Looking for Truth with a Capital T
Looking for Truth with a Capital T
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ShareSo where were we? Ah, 1970. The growth evidenced between Tull’s blues-drenched debut and the follow-up, only a year later, is unequaled by any other rock band’s first and second albums. This is in no small part due to Barre’s arrival (replacing Mick Abrahams, who lost his battle to co-lead the band and continue down the British blues revue road) and the almost incomprehensible maturation of Ian Anderson’s songwriting.
To the band’s credit, their next move was recruiting John Evan to augment the sound with his considerable piano (and organ) skills. It was a move that paid substantial dividends, immediately evident on the first song, “With You There to Help Me”. Evan’s welcome presence is in full effect on the deceptively simple, almost waltz-like “Alive and Well and Living In”, which details the dynamics of a failing, probably abusive relationship. The flute and acoustic guitar belie the heartbreakingly familiar subject matter (a woman stuck in the rut of on-again/off-again romance with a man who is distant and then demanding, while she is quick to forgive but not quite able to forget), but Barre’s abrasive guitar tone articulates the anger steadily being buried beneath the surface. It’s a cautionary tale for the teenage listener who has yet to embark on a meaningful romance (written by a young man who could not have had a great deal of experience himself), and a tale that an older listener can still admire, decades later.
However, the centerpiece (thematically, aesthetically) of the album—and a song that easily ranks in the upper echelon of Tull’s catalog—has to be “Nothing to Say”. If “We Used to Know” grapples with a wary nostalgia that accompanies the resolve to make one’s own way (as an artist but also as a young adult going out into the world), “Nothing to Say” confronts the pressures (of an artist or a young adult out in the world) of conformity or, in Anderson’s case, the expectation that he will embrace the role of countercultural guru, ready to dispense words of wisdom for his young acolytes (a role many artists are quite satisfied to assume, and much more so today than in 1970). Anderson’s ambivalence about this scenario signals, as much as any rock song of that era, that the ‘60s are over. What at first might be read as a surly refusal to take a stand is actually an admonishment that everyone needs to figure it out on their own.
At this point, Anderson had dealt with the past (Stand Up) and the present (Benefit); his burgeoning confidence would prompt him to combine those elements in an attempt to grind some axes that probed quite a bit deeper than the typical sociopolitical commentary on offer (then, now). As it turns out he had plenty to say, which brings us to the semi-dreaded concept album, wherein Anderson turns his attention, and lacerating wit, to the institution of organized religion. First off, it’s tantalizing to imagine how much more street cred this album could—and would—have accrued if it were named after almost any of the other ten songs, specifically “Cheap Day Return”, “Up to Me”, “Wind Up”, or especially “My God”.
While the first side of the LP concerns itself with, for lack of a better cliché, man’s inhumanity to man, the second side takes on religion with a righteous indignation that has not been improved upon by many (if any) other mainstream artists since 1971.I wrote a bit about this one in ”
It Was 335 Years Ago Today: A Brief History of Jethro Tull (Both of Them)” (PopMatters, 6 April 2009) while attempting a succinct overview of the band’s career. Here’s an excerpt on a couple of songs from Side One:
The one-two acoustic punch of “Cheap Day Return” and “Mother Goose” are archetypes of a sort; the kind of whimsical British folk that Tull perfected: the songs seem straightforward and pleasant enough (and they are) but are cut by their topical, and occasionally unsettling, lyrical import. This is Anderson’s calling card, and nowhere is it in better effect than the one minute and 24-seconds of perfection entitled “Cheap Day Return”. In astonishingly succinct and effective fashion Anderson deals with his own alienation, offers a sardonic appraisal of his own budding super-stardom (What a laugh!), and his father’s imminent death, all in a song that sounds innocuous as a nursery rhyme.
Side Two is a remarkably ambitious—and successful—attempt to look at the racket religion has degenerated into, (or was it always thus?) and after getting some licks in on the clergy, Anderson turns both barrels on the men who have sought to conveniently create a God in their own image. Pretty sophomoric stuff, eh? Well, that’s partly the point (more on that in a moment), but these songs have lost little of their power or perspicacity.
