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Post by AnalogRearEnd on Dec 13, 2017 0:03:24 GMT
I don't care what anyone thinks of the Ramones or Jethro Tull. But I will say that at least the Ramones never made claims to profundity or "important social statements." Jethro Tull did make such claims, which makes them objectively worse than the Ramones. Or at least more objectively egregious. Also, no one in the Ramones ever waved a flute around his crotch as if it were a phallus.
Amen.
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Flat Transfer
Terry Kath
Providing DR numbers for the EK 34188, DIDP 20006
Posts: 484
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Post by Flat Transfer on Dec 13, 2017 0:10:24 GMT
I prefer to judge artists/bands by their musical output, and to a lesser point their personalities in general.
Having said that, Anderson has a creepy old man vibe about him. I remember reading an interview in which he made some offhand sexual remark about a female violin player who accompanied JT on tour.
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Post by antiram on Dec 13, 2017 0:39:11 GMT
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Post by Boozin' Susan on Dec 13, 2017 2:54:00 GMT
When I mentioned the Ramones earlier, I was just trying to come up with a group didn't have the same ponderous feel as the 1977 Jethro Tull video I'd watched a few minutes prior.
I wasn't trying to pit the groups at each other. I suppose both have their good and bad points (but with the number of Tull threads going on at SH.tv now, there has to be less there than meets the eye).
FWIW, this is the Jethro Tull performance that I felt was very Spinal Tappy:
Contrast it with this Ramones performance from the same era:
Joey was a bit dorky, but not creepy like the Tull dude. If Ian Anderson is anyone's idea of a good front man, OK. But, I'd take gangly and awkward to him any day.
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Post by Chicken in Black on Dec 13, 2017 3:25:52 GMT
"Agualung" inspired Anchorman the restaurant concert scene. I won't say anything bad about it, especially as I can't identify the tune.
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Post by antiram on Dec 13, 2017 3:46:34 GMT
It is just weird to see all those Jethro Tull mentions. The SHites are really scraping the bottom of the barrel now. I honestly thought Jethro Tull was as rightfully forgotten as, I don't know, Mountain or Mahogany Rush or whatever ancient fifth-tier garbage from way back when. But then I guess they are forgotten in the real, non-SHite universe. There is still hope for Uriah Heep!
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Post by AnalogRearEnd on Dec 13, 2017 4:04:30 GMT
Again; prog was a mistake.
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Post by thisonehurts on Dec 13, 2017 10:03:20 GMT
They worship prog like some giant mysterious obelisk. I'm sure I remember a thread entitled 'Is Close To The Edge Mankind's Greatest Achievement?'
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Post by hugofuguzev on Dec 13, 2017 10:49:31 GMT
They worship prog like some giant mysterious obelisk. I'm sure I remember a thread entitled 'Is Close To The Edge Mankind's Greatest Achievement?' I remember that train wreck of a discussion...coulda been worse, though, it could have been 'Is Love Beach Mankind's Greatest Achievement?' I wouldn't put it past some of the more Prog-obsessed SHiTEs. I don't mind me some old Genesis, Bruford-era Yes or King Crimson on occasion but Emerson, Lake and Palmer all should have been shot at birth.
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Post by Urethra Franklin on Dec 13, 2017 11:02:25 GMT
They worship prog like some giant mysterious obelisk. I'm sure I remember a thread entitled 'Is Close To The Edge Mankind's Greatest Achievement?' I remember that train wreck of a discussion...coulda been worse, though, it could have been 'Is Love Beach Mankind's Greatest Achievement?' I wouldn't put it past some of the more Prog-obsessed SHiTEs. I don't mind me some old Genesis, Bruford-era Yes or King Crimson on occasion but Emerson, Lake and Palmer all should have been shot at birth.
it would have been some achievement if all three ELP guys bit the dust in the same year. But two out of three ain't bad. ...... Oh wait, don't get me started on Meatloaf.
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Post by antiram on Dec 13, 2017 13:58:50 GMT
This is gonna sound kinda SHitey, but I don't have a problem with prog rock, except for the total wankers (Wakeman, ELP, ELO, Tull, a lot of King Crimson, a lot of Genesis, etc.) I also never could get into the later American wankers like Dream Theater and Spock's Beard
But...I actually actively enjoy some of the kraut rock school of prog, like Can, Amon Düül II, Ash Ra Tempel, that kind of stuff. Canterbury groups like Soft Machine and Caravan also had their transcendent moments. Hawkwind was never exactly prog, but it came close sometimes. However, they had some propulsion too. Even Yes, before Wakeman got his mitts on them, had those crunchy guitars and that central-nervous-system-grabbing Hammond. And although my invocation of them was snarky, there are even moments from...uh..Uriah Heep that somehow are enjoyable in all their homeliness...
However, I also acknowledge that it is the most solipsistic music ever created. Even more than the Grateful Dead, who at least played a boogie now and then. I call it "weed music". It sounds great on lotsa weed. It sounds much less great without the weed. As with weed, the music is a very internal, inward-looking trip. It is as much a kind of fantasy trip as Dungeons and Dragons, especially enjoyed by Aspies and introverts. Like weed, it is ultimately a colorful road to nowhere; in the end, the music adds up to nothing but a lot of pretty texture. Like with weed, it kind of leaves you feeling a little dumber when you binge on it. It is awful as seduction music, and it truly does not resonate with the chicks.
