"Get the Lead Out" "Lick and a Promise" & "Home Tonight"

As Rocks barrels toward its final tracks, there's one track, "Get the Lead Out," that always sticks me a bit. It's not a bad song. It's not really anything. A good riff an okay vocal, nothing to rave about, probably the first track since the first album that I would shrug at. It's presence doesn't hurt Rocks - it's a perfectly workable, stylistically consistent tune - but it doesn't add to it. Just an exercise in Aerosmith being Aerosmith. It's good and funky and cool, and signifies pretty much the exact nature of the next two albums, which resemble this more than the other tracks on the album.



Fortunately, then, there's this slice of greatness, which epitomizes what I'm always saying about Rocks. "Lick and a Promise" is a dirty, filthy, indulgent ode to the rockstar lifestyle... with this weird undercurrent of sorrow. "He dug the money but forgot all their names" sounds more like an indictment than anything. Note also the not-so-subtle double entendre about a "lick," which could either refer to a guitar riff or what Johnny's doing with his lady-friends. Okay it's definitely the latter.

By now you should know how much I love the guitar work for this album. This one sounds like fireworks, suitably putting forward the overtones of success, fame and fortune... but but that solo goes back to what I was saying earlier, about denying closure and seeming ambiguous. I mean, maybe most people don't read these things the way I do. Or maybe even at all. But in that littler snippet at the end I hear the guitar sink to meet the lyrical tone.

At this point in the 1970's, Aerosmith was a top-selling act, filling arenas nationwide, known to under-30 rock fans everywhere. What should, in theory, be a triumphant ode to rock and roll superstardom sounds like a warning not to follow: "Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah... nah, not tonight."



It either comes from Steven Tyler's love of the Abbey Road medley, or his desire to duplicate the creative success of "Dream On," or some blend of the two. Here's a ballad that neatly and thoroughly sums up and sends off the bittersweet tone of the album, with this yearning, pleading "good night" message, this begging for forgiveness and pledge of fidelity from someone who clearly is not to be trusted with your heart. It goes back to "Last Child" and that yearning for home and simplicity, for a return to something safe and sane.

It also shows why Aerosmith always seems to contrived when they pour strings and orchestral stuff all over their ballads and epics, which was the one misstep with "You See Me Crying" from Toys in the Attic. They get that same intended tone, so much simpler and more well-wrought just by using Tyler's voice and the instruments employed by the band. Even the piano falls away by the song's climax. More than any other Aero ballad, even the outside favourite "Seasons of Wither," it balances grandeur and ambition with realism and heart.

With this, we drop the curtain on my favourite album of all time, the critical-consensus best Aerosmith album, and a touchstone for hard rock bands decades on. The final track is the closest the band gets to a sincere statement on the whole set, and feels well-earned. Here we rest.