Locomotive Breath

The Zoo Crew has got Locomotive Breath spinning on the turntable right now, that chugging beast off Jethro Tull’s 1971 album Aqualung, and if you have been riding with THE ZOO for any length of time you already know this one grabs the room by the collar. Ian Anderson wrote it as a picture of a train that will not stop, a runaway of population growth and the machinery of commerce that keeps picking up speed whether anybody asked for the ride or not. He has said it was his first song on a subject that still sits uncomfortably with folks. Born in 1947, he has pointed out more than once that the population of the planet has more than tripled in one man’s lifetime, and the song is his way of asking where that train is headed and why nobody seems able to pull the brake. He does not drive a car himself. Buses and trains are how he gets around, so the old blues habit of writing train songs never left him.

Getting the track onto tape was another story entirely. Down at Island Studios in London, across the cold months at the turn of 1970 into 1971, the band tried to play Locomotive Breath live in the room and it simply would not gel. Anderson wanted a metric, relentless, machine-like beat, the click-clack of wheels on rail, and what they got in rehearsal was too loose and untidy for the picture in his head. This was before click tracks were a studio fixture, so he walked out with a pair of drumsticks, clicked them together for the length of the piece, then laid down hi-hat and bass drum against that homemade pulse. Clive Bunker came back in and put the tom-toms and cymbals on top. Anderson himself played the electric rhythm guitar all the way through, and he has said it was the only time he ever played a Les Paul, borrowed from Martin Barre because he wanted that heavy edge under the folk colors the band was already known for. Barre later cut the parts Anderson simply could not play. Jeffrey Hammond, the old school friend who had only just stepped in on bass, worked his fingers raw chasing the part. Anderson has called the finished record a completely artificial construction, built in layers rather than captured as a band playing together, and he has also called it a classic, straight-ahead Jethro Tull song. Sometimes, he has said, you have to do the job yourself.

The piano that opens the thing is John Evan’s, and the story on that one is almost too good. Evan, born John Evans and renamed without the s because it sounded cooler, knocked out that introduction in the studio while some of the others were out to lunch. Anderson later said the part may sound simple, but later keyboard players struggled to match what Evan did, and it was very clever. Evan had been the real musician of the old Blackpool gang, the one whose mother funded the van and the organ and let them rehearse in her front room. On Aqualung he was still new to the full lineup, having played Benefit as a session man the year before, credited with a wink as the fellow who played keyboards for their benefit. His introduction has stayed with the song ever since, a quiet blues figure that barely announces itself before the band crashes in.

Lyrically Anderson was careful. He has said people get their knickers in a twist if you talk about population, industry, and the mouths that have to be fed, so he wrote around the picture of a juggernaut you cannot step off. The old man on the train, the all-time loser, the headlights staring back, all of it sits inside that helpless motion. He has ranked the song among his own favorites, and it has been a live fixture, often the encore, since 1972. Some nights the band has rolled it straight into the finale of Pomp and Circumstance to send the hall home. A trimmed single went out in America in 1971 backed with Wind-Up and did not chart. A 1976 single, backed with Fat Man, reached number 59 on the Billboard chart and number 85 in Canada. Cash Box at the time praised the flute work. Radio has never really let go of it.

Aqualung itself was cut under strain. Anderson remembers the last sessions as absolutely freezing, and the band had come in a little self-satisfied, short on momentum, which is part of why Locomotive Breath had to be built from a bass-drum part he played himself. The album sold in the millions and got branded a concept record, a label Anderson has pushed back on for decades. He has called it a bunch of songs, social documentary more than a grand scheme, written from what he saw on the street rather than from a fantasy world. The title track came from a real homeless man his wife had photographed. Locomotive Breath was the one that took the wider view, the planetary one. Side by side they gave the record its weight, bookended with Cross-Eyed Mary and the quieter pieces in between.

Anderson’s own start was a long way from Island Studios. He was born in Dunfermline, Fife, on August 10, 1947, and the family moved to Blackpool in 1959, when he was about twelve. British television was just then putting blues and rock and roll in front of kids who had never seen it, and he soaked up Muddy Waters and the rest. At Blackpool Grammar School he fell in with John Evans and Jeffrey Hammond. They formed The Blades, named for the club in the James Bond books, rehearsing in Evans’s mother’s front room. Evans wanted to play drums at first, took a few lessons, and only later moved to organ. A local music shop ran a shaky hire-purchase arrangement, ten shillings a week and your name on a bit of paper, and Anderson’s grandmother stood as guarantor. The shopkeeper nearly went broke. A younger drummer, Barrie Barlow, answered an advertisement in the Blackpool Evening Gazette. By the mid-sixties the group was the John Evan Band, the name a thank-you to Evans’s mother, who had paid for the van and a Hammond organ, with the s dropped so it would look sharper on a poster. They worked the northwest club circuit with a bit of brass, chasing the Graham Bond Organisation more than the hit parade.

When Evans left for college to study pharmacy, most of the band folded with him. Anderson and bassist Glenn Cornick stayed on to honor the bookings, headed for London, and kept changing the name because they were not good enough yet to get rebooked under the same one. In February 1968 a club agent handed them a name off a history book, Jethro Tull, the eighteenth-century agriculturist who invented the seed drill. Anderson has said they were so bad they had to pretend to be a new band every week, and the name stuck before he could shake it. The flute came almost by accident. He had picked one up, found he could make a sound, and discovered that standing on one leg while he played it gave him a stage picture nobody else had. Blues clubs gave way to the heavier, stranger records that followed, Benefit and then Aqualung, with Martin Barre on guitar, Clive Bunker on drums, Hammond on bass, and Evan back from school because Anderson talked him into it. The one-legged flute player from a Blackpool school band had become the fellow writing about trains that will not stop.

That is the record on the air at the moment, four minutes and change of piano, flute, and a rhythm nailed together with drumsticks because the band could not find the groove any other way. Zoo Freaks who want the long trail can start at the band’s own house, Jethro Tull, where the Aqualung pages still talk about Locomotive Breath sitting alongside the title track as one of the songs that carried the album. The same camp keeps a Facebook page, an Instagram, and an account on X. Listeners who like to argue the deep cuts with other diehards have a long-running fan gathering over at the Jethro Tull Facebook group, tens of thousands strong and still posting. The Crew will keep the locomotive on the rails a while longer. Old Charlie stole the handle, and the train it won’t stop going, no way to slow down.