The Man with the Flute and the Fish Farm

There is a certain kind of man I have always been drawn to, and Ian Anderson is the cleanest example of him I know. A man who walks on stage with a flute and walks off it into a pair of rubber boots. A man who can write a concept album in the morning and clobber a salmon in the afternoon, and see no contradiction in either. I admire him not because he was famous. I admire him because he refused to be only one thing.

The world likes its artists fragile. It prefers them haunted, impractical, dependent on someone gentler to handle the money. Anderson never accepted the invitation. He stood on stage on one leg, playing a flute like a man arguing with God, and somewhere on the other side of the country a few hundred people were on his payroll, gutting fish, packing smokehouses, running trucks. He understood, in a way most musicians never do, that a song does not feed you for long, and that a man who cannot feed himself eventually begins to write smaller songs.

What moves me about him is the parallelism. He did not retire from music to become a businessman. He did not dabble in farming as a hobby between tours. He ran both at full strength, in the same lifetime, with the same pair of hands. The flute and the fish. The stage and the soil. He had a compound in Scotland and an audience in every capital, and he treated both as work that deserved to be done properly.

There is, in his story, a quality the polite world calls ruthless, and I think the polite world is wrong about it. He fired musicians who could not keep up. He killed animals he had raised. He made hard calls about who belonged in his band and which fish belonged in the smokehouse, and he did not seem to enjoy any of it, and he did not seem to apologize for any of it either. This is not cruelty. Cruelty is what happens when a man enjoys the hard part. What Anderson had was something older and rarer — the willingness to do the unpleasant necessary thing with his own hands, in full view of himself, without flinching and without theatre. Food is food. Business is business. Someone has to do the messy part if anything is to exist at all.

I think this is why his myth grew the way it did. There was no daylight between the man on stage and the man on the estate. The same person who wrote the lyric also signed the cheque, hired the boat, walked the fields, and decided, at the end of a long day, whether a player stayed in the band. The art was not separate from the labor. The labor was not separate from the art. They were two rooms in the same house, and he lived in both without pretending one was holier than the other.