They seemed to have a good time up in the northern part of England when Ian Anderson & co came for a visit. Read on!
Tull: never too old – yet
Jethro Tull Newcastle
Concert review by Phil Sutcliffe
YOU KNOW how supergroups are supposed to open the show with the 1812 Overture complete with real facsimile nineteenth-century Muscovite cannon and a battalion of the Green Howards rented for the day to pose as Napoleon’s army (all marching on their stomachs for authenticity)? Or if that’s felt to be a little tasteless perhaps just a Ben-Hur chariot race round the aisles? Well, the lights came up on the City Hall stage and Ian Anderson strode on alone with no special effects, no scenery bar the amps and drumkit, stared 2,500 people in the eye (for his gaze is always directed at you like the bottoms in Cezanne’s nude ‘Baigneuses’) with the roguish glint which hints at Fagin, Captain Hook and the Lincolnshire Poacher, and unleashed an earthquake of applause that would have done credit to the San Andreas fault. Anderson was magnificent. I can’t remember when I last saw such crowd rapport generated. They whistled, shouted (“Where’s your codpiece?”) and roared (“Ah that new Indian restaurant? Yes, I sympathise,” said Anderson), sang all the words in the quiet verses of old favourites, and were vibrant with reaction to every move — particularly the first time he took up the flute and perched on one leg, left foot against right knee. His chat was as dazzling and dirty as ever. And I’ve hardly mentioned the music till now because it really was a secondary pleasure. But it was about as good as Tull music can be on stage. His classics `Aqualung’ and ‘Thick As A Brick’ (the fourth number and a standing ovation) really threw the switch. They are so nakedly heavy between the more delicate flute and acoustic passages. Four ‘Songs From The Wood’ made it past the oldies and it seemed to perk up the band to be playing them though Anderson gave some credence to the Tull-go-Steeleye-Span lobby by describing ‘Jack-In-The-Green’, about a spite-like protector of England’s verdant pastures, as “typical folkie bullshit”. Anyway, the title track won over the doubters of this country cuteness with a lovely acapella vocal erupting into get-down rock that even outweighed ‘Brick’. My own favourites from ‘War Child’ were interesting: ‘Skating Away’ was all light and airy beauty but ‘Back Door Angels’ suffered from Anderson’s razzmatazz and was pretty but not touching as on the record. All round, that was entertainment and proved that Anderson isn’t too old to rock ‘n’ roll — but you have to add ‘yet’ and he knows it. The olde Englishe stuff seems to be a pleasant diversion rather than a whole new direction and he’s got to find one some time. The rather stereotyped pattern of all Tull’s work was wearing thin after nearly two hours. So try this on for size. I see him as a kind of rock Lennie Bruce, talking more, playing less, getting more serious and more funny both, bouncing off hecklers, insulting them, hitting the audience where they live on subjects like sex and politics which he already flirts with. Between raps the music would be more wild, the lyrics more pointed. He’s committed to entertainment and it’s great to receive that, but I’m sure that a pyrotechnic mind like his has even more to offer.
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Mr. Kristiansen may not have been one of the regular staff of music journalists at the NME, but he conducted a very good interview with the mainman in Tull, Ian Anderson. Maybe he should been one of the regular staff at the NME? Read on!
Jethro`s Disneyland
In a rare interview, Ian Anderson discusses the new album, stage act and the decision to play only two British concerts in `73.
