by Will Romano
Though Tull wouldn’t seriously pursue this direction again, such exchanges only served to show the divide between Anderson, his management, and his own band. Ellis didn’t last long beyond the release of Heavy Horses—and neither did the band’s progressive rock and prog folk tendencies, which were quickly evaporating in any case. The coffin was nailed shut when Tull’s resident symphonic arranger, Palmer, exited.
“I’ve never discussed it with him. . . but I wonder whether or not with the benefit now of thirty years of hindsight, Ian ever wondered whether we could have carried on in the direction we were going and let us develop organically, rather than making oblique changes,” says Palmer. “It’s kind of like taking the petro engine out of a motor car and installing rubber bands and winding it up to see if it works.”
In retrospect, the release of 1978’s double album, Bursting Out: Jethro Tull Live, a fine blend of material, was the last hurrah for dense, folk-baroque rock music.
As Tull flung themselves headlong into the 1980s, the musical complexion of the band had transformed itself into a streamlined, harder-edged rock outfit to meet the demands of the time and Anderson’s need for change.
What followed was strong material, just not the kind that fans had expected from Tull throughout the 1970s. Releases like 1979’s Stormwatch and 1980’s A (originally intended to be an Anderson solo record ), which features Curved Air/Zappa/U.K. alumnus violinist /keyboardist Eddie Jobson, as well as 1982’s Broadsword and the Beast, 1987’s Crest of a Knave, 1989’s Rock Island, 1991’s Catfish Rising, and 1995’s Roots to Branches (among others), reflected a part of the band’s past prog glories, but essentially, their greatest contribution to the longevity of the band was laying the groundwork for a revamped sound (i.e., distorted heavy blues-rock guitar, aggressive flute, and powerhouse drums) that carries on to this day.
It seems “prog rock” was but one avenue Jethro Tull explored in its long and storied career. “At that time, we were creating what was our contribution to progressive rock, mainly Thick as a Brick and A Passion Play, we were just full of fun about it,” says Anderson. “Yet the very parochial Englishness of the successful music of that period did fail to get across, I think, because the cultural references weren’t there. The Italians took to heart this grand sort [of] serious nature to the music. I think that was probably the case in a few other countries as well. Japan, for instance. For us, it was a big fun time. It was not as serious or anal as it is considered to be these days. I think we should all try to remember that.”
Minstrel in the Gallery (1975)
(Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
COLOSSEUM AND GREENSLADE
For Those About to Rock . . .
COLOSSEUM—STEEPED IN THE BRITISH BLUES SCENE OF THE 1960s, with members who’d played with iconic names such as Graham Bond Organisation, Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated, John Mayall’s Blues Breakers, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames—were one of the major forerunners to the British jazz-rock movement, having evolved into one of the most groundbreaking British underground bands of the late 1960s to mix blues, jazz, rock, and classical.
“The interesting thing is,’ says Colosseum drummer and founder Jon Hiseman, “that in hindsight what we were doing kind of led to what people call a progressive scene. We never really thought about it.”
Hiseman was fascinated by jazz as a youngster—having studied New Orleans through New York bebop—and turned his passion into professional work, performing in the British jazz scene of the 1960s.
“I played a lot in the British jazz scene and got heavily involved in the new wave of semi-free-form jazz, and then I got into rhythm and blues, because I could earn money at that,” says Hiseman, who’d played with John Mayall as well as Graham Bond Organisation, replacing Ginger Baker, who was off to form Cream with another former Bond alumnus, Jack Bruce. “So here I am in the rhythm and blues scene, but my whole upbringing was actually elsewhere, and then I turned professional because Graham Bond asked me to join him. Now, of course, Graham Bond had been the leading jazz alto saxophone player in the U.K. before he switched to play organ and sing, and Dick Heckstall-Smith, who was in his band, was one of the leading jazz saxophonists in England before he made the switch over to play blues. Jack Bruce and Ginger Baker, who had been in Graham Bond’s band for three years before I joined it, both come out of the jazz business.”
Fellow Colosseum members Dave Greenslade (keyboards), Tony Reeves (bass), and Heckstall-Smith were jazzmen at heart who logged serious miles with blues and R&B bands.