So, if you wanna just get very stoned and hide in your head and escape the world, then you are the perfect target audience for prog rock.
If you wanna dance, or have sex, or do the housework, or drive to work, or enjoy a meal, or go jogging, or pretty much do anything besides getting very stoned, then prog rock is about the worst choice you can make.
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Post by audiopro on Dec 13, 2017 14:20:27 GMT
I went to college with a kid who took up the flute because of his love of Jethro Tull. I was asked to record him once, and it became obvious that he lacked technique but liked to pose and piss about with the instrument.
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Post by krabapple on Dec 14, 2017 6:48:45 GMT
Disclaimer: I like old Tull. But I know schtick when I hear it. By coincidence I am reading Robert Christgau's first essay collection 'Any Old Way You Choose It'. Leaving aside how up his own ass the 'Dean of Rock Critics' already was in his 20s (but then again imagine if you were called to on write about 'the youth of today' when you were 25), older Bob (turning 30) had Tull's (i.e. Ian Anderson's) number already in 1972, in an review/essay on the 'Thick as a Brick' show he wrote. He's reprinted it on his website www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bk-aow/tull.phpI give it to you here The Tull Perplex Some thirty-two thousand Long Island longhairs communed with Jethro Tull at Nassau Coliseum over the past two nights, and it's safe to say that even they don't know exactly why there were there. Tull defies analysis so successfully that it has inspired no imitations while building its following in nine U.S. tours over three-plus years. Any bunch of funky opportunists can come up with a variation on white blues or country rock or Memphis boogie. Tull's concept is much more complex and more difficult to execute. Because its fans have been known to get involved in riots--not only the modest ticket melee that preceded this appearance but at least one major tear-gas affair, in Denver in 1971--and because it has spawned groups like Blodwyn Pig and Wild Turkey, there is a tendency to lump Tull with the so-called heavy bands. This is like calling the Mothers psychedelic because they entitle an album Freak Out! The analogy is doubly apt because Ian Anderson, Tull's vocalist-flutist-guitarist-composer and conceptmaster, is both an admirer and, it turns out, an imitator of Frank Zappa. If Jethro Tull can be categorized at all, it is as a supercommercial Mothers of Invention. Like Zappa, Anderson doesn't seem to like rock music or its audience and refuses to traffic in the good-time boogieing rhetoric that has become so commonplace. Although he is not as ambitious musically as Zappa, he does control his band and obviously plans its sudden shifts and turns. Tull's stage act is interspersed with comedy bits--most of which elicit not so much laughter as respect of the "He's really weird" variety--and is defined by its distance from itself. The musicians parody their own rock star roles--one moment that is quite funny comes during the drum solo, when all five members of the group appear on stage, thrashing tiny cymbals--and Anderson goes a step further. Secure in his reputation as a madman, a dervish, the Fagin of rock, and master parodist, he now parodies that. Yet Anderson is careful to give the audience its all-important money's worth. If the people pay for weird, he will be weird for a while. If they pay for heavy, he will program in one of those tedious unaccompanied solos. If they pay for rock, he will include several of the brilliant, intricate, hard-driving passages that are well within his reach as a composer and his band's reach as technicians. If they pay for meaning, he will perform religious commentary like "Aqualung" and "Windup." There's no need to belabor the obvious when Frank Zappa himself has set it down in an album title: We're Only in It for the Money. The real question is whether the audience gets value, and the answer is "probably." Despite Anderson's veiled contempt, people seem to have their own good time, clapping spontaneously on many occasions, getting off on the drugs that Anderson himself eschews. However unoriginal Anderson's attacks on organized religion--and for that matter, on the rock star trip itself--may appear to the matoor observer, they obviously serve a function for the audience that's listening. And Tull's music does have its virtues, summed up for me by one young fan: "It isn't corny." But a young fan's corn can be an older one's manna, and when I want to see an embodiment of the spirit of self-conscious critical intellect on the stage, I'll wait for Mick Jagger, who seems positively innocent because he is still capable of having a good time. The Tull concert lasted over two hours, and I got pleasure from perhaps ten minutes of ensemble playing. Such ratios are antilife, and all the anticlerical bull in the world will never redeem that dead time for me. I wonder how the percentage really ran for the rest of the thirty-two thousand. Newsday, May 1972
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Post by biscuitsinthewindow on Dec 14, 2017 12:17:41 GMT
I like '70s Tull and Mull of Kintyre. Is Jethro Tull considered prog? I might need to change my view on them.
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Post by Boozin' Susan on Dec 14, 2017 21:09:24 GMT
On one hand, you've got a lead singer that blatantly uses a flute as a phallic symbol. But, on the other hand, you've got a guitarist that has found a way to recycle an old circus tent. Certainly a lot for women to like about Jethro Tull... Extra points for the idiot who had thought this picture would make a good bootleg cover.
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