SIDE A
1. A Passion Play (Part 1) – 23:09
“Act 1: Ronnie Pilgrim’s funeral – a winter’s morning in the cemetery” (0:00-9:08)
a. “Lifebeats” (0:00-1:14)
b. “Prelude” (1:14-3:28)
c. “The Silver Cord” (3:28-7:57)
d. “Re-Assuring Tune” (7:57-9:08)
“Act 2: The Memory Bank – a small but comfortable theatre with a cinema screen (the next morning)” (9:08-21:39)
a. “Memory Bank” (9:08-13:28)
b. “Best Friends” (13:28-15:26)
c. “Critique Oblique” (15:26-20:04)
d. “Forest Dance #1” (20:04-21:39)
“Interlude: The Story Of The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles” (21:39-23:09)
SIDE B
2. A Passion Play (Part 2) – 21:58
“Interlude: The Story Of The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles” (0:00-2:48
“Act 3: The business office of G. Oddie & Son (two days later)” (2:48-12:18)
a. “Forest Dance #2” (2:48-4:00)
b. “The Foot Of Our Stairs” (4:00-8:18)
c. “Overseer Overture” (8:18-12:18)
“Act 4: Magus Perde’s drawing room at midnight” (12:18-21:58)
a. “Flight From Lucifer” (12:18-16:16)
b. “10:08 to Paddington” (16:16-17:20)
c. “Magus Perde” (17:20-21:15)
d. “Epilogue” (21:15-21:58)
Jethro Tull were one of the hugest rock bands in the world for a period in the early 70s, Prog or otherwise (Progressive Rock was, for a brief period, a huge part of the mainstream). However they really are not an act any average young person would have heard of at all, compared to some of their contemporaries, whether because they took a pop turn and became bigger in the 80s (Genesis, Yes) or were just such huge mainstream cross-genre behemoths (Pink Floyd, Rush). This was because they fundamentally did not step outside a clear formula of folk and blues influenced, sometimes synthier, sometimes not, sometimes heavy, sometimes not, always flute-heavy guitar-based rock, They achieved diversity through the natural passage of time across their 22 studio albums over 35 years, and band leader, singer and main writer Ian Anderson’s genius and creativity. But there was never big hit singles, famously rather deliberately on Anderson’s part. The classic riff that is Aqualung is the closest thing Jethro Tull come to cultural ubiquity. This slight sense that, despite being monumentally huge for a long time, Jethro Tull are a slightly transient band floating in the breeze has impacted my relationship to them. Unlike so many of their contemporaries, there isn’t really an entry point for a young 21st century Aussie fella. This, alongside their sound being on the folksier, bluesier side compared to the kind of symphonicity I adore, means that to this day they are unquestionably the big 6 band I am the least engaged with and knowledgeable on. To clarify again, as I feel I surely must have on this website sometime before, the so called ‘Big 6’ of 70s prog kings are Pink Floyd, Genesis, Yes, King Crimson, ELP and Jethro Tull (sorry Rush fans). I’ve heard nearly every single album and song released by each of the other five. I’ve only heard 7 of the 22 Tull albums, plus assorted highlights. So I really do still underrate them, fifteen years into my atypically ‘casual’ fandom. The albums I have heard are all excellent and span from 1969 to 1978, so smack bang in their classic period. One of them is the controversial gem, A Passion Play.
