One thing I've alluded to is the fact that Steven Tyler's lyrical technique got a lot less prosaic on this album. Whereas most of his songwriting on the first album was "Things are like this and it feels like that" - often using it as a jumping off point for philosophical musings - the lyrics on Get Your Wings (and much of the rest of their 70's output) are in-the-moment, modernist and impressionistic. Instead of descriptions, you get associations and streams of consciousness. That's the sense in which "Same Old Song and Dance" is about a crime and "Lord of the Thighs" is about a pimp.
"Spaced" is about... space. I think. It's a weird, creepy, understated song, like a lot of the album tracks on Get Your Wings. It's a weird, detached moment that reveals Tyler's interest in other planets, worlds, dimensions ways of thinking: here, he's a bit pessimistic:
Spaced enough to know I feel I really don't care
Spaced enough to know I'm really losing my mind
And I'm never ever going back, I'm off the track,
No-one even knows I'm alive
Spaced, without a trace
Waiting for word to arrive
I'm the last man to survive...
These lyrics are surrounded by dark, growling guitars, the vocals breaking from restraint only briefly. If there's a point, another band might have belabored it by taking the sci-fi theme even further, maybe attaching a narrative. Instead there's just a swirl of imagery and impressions and the rest is implied, leaving it all a bit eerie.
I think, on this album, the point wasn't to make specific statements and write a song about "this" or "that," but to find the song in its own composition, leading to that almost-abstract approach to lyrical matter, with a heavier concentration of delivery and appearance, than on content. So you get variations on a theme. "SOS (Too Bad)" is another song on this album about run-ins with the law or figures that exist on the fringe of society: in this case, a dirty sexy rave-up that spends itself out before the 3-minute mark. It could be about anything so long as it winds up at that "Too bad, can't get me none'a dat" hook (but let's face it, with a line like that it was only going to be about a few things.)
What I like about this song is that it demonstrates an ability Aerosmith has kept in their back pocket even to this day: rhythm. Even as the song cuts its blistering pace, Tyler is all on top of the rhythm, with lyrics like Well she would if she could and she'd be good if she could only be a lover, she'd be out tonight which maybe don't make much semantic sense, but just sound so fucking cool and right. The way that guitar just shudders under "I'm a rat, a lonely schoolboy..." gets me, too. The fact that many songs like these exist in the cracks of the Aero-discography is probably why I thought they'd be worth spending a whole summer thinking about.
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