My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list.

1. The John Barry Orchestra, James Bond Theme
2. Johnny Rivers, Secret Agent Man
3. Shirley Bassey, Goldfinger
4. Pink Floyd, What Do You Want From Me
5. Can, Mushroom
6. Traffic, Tragic Magic (live, from On The Road)
7. Junkhouse, The Sky Is Falling
8. Fleetwood Mac, Worried Dream
9. George Thorogood & The Destroyers, Howlin’ For My Baby
10. Johnny Cash, Ragged Old Flag
11. Jefferson Airplane, Rock Me Baby, (live, from Bless Its Pointed Little Head)
12. T. Rex, The King Of The Mountain Cometh
13. Rory Gallagher, Cradle Rock (from The Best of Rory Gallagher At The BBC)
14. Thin Lizzy, Angel Of Death (live, from Life/Live)
15. Motorhead, Stone Dead Forever
16. Flash And The Pan, Up Against The Wall
17. Roxy Music, Like A Hurricane (live)
18. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Black Moon
19. Elvis Presley, Paralyzed
20. The Birds, No Good Without You Baby (early Ron Wood band, not to be confused with The Byrds)
21. The Rolling Stones, Gotta Get Away

My track-by-track tales:

1. The John Barry Orchestra, James Bond theme . . . I was filing CDs as part of my ongoing and not quite yet successful attempts at tidying my place and atop one pile – so let’s call this the top of the pile show because honestly that’s from where most of the songs I’m playing come – was a disc of Bond movie songs. So here we go, setting the tone for the early part of the show.

2. Johnny Rivers, Secret Agent Man . . . A hit for master of covers Rivers and I don’t often play hits but it fits the Bond theme of my first few songs.

3. Shirley Bassey, Goldfinger . . . My favorite Bond song, or maybe tied with Paul McCartney’s Live And Let Die, those are the two that really stick out to me, but I love Bassey’s passionate, expressive vocals. Bassey also sang the theme song to the Bond films Diamonds Are Forever and Moonraker – she is the only artist to do more than one Bond movie song – and covered The Beatles’ Something and The Fool On The Hill as well as other songs like If You Go Away. Hugely successful in the UK, the Welsh singer is still active at 87 and released a studio album as recently as 2020 in celebration of her 70 years in the industry.

4. Pink Floyd, What Do You Want From Me . . . Perhaps my favorite Floyd song from the post-Roger Waters era, from the 1994 album The Division Bell. Written by David Gilmour, keyboardist Richard Wright and Gilmour’s wife Polly Samson, an English writer who has contributed lyrics to the post-Waters Floyd albums and Gilmour’s solo work. It’s similar, to my ears, to the Gilmour track There’s No Way Out Of Here. That song, written by UK songwriter Ken Baker, appeared on Gilmour’s first, self-titled solo album in 1978.

5. Can, Mushroom . . . Hypnotic stuff from a band that often went out on various flights of sometimes impenetrable fancy yet on the flip side has a wealth of tighter, single-worthy (and this song was a single) tracks that in a that context still manage to convey the progressive elements of the band.

6. Traffic, Tragic Magic (live, from On The Road) . . . Intoxicating near nine-minute musical excursion from one of my favorite bands, flutes and sax and guitars and percussion all cooked up in that typical Traffic stew.

7. Junkhouse, The Sky Is Falling . . . From the debut Junkhouse album, Strays, released in 1993 and through which I quickly became a fan of all things Tom Wilson, a Canadian artist whose credits include the Florida Razors, Junkhouse, solo work, Blackie And The Rodeo Kings and Lee Harvey Osmond.

8. Fleetwood Mac, Worried Dream . . . An old work colleague and I were discussing early, Peter Green era Fleetwood Mac the other day so here we are. Worried Dream is a cover of a B.B. King-penned tune that appeared on King’s 1968 album Blues On Top Of Blues. The Fleetwood Mac version was released on the Green-era compilation The Original Fleetwood Mac which covers songs recorded in 1967 and 1968. The compilation came out in 1971, a year after Green left the group after the 1969 Then Play On album and a 1970 tour.

