Life Is A Long Song

The Zoo Crew has a soft spot for the tunes that sit off to the side of the big hits, and Jethro Tull's "Life Is A Long Song" is one of those. It is spinning right now for the Zoo Freaks over on THE ZOO, pulled from the double set Living In The Past, and it still feels like a letter from the road rather than a chart calculation. Ian Anderson wrote it, sang it, and played the acoustic guitar that carries the whole thing, and the words treat a life the way a player treats a set: some verses bright, some verses weary, and a last line that admits the tune ends too soon for all of us. That is a rare kind of honesty from a band that was about to write forty-minute concept albums.

The track first showed up on a British EP of the same name, issued on 3 September 1971 on Chrysalis. It was recorded on 17 May 1971 at Sound Techniques in London, the little Chelsea room that had already given Fairport Convention and Nick Drake their sound, and Anderson produced it himself. The EP climbed to number 11 on the UK singles chart, which put it in the same neighborhood as "Living In The Past" without ever trying to be that kind of single. The sleeve is a fish-eye look from inside a round-back guitar, the kind Anderson was playing in those years, so the cover itself is a wink at the song. When Chrysalis gathered the odds and ends for Living In The Past in 1972, the EP came along for the ride, tucked in with the outtakes, the UK-only singles, and a couple of Carnegie Hall tapes from November 1970. American listeners mostly met the song there, on that gatefold with the fat photo booklet.

There is a lineup story hiding in the drum part. Clive Bunker had left after Aqualung, and Barrie Barlow, soon styled Barriemore Barlow to match the band's fondness for odd names, stepped in. "Life Is A Long Song" is the first Jethro Tull recording he played on. Barlow was no stranger. He had met Anderson and John Evan back in Blackpool, when the two of them were still in a beat group, and he had even turned up as a television extra on Coronation Street beside Anderson's girlfriend of the time before he ever sat behind a Tull kit. Jeffrey Hammond, the old school friend whose name already lived in "A Song For Jeffrey," was on bass. Martin Barre was on guitar. John Evan was at the piano. For a short stretch the band was almost the old Blackpool crew plus Barre, and this gentle EP was the handshake.

The rest of that EP fills in the picture. "Up The 'Pool" is Anderson's postcard from Blackpool, the seaside town where he grew up after the family left Scotland, complete with the iron tower, jam sandwiches, and candyfloss, sung from the point of view of a Londoner heading north to see his mother. "Dr. Bogenbroom," "From Later," and "Nursie" sit beside it, short acoustic sketches rather than stage epics. The BBC even ran a little promotional film for "Life Is A Long Song" before music films were a regular business. Years later Anderson took the song out with an orchestra, the Neue Philharmonie Frankfurt under John O'Hara at the Rosengarten in Mannheim in December 2004, and he cut a fresh version for The Jethro Tull Christmas Album in 2003. Fairport Convention, old neighbors in the folk rooms, covered it on Who Knows Where The Time Goes. Roy Harper, who had his own Blackpool chapter, took on "Up The 'Pool" for a Tull tribute set, and Anderson has called that one of his favorite covers of his own work.

The man with the flute did not start as a prog celebrity. Ian Anderson was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, and the family moved to Blackpool in 1960, when he was about twelve. Television shows were finally putting Muddy Waters and the blues players on British screens, and he soaked it up. At grammar school he fell in with Jeffrey Hammond and John Evans. Anderson had a Spanish guitar he had taught himself. Evans, a trained pianist whose mother kept a rehearsal kitchen and later a van, switched to drums because the Beatles had a drummer. Hammond brought a cheap bass and a stack of blues records. They have both told the story of watching a scruffy local group at a youth club, surrounded by girls, and deciding a band was the obvious way in. Little front-room gigs followed, Anderson on guitar and vocal, Hammond on a twelve-pound bass whose amplifier arrived in a cardboard box.

The group grew into the John Evan Band, the surname trimmed because Hammond thought it sounded better, a blue-eyed soul and blues outfit with brass on the northwest club circuit. Evans moved to a Farfisa organ. A teenage Barlow answered an ad in the Blackpool Evening Gazette and joined for a while. By the late sixties the survivors had pointed the van at London, signed with managers Terry Ellis and Chris Wright, and discovered that a seven-piece was a fine way to go broke. Anderson has said the flute arrived almost by accident. He tried to sell his guitar at a local shop for train fare and rent. The shop would not pay cash and offered goods instead, and he walked out with a flute he barely knew how to finger. The singing-through-the-flute and the flutter-tongue came later, borrowed from Rahsaan Roland Kirk. What remained of the gang joined guitarist Mick Abrahams and drummer Clive Bunker, and a booking agent handed them a new name so the clubs would take them back. Anderson thought Jethro Tull was something the agent had invented. A couple of weeks on he learned they were named for an eighteenth-century farmer who perfected the seed drill. Their first single even came out credited to Jethro Toe, a printer's slip. This Was followed in 1968, blues with a jazz lean, and the British press briefly called them the new Cream. Abrahams left, Tony Iommi passed through for a blink, Martin Barre settled in, and the band that cut "Life Is A Long Song" was already a long way from the youth-club gigs, still carrying Blackpool in the songs.

Zoo Freaks who want the long trail can start at the band's own house, Jethro Tull, where the archive still keeps room for Living In The Past and for Anderson's later orchestral reading of this very song. The official pages are easy to find: Facebook, Instagram, and X. Fans comparing pressings and set lists gather in the Jethro Tull Fans group, and the old press clippings live on at Jethro Tull Press. Put the needle on the quiet one. The tune is short. That is the point Anderson was making.