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In 1969, Jethro Tull had a Top Three UK single with Living In The Past and also a No.1 album, Stand Up. They hadn’t yet breached the US Top Ten, though, coming close a year later with the folky/experimental Benefit. That accolade would come in 1971 with Aqualung. And what would become Tull’s best-selling album began with one of their best-known riffs.

Ian Anderson recalled that, like much of the album, the title track emerged as a result of the singer-songwriter approach he brought to the project. “That came out of an acoustic jam; you’ve just got to have the imagination to hear that. You have to know that you can make it sing.”

Tull recorded Aqualung at Island Studios in London, and while the final arrangement of the title track explored the many styles they had brought together previously, with folk and rock in the mix, it also had a more metallic edge.

In both tone and theory, the distinctive six-note guitar intro shared much DNA with the doomy, imperious riffs associated with the nascent Black Sabbath, even containing ‘The Devil’s Interval’ itself, the tritone. Indeed, Tony Iommi had briefly been in the band in ‘68, replaced by long-time Tull alumnus Martin Barre.

As well as livening the song with a brilliant solo, Barre brings heft and menace to Anderson’s tale of the heavy-breathing titular homeless person who’s ‘Sitting on a park bench/Eyeing little girls with bad intent’. But as the music broadens out and the album’s prevailing acoustic aesthetic comes into play, Anderson treats the ‘poor old sod’ with some sympathy, as he bends to pick up dog-ends on aching legs.

“Aqualung is a song about homeless people, but more importantly it’s a song about our reaction – those of us that are fortunate enough to have homes, to have a degree of wealth and happiness and family and friends and support,” said Anderson. “It’s about our reaction of guilt, distaste, awkwardness and confusion, all these things that we feel when we’re confronted with the reality of the homeless, whether it’s the slightly Chaplin-esque tramp figure on the Aqualung album or whether it’s a 17-year-old criminal, drug-addicted or working in the sex trade or whatever it might be.”

Anderson has credited his then-wife, photographer Jennie Anderson, with much of the song’s earthy, quasi-Dickensian lyrical content. She had also given him early inspiration by showing him a set of photographs she had taken of homeless men in London while at art school.

At six and a half minutes, Aqualung didn’t lend itself to AM radio play, and never came out as a single. But then Tull were already way past the stage of striving for hit singles.

“It was too long, too episodic,” Anderson said later. “It starts off with a loud guitar and then goes into more laid-back acoustic stuff.”

“Many of the songs mix acoustic and electric moments, in such a way that the album became the blueprint for a lot that’s happened since,” said Barr. “Honestly, I don’t listen to it, except for reference. When you’ve played a song like Aqualung for so long live and very loudly, it’s good to go back and remind yourself what it should sound like.”

Barre’s biggest challenge came in the shape of Led Zeppelin‘s Jimmy Page, who was working on their fourth album in the studio next door, and paid a visit just as Barre was recording his guitar solo.

“We’d locked ourselves away, and I hadn’t seen Jimmy at all,” Barre told Guitar Player in 2015. “Finally he walked into the control room to say hello, just as I was recording the solo to Aqualung. In those days, if you didn’t get a guitar solo in one or two takes, it might become a flute solo. It was, ‘Go in there and do it or else.’

“And here was Jimmy, waving like mad – ‘Hey, Martin!’ – and I’m thinking, ‘I can’t wave back or I’m going to blow the solo!’”

The title track set the tone for Jethro Tull’s most iconic collection of songs, which hit No.7 in the US and No.4 at home. And in 2004, the band revisited it, playing the entire album for a radio audience of just 40 people in Washington, DC. Aqualing Live was released the following year, with royalties going to appropriate homeless charities.

More than a decade later, Anderson recorded a new version of the song, entitled Aquafugue, with the UK’s Carducci Quartet. Released on the 2017 album Jethro Tull: The String Quartets, it featured Anderson playing Barre’s iconic six-note riff on his famous flute, an instrument that hadn’t appeared on the original.

“The idea of having the string quartet play it as a fugue to introduce it and then to kind of get into the obvious payoff rendition that the fans would recognise was a little bit of arts meets crafts,” Anderson told Songfacts. “I think you’ve got to try and balance it up so that it’s not all too clever. You’ve got to mix it up a little bit.”

Along with Living In The Past and Locomotive Breath, Aqualung remains one of Jethro Tull’s essential musical moments, as well as one of the all-time great prog anthems.

Looking back on Steely Dan’s immense success and impact, it’s hard to envision a time when the supremely honed and highly original jazz-rock group weren’t at the top of their game. But when the core duo of Donald Fagen and Walter Becker were starting out, recognition for their talent and approach would take some time – and some getting used to.

Keyboard player Fagen had stumbled across Becker practising guitar in the campus cafe at New York’s liberal arts school Bard College in 1967. Fagen wanted to start a band, but he’d struggled to find a guitarist who could play jazz and blues the way he wanted to, not “like Dick Dale”, as was the trend, he said.

