Beside Myself

The Zoo Crew has got “Beside Myself” rolling on the turntable, and if you are one of the Zoo Freaks parked by the radio at THE ZOO, settle in. This one comes off Jethro Tull’s 1995 album Roots to Branches, track seven, running just under six minutes, and it is one of those late-career cuts that still smells like the road. Ian Anderson wrote every song on the record and cut the whole thing at his own home studio. The band around him was Martin Barre on electric guitar, Andrew Giddings on keyboards for his first album as a full member, Doane Perry on drums, and a bass chair that marked the end of Dave Pegg’s long run with Tull, with session player Steve Bailey stepping in on six of the tracks. Chrysalis put the album out in September 1995, and it turned out to be the last Tull record on that longtime label. A remastered edition followed in January 2007. “Beside Myself” even got a single release that year, sitting next to “Rare and Precious Chain,” which tells you the band thought the song could stand up outside the album sequence.

Anderson has said he hears Roots to Branches as the 1990s version of Stand Up. In his words, it carries a lot of the things he felt were the key elements of Jethro Tull: lots of flute, lots of riffy guitars, and a broad palette running from the blues and classical writing out to the Eastern motifs that had already shown up on that 1969 record. The comparison is not just nostalgia. A trip he made to India sat under a good deal of the writing. One band historian has called the album an Indian Songs from the Wood, which is a tidy way of saying the folk instinct is still there, only the scales, the rhythms, and the pictures have traveled. Anderson later allowed that the only thing that let him down was making it sound a little too Seventies. He had wanted the record to feel like a live performance rather than a polished studio job, and looking back he wished it had been a bit more varied. That is a useful window on “Beside Myself.” It opens on a classical guitar figure, the flute and keys trade lines, and the rhythm section keeps a light, almost walking pulse instead of the old heavy stomp. Fans who lived with the album have called it one of the lighter touches on the record, a searching piece rather than a riff machine.

The lyric is Anderson in observational mode, which is how he has usually worked. He has said he rarely tells stories that march forward in time. He describes what he sees. Here the picture is a small child messing about in the streets of Bombay, a city the narrator says has no shame and no particular reason to. Tragedies play out in the middle distance. A big sister is asked if she can hear him and see him cry. There is money taken in the shadows by the station, a wish for a silver train that might carry a kid to school and home again, a hollow-faced mother with a babe in arms who looks straight through the singer. Between guilt and charity he feels what he calls the wimp inside of him, then turns proud of someone who has climbed out of the mess. The refrain keeps landing on the same three words: I’m beside myself. The old phrase usually means knocked off your pins by feeling. Here it also means standing next to yourself, watching and not quite able to step in. The song does not tidy that up. It circles back to the child and the city, as if the scene has not moved on just because the singer has.

That restlessness fits the man who started the band. Ian Scott Anderson was born in Dunfermline, Fife, on 10 August 1947, and after primary school in Edinburgh the family moved to Blackpool in 1959. At grammar school he fell in with Jeffrey Hammond and John Evans, later John Evan. The early pitch, Anderson has told it dryly, was as much about the girls around the local groups as it was about the music. He and Hammond watched a scuffy outfit called Johnny Breeze and the Atlantics at a youth club, noticed the crowd, and decided a band was the way in. Anderson had a Spanish guitar he taught himself. Evans started on drums, then moved to a Farfisa organ he later called terrible. Hammond brought the blues records. A newspaper ad in the Blackpool Evening Gazette brought in a young drummer, Barrie Barlow. By the mid-1960s they were the John Evan Band, the name shortened because Hammond thought it sounded better, a blue-eyed soul and blues outfit working the North West clubs, brass and all, rehearsing in a kitchen courtesy of Evans’s mother.

Anderson had a spell at Blackpool College of Art, and he has said music was the fallback if art and a crack at journalism did not pay. The Blackpool paper turned him down. The band did not. In the summer of 1967, before the move south, he walked into Ken Watts’s music shop in Lytham St Annes meaning to trade an old Fender Stratocaster. He came out with a Shure microphone and a Selmer Gold Seal student flute hanging on the wall, no instruction book and no fingering chart. He made the notes up, sang through the flute at the same time, and had a rough blues scale under his fingers by January 1968. Hammond later pointed him at Roland Kirk, the American jazz player who vocalized through the horn the same unorthodox way. The one-legged stance people still copy started even earlier, on harmonica, and a writer at the Marquee simply misread it as a flute trick. The name Jethro Tull came off an old agriculturalist their agent found in a book. The first gig under that name was at London’s Marquee in February 1968, Anderson and bassist Glenn Cornick having joined up with guitarist Mick Abrahams and drummer Clive Bunker. This Was, the debut, was cut when Anderson had only been playing flute a few months.

Roots to Branches sits a long way down that road, nearly thirty years after the Marquee residency, and “Beside Myself” still has the same habit of looking hard at a place and refusing to pretty it up. If you want the band’s own word on the record, the album page on the Jethro Tull official website carries Anderson’s Stand Up comparison and the note that the songs were written by him and recorded at home. The same camp keeps a running conversation at the official Facebook page, on Instagram, and on X. Longtime listeners gather in the Jethro Tull Facebook group, and the fan-run Ministry of Information has been logging the tour history for years, a set-list archive the band itself has reused in tour books. Spin it again if you want. The child is still in the street, and the flute has not finished the sentence.