rock on

note: this post is dedicated to my new friends dumdad and tim who share a love of jethro tull♡

ian anderson of jethro tull performing one of his mind-splitting flute solos

in the past couple of days i've come across songs i used to listen to all the time when i was in college.

and then there was that big gap of time when i got married, got a job, had kids.......

and i forgot how much i liked this music. especially joni mitchell. god, listening to her play a case of you sends me over the edge. how could i have forgotten how much i liked this song?

pure joni

but now that the kids are leaving the nest, i find i am re-discovering things like this. is life meant to be this way? we start out single, free to roam the world, and all the music of that time period sticks to those memories like honey.

then years later when you come up for air after the house remodelings, soccer matches, fencing tournaments, dance recitals, dirty laundry, dabbed tears and letting out hems, it happens. you enter a wormhole and revert to your old self. and all the old music comes back with it.


lately i've been on a jethro tull jag.


no one rocks the flute like ian anderson, i'm sorry, no one. 

the one leg lifting like a stork when he was really into it, those whoops of breath taken in between blazing riffs..............lordy. i'm back on my lawn in minnesota overlooking the lake, suntanning. aqualung is on the record player in my bedroom, the speakers pointed outside. the sounds of speed boats sawing around my ears and smell of coppertone. the sky darkens with the approach of a summer thunderstorm and just on cue, the opening guitar strums of tull's song, My God, come creeping through the window with the same ominous intensity...

i'm a bit too young for the jimi hendrix and janis joplin era but i have a brother and sister who are older, were much cooler than i and way into that music - my brother played in a band in our town called the poore boyes (love that olde englishe spelling that was hip in the 60s).

they played at a local venue called danceland -- and before they became famous so did a little known band at the time called the rolling stones (probably where jagger honed his elastic body contortions across the stage)

.......i have memories of my brother and his bandmates jamming in the basement - the metal twangs and thunking of the drumset wafting up through the house's ductwork into my bedroom lulled me to sleep.

anyway, i'm into a mood where i'm thanking the music gods for joni and jethro.....

and warren zevon i love you, god rest your soul. what kind of mind thinks up a song like excitable boy?

.............or my favorite:  lawyers, guns and money

here he is doing a really nice acoustic rendition of that song


there are plenty more i haven't mentioned.....anyone else want to share their fave 70s rock band?


images courtesy of gryphons aerie and the st. louis examiner