack Nitzsche and was managed by Herb Cohen during the late 70s. He wrote two songs (Shame and Stay) for Agnetha's solo album, Wrap Your Arms Around Me - produced by Mike Chapman and a single release by Swedish band Katz - Heart Beats Stronger. David was diagnosed with thyroid/throat cancer in the early 80s. After a successful operation and radioactive therapy, he changed his name to Housk Randall - and became a sexual anthropologist/photographer. As Housk he had 5 books published in 4 languages: Revelations, Rituals of Love, The Customised Body, Piercing, Radical Desire and Bizarre Rubber - a photographic fantasy catalogue for fetish designers DeMask. In 1996 he married, changed his name to David Randall-Goddard and established a successful family photographic studio Family Portraits.

As probably mentioned upthread, I've never spent much time with Tull beyond whatever's come on the radio, but yesterday I heard "Hymn 43" for the first time in decades and it kicked ass.

David Clark Allen was a really stylish looking guy. He often posts about new flamenco fusion bands on his blog.

I feel averse to posting whole albums but their so obscure at this point I don't think it could hurt too much.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nIP_WlCdtM

Quite pleased to find this

"It's amazing," Opeth frontman Mikael Akerfeldt told Metal Hammer in 2012. "It's a crazy flamenco prog-rock folk record! They had tap dancing on the record and castanets too! Everyone I've played it to has been blown away by it."

For some reason the most popular version of the album on youtube cuts off half of the first song, so I chosen another one for the link above.

Benefit getting the book treatment now - https://superdeluxeedition.com/news/jethro-tull-benefit-50th-anniversary-reissue

I will buy this mainly for shelf consistency, since the previous deluxe edition isn't book-sized.

Me too, although good quality live recordings for that era are always interesting.

actually wow, they are including two live sets from 1970, including one on video! that's going above and beyond. especially since these cost around $40-50 and not $100+.

This and Stand Up are my two favourite Tull records, or at least the ones I return to all the time, then having Singing All Day, 17 and Teacher at the back end, so great!

I’ll be getting this tho would love to find a good indie retailer in the States instead of paying £17 shipping 😳.

Still hoping they may do a run of earlier ones at some point. War Child, Minstrel, and Passion in particular.

I found (to my shock) that I have a spare copy of the A Passion Play box, so I had a look at the Discogs price jfc!

Lmk if you turn up a spare copy of SftW

Bull Moose out of Maine is pretty good with these, if you pre-order you're reasonably sure to get one.

I found (to my shock) that I have a spare copy of the A Passion Play box, so I had a look at the Discogs price jfc!

I think I have two copies because my wife was tangentially involved in the reissue process so every time one came out, I would ask her to bring home a copy for me and one for my mate and I think I must not have given him this one for some reason? So, I'm going to message him first.

That seems eminently fair and sensible!

As would you selling it for the price of a kidney on Discogs, should you so choose.

My mate can have it for £350 :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPTeqsBd1Ik

Not bad, but that riff is pretty monotonous. I get the feeling these older progressive musicians have made their recent music simpler not in the hope of getting played on the radio, but because even their casual fans won't listen twice if there isn't an obvious hook in a new song.
I'm wondering now who has done worse harm to the vocal cords, Ian Anderson or Roger Waters.

Snagged the Benefit box from Amazon for about $50. Still would prefer the mid-70s records but I can’t let these things slip away. The books and mixes are just too well done.

Hey all, this appeared on D1m3 the other day, it's a good one - 1979-10-15 Providence Civic Center Providence RI

https://www.fromsmash.com/tPy.t_yl1y-bt

Grabbing it, thanks! Been feeling a tull fest coming on.

Beastie next, I guess? The Benefit box was great to have though.

Beast tour is great, I’ll be excited to hear what they put together for the live bit of that box. Assuming it is coming.

found a good copy of Stand Up recently, what a cool record that is

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqJpTQv9yH0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH1L0ix6_bg

Thought the revive would be about the new album.

yeah I'm oddly curious about it, though I'm kind of dreading what Anderson sounds like now, and can't get past the cover reminding me of Breaking Bad

Barre-aking Bad

I got the Tull dvd in the Classic Artists documentary series after enjoying the Yes and Moody Blues ones so much years ago. It's from 2008 and disappointingly it seems a great deal shorter than the others, it's a bit under two hours long. I was surprised by just how many lineup changes there was and the main controversy in their history seems to be Ian letting go of some members without a face to face meeting. Quite a few of the members who were let go seemed ready to go anyway but it's left mostly unknown why they were getting tired of the band. A lot of the albums are left unmentioned (the Yes doc spends a fair amount of time on each album).

Ian regrets letting the label persuade him to put the Jethro Tull name on the A album, I think he wanted it to be a solo album. I've seen this with American Music Club and as small a band as Lycia. I'm not sure whose idea it was with Yes/Cinema but I imagine there was a commercial incentive.

There's about an hour of bonus interviews and Ian says aside from an odd Elvis song and The Animals, he didn't have much interest in the big rock bands that preceded him.

Quite a few of the members who were let go seemed ready to go anyway but it's left mostly unknown why they were getting tired of the band.

I saw an interview with Dave Pegg describing how, at the start of his tenure with the band, Anderson told him the reasons each of the other members of the band had for hating him (Anderson). By all accounts, he's an autocrat in band affairs; and, in a way, despite its eclecticism, Tull's music (particularly by the late 70s) had a certain narrowness about it that the others may have found stifling.

One of things that was made clear in the doc was that Anderson was in control by the second album

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKjNilF7WFE

I heard "Fylingdale Flyer" recently and it got me listening to the deluxe edition of A and I was a bit dismayed by how different the song sounded. Steven Wilson said the pitch shifting effect is really hard to preserve and he couldn't quite get it right; he also said that Bowie's Low and Heroes used this effect, but did the remasters of those albums sound so different?

Beastie!

https://superdeluxeedition.com/news/jethro-tull-the-broadsword-and-the-beast

I learned this week that they actually had a brand new album, RökFlöte, come out in April.
It seems that Tull and Yes are in a race to see which of the big-name prog acts can keep putting out records the longest.

wow they finally announced a release date for the Broadsword book!

I’m not sure I’d buy the box of it but there was a special place in my heart for Broadsword as a teenager. The dramatic Peter John Vettese synth orchestrations on songs like “Clasp” and “Seal Driver” are sort of unprecedented in Tull history but 16 year-old me kind of loved them. The hilariously awesome sleeve. And, while the songs weren’t top shelf Tull, it’s probably the last time they aren’t completely boring and/or terrible.

Worth noting: they reissued the Thick as a Brick book box last year and it’s terrific. Wilson’s mix is just outstanding.

Dear budding fiction writers, now's your chance to express your Tull love in print!

https://www.alphamercs.com/open-calls/stories-in-the-key-of-tull