Monday 11.30.2009 | 4:23 AM EDT

Jethro Tull Turned Me Juvie

I know i’m probably stating the obvious here, but let me just remind us all:

Jethro Tull sucks ass.

Standing in line at Five Guys Burgers last week, Ian Anderson’s pretentious little flute flurried and pranced out of the speakers like a renaissance fairy. I almost had to leave before my order was up. Thankfully, Deep Purple came on next, raining rawk bombs on Jethro’s baroque parade and I was left to wait in peace as my tasty burger sizzled to perfection.

Now, I’m not a total philistine–I don’t subscribe to the notion that classical arrangements and motifs don’t have a place in the Pantheon of Rock (witness the current crop of exquisite baroque pop from The National, Arcade Fire, Belle Orchestre, Belle & Sebastian).

But I draw the line at the flute…

With very few exceptions (War’s “Spill the Wine” is exempt by virtue of its weirdness and irony) the flute’s trim little figure and sweet falsetto isn’t hussy enough to hang with the bad boys. Cello, viola, tuba, french horn: these fellows have something interesting and unexpected to contribute in the Context of Rock. Their bassy registers and booming voices sit well with the more traditional denizens of rock’s ballsy tribe. But the flute? Sorry. I cannot abide that obsequious little bird flitting around the landscape trying to distract me from the perfectly bad-ass bears, tigers and wolves.

Excuse the mixed metaphors, I’ll get to the point:

At age 12 or 13, I owned more than my share of prog-rock records. Rush, King Crimsom, Yes, ELP… Mmmm…. proggy-treats. I even fell prey to the lamentable second coming of the genre that included Asia and mid-period Genesis. Don’t be a snob, admit it. You love Heat of the Moment and Abacab.

So you see, I was not entirely averse to pretentious doodling and flamboyant overstatement. To wit, one summer day I rode my bike down to Turtle’s Records & Tapes to buy whichever record had “Locomotive Breath” on it. I thought its piano intro was “pretty.” Back home, I quickly realized that there were many better sources for pretty little piano pieces without having to sit through the Jethro’s dreck. The intro to Love Reign O’er Me, or all all of Chopin’s Nocturnes come immediately to mind.

Now recall (or for the younger folk, gasp!): in 1980 there were no listening stations at the record store. No internet cronies to swap tunes with. And at the age of twelve, a $7.99 LP was a week’s allowance. So now I’m stuck with this piece of shit record and nothing new to listen to for another week? Fuck! So I did something bad. Probably the worst thing I’ve ever done. I took out my pen-knife (I lived in a very rough neighborhood), gouged an inconspicuous little groove across the middle of track 2, and Huffied it back to Turtles.

I slipped in unnoticed and stealthily made my way to the Jethro Tull bin, where I buried the one remaining copy of Aqualung among the lamentably deep catalog of Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute. Then I approached the scary-cute goth girl at the counter and entreated her with the irresistible doe eyes of a disappointed young music geek: “This record has a scratch on it,” I sulked, producing my receipt. Goth girl eyed me suspiscioulsly as she slipped the record from it’s sleeve and inspected it with the steely eyes of a particularly tenacious private detective. I helpfully pointed out the scratch and suggested she play it if she was still unconvinced. “Okay, go get another copy,” she relented.

I love it when a plan comes together.

After dutifully rifling through the Aqualung-depleted JT bin, I returned to the counter. Doing my best to mask triumph with indignant disappointment, I muttered: “You don’t have another copy. I guess I’ll have to get this instead,” producing a copy of the decidedly un-proggy, undeniably un-shitty Space Oddity – a piece of vinyl that still occupies my record shelf, pristine as the day I bought it.