A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs - PLEDGE WEEK: “Living in the Past” by Jethro Tull

Episode Date: July 24, 2025

This episode is part of Pledge Week 2025. For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon. If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com/andrewhickey . Whether you do or not, I hope you enjoy this one. (more…)

This episode is part of Pledgeweek 2025. For five days this week, I will be posting old Patreon bonus episodes to the main feed to encourage people to subscribe to my Patreon. If you want more of these, and only if you can afford it, subscribe for $1 a month at patreon.com slash Andrew Hickey. Whether you do or not,

I hope you enjoy this one. The story of Jeff Rott and Roll is, ultimately the story of Ian Anderson, who has been the only consistent member of the band since it formed 57 years ago. Anderson was born in Scotland, but moved to Blackpool with his family when he was 12, by which time he had already got his first guitar

and started learning. In 1963, the same year he left school and started going to art school, Anderson formed his first band, The Blades, named after the club that James Bond would go to in Ian Fleming's novels. The initial line-up of the Blades was Anderson on guitar, Geoffrey Hammond on bass. Hammond hadn't played bass before Anderson told him he looked like a musician and should learn,

and John Evans, who got renamed Evan, because it was thought that sounded better, on drums. Soon though, Evan realised he preferred playing keyboards, and the group advertised for a new drummer, and got him Barry Barlow. Like most bands formed by teenagers, the band went through multiple line-up changes in a short space of time, Unlike many beat groups of the era, they soon found themselves more interested in playing blues and R&B material, in the same sort of vein as the Grey and Bond organisation. By the time of the first existing recordings of the group from late 1966, they were known as the John Evan Blues Band,

and there were a seven-piece band consisting of Anderson, Evan, bass player Beau Ward, drummer Richie Dharmer, guitarist Neil Smith, and home players Tony Wilkinson and Neil Valentine. Soon the rhythm section would be replaced by Barry Barlow returning on drums and bass player Glenn Kornick, and would change their name again to the John Evan Smash, after supporting the Pink Floyd and deciding they needed a more 1966 sort of name. Under that name, they appeared on a TV talent show singing one of Anderson's songs, Take the Easy Way, and also went down to London to record their first demos.

They got signed by the Alice Wright Agency, a small booking agent of a small booking agent and management organisation, whose biggest clients were ten years after. Soon they were back in the studio again, this time with producer Derek Lawrence, who had been a protégé of Joe Meek and produced records by people like The Pretty Things. They had an initial demo session, after which he suggested they changed their name again to candy-coloured rain. Up to this point, Anderson had stuck to the standard blues instruments of guitar and harmonica, but then he tried to collect on a debt he was owed. the debtor didn't have the money and gave Anderson a flute instead. He started teaching himself, inspired by the jazz musician Rassan Roland Kirk's album,

I Talk to the Spirit. The first song Anderson learned on the flute was Kirk's Severnade to a cuckoo. Candy-colored rain, or the John Evan Smash, or the John Evan Band, as they were named on the session sheet, went back into the studio with Lawrence again and cut a couple of tracks which remained unreleased at the time, both songs by Anderson. one of them, Aeroplane, also featured Tony Wilson, a future founding member of Hot Chocolate, on backing vocals. But the group fell apart before the recordings could be released,

and Anderson and Kornick put together a new band with two members of a band they'd played on the same Bill as, guitarist Mick Abrams and drummer Clive Bunker. That group fulfilled the outstanding dates for the old band, and also started getting booked into more gigs themselves. Their manager, Terry Ellis, booked them under men. many different names. The default was Ian Anderson's bag of nails, but there were lots of names. Sometimes they were the bag of blues, sometimes Anderson was Ian Henderson rather than Anderson,

so they could get multiple bookings the same night by pretending to be different bands. The name they were under when they were booked for the Marquis Club was Jethro Tull, a name suggested by someone at their booking agency. The real Jethro Tull was an 18th century agriculturalist who invented a horse-drawn seed drill. Anderson disliked the name, but the promoter at the marquee liked the band and wanted to book them for a residency, and so that was the name they were stuck with. At the same time they were playing the marquee, they were also signed to MGM records by Lawrence.

