Spring finally came to the icebox that has been southern Germany for the past 5 months. To add insult to injury with that development, both the S.O. and I have had to work a lot these last couple of weeks for different reasons. SO when Saturday rolled around we took the opportunity to out and do something different.
For the uninitiated, springtime is Spargel season in Germany. Spargel is the German work for Asparagus. We went to a farmers market type place that specializes in preparing all different types of dishes that feature asparagus. One would think that a side dish would have only so many uses, but that person would be wrong. They had lots of variations available. Being the purist I am, I went for the vegetarian route:
The Hollandaise sauce was very well prepared and the Asparagus was good. A tasty but healthy treat.
In addition, we took advantage of the beautiful weather to go hiking today. The wondrous thing about where we are living is that are village is literally surrounded by a Baden Wurttemburg state park. That has lots and lots of hiking and biking trails.
And finally, I splurged on a whole bunch of new music for my I-pod for the journey to work and to listen to while I gamely make the attempt to convince myself that I can still run 5km. I don’t do well in the winter on the exercise front and it shows in my waistline. The S.O. never misses an opportunity to point it out and she is right. ( Of course if could be due to over-indulgence in beer, but come on now!)
Did I say new music? None of it was new, in terms of the year(s) the songs were first produced. Actually I guess you can refer to it as classical or golden oldies now given that the album Aqualung is 45 years old this year. 45?!?! Say it ain’t so Joe? That means I went to my first ever Jethro Tull concert 43 years ago . ( True, no matter how hard I try to deny it).
I got new remasters of Passion Play by Jethro Tull, Passion Play -the Château d’Hérouville extended performance. This a remastered work that takes the cuts from the original 1973 Passion Play album. The story behind this is a bit interesting. The band wanted to do a second extended song album after the success of Thick as A Brick the previous year. There was a problem in the studio in which they’d begun recording the album – the Château d’Hérouville near Paris, which led the band to give up the ghost and shift locations, setting aside the hour or so of music they’d recorded and start anew elsewhere. And thus the original Passion Play album was born. There was still a body of work from the Chateau though, and so in 2014 an extended play album was released includes the original album and the Château d’Hérouville sessions, both mixed to 5.1 surround sound and with new stereo mixes. I like it.
I also got : Journey to the Center of the Earth by Rick Wakeman and a remastered copy of Stand Up, one of Jethro Tull’s early albums. Listening to it is a journey back in time for me, just the right amount of 1960’s rage and smoky bar off the wall songs. Good rock and roll from a better time, that I missed most of because I was still very young and more concerned about Saturday morning cartoons than English rock and roll. By 1971 though, that had changed and I was hooked on Jethro Tull. I still am.
The album that got me started? Aqualung.
Today’s generation of millennials can’t really appreciate a band like Tull and that’s sad, because I think, musically, they are much better than a lot of the pop hits of today. Sorry Katy Perry and Beyonce-but that is just the way it is.