“At thirteen or fourteen I met Jon Hiseman and Tony Reeves at a local youth club that was connected to the church, and we started to play,” says Greenslade. “That’s just what we did. We were all interested in Duke Ellington, Modern Jazz Quartet, Dave Brubeck, and the British jazz scene, places like Ronnie Scott’s. We’d go to hear people whenever we could. We loved jazz, really, and started playing the youth-club circuit, and they’d have these talent competitions, which we always used to win.”
Greenslade gigged with a semipro band called the Westminster Five, took up residence in Morocco while playing in a band there, came back to England, joined Chris Farlowe and the Thunderbirds and then R&B/soul singer Geno Washington’s Ram Jam Band.
Tony Reeves had been playing with John Mayall prior to Colosseum and, like Heckstall-Smith, had been let go by the British blues maven. “You’re still a musical virgin unless you’ve been sacked by Mayall,” says Reeves.
“John Mayall was a sacker,” says Hiseman. “He used to change his personnel quite frequently, and he did it by firing people. The only three people I’m aware of that he never fired were myself, Eric Clapton, and Peter Green. We left.”
It was during his stint with John Mayall that Hiseman decided to get his old gang together to form a new band. “John gave the band three weeks off or something, when he took a holiday in America,” says Hiseman. “During that time Barbara [Thompson, now Hiseman’s wife] and I went to Rome. This was in the autumn of 1968. We had been away for three weeks and it was our last couple of days in Rome and we walked up to the Forum and up to Palatine Hill and we stood overlooking the Coliseum and I turned to Barbara and said to her, ‘I’ll go back to London, and I’m going to form my own band, and I am going to call it Colosseum.’ .. Barbara said, ‘Go for it.”’
“I was playing with Geno Washington’s band,” says Greenslade. “After eighteen months, I got a call from Jon Hiseman—I hadn’t seen him for quite a while. He said, ‘I’ve had it with all of these characters in the music business. I want to form a band.’ He said, ‘We have no idea what we are going to earn, and we have no idea what we are going to play.’ But I said yes straightaway and left Geno and that comfortable income to go to a drafty church hall in Elephant and Castle in London, with Tony Reeves, Dick Heckstall-Smith, Jon Hiseman, and myself as the core of Colosseum.”
“When we came to form Colosseum, first of all I picked like-minded people,” says Hiseman, who also hired guitarist Jim Roche, who left after only six weeks. Hiseman replaced him with James Litherland.
The band’s debut, Those Who Are About to Die Salute You (released through Philips’s Fontana label) runs the gamut from blues to classical to jazz to hard rock, covering the shufflin’ “Walking in the Park” (written by Graham Bond, previously performed and recorded with Heckstall-Smith and Hiseman), and squeezing out the jazzy baroque instrumental “Beware the Ides of March” and the funky R&B ditty “Debut,” featuring a mini drum solo restating the jittery saxophone and Hammond L-100 organ melody lines.
“Basically what you had in Colosseum was jazz improvisation on top of what were blues sequences with shuffle or eighth-note feels,” says Hiseman. “In a way, the whole ethos, the dialogue that takes place in jazz between the drummer and the soloist . . . I retained that dialogue.”
From the word go, Colosseum were on tour, and their road work helped the band achieve a measure of success: Those Who Are About to Die Salute You reached number fifteen
on the British albums chart, and the band’s greatest work was still ahead of them.
Colosseum’s sophomore effort, Valentyne Suite, released through Philips’s new progressive rock sublabel Vertigo, was on the leading edge of British experimental popular music at the time. (Colosseum did, in fact, sign with manager Gerry Bron, and the band’s debut was licensed to Philips’s Fontana.)
“I told Gerry, ‘I would like to resign Colosseum [to Philips],” says Olav Wyper, who was general manager at Philips and spearheaded the launch of Vertigo (and later RCA’s progressive rock sublabel Neon). “He said, ‘Why? They will be back on Fontana and sell only a few hundred albums.’ I said, ‘No, they will be among the first bands released on a new label. It’s going to be called Vertigo.’ He agreed to that.”