By Jørgen Kristiansen
ALTHOUGH THEIR CURRENT 1973 schedule allows for only two concerts in Britain this year, there are no signs of a let up in Jethro Tull’s apparent ambition to take the title of The World’s Most Travelled Rock Band. In between sessions at North London’s Morgan Studios on the upcoming “Passion Play” album, Jethro recently completed a European tour playing to capacity houses all along the line. In Copenhagen they opened a new concert hall, and drew a sell-out crowd of 5,000 — the major part of their set, approximately 1 1/2 hours, consisting of an improvised “Thick As A Brick.” After the show Jorgen Kristiansen spoke to Ian Anderson for NME, and tackled him first on the group’s decision to play only two British concerts — the Wembley shows in late April — during 1973. Are Jethro Tull ignoring their British audiences, he asked, or simply taking it easy? “Certainly not,” says Anderson. “I can’t remember when I had my last day off. It must be well over one year ago. “This year we’re going to play three American tours – each one lasting four weeks. We’re in the middle of a European tour, and were going to the Far East and Down Under. “So far we’re not as big in Japan as we are in England and the States, but we got very good receptions in Japan the first time we played there, and we’re going back this year. “Anyway, I’m not interested in the markets, only in the music. “Besides this hard programme, we have recording plans. We’ve already taped numbers for one and a half LPs to come after ‘Passion Play’, but I’m not sure whether we’ll use this material. ” ‘Passion Play’ was also recorded almost a year ago — but the music changed a lot after we taped it. So, after a few months, we decided to do the whole thing again. Thank God we’re in a financial position where we are able to re-record, in spite of the high costs. That’s why ‘Passion Play’ has been a long time on the way.” What’s the theme of the album? “It’s a piece I wrote about life and death. But it’s not limited to that subject. ” ‘Thick As A Brick’ isn’t the same to me as when I wrote it. People can put into it what they want. As long as they like the music.”
Anderson denies that “Brick” is a religious piece, but agrees that it’s possibly about a human being searching for a higher meaning in life. It sometimes appears that Jethro has a schizoid identity — serious on records, but the essence of humour on stage. “I can’t see the paradox,” says Anderson. “Our stage act is both funny and serious. Serious because life is serious, and funny because the audience would be bored if they got more than two hours of seriousness.” He also denies that his behaviour on stage, like a flamingo gone beserk, is a choreographed piece that takes away concentration on the music. “I’m just acting because I’m living the music; it makes me act. I’d be bored to death if I sat in the audience and had to listen to a group playing for hours, with no movement.” Are his movements with the flute, then, sexually based? “Wrong. I’m not on that level. It’s just humour. Neither is it a satire on other singers. “I don’t even think Mick Jagger takes himself too seriously when he’s doing his sexy stage act. Talking about Jagger, I still think the Rolling Stones are the world’s greatest rock ‘n’ roll band. Maybe they’re not the best musicians. They’ve got charisma, though. And good ideas. Anderson feels that Jethro are the only band out of the old late 60s underground clique still regarded as underground. But the image, he says, doesn’t concern him at all. Only the music. “IN 1974,” says Anderson, “we won’t be touring as much as this year. We need a rest — a rest to create a new show totally different to most other presentations nowadays.” Explicit plans he is reluctant to discuss, but he does reveal that his ideas will need a lot of financial support and that the new show will be a kind of Jethro Tull Theatre — a whole evening with Jethro Tull, with films projected on a screen behind the stage, two female ballet dancers and animal characters played by the group. Animal characters? “Extended Walt Disney,” he says by way of explanation. “I’m very interested in animal psychology. Desmond Morris is one of my favourite writers.
“The animals in the show will have a human mind. Maybe one of the great disasters of today is that man is too far away from animals and nature.” Does he have any opinions on Jethro’s contemporaries in rock? “I’m working almost 24 hours a day in Jethro Tull, so I don’t have much time to go and see other groups. “I wouldn’t slam David Bowie — but his music does nothing to me. Alice Cooper is an interesting fellow. I don’t think he takes himself too seriously. He just creates a shocking effect — that’s what it`s about. “David Cassidy has a good voice, but awful material. He’s the typical American show biz-teenybopper, created by some smart people who probably earn a lot more than he does. “I think he’s a pretty lonely boy at the top. At least, the Osmond Brothers have each other to lean on, while Cassidy is on his own. He’s a typical industrial product. Would Anderson be able to perform in a purely entertainment group? “Certainly not. I couldn’t go on night after night just to entertain without saying a meaningful word. “It’s my personal philosophy that you have to put a mirror in front of yourself each night to see what you’ve done that day. In a way you have to analyse yourself.” Anderson’s often been attacked for his dictatorship over Jethro Tull. It’s obvious too that he’s the centre of the band. “After all, I’m the only original member left,” he counters. “But we are very much together as a group. When a group has existed a few years, one learns to tolerate other people. “I don’t believe in the Who’s we-hate-each-other gimmick which they used in the beginning. I really think they are as together as a group as we are. The other members of the band aren’t just musicians — they are friends.” Can he see a time when Jethro might return to albums built not on a theme but as a collection of songs in the old tradition? “I don’t think so. We’re very satisfied with what we’re doing now. Of course, we play music lasting for 3-5 minutes. But today it’s phrases within the whole work.”
