52 PLANET ROCK
OLDING THEIR BREATH, hearts pounding, the
members of Jethro Tull struggled to remain hidĥ
den. Trying to evade the cops after a riot at their
show in Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre, the
group were hiding under blankets in the rear of a
station wagon. The police wanted to arrest the upstart Brits after they’d
swerved a road block earlier and ignored their order not to perform.
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the Denver PD beamHGWKHLUÀDVKOLJKWVWKURXJKLWVZLQGRZV
“I remember whispering, Keep still, keep still,” says Tull
bandleader Ian Anderson.
Jethro Tull’s new drummer, Barriemore Barlow, was
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Red Rocks was his second Tull show, but Barlow was
more used to playing clubs in his native Blackpool.
That night, he watched, aghast, as fans threw rocks
at the cops, who responded with cannisters of chokĥ
ing tear gas. Meanwhile, a police helicopter circled
overhead. Undeterred, Tull carried on playing, before
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After a couple of agonising minutes, the policemen
waved the driver on his way, and Barlow’s head emerged from the
blanket. “Barrie said ‘Will it be like this every night?’” Anderson recalls.
“I replied, Probably not every night.”
It was June 10, 1971, and Jethro Tull, who’d begun four years earlier as
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bigger Tull became, the bigger the venues and the greater the margin for
madness. Sometimes, it was as if the audience were there for an evening
of communal hedonism rather than music.
Many times, Anderson gazed at the biblical sea of humanity, and
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him. “There was a baseball, rounds of live ammunition, a bottle of urine,
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Bruce Forsyth listing items on the conveyor belt in a vintage episode of
The Generation Game.
The reason for all this was Aqualung. Released in April ’71, Jethro
Tull’s fourth LP became a Top 10 hit in America, changing the cult Britĥish band’s fortunes almost overnight. In 2020, Anderson
and his solo group will revisit the album on Jethro Tull:
The Prog Years, a tour covering Europe in the spring
and summer and the UK in November. Even today,
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Anderson, a Scot by birth, formed Jethro Tull in late
1967 after travelling to London from his adopted homeĥ
town of Blackpool. He was the lead singer in jobbing pop and
soul group The John Evan Smash. They wanted to try their luck
in ‘The Big Smoke’, but only made it as far as Luton before most gave up
and went back home.NDERSON WAS¿HUFHO\LQTXLVLWLYHDQGZHOOĥUHDGDQG
had left art school to try to make a living as a musician.
Refusing to give up, he formed a new
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‘Jethro Tull’ was their young booking agent’s idea;
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Two years on, Tull had released two albums, This
Was and Stand Up. But their early blues style had evolved,
following the arrival of a new guitarist, Martin Barre, in
¶ DQG$QGHUVRQ¶VJURZLQJFRQ¿GHQFHDVDZULWHU“I REALISED EARLY ON THAT I COULDN’T
COMPETE WITH ROBERT PLANT, AND HAD
TO DO SOMETHING DIFFERENT.”
IAN ANDERSONGETTYThe tartan
army: Jethro
Tull (with
new-ish
drummer
Barriemore
Barlow,
bottom right),
July 1972.