This album is a particularly divisive pick. It’s not an album that would be well known or registered outside Prog circles (at the time, when Prog was more mainstream, when Tull were huge and when this therefore was a big release, the broad critical response was poor). Within prog and Tull circles it is more appreciated and continues to be more loved as time passes and its somewhat cult status grows. This is a tough one to talk about in both content and structure. Compared to most great albums, where I can point to obvious classic tracks or moments that are great emotional peaks, this is a chaotic and constantly evolving mess. It is the first album I’ve talked about which does the cliche Prog gambit of being one continuous 40+ minute piece of music. Even though it suits me fine, and there are sufficient distinct sections to create some coherence, such behemoths can be naturally alienating. There isn’t a major iconic or poppy moment as a leg-up to get you in, or either constant anchoring recapitulation nor regular rest periods. It’s just a fluid smorgasbord or complex, ever-changing ephemeral riffs and figures. It is therefore known, somewhat though not entirely fairly, for being cold and devoid of emotion. The legendary reviewer Chris Welch, always a great champion of the Prog bands, lamented that “music must touch the soul. A Passion Play rattles with emptiness”. What is it I like about it? That’s hard to say but I’ll explore as we go on. But I think this quote from Stephen Holden in Rolling Stone nicely summarises both what made the album so disliked at the time, and also so naturally appealing to me. He says that the album…
“”strangles under the tonnage of its pretensions — a jumble of anarchic, childishly precocious gestures that are intellectually and emotionally faithless to any idea other than their own esoteric non-logic”
God damn. Look it’s me. Anyone who knows me, or doesn’t but has had the displeasure of slaving through these posts, can so clearly attest to that.
A Passion Play is Jethro Tull’s sixth album. Across their first five records, between 1968 and 1972, they evolved from a jazz-influenced raw blues outfit, via folk and flute, to (reluctant) leaders of the whole burgeoning Prog scene. Their latest release was on the back of the twin success of their two most famous and legendary albums, Aqualung and Thick As A Brick. The latter had consisted of a single long-form composition ticking every cliche prog box, ostensibly a parody of the genre and a lampooning of the in vogue obsession with the search for deep profundity in ‘serious’ rock music. As tends to happen, people didn’t get the joke. The album was a monster success and, now comfortable with a familiar formula, and to some extent continuing the same joke, they dipped even deeper into the same well. The same formula was there and, importantly underestimated, the same satirical humour. But Anderson was growing in ambition and accomplishment as arranger and composer, and growing more reflective and spiritual in his lyrical exploration. The band’s talents and instrumentation were both expanding. So compared to the great conceptual odyssey but fundamentally palatable sound palette of Thick As A Brick’s vibrant folksy guitar rock, A Passion Play is mad, full of all kinds of synthesizers, liberal amounts of Anderson gamely tooting away on the soprano saxophone, time changes everywhere and a dollop of the avant-garde. Plus you’ve got the small matter of The Hare Who Lost His Spectacles. It’s a high risk and high reward kind of production and the experience of committing to listen to it feels the same. The result of such boundary-pushing was always going to an acquired taste. I think it is that very sense of ambition which I enjoy. I am naturally taken by anything that asks questions and challenges norms. I love its scope, not to mention the fact that its broader sonic qualities, with much more diversity of instrumentation, make it more naturally in my wheelhouse than much of their earlier folk and blues material.
The ‘ambition’ I refer to and admire is mostly on the pure musical level. That doesn’t even yet address the weighty and obtuse lyrics, stacked full of biblical allusions. The album’s story is essentially a satirical depiction of a dead man’s journey through into and through heaven, which he found boring, then off to hell and eventually back into eternal life. This all certainly adds to the ‘ambition’ and ‘scope’ but, the concept and its associated lyrics were both so pretentious and over-wrought that it helped add to the poor initial reviews. You would think someone like me is liable to wax lyrical about the lyrics, themes and story, making some impassioned overblown argument as to why the album is unfairly accused of being ‘unemotional’ when it is in fact some deep profound poetry. But actually, I’ve never really paid much attention to any of it. I don’t really know what he’s on about, while religious imagery goes over my head and isn’t relatable to me. I’ve had no real connection to the album lyrics. It just always sounds good because Anderson has a great voice for Tull style music, and a great turn of phrase.
