You Call This Progress(ive)?

Album: Jethro Tull, M.U.--The Best of Jethro Tull, 1972-1975 (cassette reissue)

Best Track: "Skating Away (On the Thin Ice of a New Day)"; but really all of side 2, especially "A Passion Play Edit"


Lasting Memory: I need add nothing to this

Don't want to be a fat man
People would think that I was
Just good fun.

Would rather be a thin man
I am so glad to go on being one.

Too much to carry around with you,
No chance of finding a woman who
Will love you in the morning and all the night time too.

Don't want to be a fat man,
Have not the patience to ignore all that.
Hate to admit to myself half of my problems
Came from being fat.

Wont waste my time feeling sorry for him,
I seen the other side to being thin.
Roll us both down a mountain
And I'm sure the fat man would win.

Ian Anderson is the not-at-all mad genius behind the band Jethro Tull. His weight has yo-yoed over the decades, but as the above lyrics make clear, he never really minded being heavy. He even saw the important upside of a little extra poundage.

That pragmatic view -- making suet out of trimmings -- informed all of Jethro Tull's music. Walking the broad lines between English music hall, traditional Scottish folk, and 1970s prog rock, Anderson's Tull decided fun trumped all. Even an extremely dark song like "Aqualung" mostly took the piss rather than dwell on the horrors of pedophilia. And that's not easy to do.

Another difficult thing Anderson and his revolving cast of bandmates was adept at doing was making lyrics that were so deep they're meaningless meaningful again. For me, the best example of this unique skill came in the form of "Skating Away (On the Thin Ice of a New Day)."

Check out these lyrics:

Meanwhile back in the year one
When you belonged to no-one
You didn’t stand a chance son
If your pants were undone.

‘Cause you were
Bred for humanity and sold to society
One day you’ll wake up in the present day
A million generations removed from expectations
Of being who you really want to be.

Skating away
Skating away
Skating away on the thin ice of the new day.

So as you push off from the shore,
Won't you turn your head once more
And make your peace with everyone?
For those who choose to stay,
Will live just one more day
To do the things they should have done.

And as you cross the wilderness, spinning in your emptiness:
You feel you have to pray.
Looking for a sign
That the universal mind
Has written you into the passion play.

Skating away on the thin ice of the new day.

And as you cross the circle line
The ice-wall creaks behind
You’re a rabbit on the run.
And the silver splinters fly in the corner of your eye
Shining in the setting sun.

Well, do you ever get the feeling that the story’s
Too damn real and in the present tense?
Or that everybody’s on the stage
And it seems like
You’re the only person sitting in the audience?

Skating away on the thin ice of the new day.

These are the kinds of things 15-year-old high school sophomores say after they had their third beer for the first time. These lyrics boil down to "So what if we're all, like, just living on an electron in an atom inside some bigger animal, man?"

And you know what, I still think they're cool as hell.

Up Next: The Kinks, Greatest Hits, 1968

P.S. Because I know it's as tough for you to say goodbye to Jethro Tull as it is for me, here's one last link.