9. George Thorogood & The Destroyers, Howlin’ For My Baby . . . From the slow blues of early Fleetwood Mac to typical Thorogood raunch on a track written by Willie Dixon and Howlin’ Wolf. It’s from Thorogood’s 1993 album Haircut which featured his hit Get A Haircut.

10. Johnny Cash, Ragged Old Flag . . . Title cut from Cash’s 1974 album, a spoken word tribute to patriotism and the American flag that was criticized and celebrated, depending on viewpoint. It was written by Cash during the time of the Watergate scandal which led to the resignation of America president Richard Nixon, who Cash had initially supported but apparently soured on due to the Vietnam War quagmire. Cash said he wrote it to “reaffirm faith in the country and the goodness of the American people.”

11. Jefferson Airplane, Rock Me Baby, (live, recorded October 1968 at Fillmore West, San Francisco, released on Bless Its Pointed Little Head, 1969) . . . The Airplane takes, er, flight on this eight-minute version of the blues standard popularized by B.B. King and Muddy Waters (as Rock Me) and covered by many. Both the King and Waters’ versions were based on the 1950 song Rockin’ and Rollin’ by Lil’ Son Jackson which itself was inspired by earlier blues songs, as is the case with many standards. The roots and branches of songs, well-known and otherwise, make for interesting reading.

12. T. Rex, The King Of The Mountain Cometh . . . That distinctive bouncy boogie, maybe repetitive but still compelling and unmistakenly the sound of T. Rex. It’s from the time of the hit album Electric Warrior, which was released in 1971 and was propelled to prominence by the hit single Get It On (Bang A Gong). The King Of The Mountain Cometh didn’t cometh into wide release until various compilations and expanded re-releases of Electric Warrior.

13. Rory Gallagher, Cradle Rock (from The Best of Rory Gallagher At The BBC) . . . A new release from the vaults, came out in October, with Gallagher on absolute fire on recordings done in studio for the 1970s BBC program Sounds Of The Seventies. That’s one disc of the 2-CD set, with the other featuring a BBC concert from 1979. It’s a terrific package and, if you really want to get serious, it’s also available as The BBC Collection – a 20 disc set that includes 18 CDs containing radio concerts and sessions from 1971 to 1986 and two Blu Ray discs of BBC TV concerts and studio performances from 1973 to 1984. I’m a big Gallagher fan and the spirit is willing but the wallet is weak as far as that comprehensive package goes although perhaps at some point and it may all wind up online; the 2-CD highlights package already is.

14. Thin Lizzy, Angel Of Death (live, from Life/Live) . . . Smokin’ version of the lead single from 1981’s Renegade album that was released on 1983’s live album which was criticized for not measuring up to Lizzy’s previous live epic, 1978’s Live And Dangerous, but what could? It’s still a great song and a great version featuring good riffing and soloing from perennial Lizzy guitarist Scott Gorham and hired gun John Sykes, later of the hair metal mid- to late 1980s version of Whitesnake.

15. Motorhead, Stone Dead Forever . . . Typically propulsive Motorhead yet at the same time strangely, maybe, for such a tune, melodic. It’s from the 1979 album Bomber, produced by former Traffic and Rolling Stones collaborator Jimmy Miller.

16. Flash And The Pan, Up Against The Wall . . . This one wasn’t originally on the planning radar for this show but I was in the car on Saturday evening, going out to get some grub; usually I play music but I turned the radio on to the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey game. The Leafs were in St. Louis, down late in a game they’d lose 4-2 and the play-by-play guy says “they’re up against the wall.” My thoughts immediately turned to this Flash And The Pan track from their 1982 album Headlines. Inspiration comes from anywhere, everywhere.

17. Roxy Music, Like A Hurricane (live) . . . I first heard this terrific cover of the Neil Young song on The High Road 4-song vinyl EP with its Roxy “Musique’ cover which I bought in early 1983. It later came out – along with the other three songs from the EP – on the Heart Still Beating live album released in 1990. The other three songs were Can’t Let Go, My Only Love and Roxy’s cover of John Lennon’s Jealous Guy.

