Jethro Tull Frontman Chose Flute on Impulse

While Jethro Tull's music has become synonymous with the flute, frontman Ian Anderson admits it doesn't really fit in with rock 'n' roll. At the same time, he knew he needed to take up some instrument that would give Tull an original sound.

"If I had not taken up the flute, I would have been looking around for something else," he tells Spinner. "I'm not sure what. I've always rather liked the idea of playing the violin. But it's a fiendishly difficult instrument to play and not one that you can make a pleasing sound on without actually playing it for a few years."

While he's now accomplished flautist, Anderson didn't take up the flute until the winter of 1967, just a few months before Tull's first album. When Anderson walked into a music store and saw a flute hanging on a wall, he traded in a guitar for the flute and a microphone.
"It was only because they were both shiny and silver and they looked kind of nice. They were smaller than guitars and easy to carry around," he says. "I had no idea what I was going to do with the flute. It was an impulse buy."After bringing his flute home, Anderson came to regret trading in his guitar.

"[The flute] sat there for about four months before I decided I should try and see what I could do with it," says Anderson, currently touring as a solo act in between Tull tours.
He picked it up again around Christmas 1967 and three months later, he was playing it on stage. Four months after that, the flute appeared on 'This Was.' Through the years, the flute would give Jethro Tull its distinctive sound -- hard rock with a Medieval touch, Led Zeppelin meets the Pied Piper. While other bands would use the flute from time to time, none were identified with the flute like Tull.

"Nobody really did it in a big way," Anderson says. "It was just an occasional little bit of Christmas tree decoration. I think at the time I started playing it, I was putting it right in front, being a real lead instrument in the band."
Anderson isn't surprised the flute is seldom used in rock. According to him, the instrument is difficult to amplify and integrate into rock music -- and too much of it can be annoying. "Altogether, it's really not a suitable instrument for rock music," he says. Still, Anderson used it to drive songs like 'Locomotive Breath,' 'Living in the Past' and 'Thick as a Brick,' helping Tull become one of the top draws of the 70s.
The key to playing flute in rock music? For Anderson, it was to play flute like it wasn't really a flute.

"I started playing the flute in the way other flute players wouldn't," he says. "I began by playing improvised solos, playing the kinds of things I played on the guitar. I didn't learn scales or the niceties of tone and vibrato. I went straight off the deep end, thinking guitar but playing flute."

Metallica joins FBI in hunt for missing student

It has been more than a week since a 20-year-old college student called her friends at a Metallica concert to say she was outside the arena and would find her own way home. Now the famed heavy-metal rockers are participating in the search for her, adding $50,000 to the reward for information leading to her whereabouts.
While investigators attempt to discover what happened to a young woman described as open, beautiful, artistic and giving, Morgan Harrington’s parents, Dan and Gil Harrington, have been keeping a high public profile, trying to focus attention on the disappearance.
“One word that comes to mind when you think of Morgan is ‘shiny,’ ” Morgan’s mother, Gil Harrington told TODAY’s Amy Robach during a recent interview. “She was beautiful and she was beautiful inside, too. She radiated life.”

Dutiful daughter

Young adults sometimes disappear intentionally, but the Harringtons were uncommonly close to their daughter. A student at Virginia Tech, about 35 miles from her parents, she talked to her father every day and trusted him with her computer passwords and the key to her apartment. She also spoke with her mother daily and frequently returned home to visit.
On Saturday, Oct. 17, Morgan Harrington spent the day at home planning with her mother what she was going to wear at the Metallica concert she planned to attend at the University of Virginia.
Such days were the norm for the family, Gil (pronounced “Jill”) Harrington told Robach.
“It was a regular day for us: got up, made tea, had coffee, chatted some, showed the outfits, showed me how she was going to do her make-up,” the mother recalled.

Morgan went with friends to the concert. Sometime between 8:30 and 9 p.m., she called her friends to say she had gone to the restroom and ended up outside John Paul Jones Arena on the University of Virgina campus in Charlottesville. She told them she wasn’t allowed back in and would find another way home.
The next day, her phone and purse were found in a parking lot near the arena. Morgan, who never went anywhere without her cell phone, hasn’t been seen since.
“We have a purse and we have a cell phone. We have a missing girl,” Lt. Joe Rader of the Virginia State Police, told reporters last week. “We do not know whether if she is alive or has met some ill fate.”

‘Let Morgan go’

Gil Harrington said her daughter normally wouldn’t try to get home from a big event on her own, but added: “Kids are impulsive, especially in that excitement. Perhaps she knew who she could get a ride with. We don’t know. We wish we did know.”
Her parents reported her missing the next day and local and state police along with the FBI have been conducting the search for the 5-foot-6, 120-pound blonde with blue eyes.

“She’s really very a sweet person, kind of an innocent individual who probably is quite trusting,” Dan Harrington told Robach. “She’s quite artistic, loves to read, and, really, over the last six months, Gil and Morgan and I had just a phenomenal relationship. She goes to school only 35 miles from here. We’ve been able to have daily contact with her. She’s a wonderful person.”
The Harringtons also have a 22-year-old son who told his mother that if Morgan were abducted, whoever took her would have no choice but to keep her alive.
“He said, ‘Morgan has a purpose in this world, and Morgan is so special that whoever took her is going to keep her around for a while,’ ” Gil Harrington told Robach. Then, addressing the presumed abductor, she added, “So please let Morgan go. No questions asked. Let her come home to us.”

