I’d need some explanation of that one - 'fraid it does sound unlikely.
Maybe that’s a USA-only claim? Maybe it includes TV audiences?
Between adopting the name in 1968 and disbanding in 2011, Jethro Tull performed 3,135 concerts, plus numerous media appearences.
There were 161 dates on the 1972 tour, but typically much fewer than 100/year from 1978. There were more per year in the 2000s, but at smaller venues.
I haven’t updated the count for a year or so, but there have also been 802 ‘solo’ gigs by Ian Anderson since 1995 and 284 by the Martin Barre Band since 2011.
It was from Entertainment Weekly. It was world wide and the venues they played were very large they played larger venues outside the US in general. Entertainment Weekly was a very greedy magazine they showed all the big acts based way more on money generated than crowd size or whether anybody actually enjoyed it.
Odd. Coming from a Folk/World background, I hear the vocalisations as similar to the sort of thing one hears in Native American Flute playing, and also in Didgeridoo. The position of the hands strikes me as “piper’s grip” - and leads me to think that he had been playing Low Whistle for a while before picking up the flute. That would also feed his ability to learn quickly.
Although he did apparently learn quickly, I’ve heard him tell the story that he first started with the flute when his band just somehow happened upon one. Supposedly everyone else in the band could easily do something musical with the flute right away, but he couldn’t, so he stuck with it out of pure stubbornness.
I want to see a video of a scuba diver reacting to “Aqualung.”
“Snot is running down his nose? Watching as the pretty panties run? This isn’t about diving at all, why the eff did he call it ‘Aqualung’? Makes no damn sense.”
I’ve seen some reaction videos before and i’m always sceptical that they’re listening to the music (or playing a classic game) for the first time but their reactions did seem pretty genuine.
Jethro Tull was an early and powerful influence on my musical tastes, and I still love them and Ian Anderson. However, I didn’t see them in concert until late in adulthood, and man alive, were they still great! Last time was Ian’s Thick As A Brick II tour, and it was just fantastic. First, TaaB in its entirety, then TaaB2, and a lot of comic banter, and some sincere cajoling to us menfolk to get checked regularly for prostate cancer. Super show. If I had just payed full price for the Locomotive Breath encore, I would have walked away a happy mutant.
“He’s only been playing a year”. . . rock and roll is essentially folk music, I imagine there are videos of classically trained violinists reacting to Appalachian, Cape Breton or other regional style fiddlers.
I had to take a keyboard practicum as part of my music theory courses in college, the piano instructor would typically say “good enough for jazz” whenever someone did an exercise below her standards.
(eyeroll)
I do think this flautist ‘gets it’ with regard to Ian Anderson, but hearing classical critiques of non-classically trained musicians is predictable.
How many people are good at multiple wind instruments? And how many of those could play more than one at the same time? I am very fond of Case of the Three-sided Dream. Yes, it’s a three sided album, altho I suspect the fourth side to have been double-grooved. What you got depended on where the needle landed.
A theatre buddy of mine was a Jethro Tull roadie for years, up until the Passion Play tour, I think. He has just completed a memoir about his time in that time, and it’s chock-a-block with tales of rock. Hope he finds a publisher soon.
