Jethro Tull - This Was (1968)

I'm still trying to work out how I feel about Jethro Tull. Having once been an agricultural youth, I was initially well disposed towards a  band who named their albums after shire horses and who presumably had some kind of affinity with soil, plus Stormwatch had a pleasantly ominous cover. I didn't actually encounter their music until the nineties when I chanced upon a boggle-eyed performance of Witch's Promise from that Top of the Pops repeat show, which I thought was great. My friend Carl gave me a copy of the Twenty Years of Jethro Tull triple CD thing on the grounds that he'd designed the artwork and had a spare knocking around; which was also great, or mostly great. I was in a sort of prog rock punk band at the time, albeit prog with a small p because funny time signatures definitely hadn't figured in the job description and were frankly proving a bit of a chore; but our glorious leader, somehow mistaking my polite enthusiasm for studious obsession, took it upon himself to advance my education despite that I was perfectly happy with my copy of Machine Gun Etiquette, thank you very much. Soon I was in possession of This Was, Living In the Past, Thick as a Brick, A Passion Play, Bursting Out, Stormwatch, A, Nightcap, The Jethro Tull Christmas Album and some greatest hits thing. Our glorious leader had written on the covers, giving tracks marks out of ten or adding notes about associated singles, then presumably copied those songs scoring above a certain rating of excellence onto a CDR which would take up less space in his collection and therefore be more efficient.

I've really tried with these albums but they just aren't for me. I didn't particularly enjoy playing guitar riffs which required that I count out an ostentatious thirteen beats before repeating the bar or launching into a chorus, and if I'm to listen to music as a mathematical exercise, then it really needs to do more than just showing off whilst a nice overachieving grammar school boy doth politely croon something about maidens fair; and but for the silly time signatures, Stormwatch wouldn't have sounded out of place on Radio 2 back in the days of Sing Something Simple.

And yet there's this.

This Was so named in acknowledgement of it having captured an era of Jethro Tull from which the band were moving on even as the record hit the stores. This Was dates from when they were worth listening to, when they sounded like a band rather than a series of twee equations scrawled upon a blackboard in between betwixt sips goodly swigs from a pewter tankard. What the fuck went wrong?

This Was is sixties blues rock as interpreted by educated white guys, but significantly influenced by the wilder end of jazz and with scant trace of either folky or psychedelic influence - possibly excepting certain parallels heard on the thoroughly gorgeous Move on Alone. What really differentiates this bunch from most later Tull - at least that I've heard - is the low recording budget having prevented too much pissing about, leaving us with a band so live and raw and at one with their own vibe as to foreshadow a Steve Albini production, albeit one without quite such menace. Song for Jeffrey and Love Story particularly seem to oblige the listener to crank it the fuck up and rock out, despite an otherwise relatively polite production; and I'm not suggesting Love Story sounds even remotely like anything from the first three albums by the Damned, but I can imagine what the Damned version would sound like without giving myself too much of a headache.

This Was a band who had a ton of fucking fun playing this stuff by the sound of it, as distinct from the subsequent entity which introduced live versions of its old standards with footnotes explaining how the lads had since added more twiddly bits to keep it interesting for themselves. My former musical boss presumably kept the decent albums to himself when passing on his cast offs, hence the absence of Aqualung and others in the above list; So there's doubtless much that I haven't heard and maybe should, but for the moment I prefer to remember them this way. Given that everything I like about this album seems to have been down to Mick Abrahams who left soon after, this leaves me with the peculiar realisation that I probably need to listen to Blodwyn Pig.