Benefit [Original recording reissued]

Jethro Tull | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Audio CD (September 14, 1999)
• Original Release Date: 1970
• Number of Discs: 1
• Format: Original recording reissued
• Label: Capitol
• ASIN: B00000K44V
• Also Available in: Audio CD  |  Audio Cassette  |  MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (123 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #236,493 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Track Listings

1. With You There to Help Me

2. Nothing to Say

3. Inside

4. Son

5. For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me

6. To Cry You a Song

7. A Time for Everything?

8. Teacher

9. Play in Time

10. Sossity; You're a Woman

Editorial Reviews

Digitally remastered reissue of 1970 album includes four bonus tracks, 'Teacher' (Original UK Mix), 'Witch's Promise', 'Just Trying To Be' & 'Singing All Day'. --This text refers to an alternate Audio CD edition.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

43 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars FOR THE BENEFIT OF TULL FANS, ONE GREAT ALBUM!!, April 12, 2005

By 

t'amant (WA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Benefit (Audio CD)

This is my favorite straight forward bluesy, rock, trippy Tull album. I listened to Benefit the most probably in the 70's (my teenage years), although I loved Stand Up, Aqualung, Thick as a Brick, Minstrel in the Gallery And Songs from the Wood about as much. Tull was one of my top bands then (and now) and I really feel that these albums are some of the best Rock has to offer. Benefit, as the best song-oriented album from the blues/rock stretch in my opinion, really stands out as the gelling of the Tull sound. Martin Barre found his confidence and ran with it while Ian Anderson really picked up the complexity level of his many contributions. Glenn Cornick's bass playing is outstanding and represents some of the best of the era, although this was his last gig with Tull. John Evan joins the band here and adds to the more layered quality and strangely seems to be the glue that binds that classic Tull sound. Other members seem to feed off of the new energy! Benefit feels to me very brooding and powerful...the psychedelic atmoshere is at a peak here as well. I am trying to describe why this album is one of the greats of all time to me, but words do little to describe the powerful emotional impact I feel for this one, for whatever reason...crank it up and feel for yourself! The Extra tracks are a great addition (Teacher was on the original American album) and the sound quality is at a new high. This is an essential recording of the era and a truly great bargain, although lyrics should have been included as well as better track notes (I like it better than Aqualung - newbies could begin here with confidence). Enjoy!!!

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Still retains enough of the edginess and eccentricity, July 7, 2004

By 

loce_the_wizard "loce_the_wizard" (Lilburn, GA USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Benefit (Audio CD)

"Benefit" remains my favorite Jethro Tull recording, likely for all the wrong reasons. First, this was the first session where Ian Anderson and his band mates embraced folk music over the blues-tinged sound of their earlier work. Next, Martin Barre sounds engaged, determined, and focused on guitar, and his strong effort here keeps the music well grounded (something that is a failing on some Tull recordings in my opinion). Third, John Evan's returns to the fold and adds some stellar work on keyboards that greatly enrichs the sound. Fourth, I liked Glen Cornick's bass lines better than those by any other Tull bass player. Fifth, Ian Anderson crafted some of his best lyrics for "Benefit," avoiding the ornate and tiring style on both his later and subsequent Jethro Tull recordings. Sixth, Mr. Anderson plays some inspired flute and contributes some excellent acoustic guitar that meshes wonderfully with Mr. Barre's amped up electric guitar.

This recording still retains enough of the edginess and eccentricity that caused Jethro Tull to stand out during the band's early years and that caught my ear way back when. I would recommend getting the remastered CD more for the improved sound quality than the bonus tracks (which aren't bad though).

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A musical landmark, August 5, 2003

By 

D B Campbell (Auckland New Zealand) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Benefit (Audio CD)

In the vast Tull catalogue, this 1970 effort stands out as a neglected classic, coming as it did on the heels of the hugely successful Stand Up. Ian Anderson's songs were becoming more complex, and shifting away markedly from his early Blues influences. The maturity of his songwriting, and of the band's playing, are illustrated perfectly by the opening track "With You There to Help Me", a broody and introspective piece that breaks out into a group tour de force. This album also welcomed keyboards player John Evan, who filled out the sound and freed guitarist Martin Barre to assume the leading instrumental role he has played in the group ever since. Listen to his slashing licks, dueling with Anderson's shrieking echoed flute, which climaxes this track. Magic.

Jethro Tull were touring heavily in the States at this time, accused of neglecting audiences back in the UK, and finding the darker side of the music business unpalatable. In the notes written for this reissue in 2001, Anderson talks of "a growing cynicism" and "a sense of alienation". Ironically, it is such conditions that often bring out the best in songwriters, as they lock themselves away in anonymous hotel rooms, escaping the noise outside by drowning themselves in their music. Anderson was no different, resisting the American influences he felt were creeping into many fellow British bands. His flute had endowed Tull with a distinctly Celtic touch from the start, but he now gave full rein to this aspect on songs like "Play In Time", which is a revved-up electric jig that would have given him plenty of opportunity to play the lunatic on stage. In a similar but quieter vein, "Sossity, You're a Woman" displays a strong folk flavour in Anderson's acoustic guitar playing. Bands like the Strawbs and Barclay James Harvest were to follow similar paths in the 70s.

Contrast this with "Alive and Well and Living In", Anderson's flute and Evans' piano combining to take the jazz and rock idioms into areas that were to be explored widely in the decade ahead. It's a strong pointer to the conceptual complexities of Thick As A Brick that were to come two years later.

"Son" is a more acidic view of the generation gap than, for example, the sentimental picture painted by Cat Stevens' "Father and Son" ("If you're good, when you grow up, we will buy you a bike."). "For Michael Collins, Jeffrey and Me" will puzzle anyone born after the 1960s. Collins was the third man in the 1969 Apollo expedition to the moon. While Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got to go down to the surface and fool around, Collins had to stay behind and keep the orbiting mother ship in trim. It was a song that reflected Anderson's own previously stated sense of alienation ("It's on my mind, I'm left behind when I should have been there, walking with you.").

"To Cry You A Song" and "A Time For Everything" were strong guitar-driven numbers which were precursors to the following album, Aqualung. "Inside", Benefit's single, was arguably the band's last Blues-flavoured song, Anderson's flute motif producing a haunting air over Glenn Cornick's fluid bass lines (it was to be Cornick's last album with Tull).

Bonuses on this reissue include the classic singles, "The Witch's Promise" and "Teacher" - described as "close cousins" to Benefit by Anderson, having been recorded only weeks before the album. These stand out in my view as two of the finest musical tracks laid down at the end of the 1960s. The former again illustrates Tull's folk roots in an eerie tale of enchantment, while the latter is a hedonistic rock anthem ("Jump up, look around, find yourself some fun") that I can recall making parties come alive as Anderson's fierce flute traded centre stage with Barre's guitar.

Radio DJs referred to this as "underground" music, and later it became "progressive". Whatever the labels, it signalled the emergence of the album as a musical art form in its own right. What followed was a sharp contrast from the innocent-sounding 45s that cranked out of tinny speakers on the beach; this was music that made demands of the listener. You couldn't dance to it - at least not a dance that had a name. It heralded an era when musicians began to rule the studios, telling the fat cat producers to just twiddle the nobs and shut up, and challenging the industry to catch up with the creative flow that defied all the established rules. This music wanted you to listen seriously, and think about what it was saying.

Recorded on the cusp of a new decade, Benefit must now take its place as a watershed in the rock music idiom. What's more, it's worn surprisingly well.