Jethro Tull’s Quirky Ian Anderson On RRHOF, ‘Aqualung’, Space Travel

Forbes Lifestyle Jethro Tull’s Quirky Ian Anderson On RRHOF, ‘Aqualung’, Space Travel Jim Clash Contributor Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. I write about extreme adventure and classic rock. Following Aug 27, 2023, 03:09pm EDT | Press play to listen to this article! Got it! Share to Facebook Share to Twitter Share to Linkedin Scottish Rock musician Ian Anderson, of the group Jethro Tull, plays flute as he performs onstage, .

. . [+] during the band’s ‘Heavy Horses’ tour, at Madison Square Garden, New York, New York, October 11, 1978.

Partially visible at extreme right is bandmember Tony Williams, on bass guitar. The band performed three nights at the venue, between October 8 & 11. (Photo by Gary Gershoff/Getty Images) Getty Images Jethro Tull’s main man, multi-instrumentalist Ian Anderson, is known for popularizing the flute as a lead instrumental voice in rock music.

Amazingly, he had never even picked up a flute until a few months before recording the first Tull album, This Was, in 1968. We’re talking five years into his music career, which he began as a vocalist and harmonica player in his native Scotland. Anderson later moved on to electric guitar, but reportedly gave it up after realizing he would never be as good as reigning British guitar gods Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page.

With its emphasis on exceptional musicianship, dynamic contrast and spectacular theatricality in live performance, Jethro Tull embodied the 1970s British progressive rock sound. The band would turn more in a folk direction later in the decade, lean into electronics during the mid-80s, and even beat out Metallica for best hard rock/metal Grammy in 1988. More than 50 years and tens of millions of record sales on, Anderson continues to tour, with numerous concerts a year, plus eclectic solo shows and classical collaborations with quartets and full orchestras.

All of that said, Anderson and Jethro Tull inexplicably are not yet in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Following are parts of interviews I’ve conducted with Anderson, now 76, over the years, for the first time presented here complete, in long form, with light edits. Moscow, USSR: Personal appearances in Soviet bloc countries and in London—and now a color .

. . [+] documentary movie featirung “Soviet Hero No.

1″ major Yuri Gagarin, the world’s first spaceman. He’s seen here in his spacesuit in a scene from the documentary, “First Voyage to the Stars,” which is being screened at the 2nd Moscow International Film Festival. Photograph filed 7/19/1961 Bettmann Archive MORE FOR YOU New Apple Exclusive Reveals iPhone 15 Price Shock Apple Leaks iPhone 15 Pro Details In New iOS 17 Release Google Warns Gmail Users Ahead Of New Security Alerts Set Up 2FA Now Jim Clash: On the 50-year anniversary of Yuri Gagarin being the first person into space in 1961, you celebrated by doing a live flute duet with NASA astronaut Cady Coleman while she was aboard the International Space Station.

Ian Anderson: I did that night, yes. I was in Perm, Russia. I’m a child of the age of space exploration.

I was born in 1947, at a time when Werner von Braun was in America helping the Americans develop rocket technology, and some of his counterparts from those Nazi years of innovative engineering were in Russia helping the Russians do the same. Before the age of puberty, I already was in a world where we knew about rockets and the dream of sending a man into space and to the moon. It’s something I knew about when I was eight or nine years old.

By the time I was 10, in fact, Sputnik took to the skies and that first “beep, beep, beep” sound was played over the airwaves. For me growing up, it was almost like an emblem of something that was a dream coming true. When Gagarin went into space in ‘61, ahead of the Americans, those of us in the West who feared the Russians and what they represented were a little disappointed that Scott Carpenter and some others managed to get up there in a less sensational way.

Clash: But over the long-haul, the West did prevail. Anderson: The almighty dollar and promises and guarantees by JFK [President John F. Kennedy] of getting a man on the moon all came true, and America had its day in July 1969.

I think I was on tour in America at the time Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon. I wrote a song on our third album called, “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me. ” Being the guy who didn’t get to step on the moon, which I find poignant in a rather sobering kind of reality — to have been part of all of that, yet having, in a way, drawn the short straw, not get covered in glory since he didn’t get to do what [Buzz] Aldrin and Armstrong did – I felt a little moment of sympathy and sensitivity about that.

Ironically, decades later, my actor son-in-law played Michael Collins in a docudrama about the first moon landing. By pure coincidence, he got to play the guy who didn’t go to the moon, although he did get to kill a lot of zombies in his role in, The Walking Dead. US astronaut Cady Coleman, one of the crew members of the next expedition to the International Space .

. . [+] Station, plays the flute at the Russian leased Kazakhstan’s Baikonur cosmodrome, on December 10, 2010.

The blast-off of the crew to their orbiting outpost is set to December 15. AFP PHOTO / STR (Photo credit should read STR/AFP via Getty Images) AFP via Getty Images Clash: Do you have any interest in visiting the ISS yourself? Anderson: I do have an interest, but I’m not physiologically or mentally equipped. It would take a year of my time and tens of millions of dollars.

To me, it’s just insane, anyway. I wouldn’t last 10 minutes. I’m claustrophobic, and would not be a happy bunny up there.

