Jethro Tull's "Aqualung" anniversary tour here Sunday

Ian Anderson, the long-serving leader of England’s Jethro Tull, has never claimed to be clairvoyant. But with each passing year, the title of Tull’s 1976 album, “Too Old To Rock ’n’ Roll, Too Young To Die,” seems increasingly prescient for this pioneering band, which counts Nick Cave, Dave Matthews and the members of indie-rock favorites Midlake and The Decemberists among its biggest fans.

“I thought ‘Too Old’ would come back to haunt me three months after the record was released!” Anderson told me in a 1988 San Diego Union interview.

“Because, yes, it was very openly a confrontation with (growing old), not in a biographical sense, but in a sense to do with style and fashion. … Jethro Tull was like the Muppets; it was just always there, to a certain generation of people. We are the teddy bear they didn’t throw away.”

Like the Muppets, if in less animated form, Tull is still active today, 43 years after the band was formed in 1968 as a blues group.

At its best, in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Tull created a fresh hybrid of rock, blues, jazz, traditional English folk and classical. Lad singer Anderson’s animated flute playing, accomplished songwriting and charismatic stage presence helped make Tull one of the most distinctive bands in rock.

At its worst, the group’s work was pompous, self-indulgent and unable to overcome its worst conceits.

“We’re low art,” Anderson said in a 1996 Night&Day interview. “At the same time, we’re definitely not a lounge band.”

The sole original member of Tull, which performs Sunday at the 21-and-up Open Sky Theater at Harrah’s Rincon Casino, Anderson is now 62. His band’s two newest additions — bassist Dave Goodier and keyboardist John O’Hara (the junior member at 48) — both joined in 2006, after touring in Anderson’s solo band.

Tull is now embarked on its 40th-anniversary “Aqualung” tour, in honor of the classic 1971 album that still ranks as one of the band’s finest. Coming soon: A newly remixed version of “Aqualung,” with Porcupine Tree guitarist Steven Wilson doing the audio engineering honors.

Does the band live up — or down — to the title of “Too Old to Rock ’n’ Roll, Too Young To Die?” We’ll find out Sunday,when the band performs "Aqualung" in its entirety, along with various other Tull songs from the past and present.