Chrysalis 1040
Producer: Jethro Tull
Track listing., “A Passion Play”
August 18, 1973
1 week
Fueled by the success of Thick as a Brick, Jethro Tull decided to have another go at making an album that featured one extended piece running the length of the album, rather than traditional rock songs.
To capitalize on the band’s popularity, Chrysalis released Living in the Past, a compilation of Tull’s early works, in late 1972. The title track became its first hit single, climbing to number 11, while the album reached number three.
A Passion Play, however, was the true follow-up effort to Thick as a Brick. Tull leader Ian Anderson says the album was a response to the success of Thick as a Brick. Yet the group was unable to recapture the magic that made Thick as a Brick a surprise hit.
“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 says. “The follow-up concept album probably lacked the little element of humor and self-parody, which was apparent on Thick as a Brick.”
According to Anderson, the album was troubled from the start. The initial sessions, held at Chateau D’Herouville in France, located on the outskirts of Paris, were aborted after six weeks 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 says. “The food and catering was not what we were used to.”
After ditching the French sessions, the band returned to England and went back into the studio. “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.”
The album, which lyrically offers a vague attack on religion coupled with the fairy-tale-like “The Story of the Hare Who Lost His Spectacles,” featured an elaborate musical soundtrack, with the Tull members once again taking on a number of different instruments, ranging from soprano saxophone to glockenspiel and marimba. Yet while Thick as a Brick won praise from some critics, A Passion Play was almost universally panned as excessive nonsense. “That certainly did the album a lot of harm,” Anderson says, noting that while the album climbed to Number One in a mere five weeks, it quickly plummeted back down the charts.
“A Passion Play was a product of a move that was afoot to try to extend pop and rock music, if not to the limits, to push it into the area where it went as far as it could in terms of composition and musical complexity,” Anderson says. Yet he admits that Jethro Tull “pushed things perhaps a little bit past the point where they weren’t as accessible as they ought to have been.” Nonetheless, Anderson says many of the Tull faithful hail A Passion Play as the band’s finest album, even if it’s a view that he doesn’t personally share.
THE TOP FIVE
Week of August 18, 1973
1. A Passion Play, Jethro Tull
2.VI, Chicago
3. The Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd
4. Diamond Girl, Seals & Croft
5. Foreigner, Cat Stevens