How Jethro Tull Conquered The US
In 1969, Jethro Tull embarked on their first great American adventure. Within the space of a few short years, they would swap modest-sized stages for packedout shows at Madison Square Garden and Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Ian Anderson and Martin Barre look back on Tull’s journey from mad-eyed bluesy Brits to the fully fledged stadium rock phenomenon that was second only to Led Zeppelin in the 70s.
No one wants to be accidentally teargassed onstage, but there are definitely worse places for it to happen than Red Rocks Amphitheatre.
It was June 10, 1971, and Jethro Tull were headlining this beautiful, 10,000- capacity open-air venue built into the natural sandstone formations south of Denver, Colorado. This was the band’s eighth US tour in the two-and-halfyears since they’d first set foot in North America, a work rate they would sustain throughout the coming decade.
Such was the scale of Tull’s US success that demand for tickets for the Red Rocks show outstripped supply.
Dozens of ticketless fans gathered outside the venue’s gates, hoping to cajole, sweet-talk or simply force their way in. The local police department, there to keep some semblance of order, were having none of it. Simmering tensions boiled over, and a riot broke out. That’s when the cops busted out the tear gas.
“This riot was happening outside the venue, so we weren’t aware of what was going on,” says long-serving Tull guitarist Martin Barre, who played with the band from 1968 to 2011.
“We were onstage when they started tear gassing people. Because of the geographical layout, the tear gas was funnelled into the auditorium, so it got the whole audience and the band as we were playing. It’s very unpleasant. It makes you completely inoperable as a human being. It was only afterwards that we were told, ‘There’s a riot, the police are here, you’ve got to get out of the venue.’ It was horrible.”
According to contemporary reports, the band managed to play for 80 minutes that night, but the fact that Jethro Tull were big enough to sell out a venue as big as Red Rocks in the first place, let alone prompt a riot on the night itself, is remarkable. Received wisdom has it that the likes of Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and, later, Elton John, Bad Company and Fleetwood Mac were the dominant British bands in the US throughout the 1970s, especially when it came to the live arena.
True enough, but Jethro Tull were up there with them, too. Between their first American gigs at the start of 1969 and the end of the following decade, th
