"Adam's Apple" & "No More No More"

The thing I love about Toys in the Attic is that it's full of great songs, but songs that are great for extremely weird reasons. Songs that can hardly be emulated, let alone originated, by a different band. Okay, Led Zeppelin had spiritual and fantasy aspirations, and a sex drive to match, but did they ever combine them so thoroughly and to such great effect as Aerosmith does here?

We've already established that Steven Tyler is an incredibly eccentric fellow. He's not just a sex-addicted drug abuser, he's an old school hippie truth seeker with belief in nature goddesses and aliens and other dimensions. So we get literally all those things wrapped up in his retelling of the original sin.

And we're lucky, because as weird and high-minded and baffling as this song is, it works because it comes full on in a burst of rock and roll swagger, one of those classic riffs (hey, there's a lot of those on this album!) and an attention-getting line like "Lordy, it was love at first bite!" Tyler's not a tepid person, so he throws himself right into this Biblical role. I guess it's to be expected from someone who used the title of a literary classic to refer to a pimp with an affinity for women's legs, and changed the meaning of the second word in "Pandora's Box."



One of those hidden gems of the album is "No More No More," one of the most "Seventies" songs the band ever did. It's got something in common with groups like Boston or Rod Stewart, but it still kicks the shit out of them on the instrumentation alone, to say nothing of the lyrics. I do think it has some of the best lines of that early songbook:

Following a great, even uncharacteristically dreamlike arpeggiated riff (the band was full of old Beatlemaniacs, after all) we wake up to the grim reality of Tyler's rock and roll dream, first alluded to on tracks like "Mama Kin:"

Blood stains the ivories on my daddy's Baby grand
I ain't seen the daylight since I started this band

An unsympathetic chorus chimes in: No more, no more! No more, no more!

Store bought clothes fallin' apart at the seams
Tea leaf readin' gypsies Fortune tellin' my dreams (I have to admit, I always thought the lyrics was the somewhat more crass "Titty-flittin' gypsies.")

Holiday inns, lock the door with a chain
You love it and you hate it but to me they're all the same

And then later:

Times they're a changin, nothin' ever stands still
If I don't stop changin, I'll be writin' out my will

It's the same old story
Never get a second chance
For a dance to the top of the hill

Time and again, Steven Tyler demonstrates a willingness to revisit old lyrics. Sometimes it's a bit cheap, but in this early case it's weirdly prophetic. In this song, he refers to himself as a dreamer (per "Dream On") and borrows half the chorus of "Same Old Song and Dance." It has the effect of mythologizing large swathes of Aero-discography, checking in with the band throughout their 40-year continuity. Here he is young and feels sure he won't get a second chance (see: "Make It") but over a decade later we find just the opposite to be true: that they lost everything and got it back later.