The Best of Jethro Tull, and spun it endlessly (although it still sits on my record shelf and is quite playable - viva La Vinyl!). I can’t remember how, but I got ahold of M.U. Worth’s vast record stores - Peaches or Sound Warehouse - and singing the first line to one of the clerks. So who was this band, and how could I find out? Pre-internet this was a challenge, you know? Particularly in a new town, with no friends, no car, and a sister whose idea of rock was the Flying Lizards’ remake of “Money.” I may have finally resorted to going into one of Ft. And it was well-known enough, of course, that FM djs didn’t feel compelled to announce it. At that time the song was a little over a decade old, which is not much more than one rock generation (consider that we’re over two decades removed from Nirvana’s Nevermind, and that lends some perspective). As important, I also discovered Jethro Tull, via the now (less so then) classic rock perennial “Aqualung.” To my young ears it sounded like nothing else on the radio - it still doesn’t, come to think of it - and I spent probably a couple of months trying to figure out who the band was that could conjure such riffs, dynamics, and lyrical weirdness. I was 15 and completely lost, having spent the decade and my impressionable childhood growing increasingly fond of my Rocky Mountain home of Salt Lake City. My family moved back to Texas, after a 10-year absence. Two significant things happened to me in 1982. Jethro Tull also took me on the short, worthwhile journey to Blodwyn Pig. By leading me to Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention, with whom Tull had some connection, particularly later in the 1970s, Jethro Tull created trails for me to follow that are seemingly endless and that I’m still following thirty years later. While Jethro Tull is often lauded for its prog side, which is substantial, M.U.was my introduction to Tull’s sympathy for folk music, opening for me the British folk revival by making me care to know about the use of traditional folk song forms in modern music. If I were to name one album, though, that really blew the doors off, it would be a greatest hits compilation, and not a great one at that: M.U., The Best of Jethro Tull. So Syd Barrett’s Madcap Laughs would eventually lead me to the Television Personalities’ Chocolat Art and the Soft Boys’ Underwater Moonlight, Julian Cope’s Peggy Suicide and his contribution to a Roky Erickson tribute would lead me to the Thirteen Floor Elevators and on to Thin White Rope, and Rainbow led me back to Deep Purple and forward to Dio. I would often spare no effort in tracking down an LP or CD I was interested in, IF the gateway record that connected me to it spoke to me in tongues, the way such records should. Aided and abetted in the Web-less years by the Rolling Stone Record Guides (mainstream rock/punk/singer-songwriter), the Trouser Press Record Guides (alternative and indie), and Pete Frame’s monumental Rock Family Trees, Rock Family Tree for Tull, Blodwyn Pig, et al. I could name dozens of them that functioned like this for me over the years. There are gateway albums, records that lead to others, elaborations that must be followed until time or economics interrupts.
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