Before launching, the label nicked the classic Hitchcock Vertigo spiral as its signature image (you’ll find it on any Vertigo LP, some of which are now quite collectible), the kinetic properties of which made a bold statement about the dizzyingly diverse and sometimes experimental nature of the acts they signed, such as Black Sabbath (originally Earth), psychedelic folk band Dando Shaft, Rod Stewart, Manfred Mann’s Chapter Three, Uriah Heep, Jade Warrior, Gentle Giant, and others. “I was articulating what the music could do—changing your perspective,” says Wyper.
The dynamic in Colosseum was beginning to shift before the recording of the next studio album, 1970’s Daughter of Time. Tony Reeves had given his notice and left, and the band had recruited singer Chris Farlowe, who had scored a number-one hit in 1966 hit with his version of the Rolling Stones’ “Out of Time” for Immediate Records.
“It was the classic [reason], really: musical differences,” says Reeves. “You only have to listen to Colosseum now. Chris Farlowe is singing. That’s a different trip. Mind you, he’s an incredible singer, but that is not what Colosseum was about. It’s never a bad thing to move on and go into new things.”
Reeves may have missed a good one. For the recording of Daughter of Time, Colosseum had the opportunity to slow the process down a bit—to spend more time with the material before committing to it, something they couldn’t do previously. However, Hiseman admits this may not have been all a good thing. “Our biggest problem was that we had gigs every night of the week,” says Hiseman. “We literally would arrive in the studio at night, work until about four in the morning, roll out the equipment, and start up the motorway to get the next gig. I think we spent very little time making the first two records. We finally put our foot down and said, ‘This is ridiculous.’ Daughter of Time was a new venture for us, because it was the first time the band recorded material in the studio that was not played onstage. We never did much stuff from Daughter of Time onstage. It was the only true studio album we ever made.”
The band’s sound did change slightly, and even though the record doesn’t carry the same musical impact as the previous albums, Daughter of Time makes for a curiously diverse and inspired affair. It seems that not only truth, but music, is the daughter of time.
Check out David “Clem” Clempson’s wah-inflected and screaming blues-laced guitar work in “Three Score and Ten, Amen” and “Down Hill and Shadows,” as well as Hiseman’s double-kick-drum solo in “The Time Machine.” While some might comment that these were prime examples of musicians “overplaying,” these tracks also capture Colosseum at their most passionate.
Other highlights include the symphonic “The Time Lament,” the rousing and edgy title track “Bring Out Your Dead” (listen to Greenslade on the organ and Clem on guitar playing simultaneous licks as Hiseman pounds out a beat per musical note), and the Jack Bruce/Peter Brown song “Theme for an Imaginary Western” (also recorded by, among others, Greenslade, Mountain, and Bruce himself).
“Theme for an Imaginary Western” may have served multiple purposes: It’s an allegory of the life English musicians had lived in the 1960s (specifically in and around London). Some musicians left London for the world stage to find fame, fortune, and romance (and sex), and others didn’t. The writer won’t speculate on Brown’s or Bruce’s motivations for writing the song (though it may be a thinly veiled criticism of the American music industry and its impact on British musicians).
“The funny thing is that song, Cream didn’t want to do it,” Mountain guitarist/vocalist Leslie West recalls. “Jack Bruce wrote that song when he was in Cream and . . . Jack said that Eric [Clapton] thought the chords were a little complicated for a regular blues [song] ... so he just kept it. He did it on his Songs for a Tailor album, and when we started Mountain, we were looking for material....”
Colosseum also covered another Bruce/Brown song, “Rope Ladder to the Moon,” which appears on Colosseum Live—the band’s final album of the 1970s and their first for Bron’s Bronze label, based on recorded performances, most from a March 18 concert at Manchester University, and the rest from a show in Brighton. (Bronze would continue to release Colosseum material even after the band had broken up.)
“We never bothered to listen to the tapes, because we all assumed they were terrible,” says Hiseman. “We thought it was a lifeless, dull night. We went on to record another three or four nights. But when we listened to the tapes, takes that we thought were fantastic were completely over-the-top. It was all too thick. Everybody was trying to play too much. It was a steam train coming at you all the time. But when we listened to the first two gigs, the first one, in Manchester, sounded fantastic.”
