The Vinyl of the Day is ‘Thick As A Brick” by Jethro Tull, 1972. The album is a continuous piece of music, split over two sides of an LP. ‘Thick As A Brick’ was deliberately crafted in the style of a concept album and a general parody of the genre. The original packaging, designed like a newspaper, claims the album to be a musical adaptation of an epic poem by the fictional 8-year-old genius Gerald Bostock, although of course the music was actually written by the band’s frontman, Ian Anderson.
After the transitional and daring “Aqualung” album turned Jethro Tull into hard rock heroes and stadium giants, the group made one of the gutsiest moves they could, with “Thick As a Brick” consisting of a single, LP-length song, full of winding structures and movements, at just around 44 minutes long. “Thick As a Brick” stands as one of progressive rock’s defining milestones, a brave gamble that took as much guts as The Who’s rock opera “Tommy,” or Pink Floyd’s “Wall” concerts where an actual giant wall was constructed around them. TAAB represents an excellent song-suite, with numerous different parts. It draws heavily on classical/baroque influences, presented in a modern arrangement featuring organ, guitars, bass, drums and flute, all complemented by Ian Anderson’s strange image-inducing lyrics. This is Tull at their most creative, with some beautiful themes interspersed throughout, all constructed in a very structured way, and yet still leaving ample space for improvisation.
Everything about the album is innovative, or at the least a wild idea, from the music right down to the album cover; it featured a batch of made-up news stories, the front page story depicting a young boy’s epic poem (titled of course “Thick As a Brick”) being disqualified from a literary contest because of its author’s unfair advantage over the other entries due to his high intellect (Trump’s America?), and for other nonsensical reasons (and yes my copy is an original with the full newspaper). At first listen they seem to tell one story, but the next listen will have the listener toying with another idea, until they’re starving to know what they mean. It’s filled with recurring themes of rebellion against authority, coming of age, father/son issues, sexual maturity, war and aggression, and the wonders of the day/life and the follies and insensitivity of man - all woven into flute/musical styles based on rock & roll, delivered in a straightforward (albeit sarcastic) musical manner you or I can relate to.
What started off in Ian Anderson’s mind as a tongue-in-cheek parody to make “the mother of all concept albums” became an actual masterpiece of prog rock, from the opening gentle acoustic lines, through the boisterous, animated 40-minute marathon, and concluding with Anderson’s quivery emotional reading of, “Your wise men don’t know how it feels to be thick…as a brick.”
AllMusic Review by Bruce Eder
Jethro Tull’s first LP-length epic is a masterpiece in the annals of progressive rock, and one of the few works of its kind that still holds up decades later. Mixing hard rock and English folk music with classical influences, set to stream-of-consciousness lyrics so dense with imagery that one might spend weeks pondering their meaning – assuming one feels the need to do so – the group created a dazzling tour de force, at once playful, profound, and challenging, without overwhelming the listener. The original LP was the best-sounding, best-engineered record Tull had ever released, easily capturing the shifting dynamics between the soft all-acoustic passages and the electric rock crescendos surrounding them.