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Some background story of Jethro Tull and an insight into the mind of that “grumpy” man called Ian Anderson. Another good one from the pen of Mr. Logan. Read on!
Easier to dislike than to like
By Nick Logan
ADMITTING that you don’t know your subject may seem a strange way to open a profile article. But I must admit straight off that I don’t know, or to be more specific don’t understand, Ian Anderson. I know a good deal of what goes on on the surface, but any deeper than that is an area Anderson appears to reserve exclusively for a very small and long standing circle of friends. Because of this, and the fact that he rarely cares about being rude to people, he is an easy person to dislike. But, even if repulsion is the result, it is difficult not to be fascinated by the bewildering complexity of one of the ablest minds to devote itself to rock music. A year ago I spent eleven days on the road with Jethro Tull in America and watched Ian at work under a variety of testing conditions, time and opportunity enough to allow insight into most personalities. But not his. Although richly informative as to how the Anderson mind acts, the tour revealed little or nothing as to how it works.
Enigmatic character
He is an enigmatic character, a 23-year-old rich in contradictions. The wild stage extrovert who on tour shuts himself off behind locked doors. The performer who will talk to and entertain with alarming confidence upwards to 18,000 people yet offstage will feign illness rather than get involved in arguments, who doesn’t go to parties or clubs, who doesn’t mix with other musicians and who has no time for either drugs or alcohol. During the American trip I was repeatedly baffled by the changes in his personality, how he could one minute be exhuberantly engaged in a game of dressing room football the next squatting on an instrument case in a black mood of hostility. A few days before Jethro Tull left for their current American tour we talked at the Andersons’ new London home, a two-storey modern house which Ian and Jenny have crammed full of old, and often bizarre, curios and furnishings. He countered my question as to whether he thought he was difficult to understand with: “I am difficult to be absolutely sure of and probably a difficult person to like because I don’t mind offending people. “If someone comes up and says `Do you want some hash? or ‘Do you want to come along to a party?’ for example, it doesn’t matter how you tell them that you are not interested it will be a big blow to them. I offend people like that at the rate of one a day.” Most of this arises from people who see Ian Anderson on stage and fix preconceived ideas of what he should be like off stage. To journalists he realises he cannot communicate through and kids who come backstage to talk to the band, to give two examples, he finds it difficult to explain that he is not what they expect. And he refuses to live a lie. “It does happen that people come backstage with the idea that I should be very friendly and open to them and a nice guy and they go away thinking I am not friendly and am a nasty guy, because unless I put on an act I have no way of getting through to them.
“I would rather hurt people in that way than offend them in a much more serious way by pretending that we have some area of communication between us when we haven’t. “A lot of people think I am just a crud and I just have to live with it.” This refusal to live a lie raises one of the most obvious sides of the Anderson character, his unpretentiousness and his honesty. On the latter, he maintains: “In some ways this is a very mentally maiming life. You have to keep looking at yourself to see how honest you are, but in other ways it does tend to get easier rather than harder.” He is his own and the band’s greatest critic, to a point where he will bend over backwards to avoid the impression of pretension. Mainly by choice, his is an isolated life; his friends can be counted on one hand. These tend to be acquaintances of a very long standing. Apart from Jenny, who was working at Chrysalis’ London office when they met, they include John Evan, the Jethro organist and pianist, and the famous Jeffrey, who Ian grew up with. Both were in his first group. Ian tells the story of that group in his own inimitable style, part truth, part colourful exaggeration. He’d had an interest in pop before — seeing that kind of life as an escape route if he failed his exams — but he didn’t get going until the sixth form when he and Jeffrey went to a youth club and were amazed to see the local beat group surrounded by girls. “There they were, all these fantastic birds, long hair, made up false eyelashes and things, crowding round this group of scabby, spotty teenagers called Johnny Breeze and the Atlantics.”
