SONGS FROM THE WOOD

Former Jethro Tull guitarist Martin Barre — who recently reconnected with his acoustic side — revisits some choice moments in Tull history, including his “Aqualung” solo, "Steel Monkey" and that weird Grammy win

- ANDREW DALY

THOUGH HE'S RIGHTFULLY earned his place on electric guitar's version of Mount Rushmore, Martin Barre has never been remotely interested in hero worship — especially when it comes to guitar heroes.

“I am not and never will be a guitar hero,” Barre emphatically tells Guitar World. “Not in this house, not in my world. It’s a concept I don’t understand. I love playing guitar. I love guitars. I love amps. I love sounds. I love music. But that concept doesn’t touch me.”

As far as his playing goes, the blues never really touched Barre either. That's probably why he got along so well with Ian Anderson, leading to his tenure as Jethro Tull’s lead guitarist from 1968 to 2012. Sure, Barre respected guys like Buddy Guy and Albert King, but being like them never appealed to him, so unlike others, he never even tried. “I like to find my own feel in music and discover ideas and techniques,” Barre says. “Discovering all there is about music is part of the piece. I want to figure it out myself because that’s half the fun. Ian and I had our favorite artists, like Roy Harper, Cat Stevens and [Captain] Beefheart, but it never soaked into what we were doing.”

Regardless of what Barre says, he is a guitar hero. What’s more, he’s a loadbearing pillar of prog rock and all things guitar-associated and adjacent to it. His solo in Jethro Tull’s “Aqualung” is the stuff of legend, and his riffs and interludes within “Locomotive Breath,” which battle Ian Anderson's hyper-huffing flute work, are equally devastating, if not floor-thumping. Hell, in a way, it’s even kind of metal, in a medieval sort of way. Still, when reminded of his exploits, which ranged from dropping prog odyssey in the Seventies to beating out Metallica for a Grammy in the Eighties to fighting the good fight against grunge in the Nineties, Barre shrugs, saying, “It was a broad scope of playing music.