Their first single was actually only the new band on the A side, which again featured Wilson on backing vocals, a song by Avraham's called Sunshine Day. The B-side was Averplane, from the earlier band's demo sessions with Lawrence. The single was not quite released as by Jethro Tull, though. The name on the label was Jethro Tow. Depending on who you ask, that was either a deliberate decision by Lawrence because he disliked the name, or a result of someone at MGM mishearing the name over the phone.

With that level of attention to detail, it's perhaps unsurprising that the record only sold somewhere in the region of 100 copies, mostly to family and friends of the band members. The Alice Wright Agency was so disappointed with the lack of sales, that they actually started their own record label, Chrysalis Records, named as a lot of a pun on Chris Wright and Terry Ellis, and got themselves a distribution deal with Ireland. Chris Wright later said, Chrysalis Records might have come into being anyway, you never know what might have happened, but Chrysler's Records really came into being because Jethro Toll couldn't get a record deal,

and MGM couldn't even get their name right on the record. The first single on Chryslerus Records, and the first single released under the band's correct name, was A Song for Jeffrey. A song which Anderson had written for his former bandmate Geoffrey Hammond, and which the group did on their first John Peel session a few days before the tracks release. That single was the only single to be released from the group's first album. This was. The single didn't chart, but the album made the top ten. The album also featured orchestral arrangements from Dee Palmer, who had worked with the group first as an outside arranger and later

as a full member until 1980. A side note, Palmer is trans and didn't come out until the late 90s, so many of you will have records that credit her by her dead name. I'm using the name she goes by now, and would appreciate it if nobody dead names or misgenders her in the comments. This is important to note with a band like Jeff Rottall, because many of the other band members use slight variations of their own names as jockey stage names, and this isn't one of those. But there were tensions growing between Abrahams and Anderson.

Both were songwriters, and both thought of themselves as the most important member of the band. But slowly Anderson was becoming the game. group's frontman. He'd developed an eccentric stage appearance, often wearing a long greatcoat that made him look like a tramp, and standing on one leg while he played the flute. Abraham's was also primarily interested in blues and jazz. He wanted to be in a blues band with a little Rasan Roland Kirk influence, while Anderson was getting more interested in folk music and the new progressive rock. The group put out a non-album single, Love Story, which made the top 30. But shortly after that, Abraham's and Anderson fell out for good.

Abraham's formed a new band, Blodwin Pig, which also featured a flute player who doubled on saxophone, influenced by Rassan Roland Kirk, and they released two top ten albums of more bluesy material. The first guitarist, the group,

turned to Tony Iommi, didn't fit well with the group. He played one actual gig with them, a BBC session, and also performed with them on the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus, where the group performed song for Geoffrey. But because that was the song,

was such an important show and they hadn't really rehearsed with Iommi, that performance was to a backing track, with only Anderson's flute and vocals live. Iommi left the band after those two shows, and went back to his old band, Earth. Iommi did, however, learn the importance of professionalism and rehearsal from his brief time with Jethro Tull, and did his best to impress those values on his bandmates, Giza Butler, Bill Ward, and Ozzy Osbourne. We'll find out if that worked in a future episode. IOMI's replacement, Martin Barr, would be with the band for the next 43 years, and for a good chunk of that time, the only constant member other than Anderson.

Barr joined the group just before a US tour, supporting bands like Spirit, Blood Sweat and Tears, the Vanilla Fudge, Led Zeppelin, and Credence Clearwater Revival. While they were in the US, they recorded another non-album single, Living in the Past, a song that should, in theory, have been hugely uncommercial. Living in the past was a song in 5-4 time with jazz flute solos and grumpy lyrics about how the hippie lifestyle, with protests about war and talk about revolution, wasn't for Anderson,

who was also very staunchly opposed to drug use and in general found little common cause with the hippies, despite his bearded, long-haired, eccentric appearance. Anderson said of the song later, when I sang, now there's revolution, but they don't know what they're fighting. I was just saying, forget all that stuff, let's stay in a more realistic world with more straightforward values,

not necessarily my personal viewpoint all the time, but has a reaction to that rather trendy pretence of revolution and infatuation with the present, and the sense of living for today and having a good time, something I usually felt a bit awkward about. But this combination of reactionary lyrics and experimental music was a huge hit in the UK, reaching number three on the charts.

