One of the old albums I’ve had an opportunity to revisit in my recent push to finish digitizing my old music collection is the 1980 album from Jethro Tull that goes by the simple name A. The album came out in September, about half a year after I’d gotten married. It featured Eddie Jobson on keyboards and electric violin, and I 
recall being anxious to get my hands on it, as I’d quickly become an Eddie Jobson fan after my exposure to him on the two albums his band UK released (1978 & 1979). However, I was also dirt poor at that point in my life, and would not have been in a good position to purchase it. In fact, my copy is clearly a cut-out – which, for those too young to know the lingo, was a term that referred to overstock records sold at a significant discount, identifiable as such by cuts that were literally made in the album jackets. So, I suspect I made the purchase between one and two years later, when Chrysalis Records would likely to have been ready to unload their unsold inventory.
Whenever that purchase was made, I recall being disappointed in the record when I heard it. In particular, I was disappointed in Jobson’s performance, or more precisely: in how he was used on the recording. I probably didn’t listen to it more than a couple times, and then shelved it, where it sat un-listened-to among my several-hundred strong record collection for years, until being moved with the rest of the LPs (and cassettes) into the basement laundry room a couple decades ago, as digital media overtook the old hardcopy technologies. I digitized the majority of my non-Classical record collection in the early 2000’s. The A album did not make that initial cut. It was left behind among the musical flotsam and jetsam that survived the digitized sinking of the venerable old record collection.
Determined to digitize it before disposing of the old media, I recorded the LP to disk recently. Listening to it as I recorded, I couldn’t figure what I was thinking back in the early 1980s, or why I would have found this album disappointing. There is some goofiness on side two of the album (Low Ratio!), but this is overall a sparkling effort, and Jobson’s playing is terrific (admittedly, there’s not as much violin as I would’ve liked to hear from him). On the other hand, this work was originally advanced as an Ian Anderson solo album, not a Tull album, and the only former Tull member to play on it was Martin Barre (guitar), so it did sound quite a bit different than earlier Tull work, and many Tull fans frowned upon it at the time.
Still, I was hardly one to be put off by sound innovation – I had little problem listening to the Yes album released that year featuring the Buggles on lead vocals and keyboards! Today, I’d consider A one of the three or four best rock albums I have from 1980. In terms of the Tull catalog, I’d place it alongside the War Child album from 1974, both in terms of how much I like it (that’s a compliment), and in terms of its innovativeness within the development of the band’s sound,
There was a period after I got married that I did not have an amplifier for my turntable, and was reduced to using the turntable built into an all-in-one compact Sears & Roebuck stereo system that Joyce brought with her, and I have to guess it was through that machine that I listened to but did not truly hear this marvelous music. I’m not sure how else I could have missed it. What a delight to find this gem buried in my basement. I’ve been rediscovering quite a bit of enjoyable music from three or four or five decades ago, which I’d either thought I’d outgrown, or that I hadn’t really paid close enough attention to at the time.