Post by Bill Baurle on Apr 12, 2015 22:51:44 GMT -5
In 1979 my older brother and I used to pool our allowance money together and bought one album per week. In those days - I was 15 he was 16, we were into bands like Foreigner and Boston. Neither of us had much acquaintance with prog rock yet, and to both of us Jethro Tull was just a band we had heard of but knew nothing about. My brother's friend at school recommended the album Songs from the Wood to him, and at first I was reluctant to surrender my share of our weekly dough for a record by a band I knew nothing about. At this point neither of us even listened to classic rock radio and we had zero experience with any Tull song, not even Aqualung or the other radio familiars.
Anyway, to make a long story longer, I agreed to let him pick up the LP, on the promise from his friend that the music was "woodsy and rustic, like minstrel music." I had been reading Tolkien and was into that kind of antique, pastoral atmosphere, or maybe the correct word is Elizabethan? He happened to attend a party in the woods that night, after purchasing the LP. This was upstate New York, in the middle of winter. I wasn't into partying yet but he was, and keg parties in the woods were the order of the day, even in bitter cold. They would make a campfire and hang around near it, getting blissfully besotted. I got into that scene a little later, when I was around 17 and began to drink. He had the LP with him the whole time, in the shopping bag. He had removed the plastic however and checked out the lyric sheet, and I guess it got passed around some, because when he returned home late at night with the LP - which I was anxiously awaiting - he handed it to me and it made an immediate impression, not only because of the cover art, but because the smell of the object and the fact that it was still cold to the touch corresponded perfectly with the mood of the cover. So there I was, holding this album, which smelled like a campfire and was cold, looking at this rustic figure squatting in a clearing in the forest, warming his hands by a fire! The effect was nothing short of magical, and I remember it vividly to this day.
I will say the opening a capella lines from the title track were a wee tad disconcerting, but once the music started I was enchanted, as was my brother. The lyrics - and I was also heavily into poetry, my faves being Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, and Shakespeare - knocked my socks off. I still don't quite grok Ian when he remarked that he doesn't like poetry. How can such a consummate song-writer dislike one of the very tools of his craft? I realize that song lyrics and poetry are different, but Ian's verse was frequently metrical and rich in baroque imagery, take The Whistler for example, or the coyly sexual Velvet Green. One read of A Passion Play will inform the reader (not just the listener) that Ian Anderson was and is a lyricist of the highest caliber. What the music critics have to say about it is irrelevant, in my view, since they generally tend to fawn over what is readily accessible and formulaic and strongly dislike anything that smacks of genuine, individualistic creativity and artistic ambition. I'll take a pretentious, pompous progger over a cookie-cutter pop songwriter any day.
Anyway, that's my Songs from the Wood story, and I enjoyed telling it.
Anyway, to make a long story longer, I agreed to let him pick up the LP, on the promise from his friend that the music was "woodsy and rustic, like minstrel music." I had been reading Tolkien and was into that kind of antique, pastoral atmosphere, or maybe the correct word is Elizabethan? He happened to attend a party in the woods that night, after purchasing the LP. This was upstate New York, in the middle of winter. I wasn't into partying yet but he was, and keg parties in the woods were the order of the day, even in bitter cold. They would make a campfire and hang around near it, getting blissfully besotted. I got into that scene a little later, when I was around 17 and began to drink. He had the LP with him the whole time, in the shopping bag. He had removed the plastic however and checked out the lyric sheet, and I guess it got passed around some, because when he returned home late at night with the LP - which I was anxiously awaiting - he handed it to me and it made an immediate impression, not only because of the cover art, but because the smell of the object and the fact that it was still cold to the touch corresponded perfectly with the mood of the cover. So there I was, holding this album, which smelled like a campfire and was cold, looking at this rustic figure squatting in a clearing in the forest, warming his hands by a fire! The effect was nothing short of magical, and I remember it vividly to this day.
I will say the opening a capella lines from the title track were a wee tad disconcerting, but once the music started I was enchanted, as was my brother. The lyrics - and I was also heavily into poetry, my faves being Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, and Shakespeare - knocked my socks off. I still don't quite grok Ian when he remarked that he doesn't like poetry. How can such a consummate song-writer dislike one of the very tools of his craft? I realize that song lyrics and poetry are different, but Ian's verse was frequently metrical and rich in baroque imagery, take The Whistler for example, or the coyly sexual Velvet Green. One read of A Passion Play will inform the reader (not just the listener) that Ian Anderson was and is a lyricist of the highest caliber. What the music critics have to say about it is irrelevant, in my view, since they generally tend to fawn over what is readily accessible and formulaic and strongly dislike anything that smacks of genuine, individualistic creativity and artistic ambition. I'll take a pretentious, pompous progger over a cookie-cutter pop songwriter any day.
Anyway, that's my Songs from the Wood story, and I enjoyed telling it.