It wasn't issued at the time in the US, but when it came out there more than three years later to promote a compilation album, it made the top 20 there too. Anderson later said of it, To be honest, I've always loathed and detested that song. In fact, when it was first a hit, I used to hide in a corner and cringe. But the guys in the band now are keen to play it, and, you know, I'm beginning to come accustomed to the damn thing.

But the song had made Jethro Tull into a major commercial force in the UK. The album that followed, stand-up, became a UK number one album and went top 20 in the US. The album was an odd mix of different styles, with Eastern influences hard rock, and one track which became one of their regular live highlights, a reworking of Bach's Bure and E minor as a jazz rock instrumental featuring a flute duet by Anderson and Barr. Anderson has often said that stand-up was his very favourite Jethro Tull album,

and it's a favourite of both fans and critics. The group spent the remainder of 1969 touring almost non-stop, and their next album, Benefit, while being their third album is the epitome of the difficult second album, being made up of depressed songs written while they were on the road and Anderson was missing his girlfriend. For that album, Anderson and Cronick's old bandmate John Evan joined the band as a keyboard player, initially a session musician who would be in the band for the next decade. Benefit made No. 3 in the UK and number 11 in the US,

despite Rolling Stone calling it lame and dumb. The group toured through most of 1970, including an appearance at the the 1970 Isle of White Festival we talked about in the episode on All Along the Watchtower, and an appearance at Carnegie Hall, the first rock band to appear there since the Beatles in 1964. By the end of 1970, there had been another line-up change. Cornick and Anderson weren't getting on very well. Cornick enjoyed drinking, taking drugs and partying, while Anderson was very serious-minded, and wanted to be a professional doing a serious job. Cornick was sacked before the next album, and replaced with Anderson's old friend Geoffrey Hammond,

the bass player he had formed his very first bandwith. The original three blades were now back together, though Hammond, who started to be credited by the double-barreled name Hammond Hammond mostly as a joke, both his parents had had had the same surname before marrying, had not played bass in several years and was not used to play in the complex music his old bandmates were now playing. Only two weeks after Hammond re joined his old bandmates, they were in the studio recording a new album.

Aqualung is often talked about as a concept album, mostly because the two sides are given their own overall titles. Side one is titled Aqualung, and side two is titled My God. As all the songs are by Anderson, apart from the title track which is a co-write by his then-wife, they tend to have thematic resonances just because they're all written by the same person in the same period, and the things he was thinking about at the time will show through. And so there are multiple songs which are about, or can be read as being about homelessness, as the title track is, or about Anderson's dim view of religion. But Anderson has always strenuously denied that the album is in any way a concept album, and certainly there's no clear narrative to the record.

Aqualung featured the two songs that would become most identified with the group, the title track, which we heard just now, and Locomotive Breath. Neither was released. least as a single, both being long songs, and by this point the group essentially stopped having single success, other than the reissue of living in the past. But there were pictures on FM radio at the time, and as a result made it to classic rock radio, and remained some of their most well-known tracks. Despite the being no singles, Aqualung became the group's best-selling record to that point, selling seven million copies. But the response to it annoyed Anderson,

who disliked people saying it was a concept album. He decided to write an album that was a parody of the whole idea of concept albums. But first was another change in line-up. By the fifth album, Jeff Rottull had not yet made two albums with the same set of musicians, and now it was Clive Bunker's turn to leave and be replaced by one of Anderson's old Blackpool Friends. Barry Barlow, jokingly renamed Barrymore Barlow, replaced Bunker, and this would be the most stable line-up the group would ever have. The next four albums would feature the exact same lineup, and the only change between 1971 and 1979 would be Hammond leaving in 1975 to be replaced by John Glasscock, and Dee Palmer graduating in 1976 from hired arranger to full-time

touring band member. So this is the start of what we might consider the definitive lineup of Jethro Toll, four of whom had all started out together in the John Evan Blues band. The first album together, thick as a brick, was one long piece of music stretching over two sides of an album. They don't mind if you sit this one out. My words but a whisper, your deafness, a shout. It may make you feel that I can't make you think. Your sperm's in the gutter, your love's in the sink. So you ride your sails over the fields,

and you make all your animal deals, and your wise men don't know how it feels. The album was, supposedly, a musical adaptation of an epic poem by a fictional 8-year-old child prodigy named Gerald Bostock, nicknamed Little Milton, after the religious poet, and came in an elaborate package that mocked up a 12-page newspaper full of joke articles, including a front-page one about how Bostock had won a poetry prize, but had been disqualified because of a decision by child psychiatrist that, the boy's mind was seriously unbalanced and that his work was a product of an extremely unwholesome attitude. towards life, his God and country. Anderson intended the album to be a parody of the work of Bansy Found Pompus, like Yes, and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. Most of the listeners didn't get the joke, though,

and took it entirely seriously. It went to number five in the UK and number one in the US. The group toured the album with an elaborate stage show with props, which involved a live performance of the whole album in one go without a break at the start of the show, followed by Anderson saying, for our next number!

