"Same Old Song and Dance"

On paper, I suspect, the music for "Same Old Song and Dance" isn't that different from "Make It" or "Mama Kin" or the general sound of Aerosmith's first album. In execution, however, there's a world of difference. The track that raises the curtain on Aerosmith's second album shows right away where all the parts go: while one guitar plays a lead riff, the other embellishes with a solo, while the rhythm section of Kramer and Hamilton keeps everything locked tight. Then Steven's vocals seem to emerge from the music, rather than get imposed on them. This is pretty much a perfect rock song, with solos from both guitarists that made it worthy of inclusion in the third Guitar Hero game.

The lyrics are technically about a crime - I'm not sure if the "narrator" committed the crime or is being wrongly accused. They're not overly clear, but they show the direction Steven's lyrics would take for the rest of his career, by suggesting the meaning of a song with largely abstract phrases ("Get yourself a cooler and lay yourself low / Coincidental murder with nothing to show") rather than telling a story in the manner of an older bluesman or a literalist pop songwriter. It's what maeks the classic Aerosmith albums so invitingly weird: you know what they're about but they're not really about it, and that was always sort of the way I wanted rock and roll to be.

Get Your Wings (1974)

In hindsight, Get Your Wings is one of Aerosmith's most consistent (and satisfying) albums. Even their best albums tend to pursue a lot of different directions, but from beginning to end, this one works as a very straightforward hard rock piece. The whole thing sounds like it came together a lot easier, more intuitively, like they're no longer guessing about what kind of band they can be. While there's a bit of disconnect between "Movin' Out" and "Somebody," or "Dream On" and "Make It," all the tracks on the second album feel like they belong together, whether they're about a crime gone bad, having sex on a train, outer space, bad weather, or having sex on a beach. If all the songs weren't great, you might say it's repetitive, but even after their next few albums, Rolling Stone once referred to Wings as their best.

Although it doesn't have all my favourite songs, Get Your Wings is probably my favourite Aerosmith album to listen to from beginning to end. The best tracks are excellent, and the lesser-known ones do a great job reminding you of their worth.

Buy this album now: iTunes Canada // iTunes USA // Amazon.ca // Amazon.com

"Dream On"

"Dream On" is a lot of things. Perhaps the first hard rock "power ballad." Perhaps a meditation on the passage of time and the pursuit of one's dreams. Perhaps an oddity on the heavily guitar-boogie-based Aerosmith self-titled album.

But the thing I like best about it was that it was written so that Steven Tyler could sit down.

From reading about Steven Tyler, you learn exactly what type of insane he is. As a performer, he throws his body into his performance 100%, running around stage, convulsing like a maniac, swinging his penis microphone at everything. When he was writing material for this album, he sat down at a piano pecking out the opening chords to "Dream On" so that, during their shows, he would be forced to briefly take a seat and settle his ass down. Over three decades, Joe Perry has been forced to stifle his initial reservations about playing songs like it, because they've become a staple of Aerosmith's repertoire.

The song is actually nearly perfect. The opening chords crawl along, seeming huge while being modest, hinting at the rest of the song, which is a constant escalation. While the lyrics sing about personal growth, the songs gets bigger with each lap, until Tyler is unleashing his fabled howl for the first time. It's not sappy or sentimental: reflective, but not sweet, singing about how there are bad times to go with the good, about how time can pass you by, about how sometimes all you have are your dreams.

And here is the crux of the album. It's tight, but doesn't suffer for it, because it's not based in that a shuffling bar boogie, but in a staggering, rapturous rock and roll throwdown. This is the first song they wrote that was bigger than a bar. This is where it becomes most apparent that Aerosmith is doing a thing. That as much as they have their influences, they are very much moving forward. If they haven't found it yet, they are driven by a need to chase after it, and "Dream On" was the first indication that they could get there. You couldn't write a song like "Dream On" by accident. This is the distillation of everything that was already great about their sound, everything that was going to be great about their later work, and how desperate Steven Tyler is to bring the heavens down to Earth.

And they had hardly even started.

"Somebody" "Write Me a Letter" & "Walking the Dog"

The "album cuts" of Aerosmith's first album establish a baseline for what we're talking about here. They have a swagger and slide to them that is gritty and dirty, in its way, but not something you would want to see in an arena. You could imagine Steven Tyler 5 feet away from you singing songs like these, with the band being paid in beer and hauling their own equipment. All told, these are songs that would probably be good to hear live, but are a bit harder to sit still for on a record.



That said, if "Somebody" is one of the less impressive tracks on the first album, it's still an enviable way of starting your songwriting career, if you're Steven Tyler. He grew up in the 60's, where the British invasion bands went from bar bands to pop stars to hippie revolutionaries and, in the time of Aerosmith, stadium rockers. "Somebody" picks up that thread decently if not remarkably.



On that note, the album concludes with a cover of an old blues/R&B song that was earlier covered by the Rolling Stones. It establishes from the beginning how much 'Smith followed the Stones, with Aerosmith as the brash, American take on the same concept of spaced-out skinny white guys playing old bar band blooze.

"Movin' Out" & "One Way Street"

As I mentioned, when speaking of "Mama Kin," Aerosmith is always bridging the gap between the gutter and the stars, and they started early on their first album. Backed by that wonderfully sinewy Perry riff, Tyler sings about getting away from the pressures of the city, but it's clear it means more than smog reduction in the middle eight when he sings:

Level with God and you're in tune with the universe
Talk with yourself and you'll hear what you wanna know
Gotta rise above 'cause below is only gettin' worse
Life, in time, will take you where you wanna go.

