"Last Child"

When I said earlier that there's no escape on Rocks, this is sorta what I mean. There's this intro/lead-in on this song that doesn't sound like the rest of the tune at all, but is very breathy and airy and dreamy... and then the song suddenly collapses into this tight groove, mechanical like the workings of a city. This may be, incidentally, where they got the idea to include intros on several tracks on their 1989 album Pump (though they revisit the concept at least once in between.)

This song revisits a theme they had broached early in their career on tracks like "Movin' Out," trying to balance an idyllic country life with a frustrating city existence. Steven Tyler grew up splitting his time between urban New York City and pastoral Sunapee, New Hampshire, and rock and roll itself was borne out of a compromise between these two settings. The heart of the song is the lyric "Hate's in the city and my love's in the meadow / Hands on the plow and feet's in the ghetto."

Half the verses are delivered at a slow clip, demonstrating a desire for the rural, and then a more rapid jumbled bit that brings you back to that complicated city life. As I mentioned, the riff is a tick-tock of clockwork conjured up by Brad Whitford, whose guitarwork is a bit cleaner and more precise than Joe Perry's, who provides the only release of the song, taking his cue from Tyler's cry of "Home sweet home" and sending us to the wilderness.

The song incorporates a lot of elements common through Aerosmith's career: blues, funk, rock, R&B... showing how a little of each can combine into something huge. The thing I love about Aerosmith, ultimately why I decided to devote an entire site to them, is that I can't think of anothe band that would have done this song, and the same can be said for most of their best ones. It's a thrill. It's pretty well perfect. And it's not even my favourite song on the album.