It still sounds pretty audacious today, but was downright defiant to pen tunes like this in 1971 (particularly “My God” and “Hymn 43”, which includes the incendiary couplet “If Jesus saves, he better save himself/From the gory glory seekers who’ll use his name in death). In just one minute on “Slipstream” Anderson captures the opportunistic hypocrisy of the materially rich but spiritually depraved amongst us who compensate (figuratively) for their nagging consciences in the confessional or in the collection basket (“And you press on God’s waiter your last dime/As he hands you the bill”). On the literal levels, these are the people we all know: our peers, parents and especially our politicians, and Anderson sardonically nails these weekend warriors to their crosses of gold.
He saves the best for last, when in “Wind Up” he recalls being shipped off to church, eventually concluding that God is “not the kind you have to wind up on Sundays”. I can trace the trajectory of when I first heard this album, early in high school, and loving the “hit” songs, to eventually gaining a fuller appreciation of “My God”—in terms of the lyrical import and the inspired way Anderson multi-tracks his vocals to imitate, and satirize, a sanctified choral hymn—and the other songs on the second side. It wasn’t until college, though, that the full effects of “Wind Up” revealed themselves to the not-so-innocent, recovering Catholic who had served mass as an altar boy only a couple of years earlier: “In your pomp and all your glory you’re a poorer man than me/As you lick the boots of death born out of fear”.
I’ll decline to further recall how profound those lyrics seemed to a 19-year-old, but I’ll argue they retain their poetic import even now. Of course one eventually comes to an age where they can see through the self-serving charade of fake humility and the sickening appropriation of the holy for personal, earthly gains, et cetera. This sort of material goes several steps beyond fighting the power or endorsing obligatory punk rock anarchy; this stuff is gospel for a young sensitive soul, alienated by everything and earnestly (sensitive souls are nothing if not earnest) looking for Truth with a capital T.
Which, at long last, brings us back to Salinger. If the holy trinity (sorry) of Jethro Tull albums comprised the ideal, if occasionally uncomfortable, source material for making that awkward (but earnest!) leap from adolescence to young adulthood, “For Esme—with Love and Squalor” is, in my eyes, among the handful of indispensable short stories (along with Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well Lighted Place”, Tolstoy’s “The Three Hermits”, Kafka’s “First Sorrow”, James Joyce’s “Eveline” and especially Joao Guimaraes Rosa’s “The Third Bank of the River”) that resonates on profound and permanent levels with a certain type of person at a certain age.
Perhaps, as already acknowledged, I simply came to The Catcher in the Rye too late (although, as already suggested, I am uncertain it was capable of working its celebrated charms on me, not because I didn’t relate to Holden Caulfield on some levels, but more because as I read I kept thinking “Yeah? Is this all you got?”). There can be no doubt that I came to “Esme” at exactly the right age: after digesting Catcher in the Rye and spending many a session (and the writer would be remiss to overlook, at least one enchanted, and mycologic evening) uncovering the ultimately not so mysterious mysteries of Aqualung. I was, inevitably, an ardent if confused soul quite concerned with “again becoming a man with all his fac—with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact”.
Like the very best literature, “For Esme—with Love and Squalor” is every bit enjoyable and edifying to adult eyes as it is to, say, the wider eyes of a college sophomore. In fact, Salinger’s achievement is that much more poignant (and devastating) to an older audience which has actually known people who have been wounded or killed in war. The narrator of this story is reeling from actual experience in the real world, so it resonates to a young reader about to enter it, and certainly a more mature reader who has seen and felt some of those proverbial slings and arrows. It is, for me, difficult to recall a more quietly coruscating image in literature than the narrator lifting Esme’s (KIA) father’s wristwatch, which has shattered in transit, out of the care package. The question, as the story ends, is: does that broken glass represent the narrator’s spirit, or will he rally to once more become part of the world?
This is the question so many (but apparently not enough, considering we are still fighting wars and still taking less than acceptable care of our veterans) young adults grapple with at a crucial time in their lives. This is the question J.D. Salinger may or may not have answered, in his own inscrutable fashion, once he turned his back on fame—and his fans—and spent the last decades of his life in a golden cage of his making. Whether or not he was quietly desperate, or just quiet, will presumably be answered if those elusive and much-discussed manuscripts ever see the light of day.
Once it seemed there would always be
a time for everything.
Ages passed I knew at last
my life had never been.
I’d been missing what time could bring.
Fifty years and I’m filled with tears and joys
I never cried.
Burn the wagon and chain the mule.
The past is all denied.
There’s no time for everything.
No time for everything.
—Ian Anderson, “A Time For Everything” (1970)
