This story, like so many of mine, begins with my father and me. When I was about three or four, maybe a year older, my parents replaced the long teak entertainment center. It had been their staple in Massachussetts, Florida, and then to Connecticut where I was born, a vestigial if quite beautiful artifact of the final years of their lives as a childless couple, replaced with something taller, sturdier, and more capable of withstanding the tantrums of two growing children. This also meant that my father’s record player, which once had sat with its Bose speaker cabinets arrayed about the room attached to the complex EQ and receiver setup he’d constructed over years, was finally removed, put in a place of honor and esteem, replaced in its stead by a CD player. This CD player in specific would be my entryway to a slew of artists, from Jimi Hendrix to Nirvana, Jan Hammer to Mozart, but here, clearly, it was my introduction to Jethro Tull. My father was an old Tullhead, having gotten into the group shortly after returning from Vietnam, especially blown away by Aqualung but following them loosely through their career after. Like many great upper middle class families, my parents had become adherents of the compilation disc, and so my father, on seeing Ian Anderson’s one-legged flute-wielding silhouette staring back from the case one day, found himself bringing home a copy of Original Masters.
My parents thought it was important for me and my brother to understand technology. They both worked in print, saw the rise of computing from its corporate/university room-filling machines to the slow miniaturization of office technologies, the microwave oven, the VHS and cable television. As such, with some assistance, they taught little old me, just barely out of diapers, to use to the CD player. I was obsessed with precisely two songs: the first was, inexplicably, “Run Around” by Blues Traveler, a song which perhaps you should in fact grow out of before you reach double digits in years; the second was “Bungle in the Jungle” by Jethro Tull. For years, I had believed this song to be about the Vietnam war, given it was written in the early ’70s by a notably leftwing progressive rock, blues and folk band and used a name that many prominent pieces of writing about Vietnam had likewise used to describe the war. This is a war with great significance to our particular familial mythology, with my father fleeing his abusive childhood home to half-volunteer, learning his draft number was coming up, to the heinous and reprehensible jungle war engineered by France and kept alive by a succession of American presidents and secretaries of state which chewed up so, so many children. I knew this even as a child. I would twirl about the room on one leg, pantomiming the flute playing, singing along joyously. My father, obviously delighted, would attempt to get me to listen to literally any other song on the comp, including, wouldn’t you know it, the single edit of “Thick as a Brick,” a track he loved and told me mysterious tales of its enormity to. At that age, I would have none of it. Ah, the single-mindedness of youth!
Thick as a Brick was the maximal extension of all the grandiosity the group saw within the prog scene at the time, being a raucous 40-minute song split over two halves of vinyl
Fast-forward to my teenage years when, having discovered via the succession of Tool, Opeth, and then Mr. Bungle that there was this thing called progressive rock I might like, which included one of my favorite bands of all-time in Pink Floyd. And so on I traipsed through Yes, who I’d only known for “Owner of a Lonely Heart” prior to then, Genesis, who were to me a Phil Collins pop-rock project that reminded me of my teenage girl babysitters, and Rush, a band which I had convinced myself was god awful based almost singularly on “Closer to the Heart” and “Free Will,” both of which I still think largely stink. This led in its time to ProgArchives, the functional holy land of progressive rock fandom in modernity, and with it the manifold lists easily searchable there, like greatest records per ranking of the various cataloged subgenres of prog or, most tantalizing to the neophyte fan, the all-time ranking list. For eons, the top spots could be counted on to be, roughly in this order, Close to the Edge by Yes, Selling England by the Pound by Genesis, Red by King Crimson, Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd and then In the Court of the Crimson King by, well, you should know (I did a feature on them for Christ’s sake!). Truth be told, this is a fairly indissoluble ranking, one you’d have to be pretty deliberately provocative to disobey. Sure, stray records would shoot up the charts after waves of renewed interest, seeing groups like Camel and Opeth make solid incursions into the top 20, but those top spots were functionally locked, given both the number of ratings and their superlative tenor.
Then, from nowhere: Thick as a Brick.