It's very philosophical, and yet it doesn't feel at all; out of place in the confines of an up-and-coming rock star song. Maybe it's only in retrospect that Tyler's earned the right, with me, to make such grandiose statements, but they suit him, that desire to escape the day-to-day, to seek a kind of honesty. There are weird, navel-gazing moments of introspection and earnestness on all the early Aerosmith albums that are worth watching out for, not the least because they're often surrounded by excellent musical moments. "Movin' Out," the first song co-written by Tyler and Perry, is Perry's showcase on the album. His guitars signify the mood and meaning better than the lyrics ever can.



"One Way Street" is a rather more conventional song, with a blues swing to it and lyrics that are less philosophical than "Movin' Out," mainly on the topic of ongoing frustrations with the ladies in his life. Still, it's a good shot at adding something new into the "blues rock" canon, with a solid effort from all members of the band, Tyler's first big swing at scatting, with some long ass solos surrounding him to boot. It's actually a surprise highlight of the album, for those mainly familiar with the greatest hits. There's probably nothing else like it in the Aero catalog.

"Make It" & "Mama Kin"

The thing about going through the entire Aerosmith catalogue chronologically is that although many of their best and best-known songs came later, there are moments of greatness from the beginning. "Make It" may not necessarily fit this description, but as the opening track to the first album, and early concerts, it works very well, highlighting Joe Perry and Brad Whitford's interlocked riffage, and the natural rhythm of the Joey Kramer-Tom Hamilton team. It's also one of the most unfortunate incidents of Steven Tyler's "first album voice."

The lyrics concern a topic that dominates the first Aerosmith album: the elusive nature of success. By this point the band had been gigging around together for almost 3 years, finally climbing the ladder to rock superstardom. They had a record contract and studio time. This might be their only shot. It was a bit meta of a note to start off with, but as a curtain-raiser for a young rock band, it feels honest. "Make it, don't break it."



"Mama Kin," which opens the second side, is probably the most viscerally effective tracks on the album. It opens with an extended solo, even incorporating a sax, with a blast of guitar that brings Chuck Berry to mind. Again, you have Tyler writing about the raggedy life of an aspiring rock n' roll star, writing home to mom, "sleeping late and smokin' tea."

In fact, the opening lines, "It ain't easy, living like a gypsy, tell ya honey how I feel / I've been dreamin' floating down a stream 'n losing touch with all that's real" say it all. At their best, Aerosmith straddles a line between down-in-the-gutter realism and head-in-the-clouds ambition, and this lyric, delivered at rapid-clip, sums it up perfectly. What's at work in this song - and on this album in general - is both rock and roll fantasy, and struggling band reality.

Aerosmith (1973)

Aerosmith's self-titled album has a reputation of being formative: the sound of a band finding itself, with a commendable but not exceptional album. I'd agree, to a point. It's clear now that Aerosmith's best days were ahead of them, for songwriting and performance, but even the weakest tracks on this album have merit as Steven Tyler and Joe Perry hammer out the terms of their songwriting partnership. There's also a thinness to the production that downplays Tyler's spacier instincts, leaving the album feeling a bit cozy, about the size of the small clubs they were playing rather than the stadiums they'd letter sell out. Tyler also admits, in his autobiography, to throwing on a half-assed "black" voice in the studio, when it wasn't his natural way of performing, leading to a sort of self-sabotage.

In the end, the album's main strengths are in its potential: Tyler and Perry aren't necessarily writing their best songs, but they are demonstrating a good sense of songwriting. Tyler's vocals are uncharacteristic on most of the songs, but the musicianship is there, if perhaps a bit too tight and clean. The album has a streetwise boogie to it that was always there on later albums, but doesn't feel explosive.

Buy this album now: iTunes Canada // iTunes USA // Amazon.ca // Amazon.com

Introduction

My name is Scotto Williams. I'm a music blogger.

Last year, I created Sound of the Week as an outlet to write about music, as well as an excuse to constantly explore new music, stuff I hadn't heard yet. I spent most of my teen and college years listening to classic rock, and that left a lot for me to get back around to. It's a really great experience. You should check it out.

But I occasionally run into problems when I want to talk about music I already liked. I have an ongoing series called "Serious Contenders," where I talk about songs I think should be considered among the greatest songs ever. I did a 5-part series on my favourite albums of all time. I've done other retrospectives on albums that shaped my tastes. But I'm always very shy about talking about my favourite band of all: Aerosmith.

They don't fit easily into the narrative over there. If you get me talking about them, I don't feel like I can stop. It would overtake the general objective of the site. I've restricted the amount of verbiage I can spill about them in the interest of keeping the blog's original mission intact.

But they are worth talking about.

They're worth talking about because I'm a guy who doesn't want to stop talking about music, and they're my favourite band. They have a complex place in modern music history, emerging from the 70's as one of the most popular, well-known, yet paradoxically under-considered bands of their time. They were never big sellers or critical darlings, but succeeded in creating a reputation, body of work, and shared experience for listeners, the type that is often sought between rock bands and their audience. They've had triumphs, a few bad albums (we'll be talking about those) alterations in their sound, personal trainwrecks... and later this summer they'll be releasing their first album in 8 years, their first of original material in over a decade.

It's time for me to talk about Aerosmith. This is The Smithery.

Let's rock
-Scotto