LIVING IN THE PAST

When It was originally released Living In The Past was a great treat for JT fans. For the first time all their singles were compiled into a double album. it was very welcomed in places like Brazil, my homecountry, where JT singles were rarely available. Besides, most of the material were not included on their LPs and the addtion of two previous unreleased live tracks only made things even more atractive, to say the least! For some reason, however (maybe a teenager´s chronical lack of money in the 70´s) I didn´t hear that album until recently,. A good friend of ine gave me a bunch of Jethro Tull´s CDs that belonged originally to his brother some years before. I was more than happy to get them, even if those were not the new remasteres.

Living In The Past was among them, whch meant that this is the single CD version, that has four songs missing from the original collection: Boureé, Teacher, Alive And Well And Living In and Hymn 43. On the other hand tunes like Inside and Locomotive Breath that were not in the original package are included on the Cd, for reasons I do not know.

Is this colletion still worth? Well, since I don´t have the new remasters of the first albums (that now have much of these songs added as bonus tracks), it was a pleasure to have all those precious tunes in one single CD. The quality of the material is very high, proving that Ian Anderson was indeed one of the best songwriters to appear in the late 60´s. And Jethro Tull was also one hell of a great band, in its various incarnations. The live tracks are another story: incredibly they were the only official live recordings of a band famous for their stage perfomances. And even then they leave much to be desired: By Kind Permission Of is a solo piano piece done by John Evans, whcih is a meddley of several classical pieces put together, with the occasional flute intervention and the whole band appearing only in the final segment. Dharma For One is much better, with Ian Anderson writing lyrics for this original instrumental piece. But the perfomance is somewhat marred by a long drum solo. Still, until 1978´s Bursting Out, those were the only live samples the fans had from JT.

I still think that this CD is very well worth it´s price. If you don´t plan to buy every single remastered CD from their early days up to Aqualung, this is an excellent collection of JT´s singles up to that point. And they were many and very good. I was surprised by the high quality of the songs, even if the my CD edition has missing tracks, the booklet is poor, a joke compared to the original vinyl release, and the fact that those tunes were not yet remastered.

Conclusion: with all its faults, this record is still an excellent addition to any prog music collection. Hence, it deserves a 4 star rating.