18. Emerson, Lake & Palmer, Black Moon . . . Almost industrial metallic, latter/later day ELP, somewhat uncharacteristic; maybe they were reaching, bereft of ideas so trying to get on a musical train, that’s essentially what the critics said. Whatever. A good song is a good song, no matter by whom and it’s all of course subjective. I dig this title cut from ELP’s 1992 release.

19. Elvis Presley, Paralyzed . . . Great boogie rockabilly, relatively unknown to those understandably owning, listening to or being familiar only with Elvis’s well-known hits. This one’s from his 1956 studio album simply titled Elvis, his second studio album, released in October 1956. I’ve always been one to, like many, being an Elvis compilation guy but in recent months, yes I’ve told this tale before, I was in my friendly neighborhood music store and lo and behold they had on CD a 4-disc, 8-album box set of Elvis’s early studio albums, and it cost me maybe $15. It’s about $50 at least on Amazon. I had to have it, got it, never a regret.

Presley was truly great and further to that, during Elvis’s time it was the practice that artists generally performed but didn’t write their own material; people like Bob Dylan and The Beatles and The Rolling Stones and Kinks later changed that. So, I’ll admit that in my younger days I somewhat dismissed Elvis, while enjoying his hit songs, due to his not writing songs but I came to realize and understand the circumstances under which he and others of his time operated. Yet even so, for all that, he could and did write albeit not extensively and beyond even that, any viewing on available video of him in studio sessions with his band reveals just how in charge musically he always was: he knew what he wanted musically, how to achieve it, and he did. Amazing artist.

20. The Birds, No Good Without You Baby . . . Not The Byrds but The Birds, an early band Ron Wood later of the Jeff Beck Group, Faces and The Rolling Stones, was a member of. A gritty, wonderfully dirty, raunchy version of a Marvin Gaye track from his 1965 album How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You which of course features that hit single title cut. The Birds version of No Good Without You Baby, depending on source including the 2-CD Wood anthology The Essential Crossexion, adds the word ‘baby’ to the song title and it’s in the lyrics although Gaye’s album lists it as simply No Good Without You. But that happens a lot, witness my earlier playing of Rock Me Baby by Jefferson Airplane, which B.B. King listed as Rock Me Baby while Muddy Waters did the same song, but titled it Rock Me. The Birds/Marvin Gaye song was written by William Stevenson, still around at age 87 and his name might not spring immediately to mind but he wrote or co-wrote many hits including Hitch Hike (covered in their early days by The Rolling Stones, among others) and most notably Dancing In The Street and Devil With The Blue Dress aka Devil With The Blue Dress On.

21. The Rolling Stones, Gotta Get Away . . . I gotta, gotta, gotta get away, to quote the song lyrics . . . time’s up for this show. I exit via this I think underappreciated Stones song, recorded in 1965. It was the B-side in the USA to As Tears Go By.

Two albums – The Who’s Quadrophenia, from 1973 and Billy Joel’s The Stranger, released in 1977. We’ll see, but I expect this will be my last album set for a while after six straight Saturdays, back to individual songs or some other theme next Saturday. My album commentaries are beneath each record’s track list.

The Who – Quadrophenia

1. I Am The Sea
2. The Real Me
3. Quadrophenia
4. Cut My Hair
5. The Punk And The Godfather
6. I’m One
7. The Dirty Jobs
8. Helpless Dancer
9. Is It In My Head?
10. I’ve Had Enough
11. 5:15
12. Sea And Sand
13. Drowned
14. Bell Boy
15. Doctor Jimmy
16. The Rock
17. Love Reign O’er Me

I agree with the allmusic review site’s assessment of Quadrophenia – which was about the British mod culture of the late 1950s into the 1960s that was at least part of the roots of The Who – that “the concept might ultimately have been too obscure and confusing for a mass audience.” Particularly if you didn’t grow up in the UK of that time.

