I had a friend that turned me onto Tull after Thick as a Brick came out. It was lifechanging. As I worked myself back through the discography, I found a blues/jazz group slowly working its way towards Prog Rock. Martin Barre, the lead guitarist is one of the greatest of the age at least according to his peers. I was especially enamoured of Jeffrey Hammonds work on keyboards. Thick as a Brick has some of the most innovative voicings ever heard on a rock album-- all done with non-synthesizer instruments. Thick as a Brick has some of the quirkiest time signatures of any in the rock canon. It was wickedly good fun to play back in the day when I was a young aspiring keyboardist.
Good points, especially about Martin Barre. Unlike the narcissists who pass for "lead guitarist" in most modern bands (especially the so-called "country" groups), he was not only a virtuoso on his instrument but a brilliant arranger. As you say, the Jethro Tull discography is broad and deep. There is a LOT of good music in there.
I expect a lot of the people who disparage Tull have 1) minimal exposure to the band's corpus of work, and 2) very narrow exposure to music, mostly limited to top 40 radio and (worse) modern "country" radio. As the late great Tom Petty said, "Most country music these days is just bad rock music played on a different radio station."
Waylon and Johnny would roll over in their graves if they could hear the pap that passes for music on country stations nowadays.
