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‘Stand Up’: How Jethro Tull’s Second Album Broke The Blues-Rock Mold
Warner Records
In Depth

‘Stand Up’: How Jethro Tull’s Second Album Broke The Blues-Rock Mold

Leaping beyond their bluesy beginnings, ‘Stand Up’ saw Jethro Tull pioneer a baroque fusion of ‘cocktail jazz’, English folk and hard rock.

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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.”

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.”

Assuming the role of an orchestrator, Anderson knew that breaking the band’s blues-rock habits wouldn’t be easy, so embellishing upon them became the rule. One of the best Jethro Tull songs of all time, Stand Up’ opening track, A New Day Yesterday, beefed-up the raw R&B sound of This Was, thanks in no small part to Martin Barre’s Hendrixian virtuosity, the guitarist’s solo twisting like ribbons around a Maypole. On the album’s following song, Jeffery Goes To Leicester Square, Jethro Tull’s change of musical direction became even more apparent, with balalaika cavorting around a merry European-style folk ditty far removed from the Delta heartlands.

Not only did Ian Anderson play his flute with extraordinary fervour throughout the Stand Up recording sessions, but the use of tabla-indebted percussion and mandolin on songs such as Fat Man dragged an Eastern fusion sound into the group’s repertoire. “Ian’s songwriting skills developed rapidly during the Stand Up period,” string arranger Dee Palmer later observed. “He has a remarkable gift.”

Further repositioning Jethro Tull as folk-rock pioneers of the finest order, the gorgeous strings and woodwinds on the whimsical acoustic ballad Reasons For Waiting even seemed to be reaching back in time to Britain’s baroque past. “I was utilising influences from classical folk music and stuff that I might’ve been aware of as a child,” Anderson later told Classic Rock. Perhaps the best example of this was on Bourée, a work of rock’n’roll revisionism that took a lute piece by Johann Sebastian Bach and turned it into a wild and unwieldy blast of what the singer would label “cocktail jazz”.

With other hints of jazz-rock creeping into songs such as Nothing Is Easy, guitarist Martin Barre knew that, with Stand Up, Jethro Tull had achieved something completely different from their peers. “The songs were new, the direction was new, there was nobody else playing that style of music,” the guitarist later said. Having started out with blues-rock as their foundation, the group were now stretching themselves into folk-rock territory and had set their sights on making a rich and ancient seam of classical influences palatable for discerning longhairs.

The release: “It was an important album”

Released on 25 July 1969, Stand Up, went on to sell more than 500,000 copies in the US, peaking at No.20 on the Billboard 200 and No.1 in the UK. The album’s homeland success was boosted by the Top 5 performance of standalone single Living In The Past, which, having been released in May, cleared the way for Tull’s second album to take the group confidently into the future.

Despite lacking a single that would replicate Living In The Past’s success, Stand Up marked a significant evolution for Jethro Tull. Describing it as “more of an eclectic and inventive album” than their debut, Anderson later explained to VWMusic why he thinks the record marked such an innovative leap for the band. “It didn’t rely simply on the blues any longer,” he said. “It was bringing together lots of disparate influences from different kinds of music in different parts of the world.”

With a striking album cover featuring woodcut caricatures of the band by American artist James Grashow, Stand Up also saw Anderson develop his jester-like stage persona, imbuing Jethro Tull with the age-old spirit of wandering troubadours and boggle-eyed medicine men. Shortly after the album’s release, the term “progressive rock” would be associated with bands such as Tull, who received plaudits for attempting to push rock’n’roll into more eclectic and ambitious territory.

Despite Stand Up’s preponderance of folk influences, Jethro Tull’s new style wasn’t entirely divorced from the hard-rock credo of contemporaries such as Led Zeppelin, and the album resonated strongly with countercultural hippies who enjoyed the fusion of Martin Barre’s superlative guitar solos as much as they did Ian Anderson’s virtuoso flute-playing. The album’s incredible closer, For A Thousand Mothers, even seemed to tap into the timely idea of generational divides, with Anderson musing on the bucking of parental authority. “I based that on my childhood experiences, but it’s not just my childhood experiences,” Anderson later said of the song. “It’s everybody’s childhood experiences of growing up with parents who are telling them what they must do and what they mustn’t do.”

Thanks to songs that captured the zeitgeist while simultaneously introducing a new generation to folk and classical influences that may have seemed anathema to hard-rock groups of their ilk, Jethro Tull had opened a door to countless musical possibilities. “It was a real discovery for us,” Barre later said. “It was very spontaneous – a lot of nervousness and anxiety because it was an important album.” Best seen as a prelude to future explorations into the realm of progressive rock and folk-inspired music, Stand Up made strides beyond anyone’s expectations.

The legacy: “The beginning of the real Jethro Tull adventure”

In the years since its release, Stand Up has been cited by many musicians as an important influence, including Pearl Jam’s frontman, Eddie Vedder, and Aerosmith bassist Tony Hamilton. Even Ian Anderson himself considers the album his own personal favourite, largely due to how pivotal it was in changing his band’s trajectory. “That was my first album of really original music,” he said in an interview with BraveWords. “It has a place in my heart as being the beginning of the real Jethro Tull adventure.”

Stand Up’s success proved that there was an audience eager for music that challenged the conventions of traditional rock’n’roll, and it’s easy to see how the album inspired countless other artists to follow in Jethro Tull’s footsteps. In particular, the arrangement for the song We Used To Know shares much in common with Eagles’ Hotel California, though Anderson has been quick to shoot down any accusations of plagiarism. “It’s just the same chord sequence,” he told Songfacts. “It’s in a different time signature, different key, different context. And it’s a very, very fine song that they wrote, so I can’t feel anything other than a sense of happiness for their sake.”

Just a few years on from Stand Up’s release, Jethro Tull would build upon the sound of their second album with genre-defining prog classics such as Aqualung (1971) and Thick As A Brick (1972). But, as Anderson would later tell Noozhawk, the group’s second album was “the one that marks the departure from the imitative kind of simple blues thing that we began with to finding more influences, more eclectic musical settings for simple songs that I was writing”.

For this reason alone, Stand Up is a seminal record that saw Jethro Tull fashion an embryonic form of prog-rock. Capable of raising any listener to their feet, it remains fully deserving of rousing applause.

Buy Jethro Tull vinyl at the Dig! store.

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