What if Jethro Tull never turned prog?
That question got its answer in 2002 when the original blues quartet lineup regrouped for the career-spanning Living With the Past film.
For the first time in more than 30 years, longtime frontman Ian Anderson reunited with guitarist Mick Abrahams, bass guitar player Glenn Cornick and drummer Clive Bunker to perform a brief set of standard blues tunes. The results showed a very different group from the progressive-rock outfit we've come to know and love through albums like Aqualung, Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play.
It was a sight many fans through they'd never see. After all, Anderson and Abrahams couldn't see eye to eye on Jethro Tull's musical style. Their first album, 1968's This Was, was, as Anderson described it, "sort of progressive blues with a bit of jazz." He saw no future in it.
Abrahams, on the other hand, was a hardcore blues guitarist and a key figure in shaping the band's early, blues-heavy focus. But after This Was, he declared himself "fed up with all the nonsense" and left to create his hardcore blues group, Blodwyn Pig.
"The blues were certainly there in the case of Mick Abrahams,” Anderson told Guitar Player, reflecting on the guitarist's short stint in the band. "That was his background. He was very much blues and rock and roll — and very much American music,
He astutely adds, “If someone’s doing something that I feel is really not working or not right for the record, then I will hopefully politely convey that to them before they expend too much energy going down that approach.”
It's no wonder Abrahams departed with little love left between him and the band. As Anderson’s recent GP chat proves, he was an iron-fisted bandleader from the get-go and was in no mood to simply echo music already floating through radio airwaves.
“I don’t think I would want to have a guitar player whose sole interest and influence was Black, American folk music,” he says matter-of-factly. “You might call it the blues, but to me, it’s cultural misappropriation.
Abrahams’ departure paved the way for Martin Barre's arrival, with a brief cameo from Tony Iommi, who featured with the band at the Rolling Stones' Rock & Roll Circus along the way.
But as Anderson and Barre began to sow the seeds of what would prove a fruitful and innovative songwriting partnership — via some ‘seat of his pants’ first shows alongside Jimi Hendrix and Jeff Beck — the rest of the founding members would soon peel away.
Cornick blamed musical differences for his parting, and Bunker a relentless touring schedule. By 1971, Anderson was the sole founding member left.
So,when he got the old band back together for what he called a reunion of the “little old blues band Jethro Tull,” he was left in a reflective mood.
“When we first started playing, there would be three, five, six people in the audience,” he says to the camera, a glass in his hand. “We would play shows and people just look at us, go uh [shrugs], and ignore us.
“We would pack up and go home back to our parents in some cases, or my chilly bedsitter in Luton in my case. It was actually damn depressing. You thought ‘Is this it? Is this being a professional musician?’ It was tough.”
I used the blues to open doors into the music business and get an audience...I never felt that’s what I wanted to do with my life
Ian Anderson
To reiterate the bleakness of the band’s humble early days — and perhaps to prove that there is a sense of humor rattling around beneath his tough-boss exterior — he ensured their reunion felt like it did all those decades earlier.
“A few unlucky audience members,” he writes, “have been co-opted to attend and look suitably bored — just like the bad old days when we first played together as an unknown new group.”
The Jethro Tull people know today, and the one that just released its 24th studio album, is a world away from the band that bored British pubs of the late ‘60s. But without those trials and tribulations, they may never have gone down in prog rock folklore — or any folklore for that matter.
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