"Rock in a Hard Place (Cheshire Cat)" "Jig is Up" & "Push Comes to Shove"

There's not a lot to say about the closing stretch of this album that I haven't already said about the early bits. None of the songs set the world on fire, some are tolerable, and they skirt the line of being embarrassingly dazed and confused. There's nothing wrong withb the title track, which I would hold as one of the three or four best tracks on the album (along with the first two and, if I'm feeling generous, "Joanie's Butterfly") and which are perfectly listenable. This one just lacks a certain "get up and go."



Filler. Probably the worst thing about this album and Ruts is that they really wheeze their way to the finish. This isn't an awful song but it sounds like a demo of already-heard songs like "Bolivian Ragamuffin" or "Bitch's Brew" which weren't remarkable the first time. But okay. You can't crank out ten distinct listenable tunes, so you repeat yourself and it's not awful, just redundant. There's at least some keyboard livening this one up. It's got funk, akin to some of the weaker tracks on Draw the Line. Filler all the same, though.



This one, the album closer, isn't much better, but it has character all its own at least. It's going for a blues bar closing time feel harkening back to Toys in the Attic but as I've already said, they just don't have the spirit to carry through with it and it seems like another half-baked misfire. If I was going to say something in favor of it, it's a cute novelty that pretty much sums up Steven Tyler's state of affair... well-intentioned and creative but just not in control of his faculties. Push was shoving him around. Hurr hurr.

"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?

"Bitch's Brew" & "Bolivian Ragamuffin"

Although generally dreary, these two album tracks are not completely unlistenable. Despite "Bitch's Brew" containing a weird middle part where Steven does a bad Bob Dylan impression, and "Bolivian Ragamuffin" incorporating a Burger King jingle, both have their charms. "Brew" is the kind of tough rocker that could really give this album backbone, and "Ragamuffin" has a kind of psycho funk to it that is just not often seen. You probably can't build a whole album out of tracks like this, but at the top of their game, they could've been incorporated, with a bit of polish.

If this is as bad as it gets, then it really isn't that bad. They don't not sound like Aerosmith, which would be the worst possibility. Reviews of this album are almost reluctantly negative, with Rolling Stone saying at the time that it "almost seems to work." The spirit was willing but the flesh was weak. It's not like the album was full of bad commercial decisions, it just wasn't a good point in their lives to be doing music.

"Jailbait" & "Lightning Strikes"

Even if this isn't one of the classic Aerosmtih songs, it's written in a very Aerosmith way. Ostensibly it's an ode to sex with an underage partner, that much you can tell from the repeated cries of "J-j-j-j-j-j-j-Jailbait!" But it's not exactly Winger's "Seventeen" or Warrant's "Cherry Pie" in a straightforward (morally contemptible) narrative. All through the Aerosmith discography, Steven Tyler writes his stream-of-consciousness impressionistic lyrics so that many songs are hardly even about what they're about, whether it's "Sweet Emotion" or "Lord of the Thighs" or any number of 70's classics. Thing is, when you're on top of your game, it's a work of art. When you're at the bottom, and your worse urges get the better of you - as they do all through this album - it becomes a confusing mess. We say a bit of this on Draw the Line ("Sight For Sore Eyes" is a bit of a headfuck, among others.) Night in the Ruts never quite got that crazy, but they really cut loose here, and the lyrics sheet of this album frequently seems like the incoherent ramblings of a diseased mind.

But it's that level of wholehearted insanity that helps salvage this album. When Steven Tyler goes nuts, he goes nuts with his whole body and soul. Right from those howling shrieks that open the album, you know you're getting something insane, but if the album could sustain that from 10 tracks it might've been a more rewarding listen than even Draw the Line. But the thing about that level of insanity is that it can't possibly be maintained - by its very nature it burns hot and fast, and by the end of the album we'll see the whole enterprise up in smoke. But for a few tracks - and more than you'd expect - there's something cooking on this album.



It's not that I think these two cuts are rock and roll classics, or even among Aerosmith's top 50 songs ever. I praise them, though. By reputation, they are supposed to be some of the worst songs ever, and they're not. "Lightning Strikes," written by "Chip Away At The Stone" scribe Richie Supa, is the rare moment of focus on this album, where things really come together and you think the album can't be all bad. With a little bit of professionalism and a little bit of room to go crazy, the band sounds like a revitalized version of its old self. There's nothing quite this dynamic on the earlier albums, and we get a taste of what a Tyler/Crespo/Dufay Aerosmith could have sounded like at its best. It must be said that, all through the album, Crespo and Dufay are not bad guitarists. It's not much of an insult to observe that they're not Joe Perry and Brad Whitford, because anyway they weren't in a position where they were going to get the best material anyway, what with turmoil and all.

This wasn't going to be the type of song that set the chart on fire in 1982, and yet it doesn't sound awful in 2012 (to this admittedly biased source) so they must have done something right.

Rock in a Hard Place (1983)

A major critical re-assessment of the Aerosmith catalogue - especially this number - is probably never going to happen. Rock lovers the world over are pretty comfortable with the narrative: the slow climb followed by the quick decline, followed by a meteoric return. This is the fall. This is, in fact, the bottom. Joe Perry is not in the band. Steven Tyler is wacked out on drugs. The band basically has no direction. You really don't need to listen to this album. You can guess what it sounds like, and you'd be half right.

What you'd never guess is that all that mess churned out something damn near listenable. Most of the songs aren't worse than the filler parts of their 90's albums. They make a bunch of bizarre, drug-motivated decisions that come within an inch of actually working, stuff you'd never try if you were in a band with its sanity intact. The difference between Steven Tyler's band and any other rock band in history is, as I've pointed out already, Steven's very particular form of insanity. Properly harnessed, you get brilliant rock. Unchecked, you get fascinating messes.

The rest of the band plays good on this album. Musically it might be better that Ruts, top to bottom. Steven's vocals are completely wacked out and his lyrics are often gibberish (and when they're not they're sometimes stranger.) There's not another Aerosmith album that sounds quite this crazy. It's loud and proud. It's only badly thought of because it's not cool to praise it, and because it wasn't "in" when it came out.

That's the point I think I've been edging toward this whole time. When you're hot, you can do no wrong. When you're on top, or you might be the next big thing, your every choice seems to be the right one. But when you're not... boy, when you're on the outside, sometimes there's not a damn thing you can do to get back. I'm not saying the band deserved to regain its popularity with this album, only that whatever merits it has are firmly outweighed by the fact that the band that made it was never going to create a classic album anyway. That's not how the story goes.

I almost skipped over it, but I really need to work with this one. Before I can keep going with the story, I need to pull the cover back on what "bad" Aerosmith looks like. Oh, it's fucking crazy, and nobody's idea of a great record... but it's not my idea of a bad one, either.

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