Said She Was a Dancer

The Zoo Crew have got a slow-burn number spinning for the Zoo Freaks, and it comes from a stretch of the Jethro Tull story that still raises eyebrows among folks who thought the flute and the codpiece had already said everything there was to say. Said She Was a Dancer sits on Crest of a Knave, the 1987 album that dragged Ian Anderson and Martin Barre back into American radio after a long cold spell. Anderson wrote it, sang it, and produced it, with Barre on guitar, Dave Pegg on bass, and the late Gerry Conway laying down that dry, unfussy drum pulse on several of the sessions. There is no grand flute solo barging in to announce the band. What you get is a barroom scene, a woman who claims she is a dancer, and a narrator who is not entirely sure he believes her and not entirely sure he wants the truth either.

The lyric is pure Anderson mischief. She meets him next to the bar, they hit the samovar, and it is snowing outside and in her soul. She carries a phrase book in a silk-soft hand and speaks in riddles while the vodka listens. He wonders if she is a student of the agricultural plan, calls her his frozen little senorita, and offers the line that still gets a chuckle on the request line: I am your Pepsi-Cola, but you will not take me out the can. He steals one kiss, it is a near miss, and she looks at him like he is Jack the Ripper. Goodnight is all she says. He takes himself off to bed. Anderson has always liked a character who will not sit still for a straight answer, and this one is a cousin to the strangers who drift through Budapest, the long cinematic piece from the same record. He has said the Budapest song itself came out of a show the band played there in the summer of 1986, once his voice was well enough to face a crowd again.

That voice had been the whole problem. After Under Wraps, Anderson went out and tore his throat up so badly he spent the better part of a year with specialists, wondering if the singing days were finished. Crest of a Knave was the record that came after the silence. He told interviewers he had been fairly selfish on it, writing and arranging alone, and he admitted most Tull albums had not been that autocratic. Barre remembered it differently and more fondly, calling it the album where a lot of things were of his invention and where his input ran higher than on any other. They had taken heat for a Dire Straits flavor on the previous work. Anderson told Paul Roland they consciously steered away from that delivery: Barre used less of the single-coil pickup, and Anderson pitched the songs higher and sang them more forcefully, the way he used to. Steel Monkey caught the MTV rotation. Said She Was a Dancer, Jump Start, Farm on the Freeway, and Budapest all found airplay behind it. The heraldic artist Andrew Stewart Jamieson designed the sleeve, a knight's crest rather than another painting of a tramp on a bench.

Then came the Grammy. At the 1989 ceremony, Crest of a Knave took Best Hard Rock/Metal Performance Vocal or Instrumental, ahead of Metallica's ...And Justice for All. Anderson has told the story with a shrug ever since. The award was announced to a barrage of boos, hisses, and gasps. He liked to think the academy was not voting for Tull as a heavy metal band. They were voting for a bunch of nice guys who had never won a Grammy before. He has also been plain about the record itself. It was a pretty good album. It had some good tunes on it. Nobody in their right mind would call it heavy metal. What the hell. It is just one of those moments. Redbeard, in his In the Studio sit-down on the album, even passed along a pub tale from the lane near Anderson's farmhouse west of London: Old Dylan will gladly put a coin in the jukebox and punch up She Said She Was a Dancer when some American deejay wanders in looking for directions. That is the kind of afterlife a deep cut earns when the album outlives the argument.

None of that late-eighties second wind makes much sense unless you go back to a front room in Blackpool. Ian Anderson was born in Dunfermline, Scotland, in 1947, and the family moved to the Lancashire coast around the turn of the sixties. At Blackpool Grammar he fell in with Jeffrey Hammond and John Evans, whose mother taught piano and, more usefully, let the boys rehearse in her front room. Anderson had talked his way into a guitar and a stack of blues records. The first little outfit was The Blades, named for the club James Bond frequents in the Fleming novels. Evans started on drums because that was what the Beatles had, then shifted to organ once Georgie Fame and the Graham Bond Organisation got into their heads. Hammond, who thought John Evans sounded ordinary, talked his friend into dropping the s. The John Evan Band was the thank-you to John's mother, who had also funded the van and the Hammond organ. They played blues and Motown covers around the northwest, with a teenage Barrie Barlow eventually on the drum stool after an ad in the Blackpool Evening Gazette.

The London gamble came when most of the others peeled off for college. Anderson and bassist Glenn Cornick stayed to honor the booked dates. A few weeks before the move, Anderson tried to sell his guitar at a local shop. The shopkeeper would not pay cash and offered goods instead, and the goods included a flute. Anderson took it, learned it fast, and built the one-legged stance because it was simply how he kept his balance while he played. In the south they found guitarist Mick Abrahams and drummer Clive Bunker. A booking agent handed them the name of an eighteenth-century Berkshire agriculturist who invented the horse-drawn seed drill. Anderson has said he was embarrassed once he learned who Jethro Tull actually was, and that he never did read the 1731 book Horse-Hoeing Husbandry. They could not change the name. They had just landed a residency at the Marquee and the first positive notices were coming in. This Was arrived in 1968, still mostly blues, before Anderson's songwriting and that flute pulled the band toward the folk, hard rock, and theatrical sprawl of Stand Up, Aqualung, and Thick as a Brick.

Crest of a Knave is the later chapter of that same stubborn streak. The vinyl pressing left off Dogs in the Midwinter and The Waking Edge, which only showed up on the compact disc, and Doane Perry, already in the band, still had to share the drum chair with a machine on a few tracks. Anderson has never pretended the album was a return to the codpiece years. He has called those costumes fun and perfectly silly, and he has also admitted the Royal Ballet costumer's famous piece ended up distinctly unfragrant by 1973. By 1987 he was more interested in a tighter rock frame that could still hold a Moscow bar, a samovar, and a woman who might be a dancer and might be leading him a merry dance. Zoo Freaks who want the long view can wander the official pages and the fan rooms where the set lists and the old arguments never quite die. The crew will keep spinning the deep cuts over on THE ZOO, where a knave, a flute, and a near miss still belong on the same turntable.

The band's own house is the official Jethro Tull website, where Crest of a Knave sits in the discography with Steel Monkey and Farm on the Freeway beside it, and where Anderson has posted about rebuilding the site he and keyboardist Andrew Giddings first put up as J-Tull.com back in 1998. The official accounts keep the same trail: Jethro Tull on Facebook, Jethro Tull on Instagram, and Jethro Tull on X. Fans comparing notes on the Grammy night, the Blackpool days, and whether Said She Was a Dancer belongs on a late-night run gather in the long-running Jethro Tull Facebook group, which points readers back to the official site and has been hashing over the catalog since 2007. Pull up a chair. The dancer is still not saying what she does for a living, and the record still does not care whether you file it under metal.