Thick As A Brick Act II Jethro Tull

Thick as a Brick Part 2 Album: Thick as a Brick (1972)
by Jethro Tull

In 1972 Jethro Tull released a parody concept album Thick As A Brick. . Concept albums were all the rage back then and this one features a single track 43 minutes long. Due to the limits of the LP format it is split into two parts.

The album opens up to become a 12 page newspaper, later versions left out the fold out newspaper. There are several articles about Gerald "Little Milton" Bostock, a review of the album and articles about some sort non-rabbit and many others of a full feature newspaper. It is a bit like the National Lampoon Sunday Newspaper.

Gerald Bostock was an 8 year old child genius who wrote the lyrics for the album and is also a fictional character. Ian Anderson actually wrote the lyrics as usual for a Jethro Tull album.
Don't let your kids fill out the connect the dots puzzle. I haven't checked the crossword puzzle yet. May not be rated G.

Following the storming success of his band’s 1971 opus, Aqualung, Jethro Tull’s frontman, Ian Anderson, found himself both tickled and bemused by the sheer absurdity of progressive rock. Mindful of the pretentious pitfalls of a genre that could be grandiose, lengthy and indulgent, Anderson was keen to inject more of a sense of humour into proceedings for the group’s next album, Thick As A Brick.

Though they were prog-rock bedfellows, Jethro Tull approached their fifth record with a tongue-in-cheek sensibility, framing it as a musically ambitious satire on the British class system, with comedic undertones. “We’re talking about an era when Monty Python was really successful,” Anderson later said, “and we had a similar sense of humour to them.” Coasting away from the Flying Circus in a blimp of their own making, Jethro Tull ensured that Thick As A Brick was a surreal and epic flight that celebrated their fondness for schoolboy japes while leading them to discover their very own holy grail.

“WE WERE SPOOFING THE IDEA OF A CONCEPT ALBUM”

Combining highfalutin musical ideas while rehearsing in a mobile studio owned by The Rolling Stones, the band put flesh on the bones of a two-part suite of continuous music – each one occupying over 20 minutes on each side of vinyl. Aiming to tell the story of a fictitious 12-year-old schoolboy, Thick As A Brick was full of the dazzling wordplay, riddles and frantic tempos of the best Jethro Tull songs, bolstered by gleeful anti-Establishment swipes at toffee-nosed bores. “We were spoofing the idea of a concept album,” Anderson said, “but in a fun way that didn’t totally mock it.”

“I think we all had that sort of schoolboy humour throughout the album,” guitarist Martin Barre recalled. “We were all pranksters, all in a very silly state of adult development.” Musically, however, Jethro Tull were as serious-minded as ever, creating for Thick As A Brick a watertight arrangement to which each band member contributed hugely, resulting in the band’s most innovative undertaking to date. “We worked together on the arrangements and so everyone probably had an equal amount of input,” Anderson said.

“THERE’S A DEFINITE STRAIN OF ENGLISH TOMFOOLERY RUNNING THROUGHOUT”

Released on 10 March 1972, Thick As A Brick landed with an album cover that spoofed the inanity of local-newspaper reportage. Arguably just as ambitious as the music within, the “newspaper” was named The St Cleve Chronicle & Linwell Advertiser. The band had gone to painstaking lengths to craft a 16-page editorial containing fictional articles, crossword puzzles and daft tabloid tidbits that satirised modern journalism.

Through the character of Gerald Bostock, Anderson delivers lyrics exploring the journey from puberty to manhood, with the music’s freewheeling chaos mirroring the rebelliousness of a child running amok in a world of military conscription.