(Jethro Tull)
Ian Anderson has an incredibly dry, deadpan wit and had me laughing out loud during the interview. This is one of the funniest chapters, in my humble opinion, but prepare for urine and flying tampons.
In 1975, Jethro Tull was the first band to perform at Shea Stadium since the Beatles had a really tough gig and decided it was over. They couldn’t hear themselves over all the screaming and shouting, and they were going through the motions. They felt bad about it, is what we were told, and they put an end to that kind of touring. A few years later, we appeared at Shea Stadium and suffered a number of problems. The audience was very far away because they weren’t allowed on the field, only in the stands.
In one way, I felt very close to a certain member of the audience that day. As I was waiting in the alleyway to the dressing room, about to walk out onto the field and run over to the stage, I was suddenly drenched in liquid. Someone had tipped something over from high above, and it got all over me. At first, I could only assume it was beer, but I quickly learned it was urine when the smell hit me. At that moment, I got my cue to run to the stage, stinking of someone else’s wee-wee. I’m sure that the person meant well, as it was a generous offering of bodily fluids to speed me on my way.
That was a pretty uncomfortable show because it’s not very nice to smell bad, nor is it very pleasant to play wet, as it was all over my hands, my guitar, and my flute. Somebody out there knows that they did that to me. I’d like to meet that person today, just to discuss the matter, as gentlemen do. Another embarrassing situation, this time that the audience was well aware of, was at an arena show, but I can’t remember where. I was performing on stage, and suddenly I felt something hit me in the chest.
I was wearing an open-necked shirt, which was open down to the middle of my chest. Something hit me, but it wasn’t very hard, and it didn’t hurt, so I carried on playing. After a bit, I looked down and saw blood. My first thought was, “My God—I’ve been shot.” I thought the adrenaline had kicked in, and I wasn’t feeling the pain. I thought that I was probably going to die very soon, so I figured I’d carry on playing as long as I could. These poor people had paid good money to see a show, and I better not cut it short just because I’d been fatally wounded.
I went on playing, and the first opportunity I had, when I wasn’t playing anything, I pulled my shirt open and looked down. The first thing I noticed was something that looked like a little piece of string. I pulled it, and out came a bloody tampon. I had been hit by a freshly-plucked tampon. I held it up so the audience could see it and threw it over my shoulder. I kept going, but as the show went on, I was thinking how extraordinary the whole thing was, as this blood was wet, so it wasn’t like someone brought an old tampon to throw.
This was spur-of-the-moment, and the mental process that someone went through to do that really impressed me. I was also blown away by the incredible accuracy of the throw, as it hit me square in the chest. It could have deflected off my pants or something. Like the urine, I had to think of it as an act of enduring love and adulation. A woman was sharing her most intimate, personal elements with me on stage. I suppose that if I was being cynical, I could look at it as something quite nasty. They didn’t really like me, and that was the ultimate insult. Come to think of it, I’m not quite sure how I feel about it now. I’m not aware of the tampon culture in North America.
Those two things did happen back in the seventies and haven’t happened since. I’m actually curious how many artists have had experiences with flying tampons or pint glasses of piss dumped on their heads. I know that guys like Tom Jones and Englebert Humperdinck used to get underwear thrown at them, but I’ve never personally gotten any undergarments thrown at me. It’s not a Jethro Tull thing. I suppose our audiences have usually been a bit more well-behaved. I’ve heard of girls lifting up their T-shirts to expose their breasts to performing musicians, but that’s never happened in my experience. The best I get is maybe a flicker of a smile from the ladies, but that’s about it.
Drugs and alcohol were never part of my story, but it’s part of my story growing up. When I was at art college before I became a musician, the guy sitting next to me in class had heroin needle marks on his arm. I had to ask what it was, as I thought he’d been bitten by some strange creature. It always filled me with fear that addicted people were caught up in something that didn’t make them better painters or artists. When you read about the history of art or music, particularly jazz or blues, there are constant references to drugs.
It plays a major part in artist’s lives and a very major part in their downfall. Many people that I’ve performed alongside came to a sticky end. I remember we were on a show with Graham Bond in 1968, and when the sax player took a solo, Graham shot up on stage. He didn’t even shuffle off to the side to do it. He stayed at his keyboard and just turned his back a little bit to the audience. He wrapped a leather strap around his arm and shot up. To a young lad like me, that was deeply shocking. I saw him twice more in his life, with the last occasion being just a couple weeks before he threw himself under a tube train in the middle of London. That was a very sticky end…because it was messy.
A year later, in 1969, we did a few shows with Jimi Hendrix. When I first met him, he was a very polite, quiet, calm guy. The next year, after we did the Isle of Wight Festival, he was found dead of an overdose just a few weeks later. In such a relatively short time, he went from some presumably controlled habits to a straight downhill run. Those are the object lessons in life that these people taught me.
You’ve got to have a lot of luck on your side to dabble with serious drugs and get through it. There are those that get through it, and people who make the mistake of thinking, “I can be like Pete Townshend and do serious drugs. Then, I’ll just stop and be cured.” They think they can be Steven Tyler or Elton John. It was never difficult for me to say, “No, thank you,” when someone offered me a joint or some pills. If someone presses a glass of single malt whiskey in my hand, I’m probably going to drink it. That’s about it for me.
There’s a fairly good chance I’ll spend my last days on a morphine drip, so I’ll experience what Class A drugs are all about when that happens. I’ll let you know if it was worth the wait.