Off The Charts!

I am sitting in a waiting room of a prominent hospital.  I have just finished reading my friend James’s reflections on the Jethro Tull album, Aqualung. I’d better get moving on mine, I think to myself. James is not one for waiting.  The waiting room is filled with serious adults who are growing weary of the delays in their treatments.  What better time to give the album a listen, after all, it was going to be a long day. I pull it up on my phone and start searching for my earbuds, which, not surprisingly, are not with me but are probably lying somewhere on the kitchen counter.  I’ll just listen to it quietly, I think to myself, and carefully turn the volume down.   I hit the play button and hear nothing.  Mmm, better take another look.  I pull the phone up to my ailing eyes with no support from the reader glasses I left at home, probably right next to the earbuds, and turn the volume up to what I think is just slightly.  Hitting the play button again, I put the phone up close to my ear.  And, there it goes, at full volume, so loud that everyone in the waiting room stops what they are doing and turns to look at where that iconic six-note introduction to Aqualung is coming from.  Can you hear it?  Six loud, memorable notes.  I panic and turn it off, secretly laughing to myself as everyone in this waiting room is of the age, like me, who knows this song and has probably not heard it in 45 years.  It was like waking the dead….

Sitting on a park bench!

Now that I had woken everyone up, myself included, it is time to write.  Before I could write about the album Aqualung, I needed to track down the vinyl copy rather than just listen to the digital version. I needed to see, feel, and hear the real deal.  Tracking it down was easier than I had expected. There are some still out there with unbelievable vinyl collections!   Many of us are familiar with creepy Aqualung on the front cover. That’s what you see when you pull it up on your phone, but the real album, oh, so much more.  Aqualung, genuinely the type of human being that one would tell friends and family to avoid, dishelved, unkept, and eyes that seem to be truly eying little girls with bad intent.  The inside of the album contains no words, just a painting of a cast of five individuals, who might be in the same scene or could also be viewed as unaware of one another. A man screaming out, dressed in a white shroud, another figure hidden further back with a crucifix in hand, one who carries a sack over his shoulder, suspiciously looking above as if he might be caught, a clownlike figure playing the piano, and a man with aviator goggles downing a cold one. The background appears to be the inside of a church with a statue and Gothic windows.  No words.  The words can be found on the inner sleeve of the album when you remove it from its slot.  Black and white, on one side is Aqualung as he appears on the cover, and on the other, what appears to be a kinder, gentler, exhausted Aqualung sharing his meal with a dog.  The words are very difficult to read as they are in black text on a black-and-grayish background.  I read them, and as I did, I was quite taken aback by the poetic verses, as if I were reading poems by Edgar Allan Poe, many of which had a deep-running theme of religion.  On the back of the album cover was writing resembling the opening of The Book of Genesis: “In the beginning….”  With alterations to fit the theme, all written in a difficult-to-read Gothic script. Without even listening to the music, the album cover is a work of art.  Really got me thinking. 

I listened to it over and over.  A few times on my phone during my daily walks, and finally on the turntable.  I was so excited to do this, finding the first side of the album, sitting it down, and moving that needle over.   It works!  Once it started playing, it sounded so great.  The beauty of watching that black disk go round and round with the steady stylus riding inside the record’s grooves. And a part I forgot about, turning the record over so you hear the other side.  A wonderful inconvenience!  Every time I listened to this album, it got better and better. After a few times, I felt like running upstairs, throwing on a pair of bellbottoms, a peasant top, my Dr. Scholl sandals, and lighting up a joint.  The first two songs rock.  Aqualung, if you don’t focus too much on the creepy character and just listen to the music, made me want to dance like it was 1979 and I was at an outdoor concert feelin’ no pain.  Then, Cross Eyed Mary continues to keep you moving.  With a complete turnaround, it then goes into some beautiful acoustic ballets, which at times made me feel like I was at a Renaissance Fair or trotting along with the Monty Python group in search of the Holy Grail, but it rises up again with Hymn 43 and Locomotive Breath.  Why haven’t I listened to this album sooner!  I read that Ian Anderson did not start the flute until he was 20.  Well, thank goodness he did, because that flute is incredible!  He made flute playing cool!  Makes me want to sign up for flute lessons, after all, I’m retired now, I’ve got the time.  

Unlike my friend Jim, I never went to a Jethro Tull concert, but I did speak with a few others who did attend.  One of them was my husband, who told me he went to a few with a girl he was dating at the time.  She had some friends who would bring some hash. I asked him if the hash was  “thick as a brick?” He did not respond. After my “thick as a brick” comment, I got very little out of him about the concert, thinking this was more because he did not want to discuss the former girlfriend than the show.   Another friend of mine told me that he was a Tull fan, back in the day, and growing up on Long Island, Nassau Coliseum was the place to see the shows.   His memory focused on someone throwing a bottle onto the stage and Ian Anderson going off in his British accent on a foul-language-filled tirade directed at the crowd. I’m not surprised by this, as after closely reading the lyrics to his songs, he strikes me as a pretty serious dude.  The show went on, but it seemed like they were just going through the motions and could not wait to get off the stage.  Believe it or not, I checked the band’s website, and they still tour!  No return dates to Nassau Collisium are listed. Not that Nassau Collisium is even there anymore.  
I am so glad that we began our writing with this album.  It has rekindled a light in me to listen to music I haven’t heard in a very long time, as well as to put my phone and digital music down and get the vinyl.  The real vinyl album, which makes you read, look closely at the artwork, and, most importantly, in a time when AI is doing it for us, think.  Think about what the pictures, illustrations, words, and music might mean. What the meaning might have been to the artists themselves, but more importantly, what it means to us now, and what it meant to us during those wonderful days when vinyl was all we had.