Jethro Tull - Aqualung
“Aqualung” is a song by the English progressive rock band Jethro Tull, and the title track from their Aqualung album. It was their first album with John Evan as a full-time member, their first with new bassist Jeffrey Hammond and last album featuring Clive Bunker on drums. The album’s original cover art by Burton Silverman features a watercolour portrait of the title character, Aqualung. Ian Anderson recalls posing for a photograph for the painting, though Silverman claims it was a self-portrait.[4] The rear cover shows a less-lecherous looking portrait of the same character sitting on a street-curb with a dog, a scene reminiscent of the band’s photographic portrait with age make-up and a pack of dogs on their first album, This Was. The inner art on the fold-out cover showed portraits of the five band members in typical stage attire performing irreverent acts in a chapel. The artwork was referenced on the cover of the 2009 album Hiranya by noise artist Merzbow.
Aqualung was Jethro Tull’s first American Top 10 album, reaching #7 in June 1971.
The song was written by the band’s frontman, Ian Anderson, and his then-wife Jennie Franks.
Like many of Jethro Tull’s songs, “Aqualung” tells a story —in this case, the story of a dirty, snot-dripping, pedophilic homeless man.
The original recording runs for 6 minutes and 34 seconds, the first six notes of “Aqualung” may well demonstrate Anderson’s clear interest in Beethoven and his fifth symphony. Also, the song contains what might well be considered Martin Barre’s most stunning and melodic guitar solo in his entire career. Twenty years later, after he laid down that solo, he said:
The only thing I can remember about cutting the solo is that Led Zeppelin was recording next door, and as I was playing it, Jimmy Page walked into the control room and waved to me. How I didn’t stop playing I don’t know, but I carried on somehow.
In an interview with Ian Anderson in the September 1999 Guitar World, he said:
Aqualung wasn’t a concept album, although a lot of people thought so. The idea came about from a photograph my wife at the time took of a tramp in London. I had feelings of guilt about the homeless, as well as fear and insecurity with people like that who seem a little scary. And I suppose all of that was combined with a slightly romanticized picture of the person who is homeless but yet a free spirit, who either won’t or can’t join in society’s prescribed formats.
So from that photograph and those sentiments, I began writing the words to “Aqualung”. I can remember sitting in a hotel room in L.A., working out the chord structure for the verses. It’s quite a tortured tangle of chords, but it was meant to really drag you here and there and then set you down into the more gentle acoustic section of the song.[4]
The Aqualung character is also mentioned in “Cross-Eyed Mary”, the next song on the album.
Sitting on a park bench
eyeing little girls with bad intent.
Snot running down his nose
greasy fingers smearing shabby clothes.
Drying in the cold sun
Watching as the frilly panties run.
Feeling like a dead duck
spitting out pieces of his broken luck.Sun streaking cold
an old man wandering lonely.
Taking time
the only way he knows.
Leg hurting bad,
as he bends to pick a dog-end
he goes down to the bog
and warms his feet.Feeling alone
the army’s up the rode
salvation à la mode and
a cup of tea.
Aqualung my friend
don’t start away uneasy
you poor old sod, you see, it’s only me.
Do you still remember
December’s foggy freeze
when the ice that
clings on to your beard is
screaming agony.
And you snatch your rattling last breaths
with deep-sea-diver sounds,
and the flowers bloom like
madness in the spring.
(Source: fuckyeahseventiesmusic)