But, as allmusic also says, and I concur, the album is full of great songs that can stand on their own, including the well-known and excellent singles 5:15, The Real Me and Love Reign O’er Me. And, also, to me, The Punk And The Godfather, The Dirty Jobs, Sea and Sand, Doctor Jimmy . . . so many, and so many of them propelled by Keith Moon’s propulsive rat-a-tat drumming.

The song 5:15 and its lyrics “out of my brain on the 5:15; out of my brain on the train” always resonates with me not only because I like the song but because, like the song narrator Jimmy, I, too, was out of my brain on a train although he had consumed lots of drugs, in my case it was drink.

Fall 1978, I had worked for a year to save money to pay my way through college, so at the place I worked friends and colleagues took me out for a mostly liquid lunch on my last day, where I got reasonably hammered such that I dozed off on the GO commuter train – and it quite likely was a 5:15 pm or so train – home from Toronto to Oakville.

Not sure why an attendant wouldn’t have woken me up at the Oakville stop, the end of the line going west (if you wanted to GO further west back then, you had to grab a connecting bus) but anyway when I finally woke from my slumber I looked out the train window and I was in Pickering – the eastern end of the line on the other side of Toronto. That sobered me up right quick as back we went, Pickering back to Toronto’s Union station and on to Oakville – a half-hour commute home on the train, thanks to me being out of my brain, becoming a 2.5 hour round-trip: Toronto-Oakville-Toronto-Pickering-Toronto-Oakville. Back and forth we go . . .

Billy Joel – The Stranger

1. Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song)
2. The Stranger
3. Just The Way You Are
4. Scenes From An Italian Restaurant
5. Vienna
6. Only The Good Die Young
7. She’s Always A Woman
8. Get It Right The First Time
9. Everybody Has A Dream

A huge album for Billy Joel not only due to its massive success but it arguably saved his career. Joel had achieved success with his 1973 album Piano Man and its title track hit single, although the entire album is terrific and includes another of his classics, the epic Captain Jack. But his subsequent releases, Streetlife Serenade and, particularly, Turnstiles (despite the presence of the hit single Say Goodbye To Hollywood) saw a sharp decline in sales and chart positions such that Joel was at risk of being dropped by Columbia Records. Then came The Stranger, with singles like Just The Way You Are, Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song), Only The Good Die Young, She’s Always A Woman and the epic non-single classic Scenes From An Italian Restaurant and the rest is history. It’s one of those albums where every song is familiar including one of my favorites, the title track which was released as a single in Japan where it hit No. 2.

A Halloween/horror-themed set. My track-by-track tales follow the bare-bones list.

1. The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack, Science Fiction/Double Feature
2. The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack, Over At The Frankenstein Place
3. Alice Cooper, Welcome To My Nightmare
4. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Little Demon
5. Ramones, I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement
6. David Bowie, Subterraneans
7. Blue Oyster Cult, Subhuman (live, from On Your Feet Or On Your Knees)
8. The Rolling Stones, Dancing With Mr. D
9. Alice Cooper, Devil’s Food/The Black Widow
10. Link Wray, The Black Widow
11. Link Wray, Switchblade
12. Ramones, Chain Saw
13. Link Wray, Jack The Ripper
14. Talking Heads, Psycho Killer (live, from Stop Making Sense)
15. Alice Cooper, I Love The Dead
16. Tom Waits, Whistlin’ Past The Graveyard
17. Black Sabbath, Disturbing The Priest
18. Link Wray, The Shadow Knows
19. AC/DC, Night Prowler
20. Concrete Blonde, Bloodletting (The Vampire Song)
21. Tim Curry, No Love On The Street
22. Savoy Brown, Hellbound Train

My track-by-track tales:

1. The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack, Science Fiction/Double Feature . . . College daze memories come flooding back listening to any song from this album, released along with the movie in 1975. Thanks to the brilliance of singer/songwriter/musician/producer and brains behind the whole thing Richard O’Brien, who played Riff Raff in the movie, plus Tim Curry as Frank-N-Furter, it’s a terrific and fun listen. This album opener name drops many classic sci-fi or horror movies and features that to me classic line sung so memorably by O’Brien: “I wanna go . . . in the back row.” A pre-Bat Out Of Hell album (released in 1977) Meat Loaf appears in the movie as delivery boy/biker Eddie, performing the song Hot Patootie – Bless My Soul.

