Backbone > Ear Whacks
Sitting on a Bare Stage: Conversing with Ian Anderson
By Jay Blotcher

The young 'uns can have Britney Spears and the Backstreet Boys, and welcome. For true rock icons, I'll take Ian Anderson. The leadman of Jethro Tull has been an outsized character since the group bowed in 1967. Dressed in a brocaded overcoat, often standing on one leg, long hair askew, the flautist resembled a high-hatted mad cousin to Oliver Twist's Fagin. Jethro Tull (named after the 18th-century inventor of the seed drill) defies categorization in an industry fond of facile labels. Since its 1968 debut LP This Was to its 1971 classic Aqualung, and through thirty-odd recordings and compilations, the band has finessed blues, folk, jazz, Medieval ballads, and propulsive rock. It was, therefore, a moment of pure absurdity when their 1987 release, Crest of a Knave, received the Grammy for "Best Hard Rock Performance," beating out odds-on favorite Metallica.

Thirty-five years of recording and performing have included varying degrees of success. Longwinded epics like Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play sorely tested fans' allegiances, but accessible works like War Child and Too Old to Rock n' Roll won Jethro Tull new audiences. Anderson remains the only original member of the band, with guitarist Martin Barre second in terms of longevity. While his wild mop is now a mere memory, Anderson remains the linchpin of the group. Even when he took time off to record three solo projects (Walk Into Light, Divinities: Twelve Dances with God and The Secret Language of Birds), Jethro Tull members played the sessions. These individual efforts, while modestly successful, reflected an inquisitive musician, exploring new styles and instruments. Finally recognized for their classical roots, Jethro Tull and Anderson have also played with symphony orchestras throughout the world.

Between gigs, Anderson has a thriving salmon business, grows chili peppers on his Southwest England estate, works for the conservation of small wildcats, and snatches time for writing new compositions. The 54-year-old father of two, married for 25 years, is completing a 61-concert tour with Jethro Tull this year, in support of their live album Living with the Past, a live greatest hits collection.

This fall, he embarks on an acoustic solo tour called "Rubbing Elbows with Ian Anderson." The show arrives on October 20 at the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie. "Rubbing Elbows" will allow fans a different view of the man beneath the Penny Dreadful garb; the evening promises reworked Tull numbers, solo compositions, musical improvisations, and "bawdy tales." Joining Anderson on stage will be a local DJ and local performer. Speaking by telephone from UK, the eloquent and voluble Anderson held forth on the proper punishment for dictators, his limitations in flute playing, and why he doesn't mind fans who only want to hear the old hits.

Jay Blotcher: If George Bush's campaign succeeds, by the time you start your tour, America could have commenced its "feel-good" war against Iraq. Since all musicians have superhuman powers, especially aging rockers in their fifties, what is your solution to this mess?

Ian Anderson: I have no problem with Bush going after Saddam Hussein...There are a good few folks out there who most of us would like to see exiled to-I can't say Poughkeepsie-Atlantic City. There you go. Incarcerated in a penthouse suite with their stolen millions and never allowed to access the elevators. Just kind of stuck up there atop one of Donald Trump's gambling hotels. Just a symbol of what happens to the bad guys. And room service is always late. That's what those guys deserve, because there is no hiding place for these folks. What happens when you depose Saddam? No country is gonna want to take him because, really, when the chips are down, no one likes Saddam Hussein. He's just an expedient guy. He has provided, curiously, a degree of stability in the Middle East at a time when it was so desired, with the West having, obviously, oil interests at heart. He was seen as a symbol of stability, a necessary evil. And we put up with him for awhile and encouraged him, just as we did with old bin Laden. Bin Laden was given some degree of official support as well, when it suited us western democracies to do that. But basically, these are bad guys. We don't want them around.... George Bush has a real tough test ahead of him; if he can manage to achieve what I think are pretty international aims without the spilling of civilian blood, then he deserves to be president of the whole fuckin' world.

JB: When world affairs are turbulent, is your response to tackle it with songs?

IA: It is and it isn't. [On] September 11,…I was in Italy playing with the Symphony Orchestra, as I watched it on TV live…on CNN. And we had to play a concert just a few hours later. There was a feeling of a degree of impotence in a way, but there was a resilience there amongst the audience, and all of us musicians-the orchestra and me. You felt a little moment of power in the music, to bring people together, to bring people out of the shock and the horror that even 3,500 miles away was really impacting on people in a huge way. You felt the power of music, not to just be a palliative little smokescreen over the event, but somehow to enable people for just a moment to rise above it. We said, "No, if we cancel the concert, if we don't do this, if we allow ourselves to be struck into dumb horror and silence, then the terrorists have won. We do have to carry on. We do have to push on with this."

