Talkin’ ‘Bout Degeneration

Turn back the clock 25 years and the Brit-rock double bill Saturday night at Irvine Meadows would have been an Event.

In 1971, Jethro Tull was staking a claim as a great band, able to weave blues, folk and jazz influences together with an unerring knack for the irresistible rock riff. Leader Ian Anderson was a top-notch showman with a flair for comedy and dramatics and his flute-playing was a distinctive calling card that enhanced Tull’s dynamic song arrangements.

Best of all, in much of Tull’s material, sonic drama served a fundamental sense of humanity, with a personal touch in songs about the struggles of coming of age and the search for inspiration, belonging and peace of mind.

Emerson, Lake & Palmer, in 1971, were leading a burgeoning movement in rock by melding the elaborate structures and virtuosic instrumental flights of classical music with rock ‘n’ roll flash and drive.

But soon after that ’71 peak, Tull’s music took a harmful turn toward grandiosity and impersonal distance. The band has come up with the occasional nugget since, but it hasn’t contributed much of enduring value.

Although Crosby, Stills & Nash’s recent election to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on the strength of two not-altogether-great studio albums (one of them with Neil Young as an indispensable ringer) seemingly opens the door to anybody still breathing from the early ‘70s, Tull has allowed so much tepid music to flow under the bridge that its chance may be blown.

As for ELP’s classic rock, the genre was in creative collapse by 1975, as they and such cohorts as Genesis, Yes and Gentle Giant lost their spark. Classic rock became a chapter to look back on with a bit of fondness for the best stuff, but, apart from Genesis alum Peter Gabriel’s great (and not very classically influenced) solo career, it hasn’t had a lasting legacy.

Hence the half-filled house in 1996 for the blockbuster bill of 1971.

For the headlining Tull, Anderson, 49, remains a game but sadly diminished trouper. He’s still witty, still active on stage (though his gait was slower this time than at a Tull stop here in 1993) and still able to blow up tremendous gusts of melody and breathy, gasping blasts on that flute.

But he can no longer sing. A throat injury in the early ‘80s has robbed him of the body and bite that once made his grainy voice so dramatically effective. He tried, but the thin remnant he has left was not enough to cut through the band’s attack and bring meanings and feelings to life. Tull still can trace the outlines of its past capably, but it can’t make the emotional core live again onstage.

What’s perhaps worse, Anderson revealed a blind spot as to where his greatest legacy lies. Of the 16 numbers played, five were drawn from “Aqualung,” the album that lifted Tull to superstardom in 1971 (and which now is being resold in a 25th anniversary package with extra tracks). The music’s appeal is undeniable (Tull’s killer riffs and dynamic structures were never more overt, or effective), but this concept album was a creaky and self-conscious work, overstated and obvious in its indictment of religious powers who set dogma above simple decency.

Tull’s most emotionally alive music, and its finest weave of jazz, folk, blues and rock, came on its first three albums, “This Was,” “Stand Up” and “Benefit,” in which the band got better with each attempt. It’s almost inconceivable that a Tull retrospective concert could go by without a single song from “Benefit” or “This Was,” but that was the case this time.

“Nothing Is Easy,” one of three songs pulled from “Stand Up,” was the evening’s best representation of the old shifting dynamics and cascading momentum, as flute, organ and guitar (courtesy of Martin Barre, the only other member, with Anderson, who was there in ‘71) took flight over a churning rhythm section.

A selection from Tull’s most recent album, last year’s “Roots to Branches,” was typical of Anderson’s latter-day gaseousness (the pithy riffing and the personal touch of old is a memory).

Another sorry choice was riff-meister Barre doing a pale Joe Satriani metal-dude imitation while playing an uninspired number from his new solo album. Anderson performed a serviceable flute instrumental from his 1995 solo album, “Divinities,” but it was superfluous given the multitude of flute sallies elsewhere in the program.

The newer stuff benefited nothing, except perhaps Anderson and Barre’s need to feel they still have a creative contribution to make. You’d have to be thick as a brick to expect renewed greatness from a physically debilitated Tull, 25 years after it stopped being a real contender.

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Emerson, Lake & Palmer were kind of fun in their hourlong opening set, if you don’t mind silly excess.

The band’s old pretensions are embedded in the music and especially in overblown lyrics that come off like an eighth-grader’s efforts after overdosing on sword and sorcery comics. “There’s no end to my life/No beginning to my death/Death is life,” went one big, portent-laden crescendo passage penned and sung by Greg Lake. Could a writer find a more wooden and ponderous way to say that he believes in the soul’s immortality?

But the often-laughable content doesn’t matter anymore, and one could indulge with guilty pleasure in the flash and precision of the performance.

Keith Emerson was the liveliest wire, his classic, leather-pants pose a sideways straddle between two keyboards that he played at once, with virtuoso flair. His closing antics--he surfed atop a battered Hammond organ, then abused it with knives and in various other ways--smacked of ritualism more than lively stagecraft. Another song would have been better than this noisemaking encore nod to old customs.

Carl Palmer, playing a drum kit big enough for three (some of the cymbals were double-deckers, for goodness’ sake), looked a lot like the Dodgers’ Brett Butler and performed with the same sort of technically honed skill and teeth-gritting intensity. Lake thrummed away on bass and, despite some loss of range and suppleness, sang decent representations of such chestnuts as “Lucky Man,” “Still . . . You Turn Me On” and the gargantuan hymn “The Great Gates of Kiev” (the one with the “death is life” declaration).

Like Tull, ELP slighted its best album, “Brain Salad Surgery,” failing to perform anything from the barreling, ultra-flash suite “Karn Evil 9.” Is this some new malady, like mad cow disease, that strikes once-proud bulls of British rock when they get 20-odd years past their prime?