"Sweet Emotion" & "Walk This Way"

For all the raving I do about Steven Tyler's lyrics and Joe Perry's guitars, there are times I need to point out that what Aerosmith is, is an awesome band. Five guys playing together, always on the same page. "Sweet Emotion" has a great part for everyone, from Tom Hamilton's superstar bassline, and Joe Perry's ethereal talkbox, to the tight groovy percussion, (including drums that appear to be backmasked) to the singalong chorus and the explosive coda. It's one of those songs that's more of an atmosphere than a statement. You just kinda go along with the feeling. As great as the lyrics are, they're almost afterthoughts, decoration, there to interchange with the guitar riff that drives the piece. They're delivered with a bit of fire, a bit of smack-talk, but the chorus delivers relief. It's a yin-yang thing.



"Walk This Way" is a quintessential rock song, in the oldest tradition, talking about a teenage loser learning how to hang with the cool kids and get laid. It's the rock and roll fantasy, the music can somehow make you cool enough to get noticed by the hot chicks at your school.

Dig the guitars. For one, the outro to the song has one of the best dual-guitar interactions on record. Then there's three main riffs in the song: The intro, which is a classic tease, like "Satisfaction." Then there's the one under Tyler's prototypic-rap verses, which is skittering and anxious. Then finally there's the one that accompanies the chorus, echoing out like fanfare. It's actually meant to simulate a brass section. After the bluster of thoughts unreeled in the verses, the solution comes so simple: Walk this way! Talk this way! Walk this way (da-da-da!) Talkthis way! (da-da-da!) And that's what rock and roll is, the escape from a complicated world into a simple moment of clarity. "Walk This Way" isn't a phrase that pops immediately to mind when this subject comes up, but it seems to say so much anyway.

This song is one of those moments in rock where everything just fucking works.

"Big Ten Inch Record," "Round and Round" & "You See Me Crying"

Here are three tracks from the same album that could hardly be more different if they came from different bands. "Big Ten Inch Record" is a cheeky old blues song that lends the album an intimate juke-joint feel, but doesn't seem tacky or kitschy: it's a real piece of the show.

But so is the extreme metal (for 1975) of "Round and Round," one of those rare occasions where the guitars completely overwhelm all the other instruments, with that clinical, mechanical, nonstop cycling riff that just keeps spiraling onward and onward. It's a good demonstration of the difference between Joe Perry (who writes riffs like "Walk this Way") and Brad Whitford, who wrote this one. Brad is a bit more technical, and it leads to this whopping, angular sound in songs he contributes to, which often feel inescapable.

And then in like cool rain comes the opening piano of "You See Me Crying." Maybe not one of their best ballads, but definitely one that proves the band had an interest in such things before "I Don't Wanna Miss a Thing" or "Angel." Admittedly, the form hadn't been so completely solidified by the mid-70's, but this one is more recognizable as a power ballad than "Dream On" or "Seasons of Wither," with its swelling winds and strings.

"Adam's Apple" & "No More No More"

The thing I love about Toys in the Attic is that it's full of great songs, but songs that are great for extremely weird reasons. Songs that can hardly be emulated, let alone originated, by a different band. Okay, Led Zeppelin had spiritual and fantasy aspirations, and a sex drive to match, but did they ever combine them so thoroughly and to such great effect as Aerosmith does here?

We've already established that Steven Tyler is an incredibly eccentric fellow. He's not just a sex-addicted drug abuser, he's an old school hippie truth seeker with belief in nature goddesses and aliens and other dimensions. So we get literally all those things wrapped up in his retelling of the original sin.

And we're lucky, because as weird and high-minded and baffling as this song is, it works because it comes full on in a burst of rock and roll swagger, one of those classic riffs (hey, there's a lot of those on this album!) and an attention-getting line like "Lordy, it was love at first bite!" Tyler's not a tepid person, so he throws himself right into this Biblical role. I guess it's to be expected from someone who used the title of a literary classic to refer to a pimp with an affinity for women's legs, and changed the meaning of the second word in "Pandora's Box."



One of those hidden gems of the album is "No More No More," one of the most "Seventies" songs the band ever did. It's got something in common with groups like Boston or Rod Stewart, but it still kicks the shit out of them on the instrumentation alone, to say nothing of the lyrics. I do think it has some of the best lines of that early songbook:

Following a great, even uncharacteristically dreamlike arpeggiated riff (the band was full of old Beatlemaniacs, after all) we wake up to the grim reality of Tyler's rock and roll dream, first alluded to on tracks like "Mama Kin:"

Blood stains the ivories on my daddy's Baby grand
I ain't seen the daylight since I started this band

An unsympathetic chorus chimes in: No more, no more! No more, no more!

Store bought clothes fallin' apart at the seams
Tea leaf readin' gypsies Fortune tellin' my dreams (I have to admit, I always thought the lyrics was the somewhat more crass "Titty-flittin' gypsies.")

