A New Day Yesterday

The Zoo Crew has got a good one spinning for the Zoo Freaks over at THE ZOO, and it comes from the far end of the summer of 1969. Jethro Tull open the album Stand Up with "A New Day Yesterday," a hard blues stomp that still smells like the clubs even while the rest of the record is already leaning toward something stranger. Ian Anderson wrote it, Martin Barre plays the guitar that makes the riff bite, and the whole thing sits there like a last look over the shoulder before the band walked off the blues road for good.

Stand Up was the first record Anderson felt he actually owned. Years later he told interviewers that if you twisted his arm, 1969 was the album he would name, because it was the first set of music he considered truly his own. He has called it his first wet dream that involved somebody else at the same time, which is a very Ian way of saying the songs finally had a band that could play what he was hearing. In a 1975 talk with Melody Maker he remembered the sessions as lonely work. A Jethro Tull recording day often meant him climbing into a taxi with a mandolin and a guitar while the rest of the fellows were not even in the building. He later said those early lyrics were uneconomical, full of padding and convenient phrases, and that he wrote better once he learned to say more with less. The raw energy, he admitted, was the part that got harder to keep.

The split that made the album possible was not friendly. Mick Abrahams, the guitarist on the debut This Was, wanted to stay in the heart of the blues. Anderson has said Abrahams did not react well when the new songs started appearing in the back half of 1968, some of them already headed for Stand Up. Abrahams left, and for a short, almost comic stretch Tony Iommi sat in the chair. Anderson has always been warm about that. He did all right for himself, did Tony. The man who stayed was Martin Barre, and the audition was a mess. His amp misbehaved, his nerves were worse, and Anderson still saw something. He invited Barre back to a bedsit, where they played with no amplifier at all, then walked down to a greasy spoon on Highgate Road. Anderson's memory of that meal is plain. Barre seemed like a good guy, interested in the same odd corners of music, and about as unformed a player as Anderson was. They could learn the job together.

They road-tested the new batch on an American tour before the record came out, and "A New Day Yesterday" was in that handful, along with "Back to the Family" and "For a Thousand Mothers." Anderson has said they sounded little like anything on This Was. He has also said, more than once, that the biggest driving force behind progressive rock is boredom. The band was tired of painting inside the blues lines, even when a song like this one still used those lines. On the official site the track is described almost as a holdover from the first album, a blues piece standing at the front door while the rest of Stand Up starts the real turn. That matches the way the song has lived. Fans on the long-running boards still note it as one of the few early numbers that kept a place in the live set for decades, revamped, stretched, and handed a flute solo when the room was ready for one.

Anderson has been careful about what the words are doing. Asked about the relationship songs on the record, "A New Day Yesterday" among them, he said he has always felt you do not talk about the real stuff, and that you should not betray real relationships in songs. So the fellow in the lyric who has to leave just when he thinks he has found someone is a made-up scene, not a diary page. The title does the clever bit. It was a new day yesterday, but it is an old day now. Fresh start, same weather. Other songs on the album do pull from life. "Back to the Family" and "For a Thousand Mothers" came out of a rough stretch with his parents, and "We Used to Know" looks back at the lean years before anybody knew the name. "Fat Man" nods at Abrahams, the biggest man in the old lineup, though Anderson has denied it was meant as a slight.

The record came out on July 25, 1969, the same day the non-album single "Living in the Past" was sitting at number three in Britain. The following week Stand Up was number one. The band was in America when the news landed. Anderson cannot swear to the town, but he is fairly sure Joe Cocker was in the room. His version of the morning is pure road life. Cocker walked in, told him the album had gone to the top, and Anderson said that was nice, then asked if Cocker was going to finish the bacon. Around that same stretch they were hauled into a Las Vegas casino to see Elvis Presley. Anderson was never a big Elvis man, though the early Sun sides had been part of his childhood. After the show the word came that Elvis would like to see them in the dressing room. Anderson tried to beg off, early night, show the next day. He was told he was not listening. It was not an invitation. It was an instruction.

The man who wrote that opener did not start as a flute player, and he did not start in London. Ian Anderson was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, grew up in Edinburgh, and moved with the family to Blackpool in 1959, around age twelve. British television was just then letting blues and folk players onto the screen, and he soaked up Muddy Waters and the rest the way a kid soaks up anything that does not sound like the high street. At grammar school he fell in with John Evans and Jeffrey Hammond. The origin story he has told, dry as a bone, is that they went to a youth club to watch a local outfit called Johnny Breeze and the Atlantics, saw the girls gathered around a scabby little group, and decided the band life was for them. Hammond had never had a girlfriend. Anderson was on guitar and vocals. Hammond bought a twelve-pound bass that came with an amplifier in a cardboard box. Little girls watched them in front rooms.

That school band grew into the John Evan Band, the S dropped because it sounded cooler, and Evans's mother, a piano teacher, kept them in rehearsal space and a van. They did blue-eyed soul, brass, a Farfisa that Anderson still calls a terrible organ, and club dates around the North West. A few weeks before the move south, Anderson tried to sell his electric guitar at a local shop. The shop would not give him cash, only goods, and he walked out with a flute. Nobody in a rock band was playing one. He has said he knew he was not going to be Eric Clapton, so he picked the instrument nobody else had claimed. By the back end of 1967 the old group had come apart. Out of that debris, and out of Mick Abrahams's band McGregor's Engine, Anderson, Abrahams, Glenn Cornick and Clive Bunker set up in Luton and tried on names that would not have survived a poster: Navy Blue, Ian Henderson's Bag o' Blues, Jethro Toe, and the frankly doomed Candy Coloured Rain. Jethro Tull, borrowed from the eighteenth-century agriculturist, was the one that stuck, partly because a booking agent had already printed it.

They became the Thursday night band at the Marquee. Lines went around the block. Anderson would join the queue in a shabby overcoat as if he were buying a ticket, carrying a Woolworth's bag that held the flute, harmonicas, an alarm clock and a hot water bottle. John Peel and the Marquee's John Gee pushed them when almost nobody else would. The debut, This Was, arrived in 1968 and tipped its hat to the blues. Stand Up, the next summer, was the moment the coat came off and the new day started, even if the first song on the record was still looking at yesterday. If you want the band's own shelf for that album, the page is on the official Jethro Tull website, where "A New Day Yesterday" is written up as the blues holdover that opens the record Anderson still counts among his favorites. The same camp keeps an official Facebook page, an official Instagram, and an official account on X. Fans who like a long table and a deep archive gather at the Jethro Tull Forum, and a large open circle of listeners keeps the conversation going in the Jethro Tull Facebook group. Put the needle back on the riff. It was a new day yesterday. On this station, it still is.