I first saw the film in a quiet college auditorium in 1978 as part of a film elective I took during my journalism school days so I first saw it unvarnished, without all the rice-throwing and other participatory elements that became part of the Rocky Horror cult phenomenon. So I actually had an appreciation for it as a movie, such as it was, without having to figure out whatever actual plot or flow existed amid the extraneous stuff that developed around the movie and stage plays of it.

I did, however, soon enough get into all of it, attending and participating in the movie, six times as I recall, at a theatre in Burlington, Ontario that ran it throughout the summer of 1979. Fun times.

2. The Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack, Over At The Frankenstein Place . . . Triple vocalists – Richard O’Brien again with his stirring “into my life . . . into my liiiiiffe’ refrain halfway through – Susan Sarandon in one of her first film roles and her co-star/fiance in the movie, Barry Bostwick.

3. Alice Cooper, Welcome To My Nightmare . . . It’s a deep cuts show and this was a single but I do play the occasional single, obscure, not heard in ages, or otherwise. Title track from the 1975 album whose big hit was Only Women Bleed. Welcome To My Nightmare made it to No. 45 on the Billboard charts and has been ranked in the top 10 on many lists of best Halloween songs.

4. Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, Little Demon . . . Best, I think, to let the influential shock rocker tell his own tale:

“You gotta be real cool to hear the words he said . . . Mugmgmgugmgubumububmub” . . .

“He made the sky turn green, he made the grass turn red
He even put pretty hair on Grandma’s bald head
He made the moon back up, he even pushed back time
He took the Frutti out of Tutti, he had the devil drinkin’ wine”

Etc.

5. Ramones, I Don’t Wanna Go Down To The Basement . . . Nor do you want to look under your bed, your pillow, all those childhood scare locations. The monsters await . . .

6. David Bowie, Subterraneans . . . underneath, in the caverns real or imagined in your mind. Bowie, dark, ambient, from Low, part of his 1970s Berlin trilogy of albums – the others being Heroes and Lodger. This minimalist, lyrically speaking, musical piece has nothing to do with Halloween or horror, but it fits.

7. Blue Oyster Cult, Subhuman (live, from On Your Feet Or On Your Knees) . . . Extended live version of the typically early BOC-spooky type piece, originally – three minutes shorter than this 7-plus minute version – on the studio album Secret Treaties, released in 1974.

8. The Rolling Stones, Dancing With Mr. D . . . From the 1973 album Goats Head Soup, thought to be something of a sequel to 1968’s Sympathy For The Devil, depending on who is analyzing the Stones’ output. A different vibe, more pedestrian perhaps as some critics have dismissed it, but compelling.

9. Alice Cooper, Devil’s Food/The Black Widow . . . From the Welcome To My Nightmare album featuring a fun spoken word cameo from actor Vincent Price in celebration of would-be spider supremacy.

10. Link Wray, The Black Widow . . . Not the same Black Widow song. Just typical instrumental intensity from the original master and maybe inventor of the power chord, depending on who and what one reads.

11. Link Wray, Switchblade . . . From Wray’s 1979 Bullshot album, with a similar riff to the B-52’s song Planet Claire, released on that band’s debut album from the same year.

12. Ramones, Chain Saw . . . Switchblades, now chainsaws, leading to . . . a no doubt foggy night. In London.

13. Link Wray, Jack The Ripper . . . Dark, spooky, moody, expressive.

14. Talking Heads, Psycho Killer (live, from Stop Making Sense movie/soundtrack album) . . . A different, similar and recognizable but funkier live arrangement of the hit (although while well known it just scaped inside the top 100 at No. 97) from the Heads’ 1977 debut album Talking Heads: 77. In the concert movie, Head, er, Head David Bryne notably wore an oversized suit.

