Second tier bands

Although it was amusing to listen to band members from Metallica bitch and moan about And Justice For All  losing to Crest of a Knave, what is absolutely hilarious is that one of Metallica's greatest achievements actually lost to what most people consider to be Tull's 12th or 13th best album. I certainly wouldn't put CoaK on the same level as anything Tull released from 1969 to 1979. 

It is a sobering thought about the decline of music in the 80s when you consider albums like Aqualung, Thick as a Brick or even Songs from the Wood were not even up for Grammys, given the fierce competition and the amount of great albums released during that era. As a matter of fact, no hard rock or prog albums were even nominated back in 1971 or 72, or 1977 for that matter.

Well, it's true that Jethro Tull were a bit of a wild card when their name came up at the grammys in 1989. I think a big part of it had to do with the people who did the voting who were mostly older corporate guys who weren't up on current hard rock and metal at the time. I even read this somewhere. So it kind of makes sense. They actually made hard rock and metal two separate categories the following year probably mostly because of this incident. But yeah it may as well have been Yes who won that year for Big Generator(released the same year as CoaK).  I like Coak quite a bit and think it's better than most of the later albums I have heard(except for Roots to Branches). Is it on the level of their seventies albums? Well, it's maybe better than stormwatch or Too old to rock n roll... but that's about it. I'm not a metallica expert so I can't say much about their albums. I have master of puppets and like it but haven't heard any of the others. 

Renaissance out of these