`Little girls came to see us’
Ian and Jeffrey, their minds boggling at this glimpse into a world of glamour, set off home to hatch their plans. “Jeffrey had never had a girlfriend in his life,” remembers Ian, “and saw this as his introduction to some kind of feminine attachment. He bought a bass guitar, a really pathetic £12 thing with an amp that came wrapped in a cardboard box. I had had a guitar since I was about 11. We started off as this three-piece Johnny Kidd type group playing in front rooms. Little girls came to see us.” Ian’s ambitions after he left art college were split between the music business, not necessarily performing but possibly working in a manager’s or agent’s office, and journalism. He approached the Blackpool Evening Herald to no avail. His recollections at the time were of wanting a job with some kind of freedom — “to be one’s own boss to a certain extent, to be able to meet people.” Instead he stuck with the group which had, by then, lost Jeffrey to the art world and at seven strong had become the John Evan Band, with Ian as singer and second rate guitarist. Feeling the need to play another instrument, he bought the flute a few months before the band came down to London, selling the guitar to a local music shop. Refused cash for it, he settled for a flute and a microphone in exchange. So the John Evan Band descended on London. “It was winter and very cold and dismal in Blackpool,” remembers Ian, “and the way things were at home the only thing I had to look forward to was sitting in the bedroom listening to the radio. And as things got more dismal and colder I decided it was time I moved off, feeling that some kind of move might at least bring some change of spirit.” Apart from Ian and Glenn Cornick, the band lasted two weeks before they went home. Regrouping with Mick Abrahams and Clive Bunker the newly named Jethro Tull got themselves signed with Chrysalis bosses Terry Ellis and Chris Wright who, for a time, were under the impression they still had a seven-piece band on their hands. Glenn Cornick remembers how they used to turn up for gigs and make excuses about the three-man brass section, getting delayed in accidents. Right from the beginnings, even when the band was playing unoriginal material, Ian’s personality came through the music. At the start it was the floor-length woollen overcoat, a parting present from his father when he left Blackpool, and his antics with the flute. Strangely he reasons away the “props” as a justification for him being on stage, and says he regarded his singing as “not enough.”
Found it frightening
When friends then began to point out that his character on stage was becoming a valuable commodity, and suggesting he should play more into the role, Anderson says he found it quite frightening and dropped any kind of extrovertism for some time. “After that stage it crept back,” he says, “and when it did it had nothing to do with confidence. It had begun to be a personal expression of the music, something that amplified the music to me and I hope to the audience as well. It was a visual extension of the music… as are the clothes I wore, and still do, the swirling coats and that. “I express myself through these clothes. It is like a miner putting on overalls because it is the right gear for the job.” The phrase “right gear for the job” is worth pondering on. One may wonder when Ian Anderson takes off the “right gear for the job” and, if it is a front, what lies behind it. Is it a facade to a shrewd young man who has recognised and used his assets to their utmost or the window on a rare and brilliant mind? Jeffrey, when I gave him a lift home after the interview, agreed with me that Ian had changed little or nothing since Jethro Tull but, on the other hand, registered surprise when I said that I still didn’t understand him.
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A quite interesting article where the journalist is reminded that it is called the music “business” and not the music “free for all”. Read on!
