It’s not quite Beatlemania, but the parallels are obvious. Eleven years after the Fab Four had made history at Shea Stadium, another British band are on stage at the famous baseball mecca in Queens, home to the New York Mets. It’s a damp Friday night in July 1976, but the crowd is in high spirits, launching firecrackers into the rainy sky. Under an enormous canopy upheld by two cranes, Jethro Tull are playing in front of 50,000 fans, flanked by giant screens relaying the action via their own unique video system, Tull-A-Vision.
Support acts Rory Gallagher and Robin Trower have done their best to warm up the audience, but Tull – led by the charismatic Ian Anderson – are the reason why everyone’s here. Anderson himself isn’t having a particularly great time of it. The noise of rush-hour jets at LaGuardia Airport, just two miles away, is making it hard for the band to hear themselves play. What’s more, some joker had thrown a pint of urine over the frontman, from a great height, as he made his entrance from the tunnel. So now he’s covered in piss. Despite these irritations, however, the significance of the moment isn’t lost on him as he looks out into an endless sea of faces: Jethro Tull have become a massive stadium band.
