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IAN ANDERSON on War, Religion and (why not?) Cat Stevens
by Clifford Meth
When Jethro
Tull, the pioneers of Intellectual Metal, cut their teach
on the seminal Aqualung, they were the last
blokes we expected to trip the yule fantastic. Now, 33 years
later, the band who sang, “If Jesus saves, then he better
save himself” has gone-a-caroling. But far be it from
me to stuff coal in their stockings, so allow me to remove
tongue from cheek. Allow that The Jethro
Tull Christman Album is a seriously
good spin--far better than that over-hyped (ad-nauseam) How
to Dismantle An Atomic Bomb from those
erstwhile born-again Irish lads. Really, gang: Tull remains
unique, and always a superior listen. Martin Barre is still
the Clark Kent of lead guitarists and the rest of the assemblage
is superb. And Ian Anderson is, well, Ian Anderson.
Meth:
Tull arose during the U.S. involvement in Viet Nam, but it
was our war, and you were a boy from
Blackpool. Now Iraq is the UK’s problem, too, and the
Middle East is a world situation. Your music hasn’t
addressed this yet—is that purposeful?
Anderson:
Politically, I’m an angry man. But the answer isn’t
“pull the troops out.” We’re stuck with
this now. We can’t abandon these people. We’ve
brought notions of democracy to a country where they’ve
been used to, at best, a patriarchal and tribal leadership.
In Iraq, they were used to the tyrant dictator, but nonetheless,
it was a stable country, for
the most part throughout most its very complicated length
and breadth, with all of its tribal and religious divisions.
And when you go blundering in there as a Western Democracy
with tanks and guns, you’re taking the lid off the hornet’s
nest. And that’s unfortunately what seems to have escaped
both Bush and Blair and their rather dodgy crew of advisors.
It just
seemed so patently obvious from
the word go that this was just going to result in a lot of
tears that it’s beyond me that they could have done
it. I mean, it just seems so incredibly naïve, if you
give them the benefit of the doubt, to have gone in their
guns blazing thinking all you do is take out the government,
replace it with a friendly military force for a few months,
then get them all to go to elections. How could they ever
believe that given the complexities that existed in Iraq?
And this was pointed out in countless articles
by countless learned journalists
from all over the world reporting from Iraq for the last ten
years. It was pointed out time and again that the result of
removing Sadam Husein would not be a simple one. That is what
is so extraordinary! However, we don’t want to waste
the entire interview talking about that, but yes, I’ve
got my opinion, and the answer is that it’s far too
late to pull out—far too late for people like me to
be putting in music or in song any clear cut political message.
The job
I do as a musician is to travel— not to Iraq, thus far,
but to certain other places where we have seen the suicide
bombers and the tragedy of war in the last 30 or 40 years.
I go to places like Israel; I go to Turkey, to India, to places
where people do blow each other
up. But as a musician, I’m allowed to cross those boundaries
in the worlds of art and entertainment; I cross boundaries
that politicians can’t--even if they want
to. So I think I’m rather happy to keep my
message a generally uplifting one of music and song. If there’s
a political or religious comment being made, I do so with
a degree of, I hope, subtlety and artistry, which I hope does
not make me appear partisan and does not allow for misunderstanding,
although I’ve been at the end of misunderstanding before,
choosing words in my lyrics perhaps not so carefully as I
might have done back in 1971.
Meth:
You told me years ago that you felt Linda McCartney’s
stance on animal rights was naive and uninformed. How did
you regard Paul McCartney’s leadership role in The
Concert for New York?
Anderson:
I’ve never been a McCartney fan, but it just seems like
he’s trying to lay the ghost of Linda and I just don’t
understand why he’s going near any of that stuff. His
new wife is into the landmine stuff and that seems to me so…
I mean, I got an invitation to go to that and I tore it up.
I was really quite reviled by
being asked to go and do something that is actually all about
just giving money to the McCartneys to make them look good.
One might almost think that if they manage to change the laws
and Arnold [Schwarzenegger] gets to be president that maybe
Paul McCartney is going to shoot for Governor of California.
