Masterminded by the charismatic frontman Ian Anderson, Jethro Tull’s second album, Stand Up, saw the British rock group turn over a new leaf by cross-pollinating their bluesy sound with an enchanted forest of new ideas. Blending the verdancy of the blues with breezy folk and airy classical music, and playing it all with hard-rock energy, flautist Anderson, bassist Glen Cornick and drummer Clive Bunker enlisted newcomer guitarist Martin Barre to help capture the band’s evolving sound at a time when blues traditionalists were running rampant.
Listen to ‘Stand Up’ here.
Unlike many of their risk-averse peers who stuck fast to the blues’ North American roots, Jethro Tull sought to move beyond the straightforward R&B of their debut album, This Was, with Anderson’s new songs demonstrating a willingness to experiment with different musical styles. Not only was the singer keen to infuse his music with a sense of English whimsy, but the band’s exceptional musicianship exhibited a growing confidence that would establish Jethro Tull as forward-thinking pioneers of early progressive rock.
This is the story behind the making of Stand Up, and how Jethro Tull’s second album saw the group branch out on their journey to becoming one of the most innovative and influential bands of their time.
The backstory: “We had been very much put into that pigeonhole”
Following the release of their debut album, This Was, Jethro Tull were seen as a curious arrival on a highly competitive late-60s blues-rock scene, pitting themselves against contemporaries such as Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack and Savoy Brown. “We had been very much put into that pigeonhole of being a little old blues band,” Ian Anderson said in a BBC Radio interview, “with a slight quirky oddity of having a flute placed in the middle, and wobble around on one leg.”
Inspired by seeing the likes of King Crimson and Yes perform live at London’s Marquee Club, Anderson reached for his flute and began writing new material for what would become Stand Up. Conscious of trying to forge a more eclectic sound, he brought influences such as folk and jazz music to the fore, but the songs weren’t quite connecting with guitarist Mick Abrahams. “It was just out of his comfort zone,” Anderson told Classic Rock magazine. “Mick was a dyed-in-the-wool blues and R&B guy. He wanted to do more of the standard blues kind of thing.”
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Stuck at an impasse, Abrahams left the group, and the remaining Tull bandmates held auditions to find a new guitarist. Among the candidates was Mick Taylor, who had just departed from The Rolling Stones, and a pre-Black Sabbath Tony Iommi (who had played with Jethro Tull on the Stones’ Rock And Roll Circus TV special). When both Taylor and Iommi decided Tull’s style of music wasn’t quite in their wheelhouse, Ian Anderson reached out to ex-Gethsemane guitarist Martin Barre, and the pair seemed to click immediately.
“He was just a different kind of player with a different sort of background,” Anderson said of Martin Barre, in an interview with VWMusic. “Martin was there to learn, just as I was there to learn. To find out how to play the things that were in my head.” As Anderson’s news songs finally began to take shape, the group as a whole felt confident that their second album, soon to be named Stand Up, would help them find their footing, placing them on their own unique path.
The recording: “I was really wanting to learn and direct things in the studio”
Recorded at Morgan Studios, in London, Stand Up saw Ian Anderson take an active role as a co-producer. Working together with Terry Ellis, who would often leave the group to their own devices, Anderson relished the freedom he had been granted to uproot the band’s bluesy underpinnings and coax folk and classical influences out of his bandmates. “I was really wanting to learn and direct things in the studio,” he told author Gary Parker in the book Original Jethro Tull: The Glory Years, 1968-1980. “And my role as a producer was really in the George Martin sense… he was very much a creative force within The Beatles.”