"Cry Me a River," "Prelude to Joanie" & "Joanie's Butterfly"

At some points, Rock in a Hard Place is almost a dadaist experiment in what a rock band does as it collapses. Or a real life Spinal Tap. There's a few cringe-inducing moments on it, but it is often more puzzling than bad. Just like it was odd to try covering "Remember (Walking in the Sand)" on the previous album, here they incorporate a tune originally done by Ella Fitzgerald, a jazz bar standard, "Cry Me a River."

It's one of the few tracks I had never heard prior to starting this blog (which included about half this album and half of the previous.) When I first heard it, going from whimpering to wailing in a few minutes, I thought "Ah, here we go." Here's where it gets cartoonishly bad, indulgent, sloppy, dumb, weird... but wouldn't you know, the more I heard it, the more it grew on me. You have to admit, Steven Tyler really goes for it in this one, and it's more inspired than any of the ballads or covers on the previous album.



I think that even if you don't love the material on Rock in a Hard Place, you have to respect it a little. It's a plucky little album with some ideas of its own. Muddled, drug-tinged, half-cocked ideas in some cases, but ideas that don't necessarily just emulate what worked before. Night in the Ruts almost sounded like a good previous album (as did this album's successor) and Rock in a Hard Place almost sounded like a good future album. If they'd had their shit together a bit, they could've made something really, really interesting, but as I've said, it's both on them and the times, which were not exactly ideal for something like... this.

"Prelude to Joanie," I don't know. The vocals, fed through a device called a vocoder (famously used on the Neil Young album Trans) are mostly indecipherable, and a read of the lyric sheet doesn't do much for them, except to allude to the subject matter of the proper song, "Joanie's Butterfly" (not about Happy Days' Erin Moran getting a tramp stamp.) EWhat is interesting about it, though, is that it marks the beginning of a trend toward experimentalism in Aerosmith, of incorporating unusual sonic ideas in their music witrhout ever straying too hard from mainstream rock. This was a tendancy that would distinguish their work through the late 80's into the new millennium, in fact, with the song snippets on Pump (e.g. "Water Song" and "Dulcimer Stomp") functioning much like this clip here.

And then "Joanie" itself. Amidst the sludgy, over-the-top rock and roll on this album is this very odd moment of folk psychedelia, reminiscent of late-60's Rolling Stones, a sound that wasn't exactly playing to the kids in the early 80's. Removed from time and context, though, it's a pretty interesting piece that shows the band could still... grow, in a way. Good? Is it? Maybe. Not bad. Interesting, that's for sure. Almost definitely the first and only time the phrase "Kick Ass Rocking Horse" has been uttered on tape... and if not, it's certainly the most impressive delivery.

In a way, the album is frustrating because it shows potential. All the worst moments could be salvaged and don't generally just retread past successes. A lot of forward-thinking moments only fall flat because the band just couldn't sell them the way they used to, because of their sorry state and the times. It's no wonder it wasn't well-recieved in the 80's, and surprisingly enough it hasn't agd that badly.

So I'm an apologist. Whose blog are you reading?