101697 Jethro Tull, Ottawa, ON

Back in the ’90’s I was a pretty big Jethro Tull fan.  I spent my first two decades of breath-time wholly ignorant of the band aside from the ubiquitous Aqualung and like so many of my musical discoveries I was introduced to the band when I packed off to university.

Aside from my early (and lingering) infatuation with Rush I’ve never really gotten into the prog rock thing.  I like all the cool changes and the synchronized modal runs that are indicative of the style – indeed that’s how I often write my own music – but there’s just something about the sound, the very timbre of prog rock that has always kept me at a distance.

That said, during my second year at Carleton U. a couple of friends down the residence hall named Jason and Jules had a copy of Jethro Tull’s twenty-five year retrospective that got a lot of spins in their CD player, but really, I think it was my friend Corey who really turned me on to the band.

(Corey was also the guy who first exposed me to “that Grateful Dead song” – which is what I called any and all of the Dead’s music at the time – and it was by proxy through his room-mate Ed I came to realize that Neil Young was, in fact, brilliant.)

But on October 16th, 1997 my Jethro Tull bubble burst.

Once again it was Corey sitting next to me – as was generally the case when I saw Jethro Tull – and once again Ian Anderson led a hotshot conglomeration of musicians through his band’s legendary hits and their deep back catalogue too.  But this time it was different.

You only have to see Jethro Tull once to know that Ian Anderson has a lot of cliché stage moves.  One of his signature tricks was to repeatedly throw his flute high in the air like a baton (the other is standing on one leg and crooking the other out sideways like an olde-school troubadour).  I don’t remember at what point in the show I noticed that he was sneaking back to the drum riser and subbing in a fake flute every time he did his signature instrument toss, but when I caught him I was instantly deflated.

I guess I was still pretty naive when it came to the world of big-stage Rock & Roll gimmickry, but when I saw my hero-of-the-moment make that swap I was shattered.  The music instantly began to sound contrived and only mock-cerebral; the playing suddenly seemed tired.

I walked out of the show disappointed to say the least, and I swore that I was done with Jethro Tull (to say the most).  And I was right about that.  If I have it correctly, this was the last time I saw the band, though I did go on to see an Ian Anderson solo show at Massey Hall that was fantastic.  That was when he was touring his new album Divinities (a New Age collection that I often hear played on the Sirius/XM Spa Channel) and performing the album in it’s entirety at Massey Hall.  Clearly the material was still very fresh to his embouchure and even the Jethro Tull numbers that he played that night were re-arranged so differently that he all but dispensed with his usual prog-rock stage antics, a blessing that saved the show for me.

And so I’m done with you, Jethro Tull.  Yes, we had a good seven years or so together, but once I caught you cheating it was all over between us (except that one last time in Toronto, but you were different then.  Never again, I swear).