These days, Ian Anderson is all about blurring the past, the present and the future. “Believe it or not,” he says, “there are still many people who think Jethro Tull is the man who stands there playing the flute on one leg.”
There is no one called Jethro Tull. It is – well, it was – the name of a very, very popular English rock band. Some 60 million albums sold globally – benchmarks like Aqualung, Songs From the Wood, Thick as a Brick and Minstrel in the Gallery. Ian Anderson wrote and sang every song, produced every record, dotted every “i” and crossed every “t,” for well over 40 years. And yeah, he still plays the flute standing on one leg.
Still, “Even to this day I get letters addressed to ‘Dear Jethro.’ I get people coming up to me in the street saying ‘Oh, Jethro – I named my second son after you.’”
For all that time, Anderson was quite content to issue his complex, idiosyncratic and delightfully melodic music under the collective name of Jethro Tull, regardless of which auxiliary musicians happened to be on board at the time (there were more than 30, all told, over the years).
He’s just turned 70, and that’s why he now performs as “Jethro Tull by Ian Anderson” (he’ll be at the Mahaffey Theater in St. Pete on Thursday, Nov. 9). Even though the four guys in his current band were, at one stretch, actual members of late-period Jethro Tull.
Confused? Anderson understands that.
“Before I pop off, I just have this feeling that I want people to know my name,” he says with a chuckle. “That I’m the continuity factor. There’s so many bands around where the principal performer is no longer part of it. There’s a fairly endless list of those sorts of things.”
He cites the Doors, Queen and Creedence Clearwater Revival as the most obvious examples of “classic” outfits that tour without their chief singer and songwriter.
“With a band of our vintage, I guess there’s a tendency to think ‘Well, it’s a glorified tribute band.’ So with my name there, I hope it gives it that authenticity. Being the songwriter, the guy who stands in the middle and waves the flute around. And the producer. And, since 1974, the manager of the band.”
Along the way, Anderson made the odd “solo” record, including the lush and exotic The Secret Language of Birds, the complex Homo Erraticus and, most recently, Jethro Tull – The String Quartets, which reached No. 1 on the classical charts.
The dry and often wickedly dark humor that runs through Anderson’s work is a large part of its charm. It was an uninterrupted vein that unified Tull’s “prog” period – Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play – its “English folk” period – Songs From the Wood, Heavy Horses and Stormwatch – and its heavy rock, blues and light acoustic numbers. Always coupled, of course, with exemplary musicianship and exciting, electrified live shows.
He’s got that typical English way of looking at his own mortality with a nod and a wink.
“I’ve been thinking about that since 1975, when I wrote the song ‘Too Old to Rock ‘n’ Roll, Too Young to Die,’” he explains. “Generally speaking, musicians get to go on past their sell-by date. Actors, too. They have that tendency to go on almost to the point where they pop off. There’ve been a number of actors who’ve died during the making of their final movie, leaving someone else to come in and finish the job."
“That’s the sort of ending I suppose one would like to have. It’s a bit of a John Wayne cowboy movie kind of ending. The cowboy dies with his boots on. And that’s the way, I suppose, that most of us would like to go.”
Is he imagining an onstage death, one last ‘Locomotive Breath’ flute solo and down he goes?
“I’d prefer to get to the last three or four bars, rather than the middle,” Anderson laughs. “Or maybe even getting as far as my dressing room after the show! As long as there’s a cold beer waiting for me.”
There’s one other thing to talk about.
Jethro Tull have been eligible for induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame since 1993. And still, nothing. That this important, influential and beloved band isn’t in the Hall is one of its most (of many) egregious omissions.
Anderson’s long-held position – he gets asked about it a lot – is that he doesn’t care.
In lieu of discussing it further, he tells a story. When the actual Hall opened in Cleveland in the 1980s, he was among the first to donate stage costumes and other ephemera from his storied career.
“I remember walking past the display cabinet and seeing Rod Stewart and me – well, sort of dummies wearing our clothes – and thinking ‘Aren’t we tiny? Aren’t we really, really, really tiny little men?’
“I thought, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame needs to find a new Chinese laundry, or a dry cleaner, because they’ve managed to shrink these things to the point where they’re too impossibly small for anything vaguely humanoid to have ever worn onstage. I think Rod Stewart and I are about the same height.
“A couple of Brits behind the safety of a glass cabinet. That’s not a bad place to be. That’s enough for me! This who idea of being inducted absolutely doesn’t register on my radar as being good bad or whatever.”
Jethro Tull by Ian Anderson
Thurs. Nov. 9, 8 p.m.
Mahaffey Theater, 400 1st Street S., St. Petersburg, $49.50-$124.50
More info: local.cltampa.com
This article appears in Oct 12-19, 2017.