"Although not in the shops yet, I was able to acquire a 'white label' pressing of the current Jethro winner Thick As A Brick from their London agents, Chrysalis Artists.... The group consists of Ian Anderson, Martin Barre, John Evan, Jeffery Hammond-Hammond and Barriemore Barlow. Written around a poem by St. Cleve child prodigy Gerald Bostock, their music spins a delicate web of sensitive sounds: sometimes lilting, sometimes soaring to form a brilliant backdrop for the meaningful lyrics and improvisational techniques....
"One doubts at times the validity of what appears to be an expanding theme throughout the two continuous sides of this record but the result is at worst entertaining
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and at least aesthetically palatable."
Ian Anderson (a.k.a. Julian Stone-Mason B.A.) has not only slyly reviewed his own album, he's also supplied the newspaper which contains it. Like so much flounder, Thick As A Brick comes wrapped in the St. Cleve's Chronicle, an apocryphal yet typical daily of Anderson's design. Played across the front page is the Gerald "Little Milton" Bostock scandal (the epithet refers to the author of Paradise Lost, not the soul singer). Eight-year-old Gerald is adjudged unfit to accept first prize from The Society For Literary Advancement And Gestation (SLAG) by virtue of the questionable contents of his epic poem Thick As A Brick.
Gerald is one of Ian Anderson's incarnations and ruses. Besides lyricist and impersonator, Anderson is also composer, arranger, singer, flutist, acoustic guitarist, violinist, saxophonist, trumpeter, satirist and overall conceptualizer. His adeptness at most of these functions, in particular, his ability to balance and fuse them, has created one of rock's most sophisticated and ground-breaking products.
Most of the Chronicle's features display a dry, fatuous, very English sense of humor. Under the "Deaths" column, there is the late Charles Stiff; and stories have titles along the lines of "Mongrel Dog Soils Actor's Foot" and "Non-Rabbit Missing." Characters in, say, a page two story will turn up again on page five in equally ludicrous circumstances. It is all very clever, yet at first seemingly irrelevant.
Page seven carries the words to Thick As A Brick. The writing is very dense and enigmatic, and the unidentified shifts in narrative voice compound the difficulty. The poem, as best I can make out, is a sweeping social critique, as pessimistic about poets, painters and the generally virtuous as it is condemnatory of politicians and other figures of authority. And what more perfectly encompasses or embodies the world Anderson aims to criticize than a daily newspaper? The paper in turn encompasses the poem. Furthermore, there are names in the poem which, refer back to items in the newspaper. The poem "reviews" the newspaper, just as Stone-Mason reviewed the record. The entire package operates with the allusiveness of a Nabokov novel.
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