Oh... Oh, Aqualung
March 19, 2021 5:24 PM   Subscribe

The Aqualung 50th Anniversary Special livestreamed a few hours ago (SLYT). Ian Anderson comments on the album and individual songs: "a social documentary, social realism, and touches on subjects of the everyday street scenario, people in a landscape."

And from the intro to Slipstream: "I’ve always loved the little short things, the little non sequiturs of music, where you just have this tiny thing that lasts 20 seconds, 30 seconds, whatever it might be. There is no before, there is no after, it’s just a tiny little glimpse of here and now…"
posted by jaruwaan (14 comments total) 30 users marked this as a favorite
 
Thank you so much for this. I purely love Ian and Tull. Wonderful!
posted by Splunge at 6:16 PM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


I hope the enforced break from touring has helped his tinnitus (which he said he got from fog machines, which, I guess, are loud).
posted by thelonius at 6:38 PM on March 19, 2021 [1 favorite]


Especially when played through Marshall amps.
posted by Greg_Ace at 6:44 PM on March 19, 2021 [3 favorites]


Glad to see Mr. Anderson looking so hale and hearty.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 11:23 PM on March 19, 2021


The term 'classic' is too casually applied to old albums but more than merited here.

The album was allegedly burnt because performative religious types didn't like their hypocrisy being criticised. Funny how they had no issue with lyrics about a grimy old tramp perving over schoolgirls though.

Still have my vinyl copy, probably not 50 years old but not too far off it.
posted by epo at 3:44 AM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


Ian Anderson is an under-appreciated gem, not just musically, but also just as a human being. Thank you for posting this, I’ve bookmarked it to watch this evening.
posted by MexicanYenta at 5:33 AM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


It was indeed great to see Mr. Anderson in the video, looking so well. I will never forget seeing him and his band when I was barely age 20, back in 1971. It was at the Bayfront Center in St. Petersburg, FL. We were in the very front, at the foot of the stage; and we were feeling, shall I say, very colorful ourselves! I knew the album, but it was my somewhat older housemate, from whom I was renting a room, who knew the band and took a small group of us to those great seats. Let me tell you, I have been to some amazing shows, it would stagger you if you knew the psychedelic music of that era to know. But that Ian Anderson at the top for performance art (beating out Arthur Brown with musicality, and Jim Morrison with impersonation)! It was the opening show of a new tour, and the opening track was "My God." Oh my god it was stunning..... And he looked down on us and looked right through us.... He seemed absolutely huge and insane! The was dressed in a long, heavy, brass buttoned coat, with high leather boots perhaps over tight pants; and, especially looking up from the floor, he was just a huge, imposing figure! Aqualung was of course central to this stage of the band, and when he played that flute he moved wildly, any opened his eyes wide and rolled them as if a mad man from back in time.
posted by swlabr at 10:37 AM on March 20, 2021 [10 favorites]


sry for the typos..... no excuse but excitement.
posted by swlabr at 10:44 AM on March 20, 2021


Love that acoustic guitar work. The lyrics are still as awkward as I recalled back then. Which he kinda acknowledges in his comments.
posted by ovvl at 10:45 AM on March 20, 2021


I first stumbled into Tull age twelve or thirteen via Thick As A Brick which had just come out. Somebody gave it to my big brother for his birthday. He thought it was dumb ("just one song on the whole album") so I inherited it ... and immediately fell in love.

A few months later, Christmas time 1972, I was enduring one of those difficult early teen moments at some other family's Christmas party (the Hudsons) -- the parents all upstairs getting bombed, the little kids all running around playing hide and seek or whatever, but I'd somehow managed to crack the older, cooler club, gained entrance into Tom (formerly Tommy) Hudson's lair (he called it his pit) where there was cool loud music being played, godawful jungle juice getting passed around (a blend of various bits of Mr. Hudson's scotches, vodkas, gins, rums -- fucking poison but it accomplished its task -- we were getting drunk). I doubt I had more than two sips before I was feeling it. As was everybody else. The others being Tom (fifteen or sixteen), sister Holly who was a year older than me (we used to be pretty close when we were younger but now she mostly ignored me -- teenage politics). There was also a guy named Gary Smiley who I only remember because I remember his odd name ... and at least two others, nobody older than sixteen, me being the youngest ... and the quietest. Just shut up and listen to the music.

Until Tom Hudson put Aqualung on (the song) -- one of maybe a dozen riffs that forever turned the tide of western civilization. But I didn't recognize it as Jethro Tull ... until the next song on side one, Cross-Eyed Mary, the dynamics of the intro, the ghostly flute showing the way forward as the alcohol emboldened me, opened my mouth ...

"Is this Jethro Tull?" I said. Because who else could it be? I'd figured out that much from repeated Thick As A Brick excursions. Flute and hard rocking electric guitar -- no other band did that.

Tom Hudson gave me a piercing look. "You know Tull?" he said.

"I've got Thick as a Brick," I said.

"Well, you're cooler than all these other idiots," he said, "None of them have even heard it."

And suddenly there it was. The first time in my life some older kid said I was cool. Can't say I remember much more of that evening beyond getting drunk enough to puke in the backyard and my parents somehow not finding out, probably because they got bombed themselves (and yes, one of them drove home -- it was the 1970s).

Anyway, thanks, Aqualung. For opening the kind of door that allowed me to be cool, for a few minutes anyway. That I'll always remember. And Wind Up, last track on side two, that's the song that made it very easy for me to not so much give up on God altogether, but definitely organized religion, the Church, all that tired and hypocritical bullshit ... but that's another story.
posted by philip-random at 11:57 AM on March 20, 2021 [7 favorites]


As Anderson notes in the video, some of the lyrics are problematic now (and I agree) but I also appreciate them as sketches of homeless* folks that are more of an indictment of society than judgements of the individuals themselves, and not without empathy:

Do you still remember December's foggy freeze
When the ice that clings on to your beard was screaming agony
And you snatch your rattling last breaths with deep-sea diver sounds
And the flowers bloom like madness in the spring


Aqualung likes teenaged girls, and Cross-Eyed Mary is a teenage sex worker, but compared to their contemporaries in the rock milieu I don't get much sense that Anderson is taking salacious pleasure or giving a winking approval of the sexual aspects of the caricatures. I don't want to stan TOO hard with this defense, because Anderson as a lyricist definitely DOES do that in other Tull songs (Budapest makes me cringe, for example)... just not so much, I think, on Aqualung.

*this term itself is on the way out, although we don't seem to have agreed upon a replacement yet... I've heard unhoused, houseless, experiencing homelessness, etc.
posted by lefty lucky cat at 12:00 PM on March 20, 2021 [2 favorites]


posted by swlabr at 1:37 PM on March 20

I don’t use the term eponysterical lightly, but...
posted by TedW at 1:08 PM on March 20, 2021 [1 favorite]


About a week ago: I am Ian Anderson, founder, musician, singer, and songwriter of the rock band Jethro Tull. This year we’re celebrating the 50th anniversary of our album Aqualung. Something you may not know, but I have also previously owned several salmon farms in Scotland. AMA!

Some fun questions and answers here-

I usually carried with me an old damaged flute referred to as 'the thrower' and tossed that around in the hope that one of the road crew would always catch it. If it appeared to go into the audience, it must have been that I had unduly sweaty hands that night! Never mind, I expect I can find it on eBay if I look hard enough.
posted by fomhar at 3:42 PM on March 20, 2021


Excellent! Aqualung holds up well.
posted by Liquidwolf at 11:11 AM on March 21, 2021


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