THE PERENNIAL TULL

Erika Anderson

I should have started to wonder if my mom had been a teenage stoner the
moment I found out her favorite band was Jethro Tull. With that mystical yet
kind of dirty flute, proggy guitar and lecherous lyrics—Jethro Tull is not like Led
Zeppelin, which is also mystical and dirty. Led Zeppelin somehow bridged the
loadie/square gap, which might have something do to with the Hobbit lyrics.
Jethro Tull was strictly for stoners. “Bungle in the Jungle”? Come on! They
didn’t even have as wide of appeal as the Doors, which I liked to listen to
stoned out of my teenage mind two floors below where my parents slept. I used
to listen to “The End” on repeat, my mind following every note of Robbie
Kreiger’s faux-Asian snaky guitar riffs, every syncopated cymbal skip of John
Densmore’s drumming, and I knew by heart every self-important lyric that fell
out of Jim Morrison’s smirking mouth. Looking back, my parents must have
known that anyone lighting candles in their room, burning incense and listening
to “The End” on repeat was smoking tons of shitty pot. But they never busted
me for it.
My mom grew up in a very small town in Nebraska not far from Sioux Falls,
where I grew up. The town has about 600 people now but maybe it had more in
the early ‘70s, before corporate farming made small time agriculture a slow
road to poverty. Tales of her early childhood are filled with cute anecdotes about
her and her siblings dressing the cat up like a baby and pretending to eat mud
pies and whatever other wholesome and zany things kids get up to in small
towns. However, the stories kind of trail off during her teenage years—so I’ve
had to fill them in with stock footage of butterfly necklaces, oversized head-
phones and joints smoked on gravel roads. Rural ‘70s midwest was a place far
removed from the hippie movement, yet a perusal of her surprisingly large
record collection later turned up not only Tull, but also heavy jams from such
psych-masters as Deep Purple, Pink Floyd (of course) and even Alice Cooper.
Despite her groovy and far-out record collection, she went to a nice respect-
able college right after high school, and when she was done with that went
straight into med school. She had two kids right along with her boards and
residency and even (briefly) convinced my dad that he should become a lawyer.
She is now vice president of her group, is totally on top of her shit and never
smokes any pot (that I know of).
When I was 17, she convinced me that perhaps on the off-chance that the
world didn’t end on Y2K, I might want to consider college. (My contingency plan
had been taking somewhere between one to five years off, working at a shitty
Irish/Mexican chain restaurant in Sioux Falls, and smoking lots more pot.)
What followed were four confusing years outside of L.A. stiflingly surrounded
by terrible hippies. Since then, she’ll often start conversations with, “So, have
you thought any more about grad school?”, to which I usually reply with
mumbled deferrals.
While I was home over the holidays my mom proudly announced that my
sister was planning to go to med school. I winced inwardly, thinking about my
shabby room in West Oakland, and the tiny, scattered paychecks I got from
substitute teaching that barely covered rent, my cell phone bill and the steady
diet of beans and kale I subsisted on.
Whatever financial stability I was able to nail down was always thrown into
chaos by going on month-long tours across the country or across the sea.
I would try to impress my mom when she called by telling her about the
occasional expenses-paid hotel room at a festival or small time record offers or
tiny blurbs in mainstream newspapers. “So are you making any money?” she
would invariably ask, and the whole “band thing” would be exposed for what it
was: childish, indulgent and financially doomed.
Whenever I asked her about it she’d always insist, “Of course we’re proud of
you honey! We just don’t really understand what it all means.” And what
meaning could be assigned to underground mp3 blogs, indie record deals with
no advances, DIY tours and CD-R comps? Even when I tried to explain it to
myself I often ended up in a shrug.
After our house burned down in a South Dakota thunderstorm, my parents
redid the basement with a pool table, a dart board and a new stereo system
with a record player. My mom likes to go down there after work, crack open a
Miller Lite, shoot pool and listen to old LPs: Neil Young, the Rolling Stones, Led
Zep and of course the perennial Tull.
Listening to those records growing up, did my mom ever dream of being in a
rock band? Or was being a small town girl from Nebraska who played clarinet
and sang in church simply too far removed from that for her to even consider it?
Perhaps if she would have had blogs and DIY tours things would have been
different. But I had to wonder: did she ever, just for a second, dream of getting
up onstage in front of tons of people and rocking her clarinet like Ian Anderson
rocked his flute?
I like to think maybe so.

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Originally published in the Interrobang?! 5 Anthology on Music and Family, available in softcover or as a free downloadable ebook.  More info here.