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Jethro Tull: Thick as a Brick

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Chrysalis Records
Released: 1972.03.14
Time:
 43:44
Category: Progressive Rock
Producer(s): Ian Anderson
Rating:
Media type: CD
Web address: www.j-tull.com
Appears with: Ian Anderson, Martin Barre
Purchase date: 1995.02.16
Price in €: 15,99





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Thick As A Brick Part 1 (I.Anderson/G.Bostock) - 22:37
[2] Thick As A Brick Part 2 (I.Anderson/G.Bostock) - 21:05

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


IAN ANDERSON - Lead Vocals, Flute, Acoustic Guitar, Violin, Saxophone, Trumpet, Producer, Arrangement
MARTIN BARRE - Electric Guitar, Lute, Arrangement
JOHN EVAN - Organ, Piano, Harpsichord, Arrangement
JEFFREY HAMMOND-HAMMOND - Bass, Spoken Words, Arrangement
BARRIEMORE BARLOW - Drums, Timpani, Percussion, Arrangement

TERRY ELLIS - Producer
ROBIN BLACK - Engineer
CCS - Album Design, Artwork

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


1990 CD Mobile Fidelity 510
1990 CD Mobile Fidelity 510
1990 CD Chrysalis 21003
1990 CS Chrysalis 21003
1972 LP Warner Bros MS 2072
1999 CD Chrysalis 95400
1997 CD Chrysalis 57705
1997 CD Chrysalis 57705



Released April ’72. There was only one continuous song on both sides of the album – perhaps making it the ultimate concept album of all time. Packaged as a newspaper (created by Ian and Jeffery, and complete with a review of the album). The purposely-obscure lyrics were actually based on Ian Anderson’s childhood.
Jethro Tull’s sixth line-up included Martin Barre, Ian Anderson, Jeffery Hammond-Hammond, John Evans and Barriemore Barlow.
‘Thick As A Brick’ became Tull’s first US No.1 charting album and reached No.5 in Britain. A successful, excellent tour followed, and Jethro Tull was hailed as the world’s most popular band.

J-Tull.com



The follow-up to that FM staple, Aqualung, 1972's Thick as a Brick demonstrated that Ian "Don't call me Jethro" Anderson had so much on his mind that even the previous record's side-long suites would not suffice. The result was an album-length "song" that simultaneously struck my young ears as Tull's finest work to date (and I had them all) and led to my never listening to any of their subsequent albums all the way through. The record was packaged in the popular fake-newspaper style of the day (John & Yoko's Some Time in New York City of the same year, the Jefferson Airplane's Volunteers, and the Four Seasons' bid for hipness, Genuine Imitation Life Gazette). Opening line: "Really don't mind if you sit this one out."

David Wolf - Amazon.com



Nach dem durchschlagenden Erfolg des 71er Jethro-Tull-Albums Aqualung packte Bandleader/Sänger/Querflötist Ian Anderson der kreative Ehrgeiz. Für den Nachfolger Thick As A Brick (1972) überlegte er sich ein ausgefeiltes, bizarres Textkonzept, das im Wesentlichen auf den lyrischen Ergüssen des imaginären achtjährigen Dichters Gerald "Little Milton" Bostock basiert. Musikalisch umgesetzt wird der abgepfiffene Sermon in einem einzigen, 44-minütigen (!) Song, der nur auf Grund der Limitierungen der Langspielplatte in der Mitte gesplittet wurde. Jethro Tull verfeinern ihre einzigartige Mischung aus Folkrock, Blues, Klassik-Einflüssen und Avantgarde-Elementen immer mehr, werden dadurch für den Gelegenheitshörer aber auch immer schwerer konsumierbar. Das fast völlige Fehlen von Refrains und die teils sehr abenteuerlichen Stilvermischungen erfordern einiges an Aufmerksamkeit und Toleranz. Lässt man sich jedoch auf Thick As A Brick ein, wird man eines der innovativsten Progrock-Alben aller Zeiten kennen und lieben lernen.

Michael Rensen - Amazon.de



"Although not in the shops yet, I was able to acquire a 'white label' pressing of the current Jethro winner Thick As A Brick from their London agents, Chrysalis Artists.... The group consists of Ian Anderson, Martin Barre, John Evan, Jeffery Hammond-Hammond and Barriemore Barlow. Written around a poem by St. Cleve child prodigy Gerald Bostock, their music spins a delicate web of sensitive sounds: sometimes lilting, sometimes soaring to form a brilliant backdrop for the meaningful lyrics and improvisational techniques....

"One doubts at times the validity of what appears to be an expanding theme throughout the two continuous sides of this record but the result is at worst entertaining and at least aesthetically palatable."

