Location: Fiera della Musica / Azzano Decimo (Pordenone) / Italy
Concert date: 28.06.2007
Attendance: 3
Ticket price: 22.00€
Azzano Decimo, a mere 11 km from Pordenone, where else but in the plowed-up, pesticide-soaked Po plain of Italy, 140 km from our homes in Ljubljana. A cat’s fart! Especially when the legendary titans Jethro Tull are playing there. Azzano Decimo was the dress rehearsal for the Jethro Tull show on 07.07.2007 (Orpheum, Graz), and not even the tempting Yardbirds, playing the same day in the Austrian Carinthian town of St. Veit An Der Glan, could talk me out of it. The ticket set me back a symbolic 22€ on the day of the show (just 20.00€ in advance). Italy is a seriously adventurous country this year when it comes to concert-going, just think of the Heineken Jamming festival two weeks ago! Unbelievable, but after what happened, we can toss the Jethro Tull show in Azzano Decimo into the basket of big adventures, the kind my concert-going career rarely logs!
When Peter and I got past the main gate with its security guards – “pocket-patters” – we instantly felt thoroughly Italian. Before making it to the stage, we first had to cross a hall thick with the smoke of greasy grilling. Like a pair of smoked sausages we happily popped out on the other side and stopped at the official stand selling Jethro Tull T-shirts. You read that right. Even in Italy, paradise of knockoffs, it’s possible. Jethro Tull are real orphans in this regard: the designs of the official shirts on the current tour are dreadful, and the masters of the knockoff craft have beaten them on quality too, with products at half the price. This time I’d actually tell everyone to buy the copy instead of the original! Not to promote the illegal copying of merchandise, but on pure principle, because the band apparently doesn’t think it worth giving even a smidgen of attention to the search for good taste when designing its own official souvenirs.
The Italians had thought of everything again. They’d been dutifully standing in the pit a good hour before the show. Daintily unwrapping their cheese sandwiches, getting greasy like mice! And get this, a few even managed to haul in cans of Union beer (packaged for the Italian market), which in principle you’re not allowed to do, bringing your own drinks to concerts. Even less allowed, though, was what the guy treated himself to who was already vigorously working out with a handheld camera in the front rows of the pit. Welcome to Italy – land of permitted paradoxes!
At 21.05 Peter, the undisputed “Dr. Progrock”, and I were standing about 7 to 8 m from the main stage in the pit when Martin Barre was the first to toddle onstage, completely alone. The man, who has finally gotten over his baldness complex (it was the first time I got to watch him onstage without a hat), was of course recognized by the crowd in a heartbeat and greeted with a roaring applause. The legendary pint-sized guitarist bowed politely, while Los Angeles highlander Doane Perry (drums) and two newcomers to the Jethro Tull lineup, namely David Goodier (six-string bass) and John O’Hara (keyboards, accordion), took their positions too. Of course we were happiest to see Jethro Tull boss Ian Anderson. This time he came out with harmonicas in hand, and the guys opened the show by reviving their prehistoric era, the one marked by progressive blues. Ian of course no longer has such a freshly potent voice, but he skillfully “cheated” his way through the show, like a very crafty man with a lot of mileage on him. The classic spiel: “Here’s a song we wrote only recently, in 1976 to be exact…” hit home once again. Then he grabs the acoustic guitar and we’re already at Jack In The Green. Next came the introduction of the likable new keyboardist John O’Hara, who with his graying charm looked strikingly like Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree), and Ian Anderson dedicated The Donkey And The Drum to him. With Goodier and O’Hara, Jethro Tull once again raised the “hairiness” average in a band that could previously boast of a purist devotion to gnome hairdos, and the tall O’Hara contributed to raising the band’s average height with his arrival as well. The band kept the sound at a level very friendly to the ears when it comes to decibels, a volume more typical of some jazz combo at Cankarjev dom.