The next few albums were all commercially successful concept albums, but were less well regarded both critically and by the band. Anderson called the album that followed, a piece loosely inspired by Dante and Bunyan entitled A Passion Play, over-arranged and over-produced and overcooked, and reaction to it was so bad that the band announced they were quitting. This was later revealed to be a publicity stunt that the record label had carried out without their knowledge. The album that followed that,

made up of songs for an unmade film which once again explains, the realms of heaven and hell, contained a song attacking rock critics, which was always a sign of a band slowly losing its way and unwilling to acknowledge it. They followed a depressed album made in tax exile, and a record titled, Too Old to Rock and Roll, Too Young to Die, another concept album, this time about an aging rocker left behind by new musical trends. By 1977, the group were going in a very different direction. Songs from the Wood was an album inspired by the folk rock of bands like Fairport Convention

and Steel Ice Span. and the rest of the albums the group made in the 70s were very much in that vein. Acoustic songs inspired by folklore and traditional music. However, sadly, in 1979, John Glasscock, the bass player who had replaced Hammond, became serious ill with heart problems. Dave Pegg, the bassist with Fairport Convention, substituted for him on tour, but Glasscock died in the middle of the tour. The resulting fallout from this led to most of the other band members leaving or being fired. Barlow quit depressed at his friend's death and went on to do session work,

while Palmer and Evan, depending on which story you read, either read in Melodymaker that they were about to be sacked and quit before Anderson could fire them, or got rather cursory letters from Anderson informing them of the dismissal. They formed an unsuccessful new band Talis. Jethro Toll continued, and a record that had been planned as Ian Anderson's first solo album, which featured Bar and Peg, came out as a Jeffro Tull album instead. Anderson, Barr and Pegg were constant members for the next 15 years, with other musicians coming and going,

and they released several albums with a more synth-heavy sound, as well as an album of instrumental remakes of their biggest hits with the London Symphony Orchestra, which saw Dee Parmer briefly collaborating with their old bandmates again, providing the new orchestral arrangements as she had during the commercial peak. Some of these albums were successful. The group famously won the Grammy Award for hard rock and heavy metal for their 1987 album, Crest of a Knave. A result that was so unexpected. Everyone assumed Metallica would win,

and on the slim chance they didn't, that it would be a e-pop or Jane's Addiction, both of whom were also nominated, that the group themselves didn't turn up to the ceremony, and the audience first laughed at Alice Cooper when he announced the result, assuming it was a joke, and then booed and heckled. When Metallica won the Grammy in 1992, Lars Ulrich thanked Jethro Toll for not putting an album out that year. Pegg left the band in 1995 to concentrate on Fairport Convention,

and the last new album Anderson and Barr recorded together was a Christmas record in 2003. But they continued touring together until 2011, when Anderson announced a bar that he was tired of being in Jethro Toll and wanted the two of them to concentrate on their solo side projects. That happened until 2019 when Anderson renamed his touring band Jeff Routel and started releasing new albums under the band name.

Martin Barr currently tours with his solo band while Anderson tours under the band name. Anderson now suffers from COPUD and is not as fit as he used to be, but rather astonishingly for a band that started more than 60 years ago, if you count the Blades and the John Evan band, and have had 25 different members.

All the members of the classic lineup are still alive and almost all the members before and after them. Of the musicians who played on Jethro Toultracks we've heard in this episode, I believe only Cornick and Glasgow are no longer with us. Some of the members no longer perform, but many still do to this day. Perhaps it's the rather abstemious, professional ethic, and the lack of tolerance for drugs that has kept them all going so long, but it seems that at least as of 2024,

even in their 80s, some of them might now be too old to rock a mole, but they're still too young to die. Long may that continue. B' B' B' B'u-la-da-do-d-d-o-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h-h...