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

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.