Posts Tagged ‘Benefit’

JETHRO TULL – ” Benefit ” 50th Anniversary Edition

Posted: October 6, 2021 in MUSIC
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Jethro Tull’s 1970 classic “Benefit” will be celebrated with a 4-CD/2-DVD set, featuring remixes by Steven Wilson, and an abundance of previously unreleased material. After pandemic-enforced delays, Benefit (The 50th Anniversary Enhanced Edition) will be released on November 5th, 2021, via Rhino.

[Note: The title was announced on Sept. 28 but didn’t appear on Amazon until Oct. 5. Best Classic Bands is an authorized affiliate of Amazon.]

The set is packaged within a deluxe hardback book, containing 100 pages of commentary from numerous contributors alongside images of memorabilia from the era, and of the band creating and performing their first million-selling album.

From the announcement: Following the successes of This Was (1968) and Stand Up (1969), Jethro Tull returned in 1970 with their third studio album in as many years. For Benefit, Ian Anderson (flute, guitars, vocals), Martin Barre (guitars), Glenn Cornick (bass), and Clive Bunker (drums) were joined by John Evan on piano and organ, who would go on to play on all of Jethro Tull’s albums throughout the 70s. The album featured more advanced studio techniques, such as a backward-recorded flute on “With You There To Help Me” and a sped-up guitar on “Play in Time.”

Compared to Stand Up, although containing a similar mix of bluesy hard-rockers and melodic acoustic numbers, Benefit had, as Anderson put it, a “harder, slightly darker feel” compared to previous material. Peaking at #4 in the U.K. Singles Chart, “The Witch’s Promise” continued Tull’s success in the charts, with the album faring equally as well. Benefit charted in the top 10 across six countries, including U.K. (#3), Australia (#4), and Germany (#5), while peaking at #11 on the Billboard 200 in the U.S., where it was certified Gold.

The new edition contains a previously unreleased Steven Wilson remix of Jethro Tull performing at Tanglewood in 1970, as well as previously unavailable film footage of that show.

During the summer of 1970, Bill Graham presented an extraordinary series of concerts at Tanglewood, the renowned classical music venue located in the scenic Berkshire Hills of western Massachusetts. Much like his approach at the Fillmores, Graham’s “The Fillmore at Tanglewood” series presented diverse handpicked triple bills, but with the added advantage of a beautiful open-air venue and plenty of informal lawn seating. With the Fillmore East crew providing technical support, these concerts would be hailed as a technical and artistic triumph and would entertain the largest Tanglewood audiences to date.

The July 7th presentation at Tanglewood, featuring the Who as headliners, Also on the bill that night were San Francisco’s It’s A Beautiful Day and an up and coming English group Jethro Tull, then in the midst of their first tour of America as headliners.

1970 was a pivotal year for Jethro Tull, when their relentless roadwork and perseverance began paying off. The group’s third album, “Benefit” was their most ambitious and original work to date. In terms of the band’s profile in America, 1970 was the year Jethro Tull had truly arrived. The previous album, “Stand Up” introduced guitarist Martin Barre to the fold and found the band stretching well beyond the parameters of the blues-based debut. Both albums conveyed Anderson’s growing confidence as a songwriter and with Barre on board, the group’s originality and style had come into sharper focus.

https://youtu.be/M4alu2wlyTw

The 1970 American tour would find the group expanding to a quintet, with Anderson’s longtime cohort John Evan joining the group on keyboards, further expanding the sonic palette. With Evan on board, the group’s sound became more compelling. Classical elements now entered the already heady brew of blues, jazz, traditional English folk, and hard rock that defined the band’s sound. Extended soloing, often featuring an extraordinary amount of spontaneous improvisation, became a major ingredient on stage. This tour would primarily focus on choice material from the group’s first three albums. The one notable exception was the introduction of a new song, more scathing than anything Anderson had written before, titled “My God.” Destined for the centrer position on “Aqualung” the most popular album of Tull’s career, this new number wouldn’t see a release until the following year, and then in considerably shorter form.

Jethro Tull’s performance from that legendary summer night at Tanglewood opening for the Who, freshly mixed multitrack masters for the first time ever. Although occasionally self-indulgent, this recording clearly captures an inspired moment in Jethro Tull’s career, when their creativity was soaring. Anderson’s song writing was becoming distinctly original and the musical chemistry of the group on stage had become more seductive than ever. Yet as powerful as this performance is, for the Tanglewood audience it was only the middle of an extraordinary night of live music, as the Who would soon follow Jethro Tull onstage.

There’s also a newly remastered mono version of a previously unreleased concert at Chicago’s Aragon Ballroom in 1970. The 100-page book, enclosed within the elegant, hardback book packaging, contains an essay from Martin Webb, who expands upon the 2013 “A Collector’s Edition” booklet notes. Following that are comments on each of the album’s tracks from Anderson, Barre, Cornick, and Bunker, as well as interviews with Robin Black (studio engineer of Benefit and many other Jethro Tull albums), Chrysalis’ Terry Ellis (executive producer of Benefit), Joshua White who directed the 1970 Tanglewood Festival which features on DVD2, and Wilson explaining the mixing of Benefit in 2013.

