Being a weeklie podcaste from Madison, Wisconsin featuring several remarkable curiosities therein occurring being a compendium of live music from divers artistes
Show #167: Passionate Playing (Jethro Tull)
July 28th, 2008
Someone recently requested some more 70s progressive rock and, shortly after I received the comment, I inherited an old friend’s Jethro Tull collection. This latter bit of luck has led to Tull’s A Passion Play getting rather a lot of time in my CD player. The confluence of these events will be realized with this week’s show – a live performance of APP.
Although the album was released in the UK on 13 July 1973 and in the States 10 days later, its genesis lay nearly a year previous, back in the summer of 1972. The band’s tour in support of Thick as a Brick ended in July of that year. Come autumn, Tull were back in the States with a revamped setlist that included three new songs (four if you include a lone performance of “Only Solitaire” on 14 October). The new tunes were “Left Right”, “Audition”, and “No Rehearsal”. Sometime around the end of the year, Ian Anderson retired to Switzerland to work on composing enough material for an entire album. With that being done, the band assembled at the Chateau d’Herouville outside of Paris to record the material. Problems with the recording equipment, problems with the food, and general homesickness halted the sessions with the backing tracks for three sides of a double album having been completed as well as the odd overdub/vocal. With all the trials and tribulations, Anderson nicknamed these the “Chateau d’Isaster” sessions.
These sessions seemed to have taken place in January/February 1973 as they performed just a few concerts during this time. March, however, saw them on the road and all over Europe. According to Tull’s website, “With only seventeen days left before the American tour, Ian wrote new material and vastly restructured some of the ‘Chateau d’Isaster’ ideas and the band recorded the 45-minute album.” This looks to have been a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. The American tour started the first week of May after two late April dates in London having been cancelled. Presumably the band recorded A Passion Play during the cruelest month.
Some of the tunes from the scrapped Paris sessions found a home on APP. “Tiger Toon” was transmogrified into “Prelude”; “Critique Oblique” was shortened but retained its name; “Post Last” was bifurcated with part of it ending up in “Best Friends” and the other in “Critique Oblique”. While “No Rehearsal” didn’t make it onto APP, it remained in the live set until August 1974. Also surviving the Chateau d’Isaster sessions were “Only Solitaire” and “Skating Away on the Thin Ice of the New Day”, both of which surfaced on Tull’s next album, WarChild. Most of the rest of the material from these sessions eventually saw the light of day on the 1992 set, Nightcap, which was a collection of unreleased songs.
Thematically, the pieces from Chateau d’Isaster often reflected Anderson’s interest in the books of zoologist Desmond Morris which approached human beings with an eye towards our similarities with our ape kin. This notion was abandoned for APP but briefly returned on their next album with the song “Bungle in the Jungle”.
Instead of hearing Anderson anthropomorphize, Tull fans heard in APP the bizarre story of one Ronnie Pilgrim who witnesses his own funeral before ending up in a very odd afterlife. Anderson’s musings on “life and death”, as he blithely described the album, were presented, like Thick as a Brick, as one continuous block of music. However, unlike its predecessor, APP lacks the recapitulations of musical themes and tacks a sea of minor keys. Live performances continued the theatrical bent of those from the previous tour with the addition of two films on a screen at the back of the stage. From the Ministry of Information, here is how the shows began:
Two giant silver masques hung high above the stage. The huge speakers were housed in large cages above the stage on either side. An enormous white movie screen was hovering above the rear of the stage.
Well before the show was due to start, as the audience took their seats 15-20 minutes beforehand, a white dot (spotlight) “about the size of a softball” was projected onto the screen, accompanied by subsonic pulse, so low as to be inaudible but slowly rising in pitch until noticeable at a low level. The dot gradually expanded, pulsing in time with the (still barely audible) “Lifebeat”. When it filled the screen, it turned red, and was replaced by a photo of the dead ballerina in the album cover pose: lifeless, bleeding from the mouth.
As the Lifebeat built up, the audience were given a shock – the ballerina started to move… she pirouetted, accompanied by synthesiser ’swirls’ (John Evan was on stage, but obscured by a black sheet). At the crescendo of the ’swirls’, the ballerina suddenly hurled herself through the mirror, shattering the glass in slow motion, and ran through the other side, away into the music.
The interlude “The Story of the Hair Who Lost His Spectacles” featured a surreal six minute film which included scenes of a host of ballerinas plus actors in full animal costumes dancing around a maypole as well as acting out the story itself.
The show this week features A Passion Play in its entirety. It was recorded on 23 July 1973 at the Oakland Coliseum. It is nearly an hour and includes the full 8+ minutes of “Lifebeats” which features lots of chat by the taper and a companion. I know of no soundboard recordings from this tour nor any FM broadcasts so we are left only with audience recordings. This one is pretty good and was remastered by the folks at the Progressive Rock Remaster Project.
Setlist:
Lifebeats
Prelude
The Silver Cord
Re-Assuring Tune
Memory Bank
Best Friends
Critique Oblique
Forest Dance #1
The Story of the Hare, Who Lost His Spectacles
Forest Dance #2
The Foot of Our Stairs
Overseer Overture
Flight from Lucifer
10:08 from Paddington
Magus Perde
Epilogue
Thanks to the Ministry of Information and the Jethro Tull Print Archive for being references and supplying the photos.
Although no shows from the APP tour were recorded professionally, many in the audiences captured footage with Super8 cameras. One particularly intrepid fan has assembled the amateur films to create the closest thing to a live performance of the album we have. The “Lifebeats” section is presented in all its glory with the light on the screen and the ballerina footage, though it’s not as crisp and clear as we’d like. The viewer is also treated to Ian Anderson in his Mad Dog Fagin prime, hopping about in between bouts of flute, saxophone, and guitar playing. Plus there Jeffrey Hammond-Hammond leaping around the stage with his stylish Panama hat. Too bad John Evans’ maniacal clown expressions are lost.
Part 2
Part 3
Part 4
Part 5
Part 6
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An amazing treat – thank you!
awesome post thanks for this gem , this site is great, thanks for all the Tull material
Many, many thanks for this. Passion Play is my favorite Tull album, and I never got to see this concert. I remember being about 13 and seeing the full page ad in the Calendar section. No money and no way to get to the concert…so now I can see the show.