In 1969 and 1970 I saw Jethro Tull in concert three times. Looking back on the first show, the venue seems so unlikely given their later worldwide success. It was in a small club under a Pegnataro’s Supermarket just off the highway in downtown New Haven, Connecticut.
The place was called The Stone Balloon and was fashioned directly after the Cafe Au Go Go in New York. It was a long, narrow room with a low ceiling. Tables and chairs took up most of the audience area in front of a small stage on the right-hand side wall toward the front half of the room. Unlike the Au Go Go it was brightly lit between sets. The Au Go Go was always like a cave.
They served no alcoholic beverages, just fruit drinks, soda and snacks, again much like the Au Go Go. Still, this club had an amazing array of talent pass through it in what I believe was perhaps about a year of being in business. We saw John Hammond, Taj Mahal and his band with Jesse Ed Davis as well as Tull, and others such as Neil Young & Crazy Horse passed through. Continue reading Concerts Vol. 7: Jethro Tull
My main interest was not in the Director’s Cut, which I had bought back in the early ’90s, but in the Extras disc, Woodstock: Untold Stories. It includes about three hours of material with nearly 150 minutes of previously unreleased performances, the rest consisting of documentary video segments.
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Sebastian’s charming and engaging style of entertaining creates an immediate connection with his audience as he mixes interesting anecdotes from his career with a type of humor that is so easy to relate to, especially for his contemporaries as he puts it.
If you pre-ordered the set, you also received another previously released concert on DVD/CD, Sugar Mountain Live At the Canterbury House 1968, which I wrote about back in December in 
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The only question left is whether Michael Lang, who produced the original festival, will stage anniversary events in August. There were reports earlier this year about free 
The sound is pristine, the performances near flawless and the songs are fully formed in almost every instance. It’s an easy and pleasant listen. What it lacks is a hint at how most of these tunes changed from the early demo stage to the finished product.
But Secret, Profane & Sugarcane is hardly just a bluegrass album. Costello imbues his songs with rock, country blues and jazz sensibilities as well as folk themes built around four songs from an unfinished Hans Christian Anderson opera.