I don’t know. Must be some ulterior motive.
Meth:
Cat Stevens is a contemporary of yours.
Anderson:
Ah yes! Well, you see Cat Stevens would be a much
better Governor of California. We actually met,
funny enough, just before the opening of the Olympic Games--I
bumped into Cat Stevens in Athens. He and I were both doing
a TV show for German television. I hadn’t seen him for
years and I went over and we chatted for ten minutes on a
variety of subjects. He seemed very pleasant, very nice, and
I got the inkling that music was becoming a meaningful part
of his life again. A musical performance was definitely in
the cards. So I was quite pleased with that and he had to
go to make-up because he was being interviewed on this TV
show—not performing music, just interviewed--so I went
my way. Well, after I’d done my performance, his son
came rushing over and said, “Oh, did my dad find you?”
And I said, “Nope. I didn’t know he was looking
for me.” He said, “He’s searching everywhere
for you--he’s so embarrassed that he wants to apologize
because he didn’t recognize you.” And I said,
“Wow! That’s amazing! You tell your dad that raises
him even higher in my esteem, that he would be so nice and
pleasant and give ten minutes of interesting and pleasing
conversation to someone who he must have regarded as a complete
stranger.” (laughs)
One feels
a little sorry for him having endured perhaps a degree of
vilification, and certainly humiliation when he was denied
entrance to the U.S. because we were told that the authorities
had confused his name with another person who was on the terrorist
list. I rather suspect there was more to it than that. My
feeling is because of his pronunciations some years ago against
Salmon Rushdie, when pressed on the issue, concurring with
a fatwah put him in a pretty
bad light, although Cat Stevens has always been a peaceful
and inspiring person in regards to peace and tolerance and
so-on. He is the benign face of Islam that unfortunately has
been tainted by some assumption that he is aligned with the
extremists. I really don’t believe for one second that
he is or ever has been. I think we need more people like Yusef
Islam who are going to stand up and show us the kind and caring
and responsible and very human face of Islam. We need a lot
more Yusef Islams, whether they call themselves that or Cat
Stevens.
Meth:
A naïve notion of your religious viewpoint might be based
solely on the flipside of the Aqualung album.
In light of what you just said about Cat Stevens, how did
you react to Bob Dylan’s “Born Again” phase,
or Van Morrison’s spiritual material, or George Harrison’s
Hare Krishna music?
Anderson:
I’ve never been anti-Christian. I wouldn’t call
myself a Christian because I’m not an active, practicing
one, but I believe in most of the tenets of Christianity.
It’s very easy to go along with most of that as it’s
equally easy to go along with most of Islam. It’s actually
easy to go along with quite a lot of Hinduism, once you get
over that big hurdle of slightly demystifying the pantheon
of deities that litter the life of a Hindu (laughs). Hinduism
is a tricky one, but you have to look at it more like you’re
watching a Bollywood movie, or a sort of Walt Disney cartoon.
It’s larger than life. It appears colorful and somewhat
two-dimensional in the way that the many gods of Hinduism
seem to operate. It is rather cartoon-like—however,
behind it, it is essentially a monotheistic religion, and
not a difficult one for us to go along with. Difficult probably
for most westerners to think of practicing, but for me it
would be difficult to be a practicing Christian because I
can’t quite get my head around one or two things about
Christianity that are fundamental, particularly regarding
the degree to which Christ has become deified as a prophet
and a symbol. So I have a problem with Christianity, but in
terms of most of its teachings—most of it is practical
and sensible moralities and codes for good living. I’m
not anti-Christian; I’m actually quite pro-Christian,
but I’m equally pro-Islam,
as long as we don’t get into the car bombs. For the
vast majority of practicing Muslims, the step from Islam to
terrorism is a giant chasm they could not conceive of crossing.
It’s just for some people, as always—Christianity
and Islam alike—religion has been a means of whipping
up hatred, bigotry, intolerance.
Just look
at the simple polarities in Belfast, in Northern Ireland,
and that deep, undying hatred between Catholics and Protestants.