Ian Anderson (a.k.a. Julian Stone-Mason B.A.) has not only slyly reviewed his own album, he's also supplied the newspaper which contains it. Like so much flounder, Thick As A Brick comes wrapped in the St. Cleve's Chronicle, an apocryphal yet typical daily of Anderson's design. Played across the front page is the Gerald "Little Milton" Bostock scandal (the epithet refers to the author of Paradise Lost, not the soul singer). Eight-year-old Gerald is adjudged unfit to accept first prize from The Society For Literary Advancement And Gestation (SLAG) by virtue of the questionable contents of his epic poem Thick As A Brick.

Gerald is one of Ian Anderson's incarnations and ruses. Besides lyricist and impersonator, Anderson is also composer, arranger, singer, flutist, acoustic guitarist, violinist, saxophonist, trumpeter, satirist and overall conceptualizer. His adeptness at most of these functions, in particular, his ability to balance and fuse them, has created one of rock's most sophisticated and ground-breaking products.

Most of the Chronicle's features display a dry, fatuous, very English sense of humor. Under the "Deaths" column, there is the late Charles Stiff; and stories have titles along the lines of "Mongrel Dog Soils Actor's Foot" and "Non-Rabbit Missing." Characters in, say, a page two story will turn up again on page five in equally ludicrous circumstances. It is all very clever, yet at first seemingly irrelevant.

Page seven carries the words to Thick As A Brick. The writing is very dense and enigmatic, and the unidentified shifts in narrative voice compound the difficulty. The poem, as best I can make out, is a sweeping social critique, as pessimistic about poets, painters and the generally virtuous as it is condemnatory of politicians and other figures of authority. And what more perfectly encompasses or embodies the world Anderson aims to criticize than a daily newspaper? The paper in turn encompasses the poem. Furthermore, there are names in the poem which, refer back to items in the newspaper. The poem "reviews" the newspaper, just as Stone-Mason reviewed the record. The entire package operates with the allusiveness of a Nabokov novel.

Like "Wind Up" on Aqualung, Ian asks to "Spin me back down the years and the days of my youth." The son who is pronounced "fit to fight" is helpless and incontinent; the man "fit for peace" "we'll/ ... teach ... to be a wise man/how to fool the rest." There are only the "doer and the thinker," the "wise men" and the "fools." Yet the distinction hardly matters: "Let me help you to pick up your dead as the sins of the fathers are fed with/the blood of the fools/and the thoughts of the wise ..." Failure is inescapable. Mundane yearnings for the immortal Anderson renders with the absurdity of John Lennon's "A soap impression of his wife that he ate and donated to the National Trust": "And where are all the Sportsmen/who always pulled you through?/They're all resting down in Cornwall–writing up their memoirs for a/paperback edition of the Boy Scout manual."

Stitched unobtrusively into this fabric of decay is a thread of salvation, and it lies in music. Anderson could be speaking of Aqualung in these lines, "Let me sing of the losers/who lie in the street as the last bus/goes by." And compare, from Aqualung's "Wind Up," "I'd rather look around me–compose a better song/'cos that's the honest measure of my worth...." to Thick As A Brick's "Let me make you a present of song...." Despite the differing formats, the themes of Aqualung and Thick As A Brick are essentially the same.

For all its intricacy, the "theme" or poetry of Thick As A Brick is its least important aspect. Anderson's language (in Aqualung as well) is often wordy and ponderous, and its bitter condescension and breadth of denunciation can be unpleasant. What marks this album as a significant departure from other Jethro Tull work, and rock in general, is the organization of all its music into one continuous track. Albums like Sgt. Pepper or Tommy were complete entities in themselves, but still chose to use songs as their basic components. While sections of Thick As A Brick are melodically distinct, they all inherently relate to each other. What connecting there is is uncontrived and is often the occasion for some of the album's boldest playing. The lyrics, clever and dense as they are, are chiefly valuable as a premise for the music.

Since Stand Up, Jethro Tull's music has always had a chamber music feel to it; here, the structure, too, of classical music is more closely followed. A continuous work permits the kind of introduction, modification and re-introduction of themes (the allusiveness) which is a hallmark of classical music. (Unlike jazz, Brick sounds very strictly arranged.) Within the terms of the band's own development, the move also makes sense. The exploratory eclecticism of Stand Up, followed by the stylistic homogeneity of Benefit and then the thematic unity of Aqualung, led to a work which is both stylistically homogeneous and thematically or conceptually unified. Yet if I had to name the musical influences Thick As A Brick most strongly suggested, they would have to be classical: Anderson's English forbears Purcell and Handel. There is also an incorporation of Spanish and English folk modes.

