Frank Zappa was fiercely passionate about music. When he loved an artist, he praised them to the hilt; when he thought an act was subpar, he was equally willing to let them know it.
Ian Anderson’s Jethro Tull fell firmly into the latter category. Zappa took repeated shots at the band, leaving Anderson — himself a huge Zappa fan — particularly stung. Years later, Anderson offered a theory for the electric guitar virtuoso’s hostility: he believed Zappa felt threatened by the success of British rock bands.
Zappa was never one to dilute his opinions. He took digs at the Beatles on the Mothers of Invention’s 1968 album We’re Only in It for the Money, and he expressed his dislike of the Velvet Underground and the “merchandising” nature of the Doors. In the late ’80s, he even incorporated a reggae-flavored version of Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” into his live shows.
So when Anderson received an unexpected message from Zappa near the end of his life, he wasn’t sure how to respond.
“When Frank Zappa was terminally ill, I received a message to say he would like me to call him,” Anderson told Classic Rock in 2023. “I’d never met him. I was a fan, but my instinct was he really didn’t like Jethro Tull, so it was a little odd.”
Zappa had been diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1990 and died on December 4, 1993. Anderson wanted to return the call, but nerves got the better of him.
“I dialed the number three times,” Anderson recalled. “But each time I hung up in panic; I was embarrassed. What do you say to a dying man?”
Anderson never got another chance. Zappa died just weeks later, leaving the Tull frontman to regret his hesitation.
“From what I heard, he’d wanted to talk to a few people, just to say hi, and I was one of them,” Anderson said. “It wouldn’t have changed anything. Except I would have had my first and last words with one of the great original composers and performers of rock music history.”
Anderson has subsequently offered some insight into why Zappa may have had such a problem with Tull and other successful British bands.
“He rather resented us British bands — Led Zeppelin, Jethro Tull, Deep Purple and so on,” he once told BBC Radio 2 (via Far Out). “We were going over there [to the U.S.] and making tons of money. Seemingly while he was struggling to run his band.”
Zappa’s former personal assistant, Pauline Butcher, offered a broader explanation for the lengths he went to establish himself as an artist.
“He worked out he wasn’t a pretty boy like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He didn’t play their kind of music, he didn’t even like it,” she told Classic Rock. “If he was going to get himself heard, he was going to have to do something radically different.
He worked out he wasn’t a pretty boy like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He didn’t play their kind of music.”
— Pauline Butcher
“He went out of his way to have outrageous photographs taken: the one on the toilet, the one with his pigtails sticking out like a spaniel, dressing up in women’s clothes,” she added. “All these things were calculated because he had to get himself attention.”
Whatever motivated Zappa’s attacks, they were difficult for Anderson to reconcile with his own admiration for the musician.
“People like Frank Zappa were rather disdainful of the British Invasion. They felt somehow threatened by it,” he said. “The memories I have were quite personally upsetting because I was a huge Frank Zappa fan. But he badmouthed us a couple of times publicly, and that was a bit hard to take.”
In related news, Zappa’s his former guitarist Adrian Belew has recalled his sobering last encounter with the late musician.
Anderson, meanwhile, has shared why he’s glad Jethro Tull rejected Woodstock and why he feels guilty about the band’s name.