15. Alice Cooper, I Love The Dead . . . The Billion Dollar Babies album, released in February, 1973, was a constant presence on my high school cafeteria juke box. You could count on hearing a tune from it no matter what time of day you went in for breakfast, lunch, a card game or just a break. But it was usually Hello Hooray, Elected, Generation Landslide, the title cut and No More Mr. Nice Guy, not this tongue in cheek take on necrophilia. Probably wouldn’t have been allowed.

16. Tom Waits, Whistlin’ Past The Graveyard . . . Originally on Waits’ 1978 album Blue Valentine, it was later covered by Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, who I played earlier, and definitely fits Hawkins’ shock rock persona such that some think Waits covered Hawkins.

17. Black Sabbath, Disturbing The Priest . . . I could have chosen any number of Sabbath songs for a show like this, from all eras and singers of Sabbath. But I decided to go with this one, from the 1983 album Born Again, the one and only album Sabbath did – complete with controversial devil baby album cover – with Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan out front as lead singer and whose maniacal vocals are the feature attraction along with Tony Iommi’s cascading, metallic guitar riffs.

18. Link Wray, The Shadow Knows . . . Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men . . . followed by diabolical cackles. ‘Nuff said.

19. AC/DC, Night Prowler . . . Bluesy hard rocker from the last album, Highway To Hell, the band did before lead singer Bon Scott’s death. It caused AC/DC controversy as serial killer/rapist Richard Ramirez, an AC/DC fan, used the song title as one of his nicknames (actually the Night Stalker but Night Prowler was a favorite song of his) although the band always said it’s about a boy sneaking into his girlfriend’s room at night. However, reading the lyrics – and I’m not criticizing the band – one can see a disturbed person using them for their own ends.

20. Concrete Blonde, Bloodletting (The Vampire Song) . . . Brooding title cut from the band’s commercial breakthrough album, released in 1990 and featuring the compelling vocals of one of my favorite singers, Johnette Napolitano. The song was the first single from the album but didn’t do much on the charts. It was the later-released singles, Joey in particular plus Caroline and Tomorrow, Wendy which had the biggest impact.

21. Tim Curry, No Love On The Street . . . The song, from Curry’s 1979 album Fearless, has nothing – that I can tell – to do with Halloween or horror. But, guitarist Dick Wagner of Alice Cooper fame plays on it, I played Alice earlier in the set and Curry was the key character Dr. Frank-N-Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, which I opened the set with, so here you go. Curry, as I’ve often mentioned, is a terrific talent; a scream as an actor/singer in Rocky Horror and also the movie Clue, a 1985 film adaptation of the board game where he hilariously plays the butler. Curry sadly suffered a serious stroke in 2012 but continues to perform as a voice actor and singer.

22. Savoy Brown, Hellbound Train . . . Pulsating, propulsive nine-minute title cut from the British blues band’s 1972 album. I saw them in 2013 at the Kitchener Blues Festival, great show with some of the performances available on YouTube. Founding and forever member, guitarist and chief songwriter Kim Simmonds died in 2022, and the band with him.

Three albums I think are classics: Dire Straits’ self-titled debut, released in 1978, Jethro Tull’s Stand Up from 1969 and Fragile by Yes, released in 1971. My album commentaries are beneath each record’s track list.

Dire Straits – Dire Straits

1. Down To The Waterline
2. Water Of Love
3. Setting Me Up
4. Six Blade Knife
5. Southbound Again
6. Sultans Of Swing
7. In The Gallery
8. Wild West End
9. Lions

I was in college when the first Dire Straits album came out in 1978 and its one of those cases where one buys an album for the hit single, in this case Sultans Of Swing, only to be rewarded with a stellar start to finish blues-rock record in the vein of J.J. Cale and what Eric Clapton had been offering via his 1970s albums like 461 Ocean Boulevard, Slowhand and such. It showed that Dire Straits was a band with staying power. I was inspired to play it thanks to a conversation with an old high school and college friend who mentioned to me he had been working out to Dire Straits’ third album, Making Movies, the other day. I replied that it was a good reminder to me to play the band, since I had not in a while. So here we are and since my pal “4C” (his clever nomenclature, a play on his surname) just listened to Making Movies, I thought I’d not repeat that one – great album though it is as is all Dire Straits and Mark Knopfler solo work – and go with the debut.