The album's opening is sprightly, with Ian's flute poking in and out; a more introspective, minor key digression follows, then a stalking bass line, accompanied by horns and John Evan's excited Rick Wakeman-like organ. The relentless and mechanical gives way to something very stately and regal, as English as, yet less folksy than the opening passage. The piano plays arpeggios; Anderson overlays a jazzy flute. Some over-dubbed guitar yammerings follow.

Anderson takes to the violin and creates a whirling, macabre setting for the combative son's announcement, "I've come down from the upper/class to mend your rotten ways." As the other son begins to speak, the music becomes milder, then sunnier. A bell-like organ rings out behind a jig, performed in almost telegraphic rhythm. This, and its reprise on side two, is the album's most attractive section. An ominous heraldic organ shatters the calm, and the side ends with the electric guitar shrieking helplessly, like a wounded bird.

Side two reintroduces side one's second statement. It merges into an energetic though hollow, unemphatic drum solo; then some free jazz, over which a set of lyrics is recited. A rather fine English folk melody emerges. Anderson's voice becomes more severe, a classical guitar is introduced, and the music takes an Iberian turn. A harpsichord plays as a guitar repeats the riff from George Harrison's "Wah Wah." The writing becomes very linear, with rapid harmonic shifts. This alternates with a vaulting. melodic figure. Then a sudden whoosh, and we return to the closing theme of side one, now strongly reinforced by the organ, only to be momentarily interrupted by some expansive strings. As almost a postscript, the initial theme is recalled, and with it the sentiment, "And/your wise men don't know how it/feels to be thick as a brick."

The members of Jethro Tull were hand-picked by Anderson (several are old school chums); no one, save Ian, remains from the original band. The playing, not surprisingly, is tight as a drum. Martin Barre's guitar and John Evan's keyboards especially shine, and Ian's singing is no longer abrasive. Whether or not Thick As A Brick is an isolated experiment, it is nice to know that someone in rock has ambitions beyond the four or five minute conventional track, and has the intelligence to carry out his intentions, in all their intricacy, with considerable grace.

BEN GERSON - RS 111
© Copyright 2001 RollingStone.com



Jethro Tull's first LP-length epic is a masterpiece in the annals of progressive rock, and one of the few works of its kind that still holds up 25 years later. Mixing hard rock and English folk music with classical influences, set to stream-of-consciousness lyrics so dense with the imagery that one might spend weeks pondering their meaning--assuming one feels the need to do so--the group created a dazzling tour-de-force, at once playful, profound, and challenging, without overwhelming the listener. The original LP was the best sounding, best engineered record Tull had ever released, easily capturing the shifting dynamics between the soft all-acoustic passages and the electric rock crescendos surrounding them. The sound on the original Columbia Records CD (not identified as such, but recognizable by a "VK" prefix in its catalog number) was harsh and thin, and left a lot to be desired in terms of richness--the Mobile Fidelity audiophile disc (out-of-print) solved those problems, and the current Chrysalis disc is an improvement as well.

Bruce Eder - All Music Guide
 

 L y r i c s


Thick As A Brick

Really don't mind if you sit this one out.
My words but a whisper -- your deafness a SHOUT.
I may make you feel but I can't make you think.
Your sperm's in the gutter -- your love's in the sink.
So you ride yourselves over the fields and
you make all your animal deals and
your wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick.
And the sand-castle virtues are all swept away in
the tidal destruction
the moral melee.
The elastic retreat rings the close of play as the last wave uncovers
the newfangled way.
But your new shoes are worn at the heels and
your suntan does rapidly peel and
your wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick.

And the love that I feel is so far away:
I'm a bad dream that I just had today -- and you
shake your head and
say it's a shame.

Spin me back down the years and the days of my youth.
Draw the lace and black curtains and shut out the whole truth.
Spin me down the long ages: let them sing the song.

See there! A son is born -- and we pronounce him fit to fight.
There are black-heads on his shoulders, and he pees himself in the night.
We'll
make a man of him
put him to trade
teach him
to play Monopoly and
to sing in the rain.

The Poet and the painter casting shadows on the water --
as the sun plays on the infantry returning from the sea.
The do-er and the thinker: no allowance for the other --
as the failing light illuminates the mercenary's creed.
The home fire burning: the kettle almost boiling --
but the master of the house is far away.
The horses stamping -- their warm breath clouding
in the sharp and frosty morning of the day.
And the poet lifts his pen while the soldier sheaths his sword.

And the youngest of the family is moving with authority.
Building castles by the sea, he dares the tardy tide to wash them all aside.

The cattle quietly grazing at the grass down by the river
where the swelling mountain water moves onward to the sea:
the builder of the castles renews the age-old purpose
and contemplates the milking girl whose offer is his need.
The young men of the household have
all gone into service and
are not to be expected for a year.
The innocent young master -- thoughts moving ever faster --
has formed the plan to change the man he seems.
And the poet sheaths his pen while the soldier lifts his sword.