Up until Sweet Dream, the crowd’s considerable restraint was a surprise. Even during the legendary classic Thick As A Brick, which the band trimmed down to roughly 11 minutes from an original that runs over 20, people weren’t making any kind of special racket. After the witty Mother Goose, with Perry out front on percussion and O’Hara and Barre on recorders, Anderson said the band was going to play a lullaby of the kind they play in Latvia and the other Baltic countries to rock babies so they drift off to sleep more easily. The band hits with full force and it’s Sweet Dream. The crowd wakes up in an instant, even singing along. Apparently Jethro Tull woke up not just the crowd but the sky too, and the first raindrops crept down from it. At first the whole thing seemed completely innocent, since the rain had already stopped by Bouree. Anderson made use of the rain when announcing Bouree and explaining how it came about. Ian simply said that whenever it rained, Bach stayed home, inspired to create porn-jazz. Ian couldn’t possibly have known then that he was jinxing the band’s show that night. Anderson’s deeply personal fondness for the Jethro Tull album “Stand Up” was confirmed by the performance of Nothing Is Easy. A welcome change of pace came from a song off Martin Barre’s solo album “Stage Left” called After You, After Me. After Farm On A Freeway comes the high point of the night, a stretched-out, reworked version of the Jethro Tull classic Aqualung. Since the song carries a special weight among all Jethro Tull songs, Anderson jokingly announced it like this: “Nex song is called Stairway To… Sorry, it is Smoke On The Aqualung!” The rain got heavier. For the first four minutes the band meandered through it completely acoustic, which gave the song a real jazzy flavor, and the new arrangement simply confirmed what kind of stuff legends are made of. A hugely welcome makeover, because the guys must be bored out of their skulls having to include this song in every show, or else the crowd lynches them. The rest of the song, the bulk of it, of course fired away through electromagnetic fields, which fired up the crowd too, even though by then it was well covered in anoraks or frantically clinging to umbrellas…. In short, the rain was looking more and more like a downpour. We had no idea that the end of Jethro Tull’s show was practically at the door. The next number was especially interesting. Anderson said he was dedicating it to Mr. Keith Emerson, who played it back in the day in The Nice. Anderson didn’t mention what trouble Keith Emerson got into because of it, but that’s another story. Here Anderson is of course at the heart of the song the whole time with his flute, an excellent medley of naturally sounding components from the entire quintet, truly one of the evening’s most sparkling pearls. As the sky kept raging and threatening, the band decides to go with My God, but its prayer did nothing to calm the alarmingly soggy conditions. The rain got much heavier. Anderson has just finished the verses of the intro to Budapest, strapped into his MIDI acoustic guitar, when suddenly there’s a “fart” from the speakers, and the band finds itself in total darkness on the stage and in pure “no-sound”.
Only then did the crowd finally start chanting Jethro Tull, Jethro Tull,… A moment Jethro Tull would have deserved much more while they were up there playing. Anderson symbolically came back to pick up his flute from the stage, then the roadies were wandering across the stage more and more often, until one of them signaled with both arms that the concert was over. Incredible how the scientific achievements of human technology sometimes stand on such shaky ground. A fleeting little shower washing the band off the stage. Well, the shower wasn’t fleeting, it genuinely poured from the sky. Luckily none of the musicians got “zapped” on top of the short circuit, which is what happened to Francis Rossi, for example, during the Status Quo show in Graz last year!
After all, I didn’t even fret about it that much, because Jethro Tull play at the Orpheum in Graz on 07.07.2007, in an indoor hall. Besides, in this stage abortion in Azzano Decimo Jethro Tull played the bulk of their set list, a good 90 minutes, and for a measly 22€. Well, every now and then concert-going gets truly colorful. As Peter and I were fleeing Azzano Decimo, by the highway fork for Venice and Trieste the storm was already over and the roads were completely dry. Apparently Anderson’s jabs at the weather during Bouree seriously angered the gray-bearded thunderer who keeps a watchful eye on us somewhere up in the heights built on the foundations of lush human imagination.
Setlist
1. Some Day The Sun Won’t Shine For You
2. Living In The Past
3. Jack In The Green
4. The Donkey And The Drum
5. Thick As A Brick
6. Pastime With A Good Company
7. Mother Goose
8. Sweet Dream
9. Bouree
10. Nothing Is Easy
11. After You, After Me
12. Farm On A Freeway
13. Aqualung
14. America
15. My God
16. Budapest
—concert cut short—
Photo gallery