It’s so hard for us to understand why those people still
want to kill each other, and indeed on a Saturday night still
do. Whether it’s a bottle
fight down the road in Belfast or something more insidious,
the hatred has not gone away. At the moment, the guns and
the bombs are silent, but the deep divisions are still there
with very little sign of being mended by the current and future
generations.
Meth:
Almost like an English football game.
Anderson:
Unfortunately it mirrors some of the violence that we do
see elsewhere in society, whether it’s at
a football match or on the streets of London, if you’re
careless enough to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Meth:
When I first saw Liverpool versus Manchester United, and it
was unlike anything I’d ever experienced. All of the
sport was in the audience, I thought.
Anderson:
Things get whipped up and unfortunately people rather enjoy
having a simple cause to, if not die for, at least get their
heads broken for. It is remarkable how, generally speaking,
from an audience point of view anyway, sports in the USA seems
mercifully free of that kind of violence from spectators.
It’s something that's not only British, of course—it
happens elsewhere in Europe. But I guess given the choice,
I’d rather seen the violence contained within the walls
of a soccer stadium than spreading onto the streets of a foreign
country. Maybe, in some weird way, we are containing that
outlet for violence by allowing it to happen and focus on
something as silly as a football match.
Meth:
Have you seen Bob Dylan’s Chronicles?
Anderson:
I’ve been given a copy of it, actually, but I’ve
yet to read it.
Meth:
It's outstanding. A superior book. Have you kept chronicles
and diaries like this that you would ever consider publishing?
Anderson:
I’ve never kept anything,
perhaps on the grounds of some belief that if I can’t
remember it, it’s not worth writing down and expecting
someone else to find it amusing.
But also, doubtless, because of some degree of laziness. I
know that a very early member of Jethro Tull, Glen Cornick,
did actually keep diaries and
memorabilia—things, photographs, bits of paper, stuff.
And I rather regret now not
having kept stuff. But ultimately
I think I’m not really a stuff
sort of person. I have a Grammy Award somewhere—I haven’t
the faintest idea where it could be. It’s probably in
the house somewhere. I live in a big house and I’m not
going to spend the afternoon looking for the damn thing. It’s
not that it’s not important to me—it is
kind of important; I know that 6000 peers in the musical creative
world took part in a voting system and preferred Jethro Tull
as the winners of a Grammy. I’m not unimpressed by that,
I’m really humbled by
it, and very grateful to them for their show of approval at
Jethro Tull’s activities over the years—not at
being the best metal act or whatever the award was actually
for; they were just giving us the-best-band-that-hasn’t-won-a-Grammy-before
award–that was the spirit of people voting for us. So
I’m not unimpressed by that,
but I just don’t need the object itself to remind me.
I’m not one of those people who needs something hanging
on the wall to remind me that I’ve sold a million copies
of an album or that I’m a clever chap. Especially because
as a performing musician on stage every night, you are confronting
real people in real
time—it’s not just memories or symbols;
you actually get the real deal when you’re a performing
artist. So I’ve never really felt the need for stuff
and reminders and whatever.
And I
don’t think I’d be much of a biography writer
in the sense that I’m a little too sensitive about hurting
other people’s feelings. If I got carried away, I would
say some things that are possibly quite funny and deeply cutting
and maybe cynical—overall I would have rather amusing
and perceptive things to say about people that I’ve
known, however many of them would be deeply hurt by it and
for that reason I wouldn’t do it, even though it might
amuse the hell out of me and maybe some other people. I know
it would be hurtful to have that confidence betrayed by a
public unveiling of events or character assassinations (laughs).
So I don’t think I’m going to do that somehow.
Meth:
If Oliver Stone were going to make The Jethro Tull film, the
way he did The Doors,
who would play Ian Anderson?
Anderson:
I haven’t seen The Doors
film—it would be a difficult one for
me to relate to, but the first reaction would be don’t
because whenever people do try
to do movies about the rock music industry, everything I’ve
ever seen has been... The one sterling
exception is “Spinal Tap,” which was pretty spot-on,
really, for a bunch of guys who were not part of it. I think
you can do it if you’re very clever and you’re
actually making fun of it. In a satirical way, you can do
it. But if you’re actually trying to dramatize events...
