In the early ‘70s, lightning struck for Jethro Tull not once, but twice.
First, in 1972, the band topped Billboard’s album chart with Thick as a Brick, an album that featured a single nearly 45-minute song that was split into two parts to accommodate both sides of a vinyl LP.
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The album held the pole position for two weeks on top of such classics as Roberta Flack’s First Take, Neil Young’s Harvest, Crosby & Nash’s self-titled effort and Manassas by their sometimes bandmate Stephen Stills.
If that wasn’t odd enough, Jethro Tull managed to achieve the feat again a year later with Passion Play, an album, like its predecessor, that only includes one song split into two parts to fill both sides of an LP. (These days on streaming services, the album is broken up into 15 tracks).
After Thick as a Brick hit No. 1, the band’s label, Chrysalis Records, released Living in the Past, a compilation album of the group’s earlier recordings. The title track from that album became the band’s first hit single, reaching No. 11, while the album peaked at No. 3.
Yet, A Passion Play was the true follow-up to Think as a Brick and followed that album’s template of featuring a single lengthy song for the entirety of the album.
While Jethro Tull leader Ian Anderson has high praise for Thick as a Brick, he considers A Passion Play a misfire, despite its commercial success.
“When we came to A Passion Play, we probably fell into the trap and made that slight error in judgment of coming with something that took itself much too seriously,” he said in an interview for The Billboard Book of Number One Albums. “The follow-up concept album probably lacked the little element of humor and self-parody, which was apparent on Thick as a Brick.”
The sessions for the album, which were initially held at Chateau D’Herouville in France, located on the outskirts of Paris, also proved to be troublesome due to health and technical problems.
“Unfortunately, I don’t think a week went by without somebody in the band being really seriously ill with some sort of gastrointestinal problem,” he recalled. “The food and catering were not what we were used to.”
The band returned home to England and entered a studio there but were unable to recapture the magic. “We had overworked that music to the point that it was really easy to start again with a completely clean sheet and move on to something else,” Anderson added.
The album featured the members of Tull offering an elaborate musical soundtrack, featuring numerous instruments, including saxophone, glockenspiel and marimba, and lyrics that attacked religion along with the fairy-tale-like “The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles.” However, the album was panned by critics, many of whom had praised Thick as a Brick. “That certainly did the album a lot of harm,” Anderson recalled, noting the album reached No. 1 in a mere five weeks in August 1973, but then quickly fell down the chart.
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