Ian Anderson brings 'Jethro Tull' to Luther Burbank Center

Launched during the British rock renaissance of the late 1960s, Ian Anderson’s band sought a “point of difference,” so the frontman took up the flute. Just one problem. At the beginning, he says, he wasn’t very good.

So every couple of weeks the band would change its name. In 1968 they settled on Jethro Tull after getting invited back to play a club where they had just performed.

“First of all, the name Jethro Tull was not the choice of me or any other member of the band at that time. It was an agent who gave us the name,” said Anderson, 69, in a late August phone interview from his production office in southwest England.

“We said, ‘We’ll be Jethro Tull this week and see what happens.’ Having not studied that period of history as a schoolboy, I didn’t know we had been named after a dead guy who invented the seed drill.”

Fast forward nearly half a century, and the self-deprecating Anderson is still on the road playing for his deeply devoted fans. But this time there’s a twist. Using material from Tull’s vast repertoire, Anderson is telling the story of his band’s namesake.

He’s placing Jethro Tull, the 18th-century agricultural innovator, in the not-too-distant future to consider issues such as population growth and genetically modified food.

Among the songs in the show, titled of course “Jethro Tull,” are old favorites such as “Aqualung” and “Locomotive Breath” and several new pieces from Anderson’s 2014 album “Homo Erraticus.”

The originator of the rock-and-roll flute, Anderson sold out 20,000-seat venues during Jethro Tull’s heyday and now brings his rock opera to the Luther Burbank Center on Tuesday night.

The master showman’s voice remains strong. He possesses the energy of a man half his age, bounding around the stage, eyes bulging, then standing on one leg to play his flute like the mythical Native American deity, Kokopelli.

During an hourlong interview, the articulate and studious musician held forth on topics ranging from his observational approach to songwriting to why he’s still touring.

What led you to do a show about your band’s namesake?

I rather avoided knowing too much about the original Jethro Tull until about 2014, when I was traveling through Europe and looked up Jethro Tull. I was struck by little points of coincidence. It just threw up titles of songs that I’ve written over the years.

I started making a list of songs that seemed to apply to his life, and suddenly I had a set list of essentially the best of Jethro Tull. I was surprised in a rather spooky kind of way that so many of these songs just seemed to fit elements of his life.

I wrote another five songs to round out the story and give it a little bit more relevance to the world of today.

It’s another tour, another excuse to play the best of Jethro Tull, but in the context of a production show with big video screens, special guests (on screen) and things going on that make it a little more of a theatrical event.

Are you expressing your opinion or trying to imagine what the historical character Jethro Tull would think of something like genetically modified food?

We’re in line to have our third agricultural revolution. We know that, looking forward 30 years or so, we’ll be experiencing very meaningful levels of climate change, and the effects of those on crop-growing areas will be quite a major event.

Those poor Canadians will have the North Americans knocking on their door. I think the Canadians may be wanting to borrow from Donald Trump and his ideas about building a fence to keep you guys out of Canada.

We really do need another Jethro Tull with the vision and the technology to find ways to maximize our food production for an ever-expanding population. We are looking at just 7 billion people today, but the forecast is for around 12 billion people by the end of this century. We are struggling to feed 7 billion right now.

What do you think about genetically modified foods?

I’ve read extensively on the subject of GM foods, and I’m probably more relaxed about it than a lot of people are, but I’m still concerned as I think we all should be. But if it’s a question of eat or starve, I’m going to eat my GM soybeans. I’m not going to sit there and waste away to the bone in a bad mood.

What led you to take up the flute?

We were always thinking about a point of difference. You’ve got to have something that sets you apart from everybody else. I inherently knew that there was not much point in me being a second-rate guitar player in the face of such overwhelming competition from Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and Jimi Hendrix and Jimmy Page.

The flute just happened to catch my eye in a shop window. It’s not like a cello or a tuba to have to carry around - it more or less slips into my pocket. For a few months I didn’t get a note out of the thing at all. It was much harder than I thought.

Then suddenly I managed to get a couple of notes. A day or two later, I managed to play a couple of octaves of scales, and a day or two after that I managed to play a couple of tunes and do a bit of improvisation. The next week I was playing it live on stage.

I gratefully accepted the mantle of being the flute player in rock music. But at the same time, of course, I play a bunch of other instruments (including acoustic guitar and mandolin) even worse than I play the flute.

In your songs, would you say you tell stories?

I less often tell a story than paint a picture. It’s not usually narrative - it’s more observational. I suppose I paint people in a landscape.

I’m not so concerned with close-up portraiture; I’m also not concerned with just the general landscape. I like to have people inhabit my landscape, and I want to tell you about these people.

Very rarely do I write in an autobiographical way. Like an actor, I’m taking on a character role. Sometimes I will express things in song lyrics which are not my views at all, and not my personal experience or emotions.

“Aqualung” is very much a person in a landscape, and there is a social context. It’s a disadvantaged person. Also in that song I’m expressing the response of the individual to that homeless person. That response is a little bit of fear, a little bit of discomfort.

After selling 60 million records and playing live for 48 years, why do you still tour?

It beats the hell out of going to the gym, doesn’t it? It’s keeping me mentally fit, too, because being a musician you really do have to keep your marbles in play, you have to exercise those brain cells. (Anderson doesn’t rely on an iPad for lyrics.)

Partly it’s memory, memorizing a huge amount words, lyrics and musical notes. You know you’re pushing yourself to the limit physically and mentally every time you do it. That’s a big part of the pleasure - knowing you can still do it.

Michael Shapiro is author of “A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration.” He writes about travel and entertainment for national magazines and The Press Democrat.