This is an enjoyable album for me simply because I can sink into and go along with the journey, and enjoy the many many satisfying checkpoints that come up on that journey. That’s what is so effective about single-track albums. This album does what some of the king do, which is split the 2 official tracks (each side of the record) into individual titled ‘songs’. I feel like that is mostly to help make it more commercially palatable, especially in CD release form. But they aren’t really distinct songs in any conventional sense. This is very much a single piece. The individual sections are launched by cool new moments, usually some sort of fantastic proggy riff, and that new figure will dominate the section. But because they’re not beholden to the feeling of being ‘songs’ in any ways, they can go wherever they want. There’s no verses or choruses, just endless stanzas. Some sections stay rooted in their main figure more than others but none do anything resembling traditional song structures and none really just jam on a single base. They all jump around frenetically all over the place and just dip back into their root riff every now and then to keep things grounded.
The key to an album as restless and transient as this is therefore familiarity. You need to give it time, pay attention, and learn. Once you know where you’re at and what’s to come, you can both enjoy and be held by that anticipation. This can be tough and I am grateful for being the kind of person, both in my patient and so-called ‘refined’ musical tastes (as arbitrary as that is) and my great photographic memory, who can naturally get off on such albums. I just love side-long and album-long pieces. They’re the classical music of rock ‘n’ roll, like wondrous symphonies or long concertos or sonatas, depending on their mood and structure. It doesn’t make it the best music automatically or objectively but but I will always have a natural tendency towards appreciating and sinking my teeth hard into those kinds of albums. That goes a long way towards explaining how much I love controlled chaos like this, and it goes a long way towards explaining what will be to come as this countdown nears its business end.
The ‘Lifebeats’ introduction to A Passion Play is ominous and excellent, as a single heartbeat warps and bends as distant effects rotate around your ears. Finally the band come in for the fabulous Prelude, but the noise they’re making is like they never have before, with what sounds like nightmare circus music, dominated by John Evan’s keyboards. Prelude is the clear highlight of Act 1, aptly summarising what is to come in two minutes like a good Prelude. Its themes don’t really recur, but it gives you a taste of every instrument and establishes without any doubt that this is going to be a frenzied journey. ‘The Silver Cord‘ is primarily a sweet and melancholy piano ballad, important mainly because it establishes the main theme, and the only theme that in any way recapitulates throughout, emphasizing its centrality. ‘Re-Assuring Tune’ is exactly what it says, slowing the mood with a brief pastoral detour before launching into the peak second act.
Act 2 (of 4, they each make up a roughly 10-12 minute quarter of the record) is definitely the best for me. It goes a hundred miles an hour, constantly bringing fantastic riffs, drops, switches and all kinds of fun. ‘Memory Bank‘ always falls back on the most monstrous spidery riff of the whole album, one which was particularly powerful live. The brief ‘Best Friends‘ is almost sexy, the closest they ever get to straight driving rock ‘n’ roll. ‘Critique Obligue‘ continues the highlights, starting with a dramatic build-up into some patient and tense aggression, with a staccato rhythm backing a subtle walking up and down melody then eventually going back to the ‘Memory Bank’ riff. Anderson is having all kinds of mad, wild fun throughout, with brilliant and biting turns of phrases everywhere. This is the section of the album where our protagonist is having his behaviour ‘judged’ in rather hilarious brutal fashion, pantomime theatre kind of way. There’s also silly, quaint and not exactly amazing spoken work section. The whole section is another reminder Tull and Anderson were always, particularly by prog standards, a great fun and entertaining band. This fact was about to become abundantly, starkly, controversially clear to everyone though…
This is the story of the hare who lost his spectacles!
