“….so you ride yourselves over the fields,

and you make all your animal deals,

and your wise men don’t know how it feels

to be thick as a brick.”

Maybe it was the times. Much of the world was emerging from a post-war, mid-war, military-industrial complex paradigm, at odds with itself in the throes of battle between Jesus freaks and the National Guard and the National Front, flower children and hippies, yippies, and hungry artists bent on changing the world or, at the least, changing the guard. Timothy Leary suggested tuning in, turning on, and dropping out. Sage advice to some; the decline of Western- civilization-as-we-know-it to the Hawks and the “supermarketeers”. I may have been about 15 or 16, but I knew counterculture when I saw it.

While we’re at it, I’d like to posit that counterculture trumps cancel culture any day; you see, with counterculture, there’s a substantial amount of reasoned argument amid the fray; cancel culture is nothing more than the bellicose belligerence of those easily led by the uninformed blessed with an overabundance of unfounded confidence.

There were dozens of reasons why the iconic/ironic gentleman who gave us “Thick as a Brick” and “Aqualung”, “Teacher” and “Bouree” should assemble a cadre of tunes which stand as a musical homage to the human condition, in all its glory, ignominy, and pathos. Ian Anderson, late of Dunfermline, and later of Jethro Tull, consistently pushed back against music establishment norms, not unlike the band’s namesake, an early agrarian reformer and pioneer whose methods of seeding and planting are still used today. The folk/rock/blues fusion in Tull’s catalogue never lacked for a kind of virtuosity in bringing the lost, the lonely, the dubious in the human character to light and personalizing it. We didn’t think of Pig-Me or Ray the old rocker as some fictional characters; they were identifiable mates, friends, blokes we knew or had heard of, with real backstories and real problems.

That’s why “Warchild” may be the defining Tull album.

There were a number of subsequent albums that checked the boxes. Through the “Minstrel” prog-ressions (“Cold Wind to Valhalla” and the rambling Brick-esque “Baker St. Muse”) and into the acoustic-driven Eurofolk rock of “Songs from the Wood” and “Heavy Horses” and, on a slightly more polished (less inspired?) note, “Stormwatch”, J. Tull persisted. “Crest of a Knave” and “Catfish Rising” were later peaks, but for all the genius bleeding through amidst the clever lyrics and tuneful misdirection, nothing quite matches the genius of “See how you balance the world on the tip of your noxe/you’re a Sealion with a ball at the carnival.”

Maybe you had to be there. Maybe you should go there.

Beginning with the sound of a distant air raid siren, Warchild launches into 40-odd minutes of Queen, country, religion, and the existential ennui that pervades our subconscious minds. “Warchild” presents a elegiac view of modern life through the lens of a war-torn mundacity. “Each night I’ll die in my contentment, and lie in your grave/While you bring me water, and I give you wine/Let me dance in your tea cup and you shall swim in mine.”. Everyday is a battle we face, returning to our homes (bunkers?) after the skirmishes of the day: “War child, dance the days and dance the nights away.” The pedantic distractions that follow a long day in the foxholes. Ah, 1974, when life was complicated.

“Queen and Country” follows our daily grind, reminding us of the nobility of the cause that drives us to build this city on, well, maybe it’s not exactly rock and roll. “And it’s been this way for five long years since we signed our souls away” a less than subtle reminder that our conscriptions (military or otherwise) mirror the “long, dying day” in the greater picture of our lives.

“Ladies” (of leisure) is a sentimental ode to damsels “with their eyes on the back roads, all looking for strangers to whom they extend welcome.”

“Back Door Angels” follows “Ladies”, almost as a successor in the same vein: “’tis said they put we men to sleep with just a whisper/And touch the heads of dying dogs, and make them linger”. Is it enough to perform such simple acts of compassion for our most devoted companions? Apparently, not: In esoteric fashion they “drop one penny in every second bowl/Make half the beggars lose.” In the end, the ladies – these back-door angels – make us question ourselves and our worldview: “Why do the faithful have such a will to believe in something?/And call it the name they choose, having chosen nothing…”

There’s very little I can say about “Sealion” to do justice to its lyrical environ: we are Sealions following a circus-script, day in, day out. But before you decide this sounds constricted and depressing, remember we wear “a trace of pride upon our fixed grins/For there is no business like the show we’re in/There is no reason no rhyme, no right/ To leave the circus ’til we’ve said good-night”, and “[s]o we’ll shoot the moon, and hope to call the tune/And make no pin cushion of this big balloon.” {Which, most likely, we will}

“Look how we balance the world on the tips of our noses/Like Sealions with a ball at the carnival.”

So, if you’re a purist and pursuing this on 180g vinyl, this is the end of side one, with the good wife asking (at the end of the “Sealion” fade): “Would you like another cup of tea, dear?”

The second side picks up with the second cup (or is it the third? fourth?) being properly stirred, sipped, and rattled in its saucer, an introduction to a modified Hobbesian philosophy with an exo-ego twist: “Do you ever get the feeling that the story’s too damned real and in the present tense/Or that ewverybody’s on the stage and you’re the only person sitting in the audience?” Skating Away on the Thin Ice of a New Day may be the least unlikely phrases to be fitted to the title of one of Tull’s most anthemic tunes. This foray alone is worth the price of admission to the album.

“Bungle in the Jungle”, one of Tull’s more commercially successful tracks and a long-running staple of FM radio, is a massive metaphor-bomb for the human condition, Listen not-so-closely, and you will still recognize which monkeys are “spending their nuts, saving their raisins for Sunday.” (Hint: we’re all primates)

Hobbes commented on his contemporary human life as being “nasty, brutish, and short”. Tull’s equivalent observation is that “the rivers are full of crocodile nasties/And He who made kittens put snakes in the grass/He‘s a lover of life but a player of pawns”, a slightly more optimistic (if somewhat deterministic) take on our spot in the multiverse.

“Only Solitaire” is Ian Anderson’s poke at those self-important critics that miss the message for the media. Self-deprecation notwithstanding, clearly we’re not inclined to tolerate fools.

“The Third Hoorah” – a bagpipe-laden reel that echoes the spirit of the title track – bridges the acoustic soliloquy of “Solitaire” “[w]ith a sword on your hip and a cry on your lips/To strike life in the inner child’s breast” with”Two Fingers” (in the U.K., remember, two fingers is the same as the single-digit salute in the States.

“I’ll see you at the Weighing-in/WHen your life’s sum-total’s made.” Well, then.

There’s a specific unease, a certain lack of certainty, one might say, when we speak of mortality. Especially our own. We have a plethora of filters that help us see ourselves as noble, as worthy, as – if not a hero – then, at least, a mensch with benevolent intentions. As we also know, we’re generally not worthy. So….

“…as you join the good ship Earth and you mingle with the dust/You’d better leave your underpants with someone you can trust/And when the Old Man with the telescope cuts the final strand/ You’d better lick two fingers clean . . . . before you shake his hand.”

Arguably, there is no other Tull album as diverse in its influences, from blues to prog, from folk to rock to Scottish jig and reel, than “Warchild”.

Cheerio!

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