A PASSION PLAY

During a family vacation in the Vienna woods in 1977 my father had bought a Grundig radio/casette player. We tried to listen in on the short wave for american stations but that only lasted so far before boredom crept in. The woods were great but as a teenager we needed some tunes. So my older brother put on the only tape we had with us. It was Tull's A Passion Play. He must have played it all day long for five days straight. I thought that I would go nuts. It wasn't rock. It didn't have classic riffs like Bowie or Zep. But over time this album grew on me. Form the heartbeats to the ever pleasant midieval guitars and unaccompanied vocals from Anderson to the constant build up of disjointed yet measured playing by the band, A Passion Play had a life of its own. Now when I look back at the Tull catalogue, I always measure each of their albums against this one. A magnificent work indeed. By the way, once we got home, the same brother repetitively enlightened any would be listener of the home to another twisted relic of days gone prog. That album was Nursery Crime. My mysterious journey into progressive rock had begun in ernst.