Hello, welcome along. So, in this whole massive vanity project I’m doing online here, I’m always unsure how to approach the balance between fruitlessly ‘describing’ music in words for anyone curious who wants to explore and hasn’t heard the album in question, and saying ‘go listen to the damn thing yourself’ and letting the music speak. That recommendation of course always applies. But for those who have no idea about anything to do with this album, I want to make the iconic absurdity of what goes in the middle abundantly clear:
This busy and complex album of such density and perceived impenetrable ‘pretentiousness’ literally stops half way through and breaks into a cute and silly children’s story set to music, Peter and the Wolf style. It is the most ridiculous non-sequitur in the history of popular music, and it is absolutely brilliant on every front. The ‘Forest Dances’ at either end are achingly beautiful. Meant to represent our protagonist’s ascent into heaven after his acceptance by the jury of the previous section, ,they sound like every happy, go-lucky forest tale ever told made manifest into pure music. It’s how Alice In Wonderland should sound to read. ‘The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles’ itself is obviously meant to be a bit of a satire of that very British kind of storytelling. The actual tale, as the title makes-self explanatory, involves a nameless hare interacting with various other animals as they all brainstorm as to how the poor blind thing should go about finding his lost glasses. It is deliberately twee and unresolved, focusing on the mundane and going nowhere, but bassist Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond tells it in such a captivating way. The underlying piano and strings music is both sweet and lovely, and full of satisfying little jumps and payoff moments.
The whole concept of this album as a ‘play’ is being explored by the idea of an ‘intermission’ but the great thing is that such a rest period is welcome. Being a single 45 minute song, constantly driving forward and shifting in unrelenting fashion, this album can be hard work. Without some nice relief in the middle I suspect it would be much harder to maintain constant energy, enthusiasm and concentration throughout. Plus, the two sides and four acts feel so naturally symmetrical around the intermission as a pivot joint. Structural advantages like that are important, especially when there’s no mainstream melodies jumping out. It immediately makes it easier to subconsciously orient yourself within the whole piece. So even if the random intermission was mediocre and kind of throwaway, it would still fit nicely within this album. But make no mistake, it’s not that anyway. It is absolutely fantastic and every chance of being the one bit you get a kick out of if the album is otherwise uninteresting.
Act 3 is the shortest and least interesting of the acts. After the second ‘Forest Dance’ transitions back to sane, adult territory, comes the patient and brooding ‘Foot Of Our Stairs’, featuring more assorted riffage but in particular showcasing Anderson’s underrated and brief dalliance with the soprano sax. ‘Overseer Overture’ is the closest the album’s rock sections get to ‘beautiful’ in its sad and longing chorus, but still does all kind of wild things around it, with Evan’s pulsing synths front and centre. That just leaves the vastly underrated Act 4. It is definitely the simplest and I understand where some reviewers come from when they say that things are running out of steam, but drummer Barriemore Barlow, an underappreciated worker throughout, gets some lovely moments. ‘Flight from Lucifer’ starts with some avant-garde noise before moving into some final typical explorations, with Barlow absolutely everywhere including on tympani. ‘10:08 to Paddington’ is second brief pastoral interlude, before the acoustic guitar is rudely interrupted by the most unquestionably thumping moment of the whole album. Rather than being out of ideas, the ‘Magus Perde’ sequence is a perfect final kick of pure energy to end proceedings. Martin Barre’s loud, distorted and busy riff is heavy and magnificent, as are Barlow and Hammond’s rhythmic interplays and Anderson’s long and atypical falsetto notes. Evan is filling the space with all manner of symphonic chordage, creating a cacophony rare for such a refined and precise band. It all breaks chaotically down in the last, to a reprisal of the main piano theme and kooky end blast in ‘Epilogue’
In the end, the album is quintessential prog. It’s not ‘bad at’ anything. Appreciation of A Passion Play boils down to whether you have any patience for that kind of musical and thematic obfuscation. If you don’t like complex, busy, long, challenging rock odysseys then you won’t like this album. There’s not enough pure melody, meaning or emotion in it to overcome the challenging aspects (in many cases later in the countdown, albums will be challenging but just so beautiful as to be recommendable to anyone). But if that kind of great typical Prog, you’ll probably love it, as many do, more than would have seemed possible at the time, and more than even the band themselves can quite believe.
Hoss Album Reviews 