An awful lot of kids cut school last November when it was announced that Jethro Tull would play two shows at Detroit’s Cobo Arena. The lines, longer than Cobo management had ever seen before, started forming at 7 AM. By the time the ticket office opened — three hours later — there were 4,000 kids milling around outside. One observer described it as looking like “the third day of e three day rock festival”. People were buying fifty and a hundred tickets at a time, and the first show sold out in three hours. The second was sold out the next day: ifi the meantime, a riot had been narrowly averted, the TAC squad called in and barricades erected| All this in spite of the fact, that ticket prices had gone up a dollar over the $5.50 rate of the previous Isay’s tour. When only a. thousand people were turned away and four doorsi to Cobo were smashed by frustrated Jethro fans:

The violence may not have been typical of Tull tours — yet — but the numbers were indicative of a new fever. Jethro Tull’s following has grown until, if has become vast enough to qualify as one of the success stories of our time. The baiid. itself has evolved quickly from their early blues derivations into artier, more melodic and complex stuff, and by their fourth album they were getting into grand conceptual suites oaa scale unmatched this side of the Moody Blues. Aqualung was ’ two LP sides of unmitigated social moralizing, weighty lyrics in musical settings so heterogeneous (rock, Rock, a bit of rock V roll|a lot of mostly borrowed jazz, and folk strains both British and American, as well as the odd “classical” gambit) as to have become a recognizable style.