Holiday inns, lock the door with a chain
You love it and you hate it but to me they're all the same

And then later:

Times they're a changin, nothin' ever stands still
If I don't stop changin, I'll be writin' out my will

It's the same old story
Never get a second chance
For a dance to the top of the hill

Time and again, Steven Tyler demonstrates a willingness to revisit old lyrics. Sometimes it's a bit cheap, but in this early case it's weirdly prophetic. In this song, he refers to himself as a dreamer (per "Dream On") and borrows half the chorus of "Same Old Song and Dance." It has the effect of mythologizing large swathes of Aero-discography, checking in with the band throughout their 40-year continuity. Here he is young and feels sure he won't get a second chance (see: "Make It") but over a decade later we find just the opposite to be true: that they lost everything and got it back later.

"Uncle Salty"

There's a lot more going on on the Toys in the Attic album than just sex and drugs. "Uncle Salty" is ostensibly a song about the type of neglect and abuse that causes a girl to grow up wrong. Like most of the album, the lyrics are incredibly difficult to wring meaning out of, although they carry ominous overtones. The almost detached, inhuman tenor of Tyler's voice (somehow electronically altered, I suspect) is set to an almost cliche blues-rock rhythm, which you might recognize as Shania Twain's "Man I Feel Like A Woman" (thereby dulling the song's coolness factor just a bit.)

But what's really exceptionally strong about this song - a lot of Aerosmith songs in the long run, but this is a great example - is that it pins down its meaning and spirit in just a short hook, which incorporates Tyler's lyrics and delivery, and Joe Perry and Brad Whitford's soaring, empathic guitars. Particularly in the refrain that starts at 1:09 in this video:

When she cried at night, no-one came...
(a lonely guitar rings out, like sobs in the night)
When she cried at night -
(The guitar begins - slowly, then picking up pace - a brutal death march)
-- Went insane!
(Guitar, and Tyler, wail up a storm.)
Oooh... it's a sunny day outside my window...

As the crying riff that has already been present in the song rings out, it is now attached to that line as it's repeated over and over again, summing up the entire meaning of the song while still leaving the listener to ponder it. The whole thing comes together... in one. Fucking. Line.

Now don't you dare tell me this isn't a fucking brilliant band. This isn't even considered one of their best songs.

"Toys in the Attic"

This song, to me, has always been that awesome kind of inexplicable. There's that ultra-manic guitar riff that urges the entire song along, which fills you with adrenaline and fist-pumping excitement, the kind that few bands manage to accomplish. There's that incredibly chantable lyric: "TOYS! TOYS! TOYS! IN THE ATTIC!" which has no discernible meaning or context (it's been said to be a reference to insanity) but makes you want to sing along like you're part of something. Then there's the other lyrics:

Lights
Voices scream
Nothing's seen
Real's a dream

Leaving the things that are real behind
Leaving the things that you love in mind
All of the things that you've learned from fear
Nothing is left but the years...

From two years earlier, Steven Tyler was writing some very ponderous, philosophical lyrics to go along with Joe Perry's bloozy riffs. What we have here is beautiful, evocative nonsense. The meaning they carry - one of confusion and exasperation with the "real world," seeking escape - is not explicitly spelled out, but expressed in their obscurity, urgent delivery, and composition. It's getting maximum usage out of the fewest words, the easiest to hook people in.

Ultimately, the meaning of "Toys in the Attic," the secrets its lyrics and music conceal, aren't as important as the energy it emits. By now, Aerosmith were in the game of playing huge venue to thousands of paying fans. They created for the fans something loud and visceral and intuitive: rock you can feel and not need to know.

Toys in the Attic (1975)

Critically, Toys in the Attic is taken for granted a little bit. "Yes, yes, it has 'Walk This Way' and 'Sweet Emotion' on it, well done." Those are two amazing songs, but the entire album has a vibe that epitomizes Aerosmith so well. It has the raunchy, smirking blues of "Big Ten Inch Record" a few widescreen flights of fantasy, some serious but not heavy-handed philosophy, and a ballad that is completely the opposite of the one on the previous album.

If you're a teenage boy, this album is like your cool older brother. It doesn't know everything, but it knows more than you, and you just want to hear what it has to say. It shows growth, or a confidence in revealing more different sides, perhaps due to Steven's satisfaction with tracks like "Seasons of Wither." It's very worldly and shows not only the band's adeptness and playing around with its style, but Steven Tyler's completely deranged worldview. On the title track, and a few other tracks on the album, he invokes strange imagery, vague metaphors, and strangely profound snippets that don't seem, at a glance, like they belong next to the raunchy, sexy stuff. I'm not saying it's exactly deep, only that when you look at it, it's an interesting and weird thing to have been a hit rock record. But that sense of excitement, of otherworldliness, which pervades Toys in the Attic, was why the kids were all shelling out to see this band perform in their hometown. It was a glimpse at something outside their own headspace.

But this album now: iTunes Canada // iTunes USA // Amazon.ca // Amazon.com