Jethro
Tull leader Ian Anderson recalled the reasons he abandoned
guitar and bought a flute in 1967.
He’d
already formed an early version of his band, but at the time they were
performing regular blues songs, because he didn’t believe there were many other
options.
“We
came out of that period where to get a gig – let alone get a record deal – you
had to be in a blues band or an out-and-out pop group,” Anderson
told Classic Rock in a recent interview. “But on the periphery, there
was Captain Beefheart and the Graham Bond Organization – very
different to purist black American blues – which was important to the
development of Jethro Tull.”
Anderson
noted “that signpost got bigger in the summer of ’67 when Pink
Floyd had The Piper at the Gates of Dawn and
the Beatles had Sgt. Pepper. Those records energized me –
you could step outside the comfort zone of 12-bar blues or pop music and you
could do something different.”
It
was around that time he decided to change instruments. “I’d been playing guitar
and harmonica, but as a guitarist I was never going to be as good as Eric
Clapton, simple as that,” he reflected. “So I parted company with my Fender
Strat, whose previous owner was Lemmy Kilmister, who was then the rhythm
guitar player for the Rockin’ Vickers, and I bought a flute, for no good
reason. It just looked nice and shiny.”
Anderson
admitted he struggled to settle with the new instrument, and ignored it for six
months after he purchased it, until “somebody said to me, ‘You don’t blow into
the hole, you blow across it.’ Oh, okay. Suddenly I got a note, then another
and another. Within a week I was playing blues solos, and it became part of our
gig. That was the beginning of the Jethro Tull with the guy who stands in the
middle playing the flute while standing on one leg.”