Deep Purple and Jethro Tull: Their "Other" Albums

Quick: name two early-70s albums by British hard rock bands with proggish tendencies that get played to death on classic rock radio. That's right: Jethro Tull's Aqualung (1971) and Deep Purple's Machine Head (1972). Now: name any other album that either of those bands recorded.

Can't do it? Not surprising. That's the power that tightly formatted commercial radio has achieved over the past 20 years or so. No doubt that those albums were those bands' best, but the overfamiliarity of tracks like "Smoke on the Water," "Highway Star," and "Space Truckin'" (Purple), and "Aqualung," "Cross-Eyed Mary," and "Locomotive Breath" (Tull) dull their value almost as if they were the advertising jingles that surround them.

Those two bands had other great albums. For Jethro Tull, my vote goes to Stand Up (1969), the band's second LP. Aqualung, Tull's fourth, was the first album that singer/flutist Ian Anderson dominated; the previous three were really band albums. The difference is readily apparent in the mix: Anderson's vocals are less assertive and much less pretentious, and his flute is more of an ensemble instrument than a source of solos; Martin Barre's guitar is more of a source of creativity in general, not just hooky lead lines.

Stand Up is a wonderfully eclectic yet unassuming collection of tunes. "New Day Yesterday," the opener, features a heavy guitar riff pasted on top of an odd meter. "Nothing Is Easy" is swinging and jazzy, as is the album's best-known track, "Bouree," a reworking of Bach's Bouree in E Minor. Other tunes like "Back to the Family" and "Fat Man" add light touches without being precious in the manner of Aqualung's "Mother Goose." Incidentally, Stand Up was Tull's only UK No. 1 album.

Deep Purple started out with a different lineup than the one that recorded Machine Head, which is known as Deep Purple Mark II. But Mark II's pre-Machine Head albums, Fireball and Deep Purple In Rock, were nothing special. Machine Head magically pulled all of the band's raw materials together into a coherent style and milked it for almost all it was worth.

I say "almost" because the true excellence of this now-all-but-fogotten band (not even listed in the latest edition of the Rolling Stone Record Guide!) was onstage. Made In Japan was released in a hurry to the Japanese market in 1972 to capitalize on the breakaway success of Machine Head. Its popularity led the band's label, EMI, to release it in the US and Europe as well.

Made In Japan is one of the greatest live rock albums of all time. Deep Purple plays for the crowd in Osaka as if its life depended on it. The album is guitarist Ritchie Blackmore's crowning career achievement, and Jon Lord's performance on organ -- Jimmy Smith bluesy one moment, Mike Ratledge noisy the next -- shows at least as much risk-taking experimentalism within the blues-rock format as Keith Emerson showed with The Nice and ELP. Roger Glover and Ian Paice pound away like crazy. Ian Gillain's astounding shrieks show that he was most definitely not just a creature of studio artifice, and at times (such as during "Strange Kind of Woman"), he sounds like he is actually having fun.

Made In Japan's greatness derives from the fact that these were not just recreations of studio tracks from Machine Head and earlier albums. The extended improvs, many of them jousts between Blackmore and Lord in the time-honored tradition of jazz "cutting contests," show true fireworks far more often than self-indulgence.
This is just one of those albums that must be listened to at ear-shattering volume or the entire point is lost.

Further evidence of Purple's vitality as a live act is in the Mark II band's reading of "Mandrake Root," a track from the Mark I band's 1968 debut album Shades of Deep Purple. Mark II really made this track its own on stage, though it doesn't appear on Made In Japan. To get it, seek out the otherwise inferior In Concert, originally released in the early 1980s.

Ironically, Made In Japan was probably the first live album released as "pure product" to capitalize on a band's momentum, as opposed to The Allman Brothers at Fillmore East, the Grateful Dead's Europe 72, and the Who's Live at Leeds, which served to document those bands' primacy as live acts. The pure-product greatest-hits live album became the rule after Made In Japan: The Remastered Edition, give or take a few exceptions such as Cheap Trick at Budokan that prove it.