Jethro Tull – Stand Up

1. A New Day Yesterday
2. Jeffrey Goes To Leicester Square
3. Bouree
4. Back To The Family
5. Look Into The Sun
6. Nothing Is Easy
7. Fat Man
8. We Used To Know
9. Reasons For Waiting
10. For A Thousand Mothers

From what I’ve read over the years, including in liner notes on various re-issues, Stand Up is perhaps Tull leader Ian Anderson’s favorite Jethro Tull album. Mine, too, even if I didn’t know of Anderson’s opinion. Anderson tends to look at it from the point of view, and he’s said this on the record, that to him it was in essence the first Jethro Tull album although it was the second release by the band, coming out in 1969. This Was was the actual first Tull release, in 1968. But, while excellent, that was a blues-rock album with blues-oriented guitarist Mick Abrahams in the band and, as Anderson has said, the title This Was perfectly reflects the situation because that’s where Tull ‘was’ with Abrahams on board.

Anderson wanted to diversify the sound to, as he describes in the expanded Stand Up release liner notes, not just blues but to jazz, classical, folk and what wasn’t yet termed ‘world’ music. Abrahams didn’t and left. In came new guitarist Martin Barre and the tone of Tull was set for the future as the band, in various lineups but always until recently with the core duo of Anderson and Barre leading the way, went on to the wonderfully eclectic and unique sound of Jethro Tull’s music in all its myriad forms as anyone who has ever dipped more than a toe into Tull’s ouvre would recognize.

Stand Up is full of great songs, including We Used To Know, which the Eagles – who had toured with Tull in 1972 – have long been accused of plagiarizing for their hit Hotel California. However Don Felder of the Eagles, who wrote the music, didn’t join the Eagles until 1974 and has said he was unaware of Tull outside of the fact he knew their leader played flute. And Ian Anderson has always been gracious – there’s a video on YouTube of him discussing it – that while the Eagles may have subconsciously been influenced by We Used To Know, it wasn’t ripped off and he’s complimentary about Hotel California. “It’s not plagiarism,” Anderson has been quoted as saying while further suggesting there are only so many notes and chord sequences available in a rock music context.

“It’s just the same chord sequence. It’s in a different time signature, different key, different context. … Harmonic progression — it’s almost a mathematical certainty that you’re going to crop up with the same thing sooner or later if you’re strumming a few chords on a guitar.”

I have two distinct memories tied to the Stand Up album, beyond just playing it often as I never tire of it even 55 (!) years later. The first came in 1969 when my family was living in Peru 1967-70 as my dad was working there. Many of the older kids would go back to the United States or Canada for high school, and so every holiday time became a wonderful reunion as they returned to Peru and their families for Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving . . . and they’d often bring with them what was new and big in music at the time in North America. We could get it all in Peru, eventually, but this was a different time, obviously, not the instant time of today in all things, so sometimes it took a while but we had a sort of quicker messenger service via our older siblings.

So, in 1969 here came my older brother Rob, then age 18, with two new albums, Led Zeppelin II and Jethro Tull Stand Up. I was going to play Zep II as well on this show until I checked and saw I’d played it on a recent Saturday album replay. In any case, for we younger siblings still listening to earlier Beatles, Rolling Stones and Monkees, Zeppelin and Tull represented something entirely new, often heavier (certainly in Zep’s case) and simply different. It was jarring at first, to be honest, but we quickly grew to like it and it’s via Stand Up that I became a Jethro Tull fan, and I remain so to this day, having seen the band in concert numerous times.

