My all-time greatest albums, Part 4 

With the understanding that the music you’re exposed to when you’re young always seems more exciting, more essential, this is part four of my truly personal All-Time Greatest Albums list.  

When Jethro Tull’s Aqualung was released in 1971, I was in my early teens and beginning to question the eternal wisdom of parents and teachers, and especially, institutional beliefs. 

Ian Anderson always claimed that Aqualung wasn’t a concept album, and he’s right. While one side is a travelogue through some of the more threadbare neighborhoods of London, side two is a diatribe against organized religion. And while everybody dug side one, and Martin Barre’s awesome guitar on the title song (the opening riff and the fantastic solo), it was on the flip side, which Anderson conveniently titled on the record label, My God, that he got down to some heavy-duty axe grinding. 

Essentially, his thesis that organized religion is a crock comes down to two lyrics: “He is the God of nothing/if that’s all that you can see/You are the God of everything/He’s inside you and me,” and “He’s not the kind you have to wind up on Sunday.” Heavy stuff when you’re a high school sophomore. 

Some random thoughts about Aqualung: 

When Aqualung was recorded, Ian Anderson had only been playing the flute for three years. 

Once rock and pop began to diversify and add new instrumental colors, flute solos were all over the charts, gracing You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away, California Dreamin’, There Is A Mountain and Spill The Wine, among others.  

The artwork on Aqualung are watercolors done by an American artist named Burton Silverman. The original paintings were stolen decades ago. 

The early 1970s were a golden age of album cover constructions: Déjà Vu, with its “leather” photo album look; Sing It Again, Rod (shaped like a shot glass); L.A. Woman (die-cut center); and Through A Glass Darkly (octagon shaped). The cover of Aqualung was manufactured with the texture of an artist’s canvas to show off Silverman’s paintings. 

There was a kid in my high school who took the portrait of Aqualung on the album cover to heart, with long hair, scraggly beard and wearing an old overcoat that I’d bet once belonged to his grandfather. 

Ian Anderson had a distinctive style when playing the flute, sometimes noisily taking in air – which added another “voice” to his music – and (something I learned from a flutist message board) rolling his tongue the way the Spanish do when pronouncing their “Rs.” 

Rock and pop songs that charted on Billboard during the late winter and spring of 1971 when Aqualung was released: George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord; Judy Collins’ version of Amazing Grace; two songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, the title and I Don’t Know How to Love Him, which can go either way, secular or religious; that trilogy of happy-hippie soft-headedness, One Toke Over the Line, Put Your Hand in the Hand and Signs; and Aretha’s gospel version of Bridge Over Troubled Water. Somehow, TIME magazine missed running a cover story on this “trend.” I’m sure it would have been positioned as “disillusioned with drugs and meditation, today’s youth find new kicks from the Old Testament.” 

Decades before – heck, lifetimes before – critics were praising Nirvana and the Pixies for their “soft/loud/soft” aesthetic of playing a quiet passage, then blasting (with great dramatic effect) huge electric guitars, it was the central sound of much of Aqualung, with several songs building from quiet to loud and back again. The electric guitar that erupts in the quietly acoustic second verse of My God is like the thunder accompanying the delivery of the Ten Commandments.

Ian Anderson also drops in a reference to a “plastic crucifix,” and when you’re questioning the sincerity – and the brains – of those who embrace Christianity, dime store crap like a dashboard Jesus or lenticular portraits of Jesus, seemed an apt symbol. 

George Carlin on The Tonight Show in 1974: “If God is like us … big trouble, man.”