“Flute Loop” by the Beastie Boys and “Mogwai Fear Satan” by Mogwai are two examples of fearless sonic adventures that invited the flute along with them for the ride. But these rare ’90s appearances of the reedless wonder would seem to be anomalies: The flute in rock is at once blessed and cursed, beautiful and banal, and never without a story behind it, as you will hear in this whistling woodwind edition of the Origin of Song.

Alto saxophonist Bud Shank was primarily a jazz player, but in 1965, he laid down one of rock’s best-known flute solos in “California Dreamin’.” As the story goes, Shank was invited to the session and breezed through his improvisation in just one take. Shank’s is probably the gold standard in rock flute solos, an oxymoronic idea if ever there was one. And yet, not long after Shank’s bar-setting performance, others would dare to sneak the flute into rock studios. Saxophonist Steve Douglas was retained to blow a flute note or six as the opening to the Beach Boys’ “Sloop John B” from the famously innovative 1966 album, Pet Sounds. That same year, the Blues Project did its own “Flute Thing” (the part the Beasties yanked for “Flute Loop”). The Beatles piped up on their experimental 1967 single with a piccolo trumpet on “Penny Lane” and the mellotron breaths that mark “Strawberry Fields Forever”, but when they went full flute on Magical Mystery Tour, using it to signify foolishness, as in “The Fool on the Hill”, they risked severing rock’s association with flutes altogether. But the little flute could not be crushed; it has remained an element, if not a dominating one, in rock ever since.

Among the least favored instruments in rock, it’s not just the woodwind’s incongruity with the backbeat of the rock ‘n’ roll sound that gives it its bad rap, it can also be the way it’s played, the way it’s handled, and the just plain delicate look of it that makes it seem unfit for the rock stage. Moody Blues flutist/flautist (both are correct) Ray Thomas (of “Nights in White Satin” fame) put in a memorable performance on the pipe in ‘67, but the flute-featuring prog-light Moody Blues didn’t exactly do the instrument’s rep any favors. There is, however, a case to be made for the macho-ization of the instrument by Ian Anderson, the flute player and multi-instrumentalist who formed Jethro Tull that same year. He would go on to spend the remainder of the late ’60s and all of the ’70s rendering the flute into a metallic weapon—never mind the leggings and codpiece. Thanks to Anderson plugging in, the flute was no longer just in the provinces of white satin nights and hills with men featuring foolish grins, though he did retain the troubadour-in-poet’s-shirt vibe. Tull began as a band of British folk rockers, but Anderson eventually adopted an aggressive flute style inspired by dynamic jazzman Rahsaan Roland Kirk and then adapted it for the stadium kids. Anderson, known almost as much for his frippery and quippery as for his one-legged fluttery stylings, once told an interviewer in Port Folio Weekly that he was influenced by Eric Clapton to pick up his instrument of choice. “Eric Clapton is not known for being a flute player, and that was the reason I took up the flute.”

Anderson played the Artley, commonly known as your average school band flute, the parts of which he sometimes used to create one perfect Frankenstein of a flute. On his personal website, he recommends the Yamaha student model for practice; he goes into great detail about the Pearls, the Sankyos, and Powells, but I’ll skip all that here and offer up a couple of flutey Tull tracks for the uninitiated: “Living in the Past” marries flute to melody with Anderson’s indescribable puff of magic, as does the theme to Thick as a Brick and the instrumental “Bourée.”

