Ian Anderson and Jethro Tull were ready to call bullshit on prog rock, years before the chattering rock press began to puncture its facade under the cover of digging the “authenticity” of punk.
He felt their 1971 breakthrough album Aqualung had been unfairly categorized as a concept album, and chafed too at the idea that Jethro Tull was a progressive rock act at all. So, he set about writing a pomposity-popping caricature of every over-stuffed, time-shifting set-piece album of the time.
Thick As a Brick was meant, it seemed, to incite as much hilarity as it did ruminations on where the whole genre was headed.
Cheeky, often unintelligible themes (said to be an eight-year-old prodigy’s poetry-competition scribblings) were coupled with unique packaging (a mock newspaper with dry, Monty Python-esque stories like “Sand-Castle Man Calls It a Day” and “Mongrel Dog Soils Actor’s Foot”). Then there was their choice of musical construction: One continuous, sometimes seemingly free-form track, with the only original break arriving as listeners flipped over the old vinyl LP.
Thick As a Brick arrived on March 10, 1972, and then – much to Jethro Tull’s imagined horror – promptly went to No. 1 in America. Turns out, even when they were trying to make fun of those extended noodling passages, Jethro Tull couldn’t help but add their own smart flourishes.
The completed album stirred in not just the expected classical influences, but also jazz and (in what had become Tull’s calling card) no small amount of snarky folk. If anything, the band plays with more touch and finesse, but also more power, than it did even on the celebrated Aqualung.
Credit goes, on first blush, to new drummer Barrie Barlow, a lighter touch who had replaced the hard-driving Clive Bunker after Jethro Tull’s initial four albums. But the attention to detail, willingness to follow rhythmic cross patterns, and general musical camaraderie is undeniable across the entire ensemble – something that’s underlined by the necessary form that these sessions took back then.
Guitarist Martin Barre, bassist Jeffrey Hammond, keyboardist John Evan, Barlow and Anderson did much of the basic tracking for Thick As a Brick (and even some of the vocals and solos) in single takes, since stopping would require the group to go back to the very beginning of the lengthy piece.
That gives the album this present, fizzy energy that’s often missing among typically layered, overdubbed prog efforts. In this way, Thick As a Brick, with its earthy, effects-free sensibility, sounds like little else from its own era. Too, that tabloid-inspired sleeve couldn’t have been more different than the magical fantasy worlds that often graced their contemporaries’ albums. Audiences may not have gotten all of the jokes, but they loved trying to sort out its many clues, anyway.
Jethro Tull, and this may be the funniest part of all, ended up making one of the most distinctive prog albums ever – even as it tried to spoof the very idea.
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