JETHRO TULL – ” Benefit ” Released 20th April 1970 Classic Albums

Posted: April 20, 2020 in MUSIC
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benefit

Today marks the 50th anniversary of the release of Jethro Tull’s third studio album, ‘Benefit’.

The album featured pianist and organist John Evan for the first time and was the last to include bassist Glenn Cornick. As with its predecessors, it was recorded at Morgan Studios in London. Speaking about the album, Ian Anderson described it as much darker than ‘This Was’ and ‘Stand Up’.

For some reason Jethro Tull are never spoken of in the same hushed tones of awe as Led Zeppelin or King Crimson. Or Deep Purple and Yes. Or Wishbone Ash…

Quite why that is may be down to the fact that their style was very difficult to pigeon hole and emulate, therefore no one has been obviously influenced by them. You never hear of any up and coming bands naming Tull as an influence, they never got name checked by the likes of The Mars Volta or Tool. Tull weren’t embraced by younger generations like the majority of their peers were and perhaps they never will.

“Benefit” was not the huge leap forwards that Stand Up had been from This Was, but what it did was consolidate Tull’s position as one of the best rock bands in the world. It’s a far more moody and darker album than anything they had recorded previously, relying on sweaty riffing and studio trickery to create the ambiance. Unlike a lot of Tull’s albums there’s little in the way of good humored material, with only the satirical “Son”, the strangely poppy “Inside” and the reflective “For Michael Collins, Jeffrey And Me” doing anything to lift the mood slightly.

On the flip side that means that the album is liberally studded with unsung riff-rock, the best example here is the glorious “To Cry You A Song”, and the album closes with one of it’s best tracks, the acoustic “Sossity; You’re A Woman”.

Musically the band is on form throughout and were playing as well as ever. They temporarily recruited keyboard player John Evans, who actually stuck around for the next decade or so, which broadened their sound somewhat, but the keyboards here act as a compliment to the rest of the music and they are utilised only when absolutely necessary.

Ian Anderson said that Benefit was a “guitar riff” album, recorded in a year in which artists like Cream, Jimi Hendrix and Led Zeppelin were becoming more riff-oriented. Anderson also noted that Benefit is “a rather dark and stark album and, although it has a few songs on it that are rather okay, I don’t think it has the breadth, variety or detail that Stand Up has. But it was an evolution in terms of the band playing as ‘a band.'” Overall, Anderson considered the album “a natural part of the group’s evolution”.

According to Martin Barre “To Cry You a Song” was a response to Blind Faith’s “Had to Cry Today”, “although you couldn’t compare the two; nothing was stolen … The riff crossed over the bar in a couple of places and Ian and I each played guitars on the backing tracks. It was more or less live in the studio with a couple of overdubs and a solo. Ian played my Gibson SG and I played a Les Paul on it

In many ways Benefit is Jethro Tull’s forgotten album, book ended as it is by two of the band’s most popular albums on either side. I get the increasing feeling though that its relative obscurity will (oh dear) benefit it in the end though, because it’s often obscure albums like this that catch the ear of younger generations.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXeoNX7DSc8

Jethro Tull doing ‘Teacher’ from the ‘Benefit’ album, 1970. On Beat-Club was a German music program that ran from 1965 to the end of 1972. It was broadcast from Bremen, Germany initially on Erstes Deutsches Fernsehen, the national public TV channel. Beat-Club was replaced by the programme ‘Musikladen’ in 1972.

By April 1970, Jethro Tull had already released a pair of studio albums, but their career-defining fourth LP, Aqualung, wouldn’t arrive until March of the following year, at which point it would almost overshadow its predecessor, the underrated Benefit.

On the one hand, group members Ian Anderson (who provided vocals, flute and acoustic guitar), guitarist Martin Barre, bassist Glenn Cornick and drummer Clive Bunker were somewhat at odds with their record company, and worn out by extensive touring. On the other, they were enjoying a rare moment of lineup stability (though future keyboard player John Evan was already unofficially on hand), and the success of the previous year’s Stand Up had given them the confidence to carry on experimenting, moving ever further from their Brit-blues roots of 1968’s tellingly named This Was …

So for Benefit, “transition” may indeed have been the operative word, as the band unveiled an eclectic set containing a little bit of the old, a little of the new and some things that would never be repeated.

‘Benefit’ is guitarist Martin Barre’s favourite Jethro Tull album.

John Evan, who played piano and organ on the album “for our benefit”, and subsequently joined the band for ten years, was actually named John Evans. His missing ‘s’ was a deliberate hangover from the pre-Jethro Tull group The John Evan Band, because it sounded ‘cooler’.

Michael Collins, name-checked in the song For Michael Collins, Jeffrey And Me, was the member of the Apollo 11 space-mission who stayed in the main capsule while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon.