Aqualung (1971) - Jethro Tull

For the benefit of the uninitiated, Jethro Tull is an eccentric 70s jam-band which developed ideas above its status. Thanks largely to the charm and charisma of one-leg-standing, flute-wielding frontman Ian Anderson, they got away with it. Consequently, Jethro Tull (here abbreviated to ‘Tull’ or ‘the Tull’) now represents the genesis (no pun intended) of an entire genre of whimsical, folk-influenced prog.

Aqualung is the Tull’s fourth album, and constitutes half of the band’s output from a period in which they achieved a brief disaffiliation from mediocrity. The other half is Thick as a Brick.

With a shift in focus away from the haphazard improvisation that characterised their earlier albums, Aqualung exploded, furious, wild-eyed and spitting, into record shops in 1971 with a mix of well-crafted tunes, concise lyrics and just a trifle more than a healthy dose of whimsy.

The concept album controversy

Aqualung is often bandied about as one of the archetypal concept albums, along with Pink Floyd’s The Wall and Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway. However, Ian Anderson has consistently maintained this to be an inappropriate categorisation. In his words, the album is ‘just a bunch of songs’ of which ‘three or four are ... keynote pieces for the album’. What Anderson is describing is a low concept album. His ignorance of the nature of his own creation, while distressing, is forgivable when we take into account that he regards the album in the same way that he did upon its release, whereas we view it in a much broader context.

Unfortunately, Anderson’s description of the album as ‘just a bunch of songs’ is discrediting to his ability as a songwriter in that it reveals his lack of thought or perhaps care about the album’s unity and coherency as a whole, both musically and conceptually. The way he perceives the album is as a collection of songs. This could be comparable to, for example, Steely Dan’s The Royal Scam. This is a collection of songs with no running story or even basic concept such as religion or bereavement. However, it achieves unity as an album through its consistent musical style and emotional mood, which is one of disillusionment, anger and defiance. With Aqualung, we have the themes of religion and faith and an exploration of the lives of homeless and abandoned characters. Add to this the eponymous recurring character Aqualung and the possible interpretation that he is an alter-ego of Anderson and therefore the protagonist in most of the songs, and it is hard to deny not only the possibility, but the depth of the concept. However, there is no clearly-defined story or overall narrative apparent in the lyrics alone, unlike the subterranean escapades of Genesis’ Rael or the gradual psychological obliteration of Pink Floyd’s fading rock star.

The conclusion I draw is that Aqualung is indeed a concept album, but one of a more recently-established category, the low-concept album, of which it may be considered a blueprint.

Artwork

The artwork is a painting based on photographs taken by Anderson’s wife of tramps on the Thames Embankment. These photos are said to have inspired some of the album’s lyrics. While it is a striking, iconic image, the artwork is very uninviting. It is dark, smudgy and colourless, not at all in keeping with the bright, crisp sound of the album’s production quality. However, it does superficially fit the lyrics describing the various unsavoury characters of Aqualung, of course portraying its titular anti-hero. But this is as deep as the connection between the image and the lyrics goes. Often witty, with a cheeky, playful sense of humour, the lyrics, along with Anderson’s delivery, are lively and attractive, unlike the repellent cover art.

It is also worth mentioning that the man pictured more than slightly resembles Anderson, circa 1971, which has given rise to the school of thought that Aqualung is an imagined alternative personality of the band’s frontman.

Lyrics

I wish I were able to describe the lyrics as ‘ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous’. Unfortunately, they have a definite tendency towards the ridiculous. The only moment of real lyrical sublimity comes in Slipstream, an introspective and philosophical piece which owes a lot of its illusion of poignancy to its ambiguity. Cheap Day Return, another inward-looking piece, tells a short and personal story of how Anderson went to visit his terminally ill father and was asked by the nurse for his autograph. Anderson’s words are thought-provoking, but he fails to make any kind of point with them. Then again, perhaps that was his intention, just to tell a short story which has strongly impacted him.

Other than this, the lyrics are, for the most part, light-hearted and clever. Some highlights include a rather poetic passage from the title track describing ‘December’s foggy freeze and the ice that clings on to your beard is screaming agony’, along with the flowers that ‘bloom like madness in the spring’. However, this evocative imagery is soon replaced with rather childish innuendos in Wond’ring Aloud concerning ‘tasting the smell of toast as the butter runs’ and ‘spilling crumbs on the bed’. That said, this tricksy, clever-clogs style is employed well in Mother Goose, with the ‘elephants and lions ... in Piccadilly Circus’, and the masterfully-told fable of Locomotive Breath.

The theme of religion is explored most extensively in the lyrics of My God and Wind Up. These both present interesting propositions about the nature of God, locked in His ‘golden cage’ and ‘not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday’. However, Wind Up is somewhat ham-fisted and cringe-worthy, sounding like the ramblings of a rebellious public school boy complaining that he was ‘groomed ... for success’ and challenging the religious authorities to ‘excommunicate [him]’. This is the weakest piece on Aqualung, both musically and lyrically, and very nearly wrecks the whole album.

