Reinder Dijkhuis makes a good observation in his ranking of allJethro Tull/Ian Anderson albums:
[…]the conventional wisdom is kind of a distillation of the experiences of many people over time. They like a band or artist because of certain things that appear musically, or because of the contributions of certain players, and the best records according to their combined experiences are the ones that most resemble those musical elements or most prominently feature those contributions. If you’re new to a band that’s been around for half a century, the conventional wisdom is useful knowledge. Another way of putting it is that only someone who does not like Jethro Tull at all would put Under Wraps at the top and Aqualung at the bottom, and what use is that to anyone? Also, the arcs of most artists’ careers follow predictable patterns, from a rapid evolution at the start, to an imperial phase in which they cannot do wrong, to variously, unpopular experimentation, stagnation and/or decline, with a late-career resurgence appearing in only some cases. It is worth showing new listeners which albums in a long catalog belong to which phase.
Conventional wisdom can be very wrong of course, especially in the here and now, and you always have to check your source’s biases, but he’s not wrong. Especially now that rock’s dead, or dead enough that turf battles over what’s proper rock or what instruments should be allowed in rock or whatever no longer matter. Best of lists used to be weapons wielded by publications like Rolling Stone and critics like Lester Bruce to determine a rock pantheon and judge who was worthy of entering it. Who, but for already aged baby boomers still cares about that? After decades of critical evaluation and re-evaluation most of the gems have been shifted out for any given long running rock band. You’re unlikely to discover anything new or upsetting in reconsidering the oeuvre of a band like Jethro Tull.
Not that Reinder doesn’t try and succeed in coming up with a list that has some conventional wisdom bucking surprises. The bottom of the list is as expected, the top not so much. The usual story about Tull is that it took a couple of albums to get the sound right, moving from fairly standard late sixties (prog) rock into something more unique slowly over the first three before bursting into perfection with Aqualung. That was followed up by the magnus opus that’s Thick as a Brick, with the rest of the seventies albums being attempts to keep up that high standard, not always succeeding. From there it’s the long slide into irrelevance that most big seventies bands faced moving into the eighties and the coasting on the past post-millennium of any that survived this long. Reinder’s list puts some nuances on this simplified story and makes the case for some less often considered albums and while I don’t necessarily agree, his arguments are at least interesting.
Now then, did you know that Tull had another album out this year? The first since 2003? I didn’t and I consider myself a fan. Turns out I’m more a fan of some of the albums, with the rest categorised as yep, that’s some more Jethro Tull indeed for better or worse. I couldn’t do this sort of exercise. For me the top two (Thick as a Brick, Aqualung) would be clear, I could properly make a top five, but the rest is just more Jethro Tull with no great feelings about them one way or another. I discovered Jethro Tull as a band thanks to an old boss at a chipshop I worked in as a student selling his collection of LPs which included Thick as a Brick (as well as Dark Side of the Moon), playing it out of curiosity knowning nothing about it other than that prog rock was just silly dinosaur music. I got the best of Jethro Tull as my introduction to it and that’s why everything else was just more of the same, but different.
Ultimately Reinder’s list does what such lists should do: send me back to listen to more Jethro Tull.
No Comments