There was legitimate alarm in the forums as it marched steadily up the charts, leaping by a handful of spots seemingly every day. Was this brigading? Was someone mass duping reviews? But no, everyone was assured. These all came from different IPs, were fully written reviews, all pegging a solid 5 stars, which even given the complex weighting system the site used to tabulate rankings still managed to chuck it like a fastball toward the end zone, or some other equally mixed up sports/progressive rock metaphor. And then it happened. It was number five, displacing King Crimson’s debut. Then suddenly it was number three, having jumped past King Crimson’s magnum opus and that literally perfect Floyd record. Then, a week or so later, it muscled past Genesis. Certainly, we all thought, there was no way it would knock Yes off of the top. Sure, Genesis, King Crimson and Pink Floyd each had, briefly, but those were with similarly universally acclaimed records, and even then the consensus greatest prog record of all time eventually came out on top.
Then, one day, it happened. And it remained there for well over a month. Dutifully, I let out a sigh, looked up some of their top rated records aside (Minstrel in the Gallery, Heavy Horses, Songs from the Wood), mapped out my trip to the local mysteriously well-stocked Best Buy and Borders, and set about acquiring my research materials. I learned then that I loved Jethro Tull, a band that my dalliances with Aqualung and their early blues rock satisfied but didn’t blow me away. But moreover, I learned I loved, loved, LOVED (forgive the exclamatory formatting) Thick as a Brick.
Conceived by the band as a half-joking, half-serious rejoinder to accusations that they had slowly morphed into a prog band, Thick as a Brick was the maximal extension of all the grandiosity the group saw within the prog scene at the time, being a raucous 40-minute song split over two halves of vinyl, with plenty of movements and recapitulations and switchbacks and redoubts more musically and lyrically. Apparently the group didn’t see Aqualung as a prog record, despite the thematic directionality to its two sides and the more complex arrangements and odd time signatures. This was on top of their tourmates, who were all groups in the prog and nascent heavy metal world, having briefly in fact been joined by Tony Iommi on guitar for the Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus performance. Add on top that this was a growing complexity rooted in the group’s seizing up of the experimental wing of the psychedelic blues rock and folk of the late ’60s that they were a part of and it’s easy to see why critics and fans alike perhaps were grokking a pivot the band themselves hadn’t quite yet. (Many artists are loathe to be categorized, feeling it an affront to some kind of in-born boundary-lessness of their work that, to be frank, often does not actually exist.) Regardless, they set about to first glance over the biggest fish in the prog world, Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer, both of whom by 1972 were chart-topping success stories and tour ticket printing factories, if you can believe it, and then to send them up in a method both loving and excoriating. It’s with great irony that the latter aspect, their attempt to send up the pomposity of the genre, failed so spectacularly in part because the former aspect, the love and grandeur, was in fact far too successful.
But let’s back up a moment. What is a concept record anyway? Anderson, so incensed at the notion of Aqualung being called one, sets about to write what in retrospect is considered by real heads to be not only the band’s finest hour, far surpassing its already superb predecessor, but also one of the finest hours of the genre as a whole. This is, in its way, remarkably silly. Concept albums as we know them now might imply full-narrative exercises, characters and melodrama, basically a reconfigured musical theater without the visual element. But their history is subtler, dare I say boring, and in a way indicative more of what we consider albums in the first place anyway. Way back when, albums weren’t a thing, you have to remember. Singles were the name of the recorded music game for decades, with little room on either side for mechanical reasons, necessitating an economy of form. Albums were just that: album books filled with released singles, or with empty spaces for new singles yet to be released, literally a compilation and the model for that format which would recur in our tale with Original Masters sometime later. The LP format, new in the early 40s, was initially largely used by jazz musicians as a way to release music closer to what would be heard live, with Miles Davis releasing a slew of 2- to 3-track 20-minute records through the ’50s. The innovation of the album as a proper form separate from these restraints was, ironically, the concept album itself, a form pursued by Sinatra at the peak of his popularity. At the time, it merely referred to a set of songs designed to hang together, either all pursuing a similar theme or evocative mood or set of timbres. Obviously, this model scales up to sub-musical theater narrative approaches, but so too does it pare down to rock groups releasing a largely electronics-driven release or singers shifting from purely invented stories for lyrics to more explicitly autobiographical work. It’s a loaded term unnecessarily; it refers, at heart, to a work designed to sit together.