And having seen Tull in concert leads to my other cherished memory, thanks to Stand Up. I had seen Tull in 1987 at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Gardens with my then-wife and in 1988 our first of two sons was born, the second in 1992 and they were both soon immersed in my what’s now termed classic rock music to the point where we created our own fun air guitar band with which we’d play and sing along to the Stones, Tull, AC/DC, The Beatles, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and whoever else. And by 1998 I had taken my older son, then age 9, to see The Rolling Stones in Toronto on their Bridges To Babylon album tour and by 2000 there we were in Hamilton Place, taking in Jethro Tull two days after my eldest son Mark’s 12th birthday. By then he knew all of Tull’s familiar tunes like Aqualung but the lights go down and here comes Ian Anderson from stage right doing a one-legged jig cutting across the stage, his flute ferociously accompanying the band kicking into the set opener For A Thousand Mothers, from Stand Up and then quickly into Nothing Is Easy from the same album. The opening reminded me somewhat of that first time I saw Tull, the 1987 tour in support of the then-current album Crest Of A Knave when they opened with Songs From The Wood and Anderson just appeared way, way stage right almost, from our vantage point, as if he were in the seats, and on with that concert.

Back to the Hamilton show. Mark had heard the Stand Up album, of course. But as the show went on and Tull went with an arguably deeper cuts set that included Ian Anderson solo stuff to material from the then-new album J-Tull Dot Com (this was still relatively early days of the internet, accounting for the then-maybe clever but now dated album title) I worried that perhaps they weren’t playing enough classic material familiar to him although Aqualung, Locomotive Breath and Thick As A Brick were present and accounted for.

Yet, I was gratified that Mark thoroughly enjoyed what was an entertaining show and we went on together to become a father-son Tull touring buddy duo, seeing the band again in 2002, 2005 and 2007 until, sadly, in 2007 we looked at each other midway through and acknowledged that, decent enough show at Toronto’s Massey Hall but Ian Anderson’s voice was just too shot – hence the band playing long instrumental passages that don’t exist on the actual recorded songs to cover for him – to enjoy seeing and hearing live anymore although Anderson and Tull continue to record and tour to this day. But we’ll always of course have the brilliant albums, and the memories, of which Stand Up is one.

Yes – Fragile

1. Roundabout
2. Cans And Brahms
3. We Have Heaven
4. South Side Of The Sky
5. Five Per Cent For Nothing
6. Long Distance Runaround
7. The Fish (Schindleria Praematurus)
8. Mood For A Day
9. Heart Of The Sunrise

Progressive rock, which to some, and understandably, can mean long and interminable yet not so with this great album which is prog and commercial all at once. A high school friend of mine, football teammate and sometime gym workout partner swore by this album and why not? I wasn’t much into progressive rock at the time although I, like most people, knew the hit single Roundabout. But him often talking about Fragile prompted me to eventually listen to the whole thing and buy it, never a regret. Also about Yes and Fragile; same friend told me of someone he knew, who only listened to Yes. Nothing else. Not sure I fully believed it but I’m sure it was close to being accurate and I get it because I often feel that way about The Rolling Stones, or Deep Purple or Jethro Tull or The Beatles, just to name a few of my favorite bands. As I often say, the best band/artist, song or album ever is the one you are listening to right now, in the moment, if you like it.

I later knew a work colleague who was the same with Bruce Springsteen. I was kidding him one day and said something like “you don’t listen to anything else?” and he replied, ‘no, why would I?”. I fully respect that and it also reminds me of a good pal who defaults to listening to the Stones’ Beggars Banquet album depending on mood – good, bad or indifferent – as a sort of cure-all and a great one it is. And that’s the thing about great music. Sure, it’s great to explore new stuff, and I do, we all do and we arguably should. Even if ‘new’ might mean not just actual new bands and songs but old stuff we overlooked or just weren’t exposed to previously. But, every minute spent exploring new stuff means fewer minutes to listen yet again and have that satisfying experience of listening to, say, Beggars Banquet – or Fragile – for the millionth time. At some of our ages there’s more time behind us than ahead, so why waste it and not just do and listen to what one enjoys?