I've had another fairly busy day- working on the essay, going to the rock and roll club, etc., hence the late post today. That said, I found time to do a sketch of Ian Anderson (singer of Jethro Tull), and decided to share it.
Honestly, it was tough getting a good picture- my phone hasn't been great since I smashed the camera into the corner of a desk.
Jethro Tull is... quite an interesting band. They do a wide range of music- their first album was a blues album, then they slowly drifted into progressive rock, doing a couple concept albums, at which point Ian started losing his voice (and his hair), and the style of the music started getting a bit too out there for me. That said, some of the stuff they did during that decade or so in between was really good- a great mix of folk, Celtic, blues, classic rock, and even jazz in some albums.
Normally, I'd say they're the sort of band that doesn't get all that much recognition- like Arthur Brown, one of the founding fathers of shock rock, who is pretty much known as a one-hit wonder despite lots of other good work- but that simply isn't the case. I don't know why exactly, but Jethro Tull has a massive cult following- more so than other bands of (what I would call) similar quality. There are entire sites dedicated to the band, and their songs have lots of comments on YouTube and some lyric sites. Despite this, they are seldom played on the radio, and I've never heard them mentioned in conversation unless I was the one to bring them up (that said, one of my high school art teachers turned out to be a big fan- we ended up adding their logo to a mural in the school).
Ozzy mentioned, in his autobiography, that Jethro Tull was a fairly big part of how Black Sabbath became famous. They missed a concert, and Black Sabbath "happened" to be there with all their equipment, so they convinced the people to let them play instead. At first, the audience was upset, but they started to enjoy it. At one point, Ozzy notes, Ian Anderson was standing on the side of the stage, nodding along to the music. He ended up stealing Tony Iommi for a while (you can see him playing with Tull in the Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus), but Tony went back to Sabbath pretty quickly, and the rest is history.
If the singing bothers you- he doesn't always sing in that weird voice
Anyways, that's gonna be it for today- this is late enough as is, and I'm tired enough that this is probably quite rambley. Hopefully you enjoyed this post regardless!
