Jethro Tull's Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play

Inside Two Long Songs

Tim Smolko

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780253010384
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica rock

Since the 1960s, British progressive rock band Jethro Tull has pushed the technical and compositional boundaries of rock music by infusing its musical output with traditions drawn from classical, folk, jazz, and world music. The release of Thick as a Brick (1972) and A Passion Play (1973) won the group legions of new followers and topped the Billboard charts in the United States, among the most unusual albums ever to do so. Tim Smolko explores the large-scale form, expansive instrumentation, and complex arrangements that characterize these two albums, each composed of one continuous song. Featuring insights from Ian Anderson and in-depth musical analysis, Smolko discusses the band's influence on popular culture and why many consider Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play to be two of the greatest concept albums in rock history.

ONE

Life Is a Long Song: Providing a Context for Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, british progressive rock bands such as King Crimson; Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Yes; Genesis; and Jethro Tull were imbuing their music with a broadened harmonic palette, large-scale forms, polyphonic textures, avant-garde sensibilities, virtuoso technique, and the use of the latest advances in instrument and studio technology. All of these ingredients are in evidence on Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick (1972) and A Passion Play (1973). Each of these albums is one continuous song – composed of numerous vocal sections interspersed with instrumental passages – lasting over forty minutes. Their complex yet accessible music, perplexing lyrics, and unique LP packaging place them among the most creative albums in the history of rock music. Although they are quite innovative, one would not expect such oddities to achieve success with the mainstream popular music audience. Amazingly, they did. “Jethro Tull’s back-to-back Number One albums, 1972’s Thick as a Brick and 1973’s A Passion Play, are arguably the most uncommercial and uncompromising albums ever to top the Billboard album chart.”¹ So writes Craig Rosen, author of The Billboard Book of Number One Albums. Thick as a Brick reached number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 Album Chart in June 1972, where it remained for two weeks, and reached number five on the UK Albums Chart.² A Passion Play hit number one for one week on Billboard in August 1973. How can these “uncommercial and uncompromising” albums have been so popular?

In the mid to late 1960s the Beatles and other bands fostered an atmosphere of artistic freedom within the music industry and created a new style of popular music in which active and concentrated listening was valued. A simple comparison between an early Beatles album (Meet the Beatles! from 1964) and a later Beatles album (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band from 1967) illustrates how quickly this spirit of inventiveness arose. The first album is a collection of singles primarily for dancing, while the second is an eclectic and experimental album made primarily for listening. The fact that both Beatles albums reached number one on the U.S. Billboard 200 Album Chart shows the drastic shift in artistic expression in popular and rock music from the mid to late 1960s. In this period the rock album was becoming quite an experimental art form, with bands and musicians like Pink Floyd, the Doors, the Velvet Underground, Miles Davis, and Frank Zappa taking it into uncharted territory. It was in this period, and because of this artistic freedom, that progressive rock arose as a distinctive style of rock music.

Yet even in this time of creativity and innovation, it is still remarkable that a band like Jethro Tull could release albums like Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play and see them become number one hits. The ability to compose extended pieces of music that are both challenging to the listener and accessible to the general popular music audience is something that few bands have accomplished. Of all the progressive and experimental rock bands in the 1960s and 1970s – besides the Beatles – only the Jimi Hendrix Experience (Electric Ladyland, 1968), Jethro Tull (Thick as a Brick, A Passion Play), and Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon, 1973; Wish You Were Here, 1975; The Wall, 1980) had number one albums on the U.S. Billboard chart.³ Chart success was a little easier in England for these types of bands and musicians, with Jethro Tull (Stand Up, 1969), Emerson, Lake & Palmer (Tarkus. 1971), Pink Floyd (Atom Heart Mother, 1970; Wish You Were Here, 1975), Yes (Tales from Topographic Oceans, 1974; Going for the One, 1977), Rick Wakeman (Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1974), and Mike Oldfield (Hergest Ridge, 1974; Tubular Bells, 1974) having albums that reached number one on the UK Albums Chart.⁴ While such charts are not a critical assessment of music, they are a good indication of what is in vogue at a particular time. In the early 1970s it seems that the popular music audience was interested in listening to a forty-minute-plus rock song – perhaps if only for the novelty of it.