Has Jethro`s path been self-destructive? If as predicted they tour here in October. It will be a YEAR since their last gig in Britain
By Nick Logan
JETHRO TULL are in the strange position of not knowing how their current popularity stands. In person attendance figures and record sales are the usual pointers but in Jethro’s case the former is invalid and the latter wide open to argument. If they take the earliest possible option to play here, and hints dropped suggest that they will, a whole year will have passed since the band played British concerts of any description. With rock allegiances as fickle as always and new idols arriving all the time, a year is a very long time. Then there’s the record side and, although the group admits that their last album didn’t do as well as the No 1 seller “Stand Up,” the conclusions to be drawn from that are debatable. And since they’ve stopped issuing singles, further evidence on that count stops there. In my opinion, Jethro Tull have come close to doing themselves irrevocable damage by pursuing a policy that has neglected appearances in Britain for so long and I put it to organist and pianist John Evan that sales for “Benefit,” which I thought their best album to date, backed up this view.
Disappointed
“I’m not going to pretend,” John broke in, “that we are not disappointed about the album but all I can say is that when the next one is released we will be playing here. I’ll tell you whether you’re right then.” I spoke to John at the Chrysalis offices on Thursday last week, the day before Jethro were due to return to the States to complete the second half of a lengthy summer tour. They’d been back in England three weeks, during which Ian Anderson had gone down with mysterious muscular pains in his chest, causing doubts as to whether they’d make the trip. “Are we going tomorrow?,” JT manager Terry Ellis was being asked by Glenn Cornick, who’d returned worse for wear from a drinks session with the infamous Stan Webb-John “Bonzo” Bonham team. “Well, get your underwear,” replied Ellis, setting a peculiar new code of certainty. “It’s as definite as `Get your underwear.'”
Chaotic
The general Chrysalis scene was one of easy-going chaos. When told that Ian was ill, I’d replied that I would speak to Martin Barre but the nearest thing I could find to a Tull at Chrysalis when I arrived was Glenn’s San Franciscan wife Judy. Nevertheless, a pleasant half-hour was spent chatting to the charming Judy before all hell broke loose at the door with shouting, cursing voices recognisable as those of Messrs Cornick, Webb and Bonham plus Chrysalis publicist Bill Harry. When after 20 minutes the commotion died away, a harrassed Bill Harry burst into the room complaining that the Webb-Bonham syndrome had been beating him up on the floor, had taken his belongings and torn a door off its hinges. In Terry Ellis’s office, where a distant-looking John Evan was sat behind a desk, the scene was a little more controlled, although I was told that Martin Barre had gone wandering off somewhere not knowing about our interview, but saying he didn’t want to do any more anyway, while John Evan volunteered that he’d had enough of interviews as well. “I keep letting out secrets,” bemoaned John, “and then getting told that I shouldn’t have.” In Martin’s absence, John was pressed into service and we moved to the office recently deposed of its door to find that it had only one seat as well. “You have it,” said John benevolently. “I’d rather walk about anyway and vent my feelings.” His feelings, it transpired, were largely against press misinterpretation and “headline picking… when you have a guy who puts down one word every ten minutes and goes back and writes his own story around it.”
End of era
Leading on from that, John said he felt that “Benefit” represented the end of an era for Jethro Tull. “It was a culmination of ideas and influences from way back that round off that stage of Ian Anderson, writing, playing and arranging, and the group’s playing too. “Now we want to go off in a new direction. I don’t think any of us realised how different the next album will be until we put some of the tracks down.” They’ve actually cut three tracks, although before Ian went sick they had hoped for five or six. “One is a spontaneous track that took just 20 minutes to record and was done in one take. It’s just Ian and I, with me playing celeste. There’s another called ‘My God!,’ which is the only one we do on stage not recorded yet.” “To me it’s the best thing we do on stage,” offered Glenn, summoning coherence.
