Glenn Cornick was a founder member of Jethro Tull and played bass on the band’s early albums, widely regarded as among the finest of the prog-rock era. With his shoulder-length hair and headband, he looked every inch the 1960s hippy and he took to the rock’n’roll lifestyle with relish. Unfortunately, he had picked just about the only rock band in the land that did not share his enthusiasm for the excesses of the trade. His fellow members of Jethro Tull were of far more sober persuasion, and the disapproving attitude of the band’s leader Ian Anderson to rock’n’roll hellraising had more in common with Cliff Richard than Keith Richards. It was a collision of values that could only have one outcome.
As Jethro Tull toured the world with Led Zeppelin and Jimi Hendrix, Cornick revelled in hanging out with the biggest and wildest names of the era. “I was the one who really enjoyed touring and who thought life on the road was great,” he admitted.
After playing on three Top Ten Jethro Tull albums, Cornick was unceremoniously sacked at the end of an American tour in 1970. “We were waiting at Kennedy Airport to fly home and I was taken aside by our manager and told that Ian no longer wanted me in the band. My flight had been changed so that I wouldn’t be on the same plane as them,” he recalled.
Glenn Douglas Barnard Cornick was born in 1947 in Barrow-in-Furness, Cumbria. By his own account he did “fairly well” at school until he discovered rock music. Influenced by the Shadows, he bought his first guitar: “I ran away with my bass and a backpack and never returned home,” he recalled.
He landed in Blackpool, where he joined the John Evan Band, whose lead singer was Ian Anderson. By late 1967 the band had moved to London and with the addition of guitarist Mick Abrahams, became a blues band. Success was initially elusive and for a while Cornick shared a squalid bedsit in Luton with Anderson. “We were so poor that we would share one can of soup between us each evening,” he said. In order to keep warm, Anderson took to wearing the long, threadbare tramp’s coat that was to become the group’s visual trademark.
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The band used various names before deciding on Jethro Tull, after the 18th-century agriculturist, although the group’s first single was miscredited to “Jethro Toe”. Their debut album, This Was (1968), was a blues- influenced set, tinged with a certain jazziness courtesy of Anderson’s flute playing and Cornick’s melodic bass playing.
Cornick went on to record two albums with his own band Wild Turkey before leaving Britain for California when the band broke up in 1974. His first marriage to Judy Wong, who was secretary to Fleetwood Mac, ended in the 1970s. He is survived by his wife, Brigitte Martinez-Cornick, whom he married in 2000; a daughter, Molly; and two sons, Alex and Drew, a musician who described his father as “brilliant and cantankerous until the day he died”.
Glenn Cornick, was born on April 23, 1947. He died of congestive heart failure on August 29, 2014, aged 67