Which Aqualung certainly was, with its named sides and the thematic drive of them, the first side seemingly being a description of squalor following the characters Aqualung, a tuberculosis-ridden beggar, and Cross-Eyed Mary, a schoolgirl-aged prostitute and the second side being a series of general critiques of the role of moralizing religion in society. The humor at this kind of rebuke is deepened by what Thick as a Brick‘s concept wound up being: a schoolboy, age 10, named Harold Bostock, having won a local poetry competition by penning an epic critiquing the sparring and unequal forces of intellect and muscle, the disruptive force of both cunning and force, and how the presumed stupidity of the layman is also the only respite against these twin pillars of pretentious power-struggling, all printed in a fake newspaper that the album sleeve would unfold into, complete with sports articles and games and comic strips and unrelated news items. On paper, this sounds ludicrous, as intended. Unfortunately, the lyrical work on the record is, even with the stiff competition of coming records, the best Anderson ever penned. I am not much of a lyric-listener; those days left me as I exited my teens, forgoing the angst of those days for the way a line sometimes emerges from the stewing murk of the music itself to imprint on the mind. That and, well, most lyrics read like garbage abstracted from their musical function (which is fine! it’s music, not poetry!). This set, however, cuts particularly deep for me.
The figures of the record, “the doer and the thinker, no allowance for the other,” are literalized as “the oldest of the family,” the one who wields brawn and physicality, and “the youngest of the family,” the one who wields the pen and the mind, each viewing the other as ultimately destructive while silently mirroring one another. Without belaboring a point I have made extensively elsewhere, this mirrors tremendously my own relationship with my brother, my harrowing escape from those days to flee from both my peers and my family into an increasingly sneering intellect, driven as much by my own curiosities as the capacity to shame and belittle people around me for not being enough the same way I had been. The record delivers these complex conflicts with compassion, however, viewing both figures as fundamentally driven both by the power vacuum left by the absent patriarch, a sentiment likewise echoed in my own home with my alcoholic and sometimes invalid father, as well as by their struggles against each other, feeling and perhaps actually being disallowed coexistence first by the world and only then by each other. This is contrasted with the common man, “your wise men don’t know how it feels to be thick as a brick,” presumed stupid and feeble by figures of power “writing up their memoirs for a paperback edition of the Boy Scouts’ Manual” but containing a propensity for sharp critical insight. This is a classic Shakespearean turn, a very British use of the crown as absolute authority spiritually and ethically only to cut this notion out from under with that perpetually pluralizing invocation of the Magna Carta, which goes from kings to lords, from lords to capitalists, from capitalists to commoners.
The song was not initially written as a single through-composed piece. The group convened, half of mind to flip the bird to fans and critics who called them a concept record-producing prog band, lovingly of course, and began writing scraps of material. It was sometimes during this process that they decided the best course would be to stitch them together with little turn-arounds, letting these microsongs function as repeatable micro-choruses instead, using an entire song as a verse structure that could be dropped here or there. One of the benefits of this kind of suite-like composition in progressive rock is it allows you to economically make use of your material; four half-written songs, just nice melodies and chords, quickly become radically different verses you can deploy, with all kinds of algorithmically interesting ways to combine them. Suddenly, your classic songwriting ABABCBB format gets turned on its head with the addition of all new letters, ABBCBCCACADD et cetera. I will spare you a complete mapping of the structure of the piece which, in the zeal of my youth and my desire to write and play material like this be it musical or literary, I did in fact produce. The point of this is less the literal structure of the piece as much as this other point: where a typical song in a certain sense has to hold back its big hook for the chorus, perhaps deploying a second big hook to act as a bridge, this kind of progressive and suite-oriented songwriting style lets you think briefly of every verse and movement as its own chorus, pivoting from hook to hook rather than saving them for the big shock. Most writing is tension and release dressed up in various ways. “What will come next round the bend?” is one of the most classic tensions there is; big hooks and clever lyrics set to charismatic playing and singing is music’s most enduring release.