Secret
“It’s got a surprising middle,” continued John, breaking to ask Terry Ellis: “Can I tell him about `My God` or is it another secret?” “It’s a secret.” Returning to his earlier theme, and still pacing the room, John went on: “Musically the arrangements will be more complex and so will the songs. There’ll be a much deeper kind of feeling. Really I suppose it’s just down to more light and shade, making it much more interesting to hear.” John feels that this interest is lacking in a lot of modern music and says that, “so many groups tend to start and finish their act on the same emotional pitch, and often at the same volume.” “We are trying to go in the opposite direction, with more light and shade and colour tones. We’re looking to other directions in music to draw influences from. “I’ve been getting sheet music of classical composers to get ideas, not for songs I am writing but to try to give a different angle to Ian’s.” John is in fact trying to write material for JT and has a joint effort with Martin Barre nearing completion. As Martin’s been trying to write the same song for two years, that’s quite an achievement. Of their absence from England, John says that they needed a chance to get away — from the chase after chart singles as well as the country. “Now we have reached the stage where we want to go out and perform. We’ve gone full circle in a way and it is now the music that counts.” The criticisms that Jethro Tull are only in it for the money obviously sting. I didn’t raise the subject, but John said: “I read in a lot of papers that I said I only joined Jethro for the money. “At the beginnings of the Underground groups, their big thing was ‘Let’s not bother about the money. Let’s get away from this gold lame and haircuts scene. Let’s look like freaks wearing cheap clothing like people in the streets and let’s act like people in the street and forget the money.’
Money
“Well, I can think of one group who would not do a festival in the States unless they got 125,000 dollars. I mean, let’s not pretend the money isn’t important.” John’s point is that the money is important in varying degrees to all groups, Underground or otherwise, and that he objects when Jethro Tull are singled out for the barbs. “It all seems to be a pretence to me,” he says, “There are so many groups refusing to play except for astronomical figures but Ian and Jethro Tull, if we say anything in the press, get singled out.” Still on that subject, John says he is worried by groups demanding too high fees for gigs. “This winter there are going to be a lot of concert tours and I am sure that the prices of tickets for some of them will be double what they were, say, two years ago. “I am a bit worried that the whole thing will backfire on the groups because people will refuse to pay. It is just possible that the next six months will be a sorting out period among the bigger groups.” John wouldn’t be drawn when I asked if that meant they would be keeping concert prices down but did say: “We are not interested in pricing ourselves out.” He did give an assurance though that Jethro Tull will be playing in Britain “quite a lot” during the next six months. The earliest date they could play here, after fulfilling existing tours, is October, which is also when the next album is scheduled. And back on the “new directions,” John adds: “It will be a little less Ian and backing musicians because, by now, Martin Barre is really getting going, aided by the fact that I’ve joined. Martin’s back to dropping things and walking into doors again which means that he’s in good form. “I’ve been thrust into the limelight as the big new thing but the big new thing is not so much me joining as the fact that it gives the others, notably Martin, much more scope to contribute. I am more a release valve for pressures.”
If you have a large collection of the following magazines, don`t throw them out, but contact me as I would be very interested in these: Creem, Circus, Hit Parader and Metal Edge.
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John Evan was a mainstay in Jethro Tull all through the seventies, and in that regard he played on all those great albums they did in the 70s. He later started running his own construction company, a fact that I in many ways find to be a little strange. I am sure he did something that pleased him, but if you are a successful musician, why would you do anything else than music? He must have been really fed up or bored of music, I guess? Read on!
Jethro`s image was better than their music
That`s why 5th man John Evan was asked to join
By Nick Logan
JETHRO TULL are an honest lot. How many bands can you see admitting they were “bigger in publicity than in their music” as Martin Barre did talking candidly before their American tour of the reasons for bringing in fifth JT John Evan on piano and organ? Said the honest Mr Barre “The name Jethro Tull was so big, and we thought that the music was not good enough to substantiate it.” So they introduced John Evan to broaden their potential and, by reports coming back from the States plus the evidence here at home of the five-man Jethro on “Benefit,” they seem to have made a wise move.