It’s bad enough flying [laughs]. When I have to get on an airplane to fly long distance to, say, Australia, I’m scared sh*tless. Even when I was very young, I knew I was not going to be a guy who was going into space.

But, as I said, my flute has been up there. Clash: Five decades ago, you made the hit album, Aqualung . What made it so breakthrough, so durable? Anderson: I can only talk about it as a person who still performs that music.

What it means to me, personally, is it’s an album of contrast full of big, brave dynamic variations. There were few, if any, other bands at the time who were doing that. Across the board, from big electric guitar riffs to sensitive little acoustic guitar and vocal passages with a string quartet, the Aqualung album is about contrast and dynamics.

Lyrically, it varies from being angry socially or religious observational music to whimsical, slightly surreal moments like, “Mother Goose,” and, “Up to Me,” and some romantic moments like, “Wondering Aloud. ” It covers a lot of ground. It’s a big album of dynamic variation, and emotional variation, too.

That’s why it’s a particularly special album for me. What it means to other people I really can’t tell you. Some do see it as being a concept album, of some sort.

I always disagree with that viewpoint. Three or four songs that work together, that may have some kind of a bond between them, is one thing, but three or four songs don’t make a concept album. They just make three or four songs that happen to be vaguely connected in terms of subject matter.

So, I can’t ever really get around to agreeing in any way that it’s a concept album. But Thick As A Brick , which followed, was very much a concept album, and indeed was a tongue-in-cheek, spoof of a concept album. It’s a parody of a genre that was all too easily mocked back then as, indeed, it is today.

But it was fun to do. circa 1970: British folk group Jethro Tull, led by flautist, guitarist, singer and songwriter Ian . .

. [+] Anderson. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images) Getty Images Aqualung , for me, was also important because it was the moment when I felt confident about writing music, about sitting in a Holiday Inn hotel room in the Midwest of America writing a guitar riff that could either be done on the acoustic guitar, or on some flat-out 200 watts of Marshall “Wall of Sound” kind of electric guitar.

I was able at that point to really understand how to bring to bear something more from the world of classical, more symphonic writing to include dramatic variations. Most bands would start out with a piece of music and, four minutes later, would finish, having stayed pretty much on the same level all the way through. So, I like to think that what I did was a little more varied, perhaps a little more adventurous, at the time of Aqualung .

Clash: Your long-time Jethro Tull guitarist mate Martin Barre told me that recording Aqualung was not the most pleasant experience. Anderson: The tensions were not social or musical between us. They were mainly technical.

We were working in a brand new space, an old church in the middle of London that Island Records had turned into a recording studio. Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull were among the first bands to record there, if not the first. Zeppelin got the little studio in the basement, which was okay and easy to work in.

We had this cavernous space above, big, echoey, daunting and rather dark. It had all the ghosts of its days as a Methodist church, or whatever it was. It just didn’t feel nice to work in, especially because some songs I was singing were touching on matters to do with religion.

Technically, the big problems were with the equipment and stuff that wasn’t working properly, and an audio quality both in the control room and the space we were recording. I remember at the end of the recording sessions, when we’d finished mixing and took it outside to a mastering room to cut the vinyl, it being a nerve-wracking moment because I wasn’t sure what we’d got. Rock musicians Ian Anderson (left), on flute, and Martin Barre, on guitar, both of the British group .

. . [+] Jethro Tull, perform onstage, during the band’s ‘Heavy Horses’ tour, at Madison Square Garden, New York, New York, October 11, 1978.

The band performed three nights at the venue, between October 8 & 11. (Photo by Gary Gershoff/Getty Images) Getty Images It’s a bit like taking an old film photograph. You know it’s in the camera, but you don’t know what the picture is going to look like until you develop it.

There’s the feeling you might have a bit of black film! So it was a little tense, and there were some awkward songs that were quite hard to work out. Clash: Can you give an example of a particular song? Anderson: “Locomotive Breath” was quite difficult to record, because it wasn’t gelling the way we were trying to play it. I had to go about doing it in a way which was a little artificial.

I was a human click-track banging two drumsticks together. I played that for four minutes. Then I went out and played bass drum and hi-hat for four minutes to the click.

I took one of Martin’s electric guitars out, too, and played one of the guitar riffs all the way through. Our drummer, Clive Bunker, added tom-toms and cymbals to the basic drum track I’d put down. Then Martin added another guitar part.

John Evan managed some piano when we recorded the intro separately, then edited it on after. I was after something that was quite metronomic, like a train on the tracks. You had to have that relentless metronomic simplicity about it, and it was not something we found easy to play live on stage tours.

So it was a tricky one. Clash: After Aqualung was finished, did you change your mind as to how it sounded? Anderson: At the time the album was released, I felt moderately comfortable, but I still felt sonically it was not as good as it should have been. It wasn’t a great sounding album.

After it was remixed much later, they kept the feeling of the original very much in the placement of everything, but added a lot more weight, made it more solid and clear. We had the ability to convert the original master tapes to digital formats by then. CLEVELAND, OH – SEPTEMBER 25: The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum building, designed by architect .