And the oldest of the family is moving with authority.
Coming from across the sea, he challenges the son who puts him to the run.

What do you do when
the old man's gone -- do you want to be him? And
your real self sings the song.
Do you want to free him?
No one to help you get up steam --
and the whirlpool turns you `way off-beam.

LATER.
I've come down from the upper class to mend your rotten ways.
My father was a man-of-power whom everyone obeyed.
So come on all you criminals!
I've got to put you straight just like I did with my old man --
twenty years too late.
Your bread and water's going cold.
Your hair is too short and neat.
I'll judge you all and make damn sure that no-one judges me.

You curl your toes in fun as you smile at everyone -- you meet the stares.
You're unaware that your doings aren't done.
And you laugh most ruthlessly as you tell us what not to be.
But how are we supposed to see where we should run?
I see you shuffle in the courtroom with
your rings upon your fingers and
your downy little sidies and
your silver-buckle shoes.
Playing at the hard case, you follow the example of the comic-paper idol
who lets you bend the rules.

So!
Come on ye childhood heroes!
Won't you rise up from the pages of your comic-books
your super crooks
and show us all the way.
Well! Make your will and testament. Won't you?
Join your local government.
We'll have Superman for president
let Robin save the day.

You put your bet on number one and it comes up every time.
The other kids have all backed down and they put you first in line.
And so you finally ask yourself just how big you are --
and take your place in a wiser world of bigger motor cars.
And you wonder who to call on.

So! Where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you though?
They're all resting down in Cornwall --
writing up their memoirs for a paper-back edition
of the Boy Scout Manual.

LATER.
See there! A man born -- and we pronounce him fit for peace.
There's a load lifted from his shoulders with the discovery of his disease.
We'll
take the child from him
put it to the test
teach it
to be a wise man
how to fool the rest.

QUOTE
We will be geared to the average rather than the exceptional
God is an overwhelming responsibility
we walked through the maternity ward and saw 218 babies wearing nylons
cats are on the upgrade
upgrade? Hipgrave. Oh, Mac.

LATER
In the clear white circles of morning wonder,
I take my place with the lord of the hills.
And the blue-eyed soldiers stand slightly discoloured (in neat little rows)
sporting canvas frills.
With their jock-straps pinching, they slouch to attention,
while queueing for sarnies at the office canteen.
Saying -- how's your granny and
good old Ernie: he coughed up a tenner on a premium bond win.
The legends (worded in the ancient tribal hymn) lie cradled
in the seagull's call.
And all the promises they made are ground beneath the sadist's fall.
The poet and the wise man stand behind the gun,
and signal for the crack of dawn.
Light the sun.

Do you believe in the day? Do you?
Believe in the day! The Dawn Creation of the Kings has begun.
Soft Venus (lonely maiden) brings the ageless one.
Do you believe in the day?
The fading hero has returned to the night -- and fully pregnant with the day,
wise men endorse the poet's sight.
Do you believe in the day? Do you? Believe in the day!

Let me tell you the tales of your life of
your love and the cut of the knife
the tireless oppression
the wisdom instilled
the desire to kill or be killed.
Let me sing of the losers who lie in the street as the last bus goes by.
The pavements ar empty: the gutters run red -- while the fool
toasts his god in the sky.

So come all ye young men who are building castles!
Kindly state the time of the year and join your voices in a hellish chorus.
Mark the precise nature of your fear.
Let me help you pick up your dead as the sins of the father are fed
with
the blood of the fools and
the thoughts of the wise and
from the pan under your bed.
Let me make you a present of song as
the wise man breaks wind and is gone while
the fool with the hour-glass is cooking his goose and
the nursery rhyme winds along.

So! Come all ye young men who are building castles!
Kindly state the time of the year and join your voices in a hellish chorus.
Mark the precise nature of your fear.
See! The summer lightning casts its bolts upon you
and the hour of judgement draweth near.
Would you be
the fool stood in his suit of armour or
the wiser man who rushes clear.
So! Come on ye childhood heroes!
Won't your rise up from the pages of your comic-books
your super-crooks and
show us all the way.
Well! Make your will and testament.
Won't you? Join your local government.
We'll have Superman for president
let Robin save the day.
So! Where the hell was Biggles when you needed him last Saturday?
And where were all the sportsmen who always pulled you through?
They're all resting down in Cornwall -- writing up their memoirs
for a paper-back edition of the Boy Scout Manual.

OF COURSE
So you ride yourselves over the fields and
you make all your animal deals and
your wise men don't know how it feels to be thick as a brick.

 M P 3   S a m p l e s


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