Permanent Vacation (1987)

I get why it was controversial. During their heyday, Aerosmith was pretty reliable for its internal songwriting: all their best songs bore the names "Tyler," "Perry," and sometimes "Whitford," "Hamilton" or "Kramer." And then in 1987, in the wake of their successful collaboration with Run-DMC, names began to crop up in the credits like "Child," and "Vallance:" People who were responsible for making acts like Bryan Adams and Bon Jovi such enduring, middle-of-the-road commodities. But it's hard to blame them: the band had already squandered its first flush of comeback momentum with a good album that just didn't fit in, didn't catch the zeitgeist. That misfire suits the Aerosmith narrative well, that last stab at true independence and defiance, but without this album there wouldn't be much of an Aerosmith narrative. I wouldn't be talking about Aerosmith's career trajectory any more than I talk about Alice Cooper's. (Hey, "Poison" was a pretty good song, right?)

So yes, they committed the cardinal rock sin: they sacrificed authenticity in the name of chasing a hit. Hard to argue the result, which apart from a few flat, transparently MOR numbers, is still a blast to listen to. Besides, after some of their post-Rocks albums, one starts to get the sense that "following their instinct" wasn't always working for this band: they needed the assistance to filter out the crap and pa for the gold.

They can't compete with the young lust of the pop metal crowd, like Motley Crue or Poison, nor the bite of Guns n' Roses, but they grow into their clean-and-sober elder statesman role pretty well. Steven Tyler successfully transmutes his out-of-this-world psyche, the one truly inimitable quality of this band (for better or worse) into something with pop appeal and blows away imitators and pretenders, keeping the band away from the middle. The rest of the gang, too, knuckles down to show off their musicianship whenever they can, with a sense of interplay that few 80s rock bands really got. Yeah, it's a bit too glossy, but while some have argued it hasn't aged well, I would argue it has a certain charm that has made it feel less like a product of its time than a product out of time. "Permanent Vacation" is a good title for this record, as Aerosmith leaves behind a lot of its baggage and creates a piece with real light, easy appeal, which you can still bang your head to.

Buy this album now: iTunes Canada // iTunes USA