THE RISE OF PROGRESSIVE ROCK IN THE LATE 1960S

While the early days of progressive rock have been well documented by Edward Macan, Paul Stump, and Bill Martin, a brief overview would not go amiss. Progressive rock grew out of the psychedelic rock of the British counterculture of the mid to late 1960s. The Beatles, Pink Floyd, the Yardbirds, Cream, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience (who were based in London even though Hendrix was American) established psychedelic rock in the years 1965–1967. The psychedelic bands from the American West Coast, such as the Byrds, the Grateful Dead, and Jefferson Airplane, were also an influence. While there was a commonality between the British and American aspirations of the counterculture, much of the music that came out of the American counterculture addressed divisive issues such as politics, racial tensions, and, especially, the war in Vietnam. The numerous antiwar protest songs from the period, like “I-Feel-Like-I’m-Fixin’-to-Die Rag” by Country Joe and the Fish (1967), bear this out. Although these issues were important to the British hippies, they didn’t have the immediacy they did to their American counterparts. As a result the British psychedelic bands developed a form of expression more rooted in escapism, a music in which “art for art’s sake” was celebrated. Thus, the first few albums by progressive groups like the Moody Blues, Pink Floyd, Yes, Jethro Tull, and King Crimson had some, and often many, psychedelic elements, such as surreal lyrics and album covers; extended song structures and instrumental soloing; and the use of phasing, tape reversal, and other studio effects.

Progressive rock’s other essential elements, listed below, grew out of the experimentation of the psychedelic era, even if they were not directly influenced by psychedelic music. The music stretched beyond American rock ‘n’ roll, blues, and R & B and incorporated aspects of folk, jazz, classical, and Eastern music. The instrumentation expanded beyond the usual guitar, bass, and drums to encompass classical instruments (even a full orchestra), a vast array of keyboards, and ethnic instruments from other cultures. The music blended both acoustic and electric instruments, and often pitted them against one other. The lyrics tended toward the symbolic and surreal, rather than the literal and real, with utopianism, fantasy, science fiction, mysticism, and mythology becoming common themes. Album cover designs reflected this escapist aesthetic by depicting fantastical landscapes, such as Roger Dean’s album covers for Yes. The surrealism and escapism in the lyrics and albums covers were also brought to the concert stage. Extravagant lighting systems, lasers, and fog machines were used to create other-worldly settings for the music. Yet for all this escapism, as Edward Macan points out, there is a palpable strain of confrontational social critique in the lyrics that has often been overlooked.⁵ This social critique is evident in the lyrics of Jethro Tull’s Thick as a Brick, as will be discussed in chapter 3.

One element that was common in the music of the counterculture on both sides of the Atlantic was the influence of drugs, especially marijuana. Macan describes the close connections between the psychedelic drug experience and the elements of progressive rock music:

The consistent use of lengthy forms … underscores the hippies’ new, drug-induced conception of time. The intricate metrical and wayward harmonic schemes of the music … reflect the elements of surprise, contradiction, and uncertainty that the counterculture prized so highly. The juxtaposition within a piece or an album of predominantly acoustic with predominantly electric sections, one of the hallmarks of the progressive rock style, seems to encapsulate … the contrast of the pastoral and organic with the technological and artificial, the conflict between matriarchal and patriarchal values, between ancient and modern ways of life … that were of great significance to the counterculture.⁶

Rather, drug use is one area in which Jethro Tull stood apart from their peers. Most of the members of the band, especially Ian Anderson, had a negative view of the drug culture and never took drugs. Yet, because of the band’s scraggly appearance, long mangy hair, and general freakiness, they were immediately pegged as potheads. Anderson’s manic stage presence – as can be seen on the DVD Nothing Is Easy: Live at the Isle of Wight 1970 (2004) – prompted the music press to assume he consumed huge quantities of drugs, something he continually felt compelled to deny. Anderson said in 1977, “I’ve never smoked marijuana or taken any of those drugs. The main reason I don’t do it is because everybody else does – it strikes me as boring.”⁷ Noting the obvious influence of LSD on the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, Anderson quips “most of mine have been Löwenbräu albums.”⁸ Psychedelic influences can be found in early Jethro Tull, but they are not overbearing. The most overt instances are the swirling effect on Martin Barre’s guitar in “A New Day Yesterday” from Stand Up (in which Anderson swung a microphone in a circle in front of Barre’s guitar amplifier) and the tape reversal in “With You There to Help Me” and “Play in Time” from Benefit (1970). The elements that Macan describes (lengthy forms, intricate metrical and wayward harmonic schemes, acoustic vs. electric passages) are vital aspects of Jethro Tull’s music, but they did not arise because of drug use.

