OK so on a lazy Saturday afternoon, I just sat down to watch the November 1977 Landover show from the Songs from the Wood set, followed immediately by the July 1970 show at Tanglewood contained on the Benefit 50th Anniversary set.
Talk about a tale of 2 bands.
At Tanglewood, JT was touring for Benefit, had begun recording Aqualung, Ian was 23 years old (practically a kid) and JT was doing more improvised jams than actual songs. Whereas in the Landover show, they are touring for arguably their strongest album since TAAB, Ian is 30, and a bandleader of a tight knight arena rock act at the top of their game delivering over 20 songs.
The contrast over a 7 year period is rather staggering. And yet, I don’t mean to sound dismissive of the Tanglewood set. It’s obvious that there’s a lot of youthful fire to the performance. And Clive Barker’s drum solo (despite going on maybe a minute or two long) was surprisingly “musical”, and several passages sounded VERY similar to Neil Peart’s early drum solos on Chromy…although I would definitely say that Neil had better chops. Still, it was Neil that I once heard say that he wrote drum solos to sound “musical” and I’ve always found that to be a rare quality in drum solos, and I felt like Clive’s solo had that quality that I didn’t quite get out of BB’s solo in the 77 set.
I was a bit surprised that, in spite of being on tour for Benefit, the Tanglewood show was compromised of only 1 song from Benefit, 3 from Stand Up, 1 from the then unreleased Aqualung, 1 completely reworked song from This Was, and the rest was all soloing and instrumental stuff. And yet I still found it very enjoyable.
But the 77 Landover show was really Tull at the peak. What a treat to have this show very nearly in full. And the fact that they had to sync the audio for the first 4 tracks from a later Boston show makes the final product even more impressive. If I hadn’t been told in the book that this was the case, I might not have even noticed. And considering the time period, I suppose we’re fortunate to even have this at all.
And even though I’m thankful to have these two visual representations, it almost makes it that much more of a shame that the sets between these two contain almost nothing in the way of live material at all. I have seen some of the bootleg from the TAAB tour. Thank goodness it at least exists. But to think that nothing in a professional capacity was recorded for Aqualung, TAAB, Passion Play, War Child, Minstrel (ok…a partial audio only set on this collection), and Too Old to RNR tours is really disappointing.
But if I had to pick a tour to have a complete visual of, the SFTW tour is a pretty good set to have. And then we have audio from almost every tour to follow, so I guess I can’t complain too much.
But ya…I really enjoyed watching both these shows today.
Topic: Jethro Tull (Read 21071 times)
