"Really don't mind if you sit this one out/ My words but a whisper, your deafness a SHOUT." Jethro Tull's fifth album, "Thick as a Brick", was released on March 3, 1972. OMG, I still love this album, after first buying it from my cousin's local store that summer! Ian Anderson had been annoyed that "Aqualung" (1971) had been called a "concept album". He decided to make "the mother of all concept albums" as a spoof, in the comic tradition of Monty Python. The album contained one song, filling both sides of the LP. The spoof was that the lyrics were supposedly an epic poem written by an 8-year-old named Gerald Bostock. According to the story, the boy was disqualified from a poetry competition when readers were offended by his attitude and his social commentary--starting with the poem's title. ("Thick as a brick" means a person who's really stupid.) All of this was packaged in a 12-page gatefold album cover that was a "newspaper" from Bostock's town. Anderson said in an interview that the newspaper took a little longer for band members to write that the whole album took to record. John Evan's keyboard prowess really shines through the long song's sections. A prog rock classic turns 54!
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