No one wants to be accidentally tear-gassed onstage, but there are definitely worse places for it to happen than Red Rocks Amphitheatre.
It was June 10, 1971, and Jethro Tull were headlining this beautiful, 10,000-capacity open-air venue built into the natural sandstone formations south of Denver, Colorado. This was the band’s eighth US tour in the two-and-half-years since they’d first set foot in North America, a work rate they would sustain throughout the coming decade.
Such was the scale of Tull’s US success that demand for tickets for the Red Rocks show outstripped supply. Dozens of ticketless fans gathered outside the venue’s gates, hoping to cajole, sweet-talk or simply force their way in. The local police department, there to keep some semblance of order, were having none of it. Simmering tensions boiled over, and a riot broke out. That’s when the cops busted out the tear gas.
“This riot was happening outside the venue, so we weren’t aware of what was going on,” says long-serving Tull guitarist Martin Barre, who played with the band from 1968 to 2011.
“We were onstage when they started tear gassing people. Because of the geographical layout, the tear gas was funnelled into the auditorium, so it got the whole audience and the band as we were playing. It’s very unpleasant. It makes you completely inoperable as a human being. It was only afterwards that we were told, ‘There’s a riot, the police are here, you’ve got to get out of the venue.’ It was horrible.”
Martin Barre
According to contemporary reports, the band managed to play for 80 minutes that night, but the fact that Jethro Tull were big enough to sell out a venue as big as Red Rocks in the first place, let alone prompt a riot on the night itself, is remarkable. Received wisdom has it that the likes of Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones and, later, Elton John, Bad Company and Fleetwood Mac were the dominant British bands in the US throughout the 1970s, especially when it came to the live arena.
True enough, but Jethro Tull were up there with them, too. Between their first American gigs at the start of 1969 and the end of the following decade, they went from playing clubs and small ballrooms, opening for Blood, Sweat & Tears and Spirit, to headlining sports stadiums and multiple nights at arenas – in 1978, they played a run of five shows at New York’s Madison Square Garden, to a total of nearly 100,000 people.
Their live success was mirrored by their record sales and chart positions. Tull notched up 10 US Top 20 studio albums between 1969 and 1978, including two No.1s in the unlikely shape of 1972’s concept album satire and the following year’s. The scale of Jethro Tull’s American success is often overlooked today, but these wild Brits with the mad-eyed singer who stood on one leg while playing flute to unique, complex, thoughtful songs were bona fide rock stars in the USA during the 1970s, albeit reluctant ones.