Robach asked Gil Harrington what she would say to her daughter if Morgan was listening.
Signing her words in American Sign Language, the mother looked in the camera and said, “Morgan, we are trying to shine our heart to you as a beacon to come through wherever you are. Come back home.”
Boosted by the $50,000 pledge from Metallica, there is a $150,000 reward for information that helps find Morgan Harrington. Police ask anyone with information to call 434-352-3467.

By Mike Celizic
TODAYShow.com contributor
updated 2 hours, 34 minutes ago

AC/DC tears up arena with explosive salute

Never the darlings of the critical establishment, and written off as “caveman rock” by altrock snobs for several decades, AC/DC still managed to become one of the most successful rock bands of all time, selling some 300 million albums since its early ’70s inception.

Sunday evening, several generations of AC/DC fans convened in HSBC Arena to bear witness to the enduring power of the band’s bad boy boogie.

Now with a median age of nearly 60, the Australian band simply tore the place apart with its raunchy take on old school rock ’n’ roll. Louder than one would’ve thought possible, tighter than all get out, and deliciously sleazy, AC/DC pulled songs from every corner of its fabled career, blessed us with a fair bit of its latest album, the visceral smackdown “Black Ice,” and concluded by blasting fully functional cannons at the crowd during its anthemic final encore, “For Those About To Rock (We Salute You).”

The core of the band is, as ever, the twin guitar team of brothers Angus and Malcolm Young. The siblings write the songs, and split the bloody red meat assault of the sonic attack that is the trademark of the band’s sound — Angus, dressed in his school boy’s uniform, handling the molten blues-based guitar solos and bobbing about the stage like a problem child with a few gallons of Jolt cola pumping through his veins, while Malcolm roots the band with the metronomelike precision of his right hand.

The rhythm section of bassist Cliff Williams and drummer Phil Rudd plays a four-on-the-floor rhythm that is deceptively simple. Making this music do the AC/DC version of “swing” is no mean feat, and requires playing absolutely nothing that is not integral to the song.
Atop all of this, singer Brian Johnson howls like a man possessed, his thick Scottish brogue tinting every blues yelp that emanates from his throat with an emphatic fiendishness.
After a fairly naughty animated introductory montage, the band launched into “Rock ’n’ Roll Train,” the opening number from “Black Ice,” and the place just plain exploded. Heavy on the hooks, completely fat-free, and deliciously nasty, this tune is already a hard rock classic.
The band’s first era — prior to the death by alcohol poisoning of original singer Bon Scott —was celebrated early with the swanky strut of “Hell Ain’t A Bad Place To Be,” and then the band started cranking out songs that are rightly considered among the most memorable of the rock era.

“Back In Black” is a sledgehammer to the head, but also lithe and funky; “Thunderstruck,” heard often in this same building as a crowd-pumper during Sabres games, was now an onslaught of molten Angus guitar licks and cranium-rattling drum accents; “Shoot To Thrill” moved with menace, like Led Zeppelin if the band had been a troop of punky teenagers.
If Johnson’s voice has grown a bit thinner with age, he has adjusted to his sightly reduced capabilities, and still sings with soul and muscle.

AC/DC does not sound like a band facing down senior citizenship.
The show, like the band’s music, was bombastic and deliriously over-the-top — explosions, inflatable tattooed women, and enough high voltage amplification to wake the dead, all presented with tongue firmly in cheek and fist raised high.
Hard rock ’n’ roll gets no better than this.

Concert Review

AC/DC

Sunday night in HSBC Arena.

By Jeff Miers
NEWS POP MUSIC CRITIC

Aerosmith's Troubles Continue.

Joe Perry gave Aerosmith fans a scare last week when he revealed that he and Steven Tyler haven’t spoken since the singer’s stage fall in South Dakota put the brakes on the band’s summer tour. Rumors of an inevitable breakup for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame group quickly began circulating, but Perry calmed fans’ fears by telling the Boston Herald that he was disappointed by the tour’s sudden end, but doesn’t think this is the end of Aerosmith.
“Maybe we have three more records in us. Maybe we have five [and] seven years of touring,” Perry told the Herald. Perry added “Aerosmith is taking a breather” and that he hopes the band will reconvene in late spring to begin recording their next album and plot out a tour for next fall. Even though Perry and Tyler haven’t spoken in the last month and a half, Perry doesn’t see the radio silence lasting that much longer. “That day will come. Whether it’s him calling me or me calling him, it will happen,” Perry said.
As for his comments that he and Tyler hadn’t penned a song together in the same room for over a decade, Perry recognized that was partly because they’d outsourced that task to other songwriters. While he said that technique has been successful, Perry noted he fears outside writers deviate from the classic Aerosmith sound (”I Don’t Want to Miss A Thing,” written by Diane Warren, comes to mind). “I don’t mind using outside songwriters but I’d still like to see an Aerosmith where the core of the music comes from the guys in the band,” Perry said.
Aerosmith might be “taking a breather,” but it’s only a short breath: Honolulu’s Star Bulletin reported yesterday that Aerosmith will perform a pair of concerts on October 18th and 20th in Maui as the result of a class action lawsuit decision from a Hawaii concert the band canceled two years ago. Plus, Aerosmith will head to the Middle East for a November 1st show at a Formula One race in Abu Dhabi, U.A.E. “We’re getting our visas together and the papers drawn up and everything,” Perry said. “So as far as I’m concerned we’re doing these dates.”

Info from Rolling Stone Online.

The KCTunes Classic Rock Blog Site.

Welcome to the KCTunes Classic Rock Blog Site. KCTunes is an internet radio station that playes Classic Rock from the 60's, 70's & 80's. This will be where we can but down your experences in the music world. Mostly the Classic Rock Arena. You can post experences in concerts, photos from concerts & photos from the music industry.