Cross‐Eyed Mary

The Zoo Crew has Cross-Eyed Mary up on the turntable right now, track two off Jethro Tull's Aqualung, and if you have been riding with the Zoo Freaks for any length of time you already know this one does not sit still. It comes in on that loping guitar figure, Ian Anderson's flute cutting across it like a blade, and before the second verse is done you are standing on a London pavement watching a whole neighborhood of people the respectable world would rather not name. Over at THE ZOO we still play the album the way it was pressed in 1971, side one straight through, because Mary only makes sense if you have just met the man on the park bench.

Anderson wrote Mary as a companion piece to the title song. Aqualung himself walks through her lyric, spoons his tea and winks a watery eye as she passes. The old tramp and the schoolgirl are neighbors in the same grim little patch of the city. Anderson has called her a schoolgirl prostitute type, an imaginary woman, and he has been plain that he was not writing a romance. In interviews around the album's fiftieth year he said he had no personal experience of ladies of the night, that Mary was drawn from stereotypes, and that if he were writing the song today he would soften some of the names and the descriptive language. He has also said the larger point of that side of Aqualung was the stubborn humanity in people the rest of us step around. In one account he called her a kind of Robin Hood figure, taking what she could from the men who could pay and giving something away to the ones who could not. Whether that reading holds is up to the listener. The man who wrote it has never pretended the lyric was tidy.

He has also tied the song back to a childhood memory that still bothers him. Workmen were digging up the road outside the house. One of them invited the boy in for tea and a biscuit. His mother told him not to go and never explained why. Years later, talking to the rock press, Anderson said he wrote Cross-Eyed Mary from the angle of the sad and lonely men, not as any kind of defense of what those men were doing. Martin Barre, who played the electric guitar on the track, has said none of the band ever asked Ian to change a line. Barre's view was that the early seventies let writers put an underage character in a song and call it social observation, the same way a sitcom of that era got away with jokes that make people wince now. Anderson has been just as blunt in other sittings. He has said there is no acceptable way to bring that subject into a rock song today, and he has laughed, a little uneasily, that Aqualung has more than one lyric he would moderate if he had the chance.

The record itself was cut between December 1970 and February 1971 at Island Studios in London, with Anderson and Terry Ellis producing. The lineup is the one a lot of Zoo Freaks still call the classic: Anderson on vocal, acoustic guitar and flute, Martin Barre on electric guitar, John Evan on piano, organ and Mellotron, Jeffrey Hammond on bass, and Clive Bunker on drums. Cross-Eyed Mary was never pushed as a single. It did not need to be. American FM radio grabbed it alongside the title track, Hymn 43, My God and Locomotive Breath, and the album climbed to number seven in the States and number four at home. It has sold something north of seven million copies and still outsells most of the back catalog. The band's own site still lists Mary with those other songs as one of the classic-rock staples off the record.

Anderson has spent fifty years insisting Aqualung is not a concept album, just a bunch of songs. Listeners did not buy that, and you can hear why when Mary hands the story straight back to the tramp. The second side turns on organized religion, which Anderson has traced to being fourteen and furious about religious instruction at school. A few copies of the album got burned in the States. He later shrugged that he got away with it and nobody got hurt. Iron Maiden cut their own version years afterward and stuck it on the flip of The Trooper in 1983, which tells you how far the riff traveled out of the progressive bins and into the metal rooms.

Before any of that, Ian Anderson was a Scottish kid born in Dunfermline in 1947. The family moved to Blackpool in 1959. He caught Muddy Waters and the rest of the blues players turning up on British television, took a job selling at Lewis's department store, and formed a school band called the Blades with Michael Stephens, John Evan, Jeffrey Hammond and Barrie Barlow. Soul and blues, Anderson on vocal, guitar and harmonica. The flute had not shown up yet. Art college came and went. By late 1967 he was cleaning the Ritz Cinema in Luton in the mornings, toilets included, and he has said the job ate half the day. He had already decided he was never going to be Eric Clapton, so he traded the electric guitar for a flute, practiced for a few weeks, and found he could make the thing speak in a rock and blues dialect. The John Evan Band and a outfit called McGregor's Engine folded into each other. Somebody pulled the name Jethro Tull off a history book, the eighteenth-century agriculturist who invented a seed drill, and in February 1968 they played their first gig under that name at the Marquee. The flute, the one-legged stance and the long coat came later. The job, at the start, was just a blues band that needed a name the club could put on the board.

That is the long road into the song you are hearing. A man who started in a Blackpool school hall, cleaned a cinema, and taught himself the flute because the guitar rack was already full, writing about people on the edge of a city he was only just learning how to look at. The official camp keeps the story in one place at Jethro Tull, and the album page at Aqualung still names Cross-Eyed Mary in the same breath as the title track and Locomotive Breath. Day to day word from the band sits on Facebook, Instagram and X. The long-running fan room is the Jethro Tull group, and the set-list archivists at the Ministry of Information have been logging the tours since the early days, Mary included whenever the band called her up. Spin it again if you want. The flute solo does not get old.