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| (Click Here to Read the St. Cleve Chronicle) |
In 1971, Jethro Tull had its biggest hit worldwide with
the LP Aqualung that critics described as a concept album about religion, which Ian Anderson adamantly denied, indeed despised. Anderson
decided to express his feelings about concept albums and prog-rock via parody,
recording an album-length "song" called "Thick As A Brick," highlighting poetic passages that (as part of the album's concept)
are put forth as the work of a precocious schoolboy who won a contest. Thick As
A Brick has been slammed by haters as an example of the genre at its
most excessive, while embraced by enthusiasts for the same reason. Few get the joke.
The LP opens with a familiar three-minute passage that's
less lumbering art-rock than folk-pop ditty. From there, the heaviness bullies its way in, yet it remains a single
coherent song, not a suite or a medley. Though Anderson's word salad isn't
meant to tell a story, the lyrics do cohere around a single theme, about how one
shouldn't be quick to put his faith in pulp heroes or "wise men." It is, in many ways, a coming of age story. Whether campy
parody or excessive self-aggrandizement, the music remains spry and fresh and
retrospectively one of the most iconic pieces of the era.
The LP cover appears as a weekly, chatty small town newspaper carrying little world or national news. There are plenty of Briticisms not readily understood by American
readers, and written in a manner similar to Monty Python, with irreverent references to penguins,
stuffed or otherwise, and a "non-rabbit" occur often, and the crossword puzzle is
wonderful. So is the connect-the-dots drawing called "Children's
Corner." Here it is before filling it out:
The St. Cleve
Chronicle (dated Friday, January 7, 1972) features an article on prize winning
adolescent poet Gerald (Little Milton) Bostock, his prize-winning poem and
the scandal surrounding his disqualification on grounds that the
boy is "seriously unbalanced" and the poem is "a product of
an 'extremely unwholesome attitude towards life, his God, and
country.'" Accompanying the front-page story is a photo in
which Little Milton's 14-year-old girlfriend (Julia Fealey) can be seen in the
background slightly lifting her shirt as she stares alluringly into the camera,
her legs apart just enough to reveal her underpants.
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| Ahh, That's Why Fluffy is Smiling |
The St. Cleve Chronicle is densely packed with references
that bear upon the lyrics to Thick as a Brick. Perhaps the most
important to the basic theme of the "poem" is a small story on page 5
under the headline "Visiting Prof. Gives Talk." Here we learn that a
certain Andrew Jorgensen tells his
listeners that "man must learn to function as an independent observer of
mass-behavior and develop the right of each individual to intellectual freedom
on the particular level of which he is personally capable." The
story goes on: "Unfortunately the lecture was terminated by flying bottles
which hit Mr. Jorgensen below the left eye."
Considering the
trouble and care lavished on this bogus community newspaper, it is curious that
Anderson claimed that the album is not really a concept. Anderson's
point seems to be that the lyrics provide a series of glimpses into the
life of the average middle-class Englishman, dealing in turn with birth, youth
(including sexual awakening), school, military service, and organized
religion. Nonetheless, the song hangs together around a central theme, and indeed the elaborate sleeve design plays a crucial role in the
way one understands the record. During an era in which album
packaging seemed in many cases to have been as creative as the music inside (or
at least as interesting), Tull set a new standard with Thick as a Brick.