I could quote these lyrics all day. Indulge me briefly a few lines: “And the sand castle virtues are all swept away in the tidal destruction, the moral melee.” “I may make you feel, but I can’t make you think; your sperm’s in the gutter, your love in the sink.” “The poet and the painter casting shadows by the water as the sun plays on the infantry returning from the sea.” We see this kind of lyrical penmanship, lyrical in the sense of lyrical poetry, the kind that slithers mellifluous and begs to be read allowed, to hear the susurration of the words against each other just as much as the contemplation of their meaning, recurring all over nowadays, with the deep ingraining of art pop into the flesh of all cerebral pop songcraft. Obviously, we have other poets elsewhere; Patti Smith, brilliant fucking writer that she is, never in her life made something resembling prog. But even street-level poets like Bruce Springsteen and Brian Wilson inevitably turned their eye to those complex shifting arrangements, wanting to paint with all the colors of a symphony rather than the dusky few of great pop and rock. Take as well the psychedelic turn of R&B in the late 60s, with those sprawling epics from Isaac Hayes and Marvin Gaye and Stevie Wonder, equally informed by the prog happening around them. My defense of this material is sharp in part by necessity; this is a wing of the development of a great deal of other music that is (rightly) already lauded that has been cut out of the flesh of history, material which undercuts the idea that these players were inconceivable genius inventing ab nihilo and instead something a great deal more common: people who not only invent but also are cognizant of their peers in various traditions and are sharp-minded enough to know what elements and accents to pull to more fully realize their own visions.
Some prog I will admit prides itself on its unapproachability to outsiders. Take, for instance, the hypermodulations of Frank Zappa at his most outre, taking the jazzer’s tendency to change the key of a solo to match or accentuate a chord beneath to its nth degree, unspooling the harmonic structure in a wheel of chromaticism and chord substitutions that leave you melodically dizzied. Or, another favorite of mine largely undesirable to others, the kind of bewildering rhythmic game playing, stretching beyond mere use of odd time signatures to a constant shifting of key melodies, truncating and extending, challenging the player’s memory and real sense of breathing organic pulse as much as it challenges the listener to trust and feel the groove/grooveless vibe.
I mention this because while these are the hallmarks of prog for its own sake, things that those of us who adore those elements often have to pitch to outsiders (thank you, Geordie Greep, for progpilling a bunch of new people with your avant-garde pervert jazz-rock), Thick as a Brick leans on none of them. Similarly to how Born to Run by Springsteen was the beginning of him aping art rock arrangements, one of the first in fact to turn the tools expanded by prog rock back to traditional formats, Thick as a Brick could pass at any given moment as simply a compelling folk rock song. There is a kinship it shares to Roy Harper, someone who sits on the other side of the folk rock/progressive rock divide, borrowing from the latter to expand the former rather than the other way around, but that ease of listenability and tremendous hookiness remains. This, plus the fact that the song was composed of multiple miniatures stitched together, is also what allowed the band to endlessly reconfigure it over the years for live play, having obviously the 40-plus minute version they can bust out but also various shortenings, going all the way down to the 3-minute single contained on Original Masters. I listened to that again while writing this, by the way; the amount of the totality of the song still contained in it is shocking. Sure, knowing what I do, I may have compulsively drummed in my lap the changes that would otherwise have been coming, but it hardly felt incomplete.
Why do I disparage the indie boom years the way I do? Why do I struggle to get what people see in Pavement and The Strokes and bands that feel a kiss away from the Garden State too-perfect image of that time capsule image of the hipster, Unicorn albums in tow? And, counter, why was I so surprised by Arcade Fire, by Islands, by Wolf Parade, by the sudden metamorphosis of MGMT? Because I too seek music that scores not just my aspirations but the life I’ve lived, winds itself among the two, meets me where I am. These bucolic pastures touch the same yearning that The Snow Goose does, but turns itself to a complex and self-critical position. I think, in so many things, of my father, my brother, myself, our spiraling struggles, woven about each other like a three-string DNA strand, unified strangely enough by our never-challenged love of the electric guitar properly distorted. My father and I bonded over The Faerie Queene, the long-form poem by Spencer, a classic of the form. Thick as a Brick sits adjacent to it, Wordsworth set to hard rock, a rock and roll poet, the laughing joy of the mad fusion of the high and the low, a division that was only ever artificial anyway.
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