So Old It’s New set for Saturday, October 26, 2024

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?

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