Becker was playing a wild blues-based style, and Fagen had “never really heard anything like that”. The duo soon started writing together and played in various musical configurations. They found incongruous employment as part of the touring band for doo-wop crooners Jay & The Americans, whose lead singer Jay Black recalled his impression of the pair as “yoghurt-skinned” beatniks who seemed to surface only at night. “The Manson and Starkweather of rock’n’roll,” he called them.

Graduating in 1969, Fagen took the duo’s songs to Manhattan’s legendary Brill Building, the hub for popular songwriters and publishers of every stripe, from Burt Bacharach to Lou Reed, Carole King to Ellie Greenwich.

Becker and Fagen had little success there. The musical climate was not quite ready for their hipster hybrids. However, a Jay & The Americans connection clicked. Group member Kenny Vance was now a Brill resident, and he commissioned from them a soundtrack to 1971 screwball hippie film You’ve Got to Walk It Like You Talk It Or You’ll Lose That Beat, which starred Robert Downey Sr and Richard Pryor.

Their style caught the attention of young producer Gary Katz, who’d begun his career working with pop and rock entertainer Bobby Darin and was newly installed at ABC/Dunhill Records, where he looked after acts including the Mamas And The Papas, Three Dog Night, the James Gang and Steppenwolf.

“I don’t have much to do with the songs,” Katz told RecordProduction.com in 2000, “but I can spot talent.”

Katz would later A&R Jim Croce and Chaka Khan, and while at Warner Bros Records would be instrumental in the signing of Prince. Katz concluded that Becker and Fagen’s stuff was too weird for anyone to handle but them, and their own band. Becker and Fagen were private, introverted creators, and Katz recognised that their work would be best cultivated in a small social bubble.

“They weren’t outwardly public… they had their own relationship,” he told broadcaster Denny Saunders. “They were totally bound to each other. The expression ‘soul brothers’ applies. There was very little fighting in the studio because… no matter what was going on, in the end, Donald was mother.”

Having relocated from New York to LA, by day they wrote for the label roster; by night they had a group that included jazz guitarist Denny Dias, ABC-signed drummer Jim Hodder, session guitarist Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter and vocalist David Palmer, brought in due to Fagen’s lack of confidence when it came to singing live.

In August 1972, Katz took the group, now named Steely Dan (a nod to their beatnik roots, using the moniker of the steam-powered strap-on dildo from William S Burroughs’s mind-bending 1959 novel Naked Lunch), into Village Recorder studios in Los Angeles to make their debut album, Can’t Buy A Thrill. The album began with the chilled Latin groove of Do It Again: glossy with its slick musicianship, arch lyrical commentary and pristine production, and blending soft rock, jazz, blues and soul in a singular 70s – and very Steely Dan – fashion.

The highlight of the album was Reelin’ In The Years. Fagen stepped up to the mic for an effervescent – perhaps autobiographical – break-up narration (‘The trip we made to Hollywood is etched upon my mind/After all the things we’ve done and seen you find another man’) as the band galloped along in shuffle time.

The main guitar part needed something special, and this marked the Dan’s first time of what would become a regular ploy of bringing in hand-picked aces. They called another old contact from Jay & The Americans, Elliott Randall, who was just out of the orchestra pit playing for the Broadway version of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar and now getting some freelance muso rep.

“It was my first session for them,” Randall told Produce Like A Pro. “I thought they were really special, and they must have thought I was special too.”

“They were having trouble finding the right ‘flavour’ solo for Reelin’, and asked me to give it a go,” he told Guitar World. Randall read the lyrics and got a sense of what the song was about. Unable to find a guitar amp in the studio, he plugged his 1965 Strat into a bass amp and played. Afterwards Katz called to the recording engineer: “Did you get that?” But he’d missed it, thinking it was a practice run.

For take two, Randall recalled that his imagination was fired up. “Something got me going,” he told Produce Like A Pro. He jazzed up the chorus for the intro, and, using a sprinkling of salsa, pulled off the most joyous, expressive musical conversation, from start to finish.

“That was it! Nobody said: ‘Can we try that again?’,” Randall remembered. “I was delighted, they were happy.”

The track has made millions of others happy too, including Jimmy Page, who knows a thing or two about guitar licks. In Classic Rock in 1999 he said the Reelin’ In The Years solo was his favourite, and in 2016, in conversation with YouTuber Oliver Patrick Loughnan, Page rated it 12/10.

“I’m flattered [by that],” Randall said in 2021. “It was actually very easy [to do]… The song virtually played itself.”

When Ronnie Wood reminded Classic Rock that the pioneers of American blues were “dangerous men”, he hardly needed to name the tyrant-in-chief. He might have been born Chester Arthur Burnett in 1910, but the nom de guerre Howlin’ Wolf suited the Chicago bluesman better.

An intimidating physical presence with a short fuse and zero reverence for the white-boy boomers who touched his hem, Wolf’s bite was almost as lethal as his bark. When he sang, in a gale-force boom that blew down the house, there was nothing else in the world that felt so powerful – and more than a half-century after his death, his catalogue remains the real deal.