I mean, God help us if there was to be a film about The Beatles
or John Lennon. It would be dreadful in the same way as the
fools who try to make movies about Princess Diana. It’s
just awful when people go that
route because they never really touch upon the reality in
the way that people close to it know it to be.
I haven’t
seen Oliver Stone’s movie about The Doors. But if I
did, I’d be very surprised
if it was something that made me feel that it was an accurate
portrayal of something—not
that I knew him or anything really about The Doors... Any
poor fool who has to play me would probably have to take some
serious lessons in standing on one leg. And it would have
to go straight to video. And they’d release the soundtrack
to the movie as a ring tone.
Meth:
You’ve clearly labored to keep your music fresh, but
there has to be certain benefits to the nostalgic aspects
of the band’s history and longevity.
Anderson:
That’s an interesting one because just before I came
back from America, I actually went into XM Studios with the
guys from Jethro Tull and we re-recorded the entire Aqualung
album for a series on their radio where people go in and record
their seminal albums as a live performance before a small,
invited audience. I suppose in some ways just to prove they
can actually remember all the chords. But also, perhaps, with
a view to performing music not as a literal remake, but as
a reinterpretation according to the times, technology, flirting
with different arrangements. Or in the case with Jethro Tull,
with three different band members.
It was
kind of interesting to do because not only were we recording
some pieces of music from the Aqualung
album which we still periodically play live on stage, but
there were also three songs from the album we had never, ever
played since the day they were recorded, at the
end of 1970. That was kind of interesting, and a little weird,
to touch upon these songs that, for whatever reason, had never
been attempted before. And they were actually three really
enjoyable songs to do.
Meth:
Which songs?
Anderson:
“Hymm 43,” “Slipstream,” and “Up
To Me.” And we started playing them—knowing that
we’d be doing them for XM—live on the tour.
Meth:
I’m surprised that you never did “Hymm 43”
– that one was getting airplay for many years.
Anderson:
Yeah, I think it was one of those songs that was, back in
the days of A&R radio, would be frequently played as an
example of Jethro Tull’s work. I would think it’s
unlikely you’d be hearing it very often in today’s
very, very restricted classic-rock radio programming. It’s
never been one of my favorite songs. We did change the arrangement
substantially, although we went back to the final verse in
the original style. But it was interesting to play it and
do it in a different way.
But going
back to the idea of sort of keeping things fresh, it is something
that’s not very difficult to do with most of the material
because there’s always another interpretation of it.
It’s not like being a classical musician and having
to play the exactly what Mozart
or Beethoven wrote, the only interpretation being, perhaps,
in the tempo or dynamics or phrasing that a conductor will
draw from the orchestra. It’s 1% of the outcome. 99%
of it is what was written by the composer. It’s on paper—it’s
definitive—there is no room to
change any of the notes or parts or relationships between
them.
But in
the world of rock music, jazz, blues and some folk music,
there is the room to not only interpret the song but to actually
change things—to improvise.
And beyond improvisation, to sit and deliberately, consciously
reappraise something. There’s no one to stop you. So
if you’re the author of that work—or even if you’re
not—you can seek permission to vary an artist’s
work. And if the artist has been dead long enough (laughs)
then you can take pieces of traditional music, as I do, and
do what the hell you want with them.
Meth:
When will we hear the XM Aqualung?
Anderson:
I believe it’s scheduled for a March broadcast. It will
be rough and ready, but it’s okay. I think I sang three
wrong words in a verse, which I fixed right afterwards, but
apart from everything else, it’s as it is. There’s
a few bad moments, and a few less than perfect bits of performance,
but what you’ll hear is us live in a small studio with
a bunch of people. It’s not a high level of technical
and musical excellence. It’s kind of funky.
©
2004 Clifford Meth
Author
Clifford Meth, a well-known writer in the comics community,
has been tracking Jethro Tull in print for two decades. Visit
him at www.cliffordmeth.com
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