Overall, the lyrics are a definite asset to Aqualung, with a kind of folky familiarity that recalls times when everyone in a community knew everyone else, including Charlie who stole the handle, Cousin Jack, left to put the bottles back, and Jonny Scarecrow making his rounds in a coat stolen from a snowman. The strongest pieces, lyrically, are Mother Goose and Locomotive Breath. Mother Goose in particular has a strong set of characters, created with  only a few words, like the Chicken Fancy ‘with his long red beard, and his sister’s weird, she drives a lorry’. But we also learn more of the protagonist’s delusional nature, wandering around London, not understanding why people can’t see that he is ‘Long-John Silver’, or a ‘schoolboy’ for that matter.

Structure

The album is very well-structured, with a discerningly distributed variety of intensities throughout. The three acoustic-based pieces serve as bridges between the longer compositions, an effective technique of breaking up the album. The change from Side A to side B is also exemplary, with Up To Me providing a melancholic but climactic finale to the first half, leading nicely into My God which opens the second half tentatively, soon followed by a resolutely strong kick back into gear. This also heralds the introduction-proper of the themes of faith and religion.

The only mistake Tull have made structurally is putting Wind-Up at the end. In fact, including the piece at all was probably a mistake. It makes for a weak and unsatisfying close.

Music

In broad musical style, there are two types of pieces on this album: slower-paced, soft-edged compositions, and faster, hard-hitting, riff-driven songs. These are divided as follows:

Aqualung – the latter

Cross-Eyed Mary – the latter

Cheap Day Return – the former

Mother Goose – the latter

Wond’ring Aloud – the former

Up To Me – the latter

My God – the latter, broadly speaking

Hymn 43 – the latter

Slipstream – the former

Locomotive Breath – the latter

Wind Up – the former

The one exception to this is My God, the longest of the pieces on the album, featuring more traits of an extended composition than a song, with a flute cadenza and plainchant-inspired vocal breakdown, making for some unexpected and compelling textural shifts. Another more compositionally complex corner of the album is the introduction to Cross-Eyed Mary. The rest of the piece has little going for it, with its stunted, arpeggiated riff. However, the beginning features some volatile harmonic progression along with a superbly-implemented flute part, dripping with trill and flutter-tongue-induced suspense.

The album has a lot of riffs, all of the compositions of the latter kind being anchored by one of its own. Most shockingly riff-driven is Hymn 43 whose palm-muted chugging cries out “proto-metal”, causing metal scholars everywhere to look up from the Beatles’ I want You (She’s So Heavy) from Abbey Road, and start furiously scribbling in skull-shaped notepads. Not to mention, it is irresistibly head-bang-able.

Stand-out performances come from Anderson and guitarist Martin Barre, whose accomplished improvising skills, honed in earlier albums, are now put to good use in a more structured sonic environment. Anderson’s virtuosic flute playing brings a vital extra dimension to the overall sound. In fact, Anderson is more or less single-handedly responsible for the band’s sound. While other members came and went, his stalwart flute, bright acoustic guitar sound and mellow vocals underpin every recording. However, on a few tracks, mainly the first two, Anderson’s vocals are rather raspy, low and forced. Thankfully, this is soon replaced by a warm, rich tone, riddled with subtleties and sprinkles of vocal oddities including succinct guffaws, and a strange larynx-rooted exclamation of disgust in Wind Up. There are few singers charismatic and likeable enough to get away with chuckling at their own lyrics in recorded takes, but somehow, Anderson manages it.

The rest of the band is solid. The keys have a few nice moments to themselves at the beginnings of My God and Locomotive Breath, but otherwise play a largely supportive role. The bass is mostly not to be noticed, and while this may be a missed opportunity to hear some interesting material in a lower octave, at least the fact that it mostly blends in means it is just right for the music and cannot be faulted. Drummer Clive Bunker also delivers a solid performance, but shines particularly on Mother Goose with an intriguing selection of rustic-sounding percussion. The string arrangements on Slipstream are tasteful for what they are, although their presence there at all is somewhat unwelcome in that it is basically cliché and unnecessary.

Aqualung contains a number of small musical nuances, the kind one might miss upon first listening. This gives the album a high replay value and keeps the music feeling fresh decades later. A few examples to give you a flavour of these musical titbits include the buzzing jaw-harp in Locomotive Breath and the perfectly-timed off-beat tambourine which enters tantalising at the very end of Up To Me. However, the album is full of others and it is always more fun to discover these for yourself, so no more will be spoiled by being given as examples here.

The time capsule

This being the first mention of the time capsule, it would be prudent to explain it. The time capsule is a hypothetical, airtight container of infinite capacity, made from a material highly resistant to any imaginable kind of damage or decay. It is to be buried underground for future generations to discover and peruse the contents of, or perhaps to be jettisoned into space in the hopes of being happened upon by people from other worlds. In it, they would find a vinyl player (solar-power, of course) with simple, picture-based instructions for use, and a collection of records that would represent all the music I would be proud to give these people the privilege of hearing.

The question is, will Aqualung be placed in the capsule or not?

The album is beautifully structured, all apart from its very disappointing ending. Wind Up, though frustrating, is not unforgivably pedestrian and pretentious enough to outweigh all the good that the rest of Aqualung has to offer. It is lyrically strong, musically diverse and delightfully nuanced in its production and performances. Therefore, with hearty confidence, I can without regret place Jethro Tull’s Aqualung in the capsule.

~ Amstel