Jethro Tull’s manager Terry Ellis turned to Ian Anderson and asked him to come up with a catchy radio friendly song they could release while out on tour in the U.S. as to not lose momentum back in the U.K.
Ian went back to his room at the hotel and came up a song that he describes as “the most uncommercial song he could think of.” Over the next few weeks while touring the band finished recording the song which became a big hit in the U.S. and the U.K.
When Ian Anderson wrote the carefree sounding ‘Living in the Past’ he wasn’t just looking back musically but was actually offering a dissenting point of view of the counterculture that many were growing weary of by 1969. Living in the Past is a skeptical critique of hippie culture and what he saw as a naive infatuation with revolution, instead favoring a retreat into simpler ways of living from the past.
He describes his mindset in writing the song, “Lines like “we’ll go walking out while others shout of war’s disaster” reflect my rather cynical view of much of the world in the late sixties. I was never drawn to the fashions, the free love, the drug experiences and the drug culture that people seemed willing to get into.
So when I sang “now there’s revolution, but they don’t know what they’re fighting,” I was just saying forget all that stuff, let’s stay in a more realistic world with more straightforward values.
Not necessarily my personal viewpoint all the time, but as a reaction to that rather trendy pretence at revolution and infatuation with the present, in the sense of living for today and having a good time – something I usually felt a bit awkward about. But I’m a party pooper, you know that.”
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