JB: You recently spoke about your onstage persona with Jethro Tull, admitting, "I was actually hiding from the world by wearing a long overcoat and pretending to be eccentric." With this acoustic tour, will aspects of the real Ian Anderson finally have their day in the sun?

IA: I will be walking out on the stage and I will be hiding behind a cloak of being an accessible, regular, normal guy, because I'm not really that either; I'm somewhere in between that kind of hermit and that gregarious, friendly, cheerful, moderately-in-your-face personality while I'm on stage.... I'm a musician. I go on stage. I play. But there's a little bit of a ham that does slip in there. It's an ugly thing; I don't want to see too much of it or have anybody else see too much of it, but there is a feeling when you walk out on stage. You can be extending your comfort zone to the point where one foot is in the comfort zone and one foot is poised quiveringly over the abyss-because you don't really know what's going to happen next, in terms of what someone's going to say or do. And there's something exhilarating and thrilling to working in a context where you're working with different people every night. You have a framework for the performance, but there's going to be a lot of ad-lib; there's going to be a lot of improvisation...but it's exhilarating. It's something I'm very much looking forward to, having done 34 years worth of promo where I go into radio stations or TV stations and I talk to complete strangers and they talk to me, and we try and find a very quick balance between us in terms of personality, and we try to have fun, and we try to communicate our art or our thoughts or our personalities, and in so doing, we entertain the audiences-on a good night.

JB: A few years ago, you sat down and formally learned to play the flute, after 30 years of what might be considered frantic improvisation. Did you learn anything new about the capacity and potential of the instrument?

IA: I think I did, because there were a lot of deficiencies in my playing, which I'd known for years. I wasn't really too aware, having been self-taught, why the deficiencies existed. But by choosing a better quality of instrument, by relearning to play in a more conventional way than as I had been taught, I expanded my abilities on the instrument a great deal. But I didn't want to lose sight and control of what I had done before. So I had to find a way to not lose my old way of playing. I do these days employ both a more formal flute-playing technique for certain passages of music and the old bad way, when that is part and parcel of the execution of a musical phrase. I mix and match the two approaches. That, to me, is expanding what I can do. I'm never going to be a great player in terms of the academic, classical approach to flute playing. Nor am I ever going to be a brilliant jazz improviser. I'm never going to be a tremendous, authentic, traditional Irish flute musician. I draw upon different styles, different influences, and different disciplines and try to bring them together.

JB: Your longtime fans are a faithful lot. But longtime fans can make demands on a group, insisting on the old hits and bathing in the warm glow of nostalgia. What do you expect of your fans? Do you expect them to grow or open themselves up to your musical changes?

IA: Some people do [grow], and that's great, and some people don't, which is also okay. [For] people in their forties and fifties,...this may be the time to sit and reflect on what matters to them so far. It's the movies they saw. It's the friends they made at school. It's the books they read, the radio station they listened to,. the music they grew up with, the people who are important to them. It's not really about nostalgia. It's more about thinking about what is important to you in life.... And I like to think that's what an audience does when it comes to see Jethro Tull or the Moody Blues or Yes or Bruce Springsteen. They say, "We decide this is important, so it matters to us. We're going to hold on to that for a little while yet." That's a good and positive thing.

JB: Before the day comes when you breathe your last, when you become fertilizer for your peppers, what things would you still like to accomplish?

IA: In a musical framework, there are probably 15 years ahead of me. I like to think I can still be an active, practicing, composing, and performing musician. In that period of time, I'd like to extend my horizons a bit: playing with other people, doing some other things. It's not that I don't want to do Jethro Tull anymore. Jethro Tull is always going to be a part of my life, as long as I'm capable of physically performing music…Beyond that, there are other areas of expression that interest me. I began as a visual artist, went to art college for awhile. Some aspects of the visual arts beckon to me a little bit in the future. So does communicating in prose, in the written word. That takes a bit of inertia that I have to overcome to put pen to paper, or pinkie to "QWERTY". But once I start, I get quite energetic and emotive about writing prose.... Beyond that, I'm too old for politics. I'm too old for hang-gliding, Bungee jumping, windsurfing. Golf is about as inviting to me as crack cocaine, basically because it's probably equally addictive. I have this horrible feeling that if I ever took up golf, that would be all I did for the rest of my life. I'm looking forward to a few vacations, to tell the truth. I'm looking forward to the opportunity of visiting some places and not go to work that night. I'm looking forward to going to places like Bangor, Maine-or Poughkeepsie-and actually just sitting there and looking at the river and having a nice meal and going back to my hotel room and watching the Letterman show and going to bed.

Ian Anderson comes to the Bardavon in Poughkeepsie Sunday, October 20, 7PM to perform "Rubbing Elbows with Ian Anderson."
For more information and tickets, call 473-2072.