Location: Munich (Germany), Tollwood Festival
Concert date: June 20, 2005
Attendance: 0
Ticket price: 35.50 €
Everything was under control until I stepped through the entrance of the tent at the grounds of the annual Tollwood festivities. Inside the unbearably muggy cauldron of a giant tent in the middle of Olympic Park, I all but boiled down to nothing, like spaghetti after ten minutes of simmering in boiling water.
That was also the reason the legends and ultimate founding fathers of “folk prog rock” perfection, the great Jethro Tull, kicked off the show a little before eight. I clocked it at about 7:50 PM. The sound was phenomenal the whole way through, from the first beat to the last (9:50 PM). Ian Anderson was maybe a bit less lively with his famous devilishly wild dance, that trademark troubadour-ballet shuffle of the feet we’re all used to, and for a change he reached a bit more often for the 1.5-liter plastic water bottles. After opening with unforgettable classics from the late sixties, My Sunday Feling and For A Thousand Mothers, Ian introduces both songs as something very, very old from Jethro Tull: “From the days when we were a little blues band!” Then he announces with full enthusiasm that they’ll now move on to a new song. Of course he wraps it up in his typical sarcastic spirit: “From 1976!” Jack-In-The-Green was great! It created a phenomenal switch into an English folklore-tinged mood! Taken from my “best of the best, ever” Jethro Tull record “Songs Form The Wood” (1975), on which Tull pulled off the perfection of merging classic “seventies” rock elements with Celtic folk in ideal symbiosis, and which still stands today as the undisputed pillar and model of the perfect ideal (followed on equal footing by the Tull record “Heavy Horses”, 1977). The crowd applauded thunderously throughout and greeted every song ending with roaring cheers. The first time they really started jumping, though, was during the excellent Thick As A Brick (limited, of course, to about 7 minutes), when the Germans even accompanied the band by singing the closing verses. People in the hall were also super loud for Bourée (orig. J.S. Bach). The whole hall was wound up tight and jumped as one, especially for classics like Aqualung and Lokomotive Breath. The people in the audience were, for the most part, from birth years close to Ian Anderson and Martin Barre.
Jethro Tull deliver an outstanding dose of melody, and the interwoven unique keyboard solos, guitar solos and of course Ian’s indispensable flute freak-outs are seriously breathtaking. The band is incredibly tight and Ian sings in the standard “Tull-style”. And of course Ian is the absolute central figure on stage. A real little devil with a flute! It’s unbelievable how many things Ian can do on stage at once. He swaps between guitar, flute and harmonica (e.g. in A New Day Yesterday) flawlessly, like a deft juggler. The other two multi-instrumentalists, Barre and Giddings, picked up recorders together at one of the concert’s high points, for Mother Goose. The set list was a surprise overall, since they played almost the entire record in concert, the rock classic called “Aqualung” (1971), which every true music lover has at home. They skipped Cross Eyed Mary from the set list, probably because of the unbearable heat in the tent inferno, so we were deprived of one track. Of course folks happily breathed in most of the oxygen, since about 7000 of us bleating souls were packed into that tent. Luckily everyone obediently refrained from smoking, which surely saved the concert from a definitive climate collapse. The songs where the magic was most intense and the connection with the crowd tightest were, of course, Thick As A Brick, Aqualung and, in the encore, the immortal, heavier, riff-pulsing Locomotive Breath. In terms of mood swings, A New Day Yesterday was on fire, with the most impressive constant flow between more intense rocker moves and the refined sophistication of Ian in the verses. After the classic rock punch, “newer” songs Farm On The Freeway and the beauty Budapest (both from “Crest Of A Knave”, 1987) went off at full blast, the latter with an exceptional instrumental outro. After that masterful blend of Celtic and rock elements, I absolutely must not forget Weathercock. All of it brilliantly updated and interpretively polished to the max. From head to tail. Embellished intros, outros, extra transitional flourishes, artfully stretched-out reworked solos. And Up To Me, as Ian said, Jethro Tul had never played “live” before this tour, in the 34 years since it was written.
Jethro Tull come across on stage as incredibly fresh, extremely tight, without a single flub in the delivery. In short, the band keeps growing and growing, ripening like old wine, constantly refining and improving. Over the band’s evolution, the songs have reached new dimensions. Every last one is even more polished, stretched out with solos and decorated with extra sonic palettes that give the “modern” Jethro Tull sound a magnificent fullness. All the songs have grown in line with what Jethro Tull are today. From all that I can conclude only one thing: Jethro Tull should put out a new live album as soon as possible. From all the perfection witnessed and the singular magic that only Jethro Tull, the one and only, can conjure in this corner of the music world, you just get torn apart and thrown around below the stage, and I won’t even mention the terrible goosebumps, which were truly no problem to feel during the show. Jethro Tull hit the mark dead-on, set the place on fire, and as a live act deliver pretty much the maximum a listener demands from a band on stage. Perfect sound, flawless execution, a huge measure of constantly playful, rambunctious, dizzying melodic complexity that’s wonderfully easy to listen to, and a convincingly deep, high-vibrating atmosphere that carries you off into their cheerfully positive world (even though they offer plenty of typical Celtic melancholy in the motifs at the same time).
Ian of course spiced up the concert with his brilliant sense of black humor. His introduction of the song Boris Dancing (a track from Ian’s solo record “Secret Language Of Birds”, 1999) was something special and went roughly like this. “This song is dedicated to the ever resolutely swaying Mr. Boris Yeltsin, who was constantly under such an influence of alcohol derivatives that he couldn’t find the button, or rather, his resulting wobbling never brought him even close enough to it to launch the atomic missiles with it. Unfortunately, though, Mr. Putin is not an alcoholic and knows exactly where that button is, but let’s hope that Mr. Putin nevertheless has three left feet and that it sways him at least as much as it swayed Boris.”
The heat kept wearing us down little by little, and yet with the great Jethro Tull “live” there was really no reason for any moaning. Jethro Tull remain an unforgettable stage attraction in the new millennium too! And with the enormous amount of juicy jokes they keep tossing out on stage, tastefully and at full throttle, they are also still one of the most likable bands on stage today.
Setlist
1.AquaIntro
2.My Sunday Feeling
3.For A Thousand Mothers
4.Jack-In-The-Green
5.Beggar’s Farm
6.Boris Dancing
7.Bourée (standard version in 4/4 time)
8.Thick As A Brick
10.Up To Me
11.Weathercock
12.Cheap Day Return
13.Mother Goose
14.Murphy’s Paw
15.Farm On The Freeway
16.Hymn 43
17.A New Day Yesterday
18.Budapest
19.Aqualung
encore:
20.Wind-Up (shortened version)
21.Locomotive Breath
22.Protect And Survive (inst.)
23.Cheerio
