Hymn 43

Zoo Freaks, the Zoo Crew has got Hymn 43 spinning right now, and if you have been riding with us for any stretch of time you already know this one hits different. Jethro Tull cut it for Aqualung, the record that dropped in March 1971, and Reprise put it out as a single with Mother Goose on the flip. It is short, loud, and pointed. Ian Anderson wrote it, and he has called it a blues for Jesus, aimed at the gory glory seekers who use that name as an excuse for a lot of unsavoury things. The line everybody remembers is the one about Jesus needing to save himself from the folks who drag his name into death. Anderson later said he was trying to be sympathetic to the weight piled on the historic shoulders of Jesus of Nazareth, a tough gig, almost as bad as being the Pope. He was not swinging at faith itself. He was swinging at people who borrow sacred language to look powerful, to control a flock, and to excuse cruelty. Some Bible Belt stations and crowds did not hear the distinction. Copies of Aqualung got burned in the southern states because the second side sounded sacrilegious. Anderson has said he got away with it and nobody got hurt. The single still crawled onto the Billboard Hot 100 and peaked at number 91, with a Canadian showing around 86. Not a smash, but proof that a three-minute jab at hypocrisy could still find a radio slot in 1971.

The sessions sit in that cold stretch from December 1970 into February 1971, mostly at Island Studios on Basing Street in London. The lineup on the track is the Aqualung crew: Anderson on vocals, Martin Barre on electric guitar, Jeffrey Hammond on bass, John Evan on piano, organ and Mellotron, and Clive Bunker on drums. Anderson has been careful to say Aqualung is not a concept album. Three or four songs share a theme, My God, Hymn 43 and Wind-Up among them, and the rest are about people and landscapes. He has also said he distrusts anyone who thinks they have the whole message and a guaranteed salvation, and that the ultra-conservative Bible bashers can be as frightening as any other hard edge of belief. That is the stick he was pointing. On the playing side, Hammond had only just learned the bass when he came into Tull, which is why his lines on Hymn 43 and Cross-Eyed Mary sound like nobody else's. Barre has told a couple of studio stories that still make a guitar player wince. The amp wiring was poor, and while he was doing Hymn 43 he took a serious shock and screamed. An engineer got to him fast. On another pass, producer Terry Ellis walked in and wanted a different guitar solo. Barre liked the one he had, polled the band, and the vote kept it. Uncomfortable room, good record.

If you want the long road that led to that room, it starts in Dunfermline, Fife, where Ian Anderson was born in 1947. Primary school was in Edinburgh. In 1959 the family moved to Blackpool, and that Lancashire coast town is where the band really begins. Anderson went through grammar school with Jeffrey Hammond and John Evans, later John Evan, and he picked up a Spanish guitar and taught himself. The early story he has told is almost comic. He and Hammond watched a local group at a youth club, saw the girls gathered around a scruffy teenage band, and decided music was the way in. Art college came next, fine art, with music or journalism as the escape hatch. A local paper turned him down, so the band won. They played blues and soul around the northwest as the John Evan Band, named that way because Hammond thought dropping the s made it sound cooler, and because Evans's mother, a piano teacher, had kept them in a kitchen to rehearse and a van to travel. Anderson has said his tastes back then ran to Muddy Waters and the blues players finally getting on British television, not to the pop star heart-on-sleeve stuff.

London was the gamble. The John Evan outfit went south, money ran thin, and most of them went home. Anderson has told the flute story more than once. He tried to sell his guitar at a shop for cash. The shop would not pay cash and offered goods instead, and what he walked out with was a flute. That accident became the whole public picture of Jethro Tull. What was left of the northern crew folded in with Mick Abrahams and Clive Bunker. Their booking agent, a history student, kept handing them new names because they were bad enough that clubs would not rebook the same band twice. One of those names was Jethro Tull, after the eighteenth-century agricultural man who invented the seed drill. The week that name was on the poster, the Marquee offered them the Thursday residency, in February 1968. The name stuck. Anderson has joked that it was too late to change it. The official line on the band site still tells that Marquee story the same way. From there it was the blues club circuit, This Was, Stand Up, Benefit, and then Aqualung, the record that turned a one-legged flute player and a hard rock riff band into arena regulars. Anderson has said they had no interest in being rock stars in the me-me-me sense. He wanted songs built from things he had seen.

You can chase the whole trail on the band's own pages. The official site is Jethro Tull, where the press notes still walk through the Marquee naming and the long run of lineups. Their official Facebook page is Jethro Tull on Facebook, and they keep Aqualung live clips and tour notes up there. Instagram is @jethrotull_. On X they post as @jethrotull, and the bio still lists Aqualung right next to Locomotive Breath. If you want a room full of people who still argue about side two, the public fan group Jethro Tull Fans stays busy, and plenty of the old heads in there will tell you Aqualung was the first Tull record they bought. The older private circle at Jethro Tull fans group has been gathering since 2007 and points people back to the official site. We will keep spinning the deep cuts over here at THE ZOO. Hymn 43 is three minutes of riff, Hammond's odd bass, Barre's voted-in solo, and a Scotsman from Blackpool asking a simple question about who gets to use a holy name. Crank it, Zoo Freaks. The next one is already on the platter.