Draw the Line (1977)

Every album Aerosmith recorded is a chapter in the story. They are statements of time an place, charting the band's rise, peak, fall, and re-climb, to rock greatness. So the story goes, what goes up must come down. If you could graph the band's artistic quality, popularity, and emotional health, each point on the timeline marks progress in one direction or another: up or down.

Draw the Line is where that downward trajectory begins, which didn't cease until the late 1980's. In an interview on the documentary "The Making of Pump," bassist Tom Hamilton relates the experience of Aerosmith in the 70's: There was a streak, from 1973 to 1976, where each album was a step up from the last, an improvement, a progression. Draw the Line was the first album they did where they did not feel like they had bettered themselves.

Draw the Line is for sure a different album. I think I can hear frustration setting in... the motivating factors that drove songs like "Last Child" and "Back in the Saddle," as well as "Sick as a Dog" and "Lick and a Promise" have turned oppressive, stifling. There's a street level sloppiness marking this album. The songs feels more jammy and less distinguished. It's either the sound of the band shrinking away from a challenge (and into drugs,) or just trying to fall back on what feels natural. Creatively it's easy to see this album as a disappointment, and yet...

It's not all that unpleasant to listen to in its entirety. There's a lot less lofty reaching (the one track that does aspire to high art seems very out of place.) A lot of the tracks tread the same ground, but in a way that's the album's saving grace because it's at least consistent. It has a dirty up-front-ness to it that none of the previous albums had, showing the band's debt to the New York Dolls a bit. It's a mess, but a very direct one.

There's a thing I sometimes find myself saying at my other blog. As a critic, I know this album is not perfect. I know it's a frustrated, messy album that takes a lot of missteps and isn't nearly as rich of a listening experience as Rocks or Toys. It's flawed. And yet, I still can't stop listening to it. With 9 tracks, not one of them is certifiably bad. Mostly they sit together perfectly well, and carry a charm that a "bad" album shouldn't have. If you're an Aerosmith fan, if you're likely to be reading this blog, you can't write this album off at all. We know this band is capable of so much more, and yet, when you take it all away, if this is what's left, it still works.

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