It's safe to say no band has ever duplicated the sound of Jethro Tull. Mixing rock, Celtic, folk and blues, the music was underscored by Ian Anderson's inimitable flute and lyrics that ranged from the inscrutable to the profound. Yet Anderson, who will bring the 1960s warhorse to the Chevrolet Amphitheatre on Wednesday, isn't sure that bands with a singular sound are so special. "In part they do have some spark of originality and some different approach, and perhaps they have some different approach, and perhaps do try to direct themselves to not sounding like their peers," he says. "But frequently, it's because they can't (expletive) play. They actually can't do anything else. They only have this naive, raw ability to do something in a different way." So where does Tull fall• Somewhere between Frank Zappa, who Anderson says was a "perfectly skilled and qualified musician in various genres who deliberately and quite calculatingly contrived to make music that did sound different," and Captain Beefheart, Don van Vliet, who Anderson says wasn't any good. "With Jethro Tull, I think you could probably say we're a little bit of both," Anderson says. "I think a lot of British bands were both of those things. We weren't good at straight-ahead, good old American rock music. We weren't able to compete with the Lynyrd Skynyrds and the Aerosmiths, classic rock bands. We weren't really good at doing that." From 1970's "Benefit," through "War Child," released in 1974, the band was one of rock's most popular acts. By the 1980s, Tull had seemingly stalled, no matter that infamous Grammy Award in 1988 for best hard rock/metal performance over Metallica, Iggy Pop and Jane's Addiction. Anderson says his band just couldn't compete against the MTV generation of rock stars whom he compares to tennis players. "They learn all the strokes, all the moves, and they are the Bon Jovis, they are the Steve Vais, folks who literally dreamed about being rock musicians since they were 12 or 13 years old, and had been playing guitars since that period of time," he says. "They've grown up either to be the originators of the MTV generation, or products of the MTV generation. ... That produces that kind of homogenous sort of lump in the middle which produces the mainstream of pop and rock music, the mainstream of rap, the mainstream of different genres of contemporary music. It serves as a big shop window for folks to say, 'Oh, that's what we do, these are the clothes we wear, these are the weird hand signals we do when we're doing that rap thing,' that strange thing white and black people do with the limp wrist that would have got you arrested in Texas 20 years ago." Anderson quickly adds that such a gesture is no different than a clenched fist thrust into the air at a heavy metal concert, another "narrow-minded, repetitive, (expletive) boring things popsters and rockers do." But Anderson himself is hardly boring, nor is he shy about voicing his opinion. When asked about Tull's longevity as an act, he starts to talk about the fleeting nature of fame, and how awful it must be for Mariah Carey, "that painter and decorator" singer, having her contract bought out by her record company, Virgin, after only one album. Better to be like Tull, he says, saying that he realized when the "Aqualung" sessions were completed in 1971 that the band might never again reach such rarefied heights. "Even if we fall, we're just talking about falling a couple of feet onto a soft mattress," he says. "Because that soft mattress is composed of a spongy and warm seductive stuff that is our intellect, that is our heart, our emotions, our artistic pretensions. It's a soft landing compared to the folks like Mariah Carey or Michael Jackson, people whose lives and musical skills and talents are often submerged by the almost infinite ups and downs of stardom." Additional Information:

Details

Jethro Tull performs at 7:30 p.m. Wednesday at Chevrolet Amphitheatre, Station Square. Tickets are $10 to $40. Details: (412) 323-1919.

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