With the flute officially arena rock-certified by Anderson, it was ready to be used and abused throughout the decade. Now, I don’t want to get into the whole prog-rock thing, though it’s a fact that you’re going to come across more flute in this genre than any other, because of its association with the 16th and 17th centuries, classical music, and The Hobbit. As the owner of a ’70s vintage Yes belt buckle, I stand accused, so if it’s okay, I’d like to bypass that part of the flute’s past, and return to where we left off at the formation of Tull in ‘67: The year is 1968 and the song is “Going Up the Country” by Canned Heat. You may remember the band from back when or more recently from this column where we outlined the Heat’s relationship to the boogie. “Going Up the Country” became the band’s signature song, in part, thanks to its use in the film version of Woodstock, the appearance at which, well, the less said the better (I’m not the only one who holds this opinion). The bucolic flute on that track was played by Jim Horn, an established session player who jammed on sax, flute, oboe, and piccolo on some of your favorite records from the past (he piccolo-ed his way through “Tears of a Clown”). Horn not only jammed at the concert for Bangladesh, he played on three out of four Beatle solo albums. Horn: What’s in a name?

By 1970, Van Morrison’s “Moondance” took the flute to a whole new level, though it’s not the floor that everyone should get off on. I prefer the flute’s watermark on Eric Burdon and WAR’s “Spill the Wine”; it definitely fits the mix with the leaping gnome’s spoken word vocal that eventually explodes into a sound riot.

At this point, perhaps I should reveal I’m extremely ambivalent about the flute’s virtues as a rock instrument, unless it’s being handled by Chris Wood of Traffic; I could listen to “John Barleycorn” all day or to him alongside Jimi Hendrix on “1983…(A Merman I Should Turn to Be).” But there is another side to the rock flute that makes me cranky and outright hostile—the side that makes me obligated to mention Burton Cummings and the Guess Who, a favorite of tastemaker Julian Cope, but not me. Cummings is a flautist all right, and the musician responsible for “She’s Come Undone”: Boom boomp boo-doo doomp… ugh. The culmination of all this flute madness, perhaps the thing that tainted the instrument’s reputation in rock for me for real, was the Marshall Tucker Band’s “Can’t You See.” The fairly radical juxtaposition of guys in cowboy hats wielding flutes would normally be something for which I’d be championing a group—just for trying. But there’s something about “Can’t You See”, I dunno… it repels me. Oh, I get the Southern legacy of the pipes, the fife, and all that. But don’t ask me to name the guy who played the thing (I Googled—it’s Jerry Eubanks). Now, there are those who may be prepared to argue why I should see the merits of “Can’t You See”, but I’m not prepared to hear them. I wish the song would go away, so frequently do I hear it on classic rock radio. By the time I make it to turning the station, that little flute melody is already trapped in my brain, where it stays for the next few days. That is, until Marshall Tucker Band’s “Heard It in a Love Song” comes into the rotation to replace it. “Heard It In a Love Song” is perhaps the song for which the bells tolled the end of the flute in rock (its success coincided with the rise of punk rock in ‘77).

Since that time, my world of rock became a no flute zone; if it’s flute, I’ll take Eric Dolphy, Herbie Mann, or the flute-anteceding pan pipes played by the Master Musicians of Joujouka. It is ironic that Bud Shank’s flute parts with Ravi Shankar are among my favorite melodies on the planet. No doubt, there is some flute I missed in the ’80s, ’90s, or ’00s—I’d love to hear about it because my ears were closed. Lest you think I’m saying that just because an instrument is relatively tiny, its frequency mocked in rock, or that working with it is easy, I would never imply such a thing, though picking up the seemingly benign instrument does have some hazards. Both Shank and Douglas played until the end of their lives: Douglas died at a recording session and Shank the day after one, both from conditions which could arguably be attributed to stress on the body related to lifelong blowing. Ian Anderson has served as a spokesperson for deep vein thrombosi
s, again, a condition that could be an occupational hazard. Not that I’m trying to dissuade any future flute rockin’. I’m just saying that, though the flute may be among the lightest instruments to carry, it takes a heavyweight to rock it.

Watch: Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull [at youtube.com]

Tags: Jethro Tull, The Beatles, Bud Shank, Steve Douglas, flute

Read past installments of Origin of Song:

Go Straight to Hell, Boys

The Rock, the Roll, and the Catfish

Words: A Percussive Tool