This Was (1968)
Artist: Jethro Tull
Label: Island
Format: Roon, FLAC (16/44)
Year: 1968
Equipment
- DAC
- PS Audio PerfectWave DirectStream
- Streamer
- PS Audio AirLens
- Amp
- Audio Research I/50
- Speakers
- DeVore Fidelity O/96
- Sub
- REL T/5x SE Powered Subwoofer
- Interconnects
- Morrow MA3
- Speaker Cables
- Tellurium Q Black II
I put on This Was because Mick Abrahams had died. That’s usually how these things go. You read the news, you reach for the record, and suddenly the album isn’t just an album anymore. It’s a site of argument, a set of possibilities, a band caught mid-decision.
Because I know Jethro Tull, this has never sounded to me like a blues album with some quirks. It sounds like proto-Tull that still has one boot planted in the blues. Abrahams wants the band to be muscular, guitar-forward, authoritative. Ian Anderson wants something stranger, more theatrical, less bound to inherited forms. What makes This Was compelling is that neither side wins yet. They compete. And the competition is audible.
“My Sunday Feeling” opens things pretty straight. Blues-rock propulsion, rhythm section doing honest work, and then, yes, that’s a flute. Not ornamental, not polite. Anderson inserts it where a guitar would usually live, as if to say this instrument belongs in the argument. It doesn’t quite convince yet, but it destabilizes the frame.
“Someday the Sun” is where the record briefly stops arguing and listens to itself. Abrahams and Anderson coexist rather than clash, and the result is quietly beautiful. There’s restraint here, a sense that nobody needs to prove anything. It’s one of the album’s emotional centers.
“Beggar’s Farm” sounds uncannily like it could sit on Aqualung. The social grit, the character sketching, the sense of place, it’s all there. Then Abrahams breaks it open with guitar lines that remind you this band can still throw a punch. I like it better when that happens. The song benefits from the ballast.
“Move On Alone” leans into theatricality, a quality that would later become unmistakably Tull. Anderson is already narrating rather than singing, shaping persona rather than channeling blues idiom. That’s important, because Anderson is not really a blues singer. His voice doesn’t stretch or bend the way the form demands. Instead, he declaims. That works brilliantly for storytelling and satire, less so for pure blues. Abrahams, on the other hand, sounds completely at home there.
“Serenade to a Cuckoo,” a jazz (!) piece by Rahsaan Roland Kirk, feels like an early rehearsal for later adaptations like “Bourée.” Anderson doesn’t revere the source; he absorbs it. The flute moans, the phrasing turns playful, and then Abrahams’ guitar enters and sharpens the focus. The tune comes alive in the tension.
“Dharma for One” is simply a Tull song. Period. The structure, the humor, the willingness to spotlight the rhythm section. Clive Bunker is not messing around here. The drum solo is declarative, not indulgent, and the saxophone (!) all but flips the table. Abrahams’ guitar gives the track its rock spine, but the song’s identity is already Anderson’s.
Side two deepens the divide. “It’s Breaking Me Up” is straight blues, and it’s sweet. Anderson sounds committed but not idiomatic; Abrahams sounds fluent. Then comes “Cat’s Squirrel,” which is Abrahams’ song, full stop. Instrumental, swaggering, closer to Jeff Beck than to future Tull, and not far from the epic guitar logic of early Led Zeppelin. Anderson’s absence is conspicuous, and instructive. Remove him, and this band could plausibly have gone another way entirely.
“A Song for Jeffrey” swings the pendulum back. This may be the earliest song that feels unmistakably Tull, even more so than later early staples. Anderson cosplays an old prospector, half music hall, half folk fable. Sonically, it’s a standout. The drums are dead center, the ride cymbal right in front of me, the dynamic range generous. This is one of the moments where the record suddenly locks in.
“One for John Gee” grooves. “Love Story” veers into late-Tull territory: fairy tale, bawdy joke, maybe a murder ballad with a grin. Did he kill her? Who knows. The song refuses moral closure, which is very much Anderson’s way. “Christmas Song,” fittingly listened to the day after Christmas, is a hoot and a quiet triumph. Lush orchestration, an opening soundstage, and yet it refuses to settle into piety. In the great rock tradition, it won’t behave as a moral tale.
A brief audiophile note, and a term worth defining. I went in with what I’ll call forebiasForebiasApplying your experience of the music you've just been listening to to a whole new album.—the habit of judging a new listen by the sonic standards of whatever you just heard. I’d been listening to something immaculate by Rudy Van Gelder, and This Was could not compete on those terms. The soundstage is inconsistent, the imaging wanders. But once I let go of that comparison, the album revealed its gifts. In quieter passages, with fewer instruments, it sounds very good indeed. Presence emerges. Space opens. Context matters. I guess the lesson here is to be patient: don’t judge a bourbon by your first sip. I’ll say more about this in a future post.
Abrahams leaves after this record, and later guitarists, especially Martin Barre, do heroic work serving Anderson’s long game. But Tull arguably never again had a guitarist who competed with the frontman for the center. That competition is the ghost that haunts This Was. It’s the sound of a band that could have gone another way, and chose not to.
What we’re left with isn’t a loss so much as a clarified identity. The fight was good. We have the record because the argument happened in public. And listening now, as a tribute to Abrahams, it feels right to celebrate not the path abandoned, but the friction that made the path forward possible.