A second area where the band stood apart from their countercultural peers was their view of free love, and they became notorious among rock groupies not for their sexual escapades, but for their lack thereof. Robert Plant and Jimmy Page from Led Zeppelin referred to the band as “Jethro Dull.” Anderson said in 1969, “Sex … is something which I can probably only share with one person, [whom] I would want to marry. That’s probably rather an unusual viewpoint for somebody in this day and age, particularly in my profession … where drug-taking and sex and the whole bit … is almost expected of you.”⁹ In 1991 he said, “We would go back to a hotel after a show, no groupies, no hangers-on, and … pick up something from the deli, and we would read aloud to each other … from Agatha Christie novels.”¹⁰ Yet, ironically, one can find dozens of sexual innuendos (some downright vulgar) in Anderson’s lyrics, and among his favorite stage antics during concerts is to use his flute as a phallic symbol.

Jethro Tull achieved their first mainstream success in the summer and fall of 1969, and a closer look at this period reveals just how popular they became. The band was invited to play at the Woodstock festival in August of that year but declined because of conflicts with previously scheduled concerts. “Living in the Past” was a hit single and Stand Up reached number one on the UK Album Chart in August. In a reader poll in the September 20, 1969 issue of the leading British music magazine, Melody Maker, Jethro Tull was voted the second most popular group in the United Kingdom, an astounding accomplishment for them. The Beatles, who were just about to release Abbey Road on September 26, were unsurprisingly voted number one in the poll. The Rolling Stones were number three, having released Beggar’s Banquet back in December 1968, but they had not yet released Let It Bleed, which would eventually hit number one with the help of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” According to this poll, Jethro Tull was also more popular than the Who (who had released Tommy in May), Led Zeppelin (who released their first album in January but had not yet released Led Zeppelin II), Cream (who had already broken up but released two high-charting albums in 1969), and Pink Floyd (who were about to release their double album Ummagumma). Jethro Tull’s early success with singles and albums, visceral live shows that continually sold out, positive reviews in the British musical papers, and subsequent success in American and Europe allowed the band the liberty, resources, and clout to create such innovative works as Aqualung (1971), Thick as a Brick, and A Passion Play.

Returning to the rise of progressive rock, most writers on the style see it coming into its own and branching off from psychedelia in 1969. In the early 1970s the overt influences of psychedelia gradually faded from progressive rock – and rock music in general – as the counterculture itself splintered and slowly disintegrated. Yet progressive rock became ever more popular with the ascendancy of the album over the single, the impact of FM radio stations that played longer songs, affordable concert tickets, and other factors. By the mid 1970s, Emerson, Lake & Palmer; Yes; Genesis; Jethro Tull; Pink Floyd; and North American groups like Rush, Kansas, and Styx were selling millions of records and playing in large arenas. Kevin Holm-Hudson succinctly describes the rise and fall of progressive rock, and its reception, this way:

From 1969 to about 1977, progressive rock – a style of self-consciously complex rock often associated with prominent keyboards, complex metric shifts, fantastic (often mythological or metaphysical) lyrics, and an emphasis on flashy virtuosity – dominated FM radio and rock album charts. When punk became an ascendant force in popular culture in 1976–77, the excesses and high-cultural pretensions of progressive rock made it an easy target, hastening its demise.¹¹

Although progressive rock has never died, it did fall headlong out of the mainstream in the late 1970s with the rise of punk, disco, and new wave music. Beginning in the late 1980s, there has been a resurgence of interest in the style with the mainstream success of adventurous bands such as Marillion, Dream Theater, and R...