Daughter of Time (1970)
Despite the fact that Colosseum were working more than ever, the band’s days were numbered. Lacking material for another studio record, having ambition but no time to truly realize their musical visions as they were constantly on the road, doing a Scandinavian tour without singer Chris Farlowe, and watching guitarist Clempson take a job with Humble Pie’s Steve Marriott spelled the end. By November 1971, Colosseum were on the precipice of ruin.
“Jon couldn’t face rounds of auditions for guitar players, and quite frankly, I don’t think I could have either,” says Greenslade.
By the time the band was winding down, progressive rock could, and oftentimes did, satisfy fans’ need for gritty, musician-friendly music. Though jazz-rock fusion was just starting to get its legs in a major way in the late 1960s and early 1970s with Tony Williams, Brian Auger, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin’s Mahavishnu Orchestra, fusion as a genre wouldn’t be codified as a commercial force, realistically, until later in the decade of the 1970s. Colosseum didn’t stay together long enough to capitalize on the genre’s success, which was reaching new commercial heights with Weather Report and Return to Forever.
The band continued to work for over half a year after the release of the Live record, but no new material had emerged, except for one piece—a very long and complicated song that Heckstall-Smith recorded for his solo album A Story Ended, called “The Pirate’s Dream.”
“‘The Pirate’s Dream’ really broke the band up, in a way, because it was a bridge too far and nobody had the stomach for it in the end,” Hiseman says.
The members of Colosseum went their own ways: Hiseman established Tempest (with young guitarist Allan Holdsworth riding shotgun) with the express purpose of writing shorter (more accessible) rock and blues-based songs, only to reform Colosseum (in a way) as a funky fusion band under the banner of Colosseum II (featuring guitarist Gary Moore) and releasing groundbreaking electronic and jazz-rock material such as Wardance and Strange New Flesh. Heckstall-Smith set out on a solo career, Clempson replaced Peter Frampton in Humble Pie and Farlowe jettisoned to Atomic Rooster.
Perhaps most significantly, Dave Greenslade, half of the creative driving force of Colosseum (Heckstall-Smith being the other half), and Tony Reeves (who would go on to join Curved Air later in the 1970s) formed the band Greenslade.
“Really, if you listen to the stuff David wrote on Daughter of Time, that’s the beginning of Greenslade,” says Hiseman. “Dave wanted to go on to write more of what he had done for Daughter of Time, right
around the time synthesizers were starting to come in. So he went off and established Greenslade, which was a true prog rock group, really.”
“Whatever the style of music was in Greenslade, it really is just what happens when you put Dave Greenslade, [keyboardist and vocalist] Dave Lawson, Andrew McCulloch, and Tony Reeves together,” says Gregg Jackman, who engineered some of the early Greenslade material. “I don’t suppose there was any intention of making it ‘like’ anything. The ‘prog rock’ label is likely to be put onto any music that uses rock instruments but more chords than you’ll find in the average church hymn.”
“Next thing we knew, we had a deal with [Warner Brothers],” says Greenslade.
Right off the bat, the band appeared to have a couple of problems: How do you have a rock band without a guitar player (even Greg Lake played guitar, not just bass, when complementing keyboard wizard Emerson), and how does a band coordinate two keyboardists without each occupying or stealing the other’s sonic frequencies?
David Greenslade had always been a big Mellotron, Hammond organ, and piano (and electric piano) man, whereas Lawson was a pioneer of analog synthesizers. What’s more, on some of the band’s recorded material, especially those written exclusively by Greenslade or Lawson, there would only be one keyboardist featured. Problem solved.
Greenslade were a balanced outfit, with an equal division of labor, two keyboardists who were polar opposites, an extraordinary drummer, and a versatile (and tasteful) bassist. In short, the band was a tight-knit friendly group, and one that fits squarely in the “prog rock” genre. This might sound like a backhanded compliment, but Greenslade, in the early and mid-1970s, crystallized the British prog rock movement with such albums as their self-titled debut and the sophomore effort Bedside Manners Are Extra.