. . [+] by I.

M. Pei, is seen in this 2009 Cleveland, Ohio, early morning city landscape photo. (Photo by George Rose/Getty Images) Getty Images Clash: I’m truly amazed you and Jethro Tull are not in the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame yet.

Anderson: I’ve always thought the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame is there primarily to celebrate American music, and I think there are a lot more deserving American artists who should be in before you start thinking about British bands or from elsewhere. It is particularly an American institution. My own belief is, I want to see Mose Allison in there before Jethro Tull.

Then again, there are a lot of bands deservingly that are in. Since it opened, my own personal stuff has been there. I know, because I’ve been there and seen it.

A mannequin with all of my stage clothes on was standing next to Rod Stewart. I remember thinking, ‘Either we had a very bad dry cleaner or the Hall of Fame has a bad dry cleaner because the stuff looks impossibly small. ’ You know, a three-and-a-half-foot-tall person would be struggling to get into Rod Stewart’s outfit, and mine is not much bigger.

It’s quite extraordinary. We must have been skinny little guys [laughs]! Captain Beefheart’s finally been inducted, and had been very ill for his last 30 years, but a mansion of creativity in terms of American music. He should have been celebrated as an inductee when he was still on two legs, when he was able to move around and talk.

He had a long, sad illness which took his life. Clash: Barre also told me that because you two have worked together for so long on stage, that nothing much needs to be said when you two perform together. Anderson: Well, that’s not necessarily a good thing.

I think it’s good to be a little unpredictable. It’s a positive relationship, but it’s also a negative one because it’s very easy to get set in your ways. One of the reasons I do shows as just Ian Anderson as opposed to Jethro Tull is that I have the opportunity to stretch a little wider and deeper in terms of the Jethro Tull catalog, but also in terms of introducing a new song or two, or putting something together for new arrangements.

It just gives me the feeling I don’t have to always be doing the same thing. I often do concerts with orchestras, string quartets, guest soloists, acoustic shows, rock-type shows, and I do all of that as Ian Anderson. When it’s a Jethro Tull show, it tends to focus more on a smaller selection of material and also, I suppose, will bring into the concert more rock fans.

And that can make the audience come across sometimes a little louder, a little more rowdy, certainly in countries like Italy and Spain and, to some extent, the U. S. , say in Detroit.

UNSPECIFIED – CIRCA 1970: Photo of Jethro Tull Photo by Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images getty Clash: How do you deal with obnoxious fans? Anderson: When you have a few of the more hard-nut rock fans making noise, it can be quite obtrusive. A lot of my music is acoustic. It’s particularly disheartening when I’m trying to play the intro to, “My God,” and there’s someone whistling, hooting, screeching and shouting over something that is, to me, a very important part of the song.

I’d like to be allowed to play it, and not shouted down. It’s not a football match. It’s not a basketball game.

It’s not a political rally. It’s a musical concert. And if that sounds a bit snobbish, then tough.

I’m the guy doing it, and I do it on my terms. If people persist in whistling and shouting and screeching, I’ll go on for 20, maybe 30 seconds and, on a couple of occasions, I’ve just had to stop and say, “Okay, you win. We’ll move on to the loud bit now,” and we do.

It’s very sad to have to edit your own material because you feel there are elements in the audience that are ruining it for the 98% of those who do want to listen. And that’s what I take personal offense to. So, I have to be a little careful sometimes.

I do have to say, when I’m on tour as Ian Anderson, I never have that problem. The rock ‘n’ roll jobbers – you know, the drunken fans – tend to stay at home, which is a bit of a relief, Whether it’s Jethro Tull or Ian Anderson, I prefer to feel the audience moving with the music, not just being one dimensional in their way of reacting. That’s a big problem when I play in Spain; there are definitely going to be a lot of songs I am not going to play, not even try, [because of rowdiness].

MADRID, SPAIN – JULY 12: Musician Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull on stage performs during “Veranos de . . .

[+] la Villa 2012″ at Teatro Circo Price on July 12, 2012 in Madrid, Spain. (Photo by Juan Naharro Gimenez/Redferns via Getty Images) Redferns via Getty Images Clash: How do you keep the music fresh? Some of this stuff you’ve been playing for like,50-odd years. Anderson: It’s inherent in most of the music I’ve written that there’s an element of improvisation, not just for me, but for the musicians.

So we all get to stretch a bit every night, in slightly different directions. It is what we make it. No two concerts are the same, just for the reason we all play some different notes.

The other thing is that there’s a constant change of set lists. The sound engineer and lighting guy don’t like it very much, because they want it to be the same all of the time. That way, they can program everything and have an easy ride, sitting out there in the audience.

We also work pretty hard to learn new arrangements, variations on songs. From time to time, we bring new material into the set, or we bring some new old material in that perhaps we haven’t played for 30 years, or maybe some we have never played at all. There’s also quite a fair amount of preparation before every tour for all of the musicians.

We don’t necessarily get together and rehearse, but we do all of our homework [separately] before we arrive for the first sound check. Follow me on Twitter or LinkedIn . Jim Clash Editorial Standards Print Reprints & Permissions.