Change
Not only their music has blossomed out though, so it seems, because the assured John Evan I spoke to over the transatlantic phone last week was some way removed from the shy young man who a month ago would sooner hide under a piano than face his first interview. The band, said John, had arrived in New York that morning, for a weekend stint at the Fillmore East, after three weeks on the West Coast and several concerts in Texas. John, you may recall, was enticed away from his studies as a pharmaceutical chemist to join JT and was, when I last saw him, determined to return to college when the band comes home next month to sit for his second year exams. Successful results would give him an open door to return to his studies when he has had enough of music. But five weeks with Jethro Tull appear to have somewhat deflated his eagerness to be “a chemist rather than a musician.” He says that he has barely glanced at the books he took along to study and now wishes he could get out of the exams. “I’m fitting into Jethro much better than I thought I would do,” he confessed. “Having enjoyed college I thought this would be bloody awful by comparison but it isn’t as bad as I imagined. “I’m rather relieved really that I find life with Jethro very good indeed. I’ve got much more interested in the music because as I told you before I didn’t know much about the music when I joined. I’d only heard the first album and didn’t like that much, and had only seen them once on stage.” Like Ian Anderson, John is reluctant to get drawn into social and political observations but says of America: “It has been a bit of a disappointment in some ways. You get the impression at home that it is that much bigger and better than England but the truth is it is just bigger — leave it at that.”
New songs
The group started this tour, their fourth, with a vastly altered act to take in new material and according to John it hasn’t needed much changing en route to allow for audience responses. What has changed though is John’s organ and piano playing: “At the start I had to do more or less what Ian told me to but now I’ve been with them for a while I am able to use ideas of my own. “I found that I really did fit in well with them right from the start. No, I can’t say that I’ve had any nerves at all — apart from the Long Beach Arena where there was a 15,000 audience and it was rather nerve-wracking for all of us. “We’ve been getting varied receptions. They’ve all been very enthusiastic but in different ways… and the way they react depends on the size and the venue. There seems to be a critical size in audiences. “At Long Beach there was a huge crowd in a restricted space and there was mass herding to the front so that people behind the first few rows got crushed and couldn’t see. “As far as we are concerned that is pretty worrying because the kids pay extortionate prices to get in — something like £2 or so – and we want to give them their money’s worth.” The band prefer smaller venues, those with fixed seating “like an English theatre.” Because, says John, it is then physically impossible for mass milling around and Jethro communicate better with a seated audience. “The thing is,” explains John, “you have so many rock groups who exhort their audiences to jump about and they give the impression that that is what the kids are there for. They become conditioned from the attitude of these groups into thinking that this is what rock and roll music is all about. “But as far as we are concerned it is not. For a start, we don’t play at full volume throughout a set. We have acoustic passages and try to introduce a lot of light and shade into an act. It is hard to do that with thousands of kids yelling their heads off.”
Not in Texas
That pattern of behaviour was prevalent on the West Coast according to John but not in Texas where the huge auditoriums have fixed seating. In the end we went down as well there as anywhere we played on the West Coast but we were much more satisfied with that kind of reception.” The group has also played a few summer festivals in the States and John’s observation of them is a curt “Bloody awful.” He adds that he would be happy if they never did another festival again and argues: “The fact that you get so many people watching you at the same time, and the fact that you make more money than concerts, is far outweighed by the disadvantages — the hassles and so forth. “What happens over there is that a few people hear of Woodstock and think ‘Wow, if we can get a quarter milion kids we can make a stack of money.’ They rent a field, put up a stage and think that’s it.
Back soon
“But there are so many other things to think about, not least of which is the sound balance for groups.” Jethro return home on June 9 and, after a week’s holiday, go into the studio for two weeks to record material for the next album, expected around October. There is also the possibility of one or more concerts in Britain during June. John, seeing it all for the first time, is not quite as eager as the rest to get home. No, he says, he can’t recall any particular highspots of the tour apart from Long Beach and surfing in Hawaii. “It’s all going so fast I cannot remember what I was doing last week.”
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