Classics Live! I & II (1986 & 1987)

After Aerosmith moved to Geffen Records, their previous label, Columbia, still wanted to trade in on their back catalog. The immediate result was two live albums released a year apart, one lackluster (recorded in the time Joe Perry was not with the band) and one fairly definitive (recorded just after he rejoined.)

Each is only 8 tracks long. There are only a couple of songs on either album that aren't on Live! Bootleg: "Kings and Queens," a version of "Three Mile Smile" mashed up with "Reefer Headed Woman" from Night in the Ruts (which roars a bit more live.) The most notable inclusion, however, was a studio cut called "Major Barbra," which was left off one of the early albums. I initially thought it was the self-titled debut, but it's got a bit more lush production so it was probably Get Your Wings. It has a loud, ringing, Southern rock feel with glorious slide riff and anthemic ballad chorus. It would've been a very progressive tune for those times, but they were already recording better songs (eg "Seasons of Wither.") Still, it remains a hidden gem. The rest of the album is skippable, but oddly enough, "Kings and Queens" (which I harped about being too ornate for the gritty Draw the Line) sounds great in a live setting. Still, there is absolutely no polish on these records and here it shows.



Classics Live II is actually the live Aerosmith album of choice. Like its predecessor, it's lean at 8 tracks in under 40 minutes but all the duplicates from Live Bootleg are improvements, the performances are energetic and fun and it has a cohesive atmosphere (whereas CL1 was various concerts between 1978 and 1984, CL2 was two specific concerts from 1984.) Among the "new" material is a definitive, bombastic version of the early cut "Movin' Out," a take on "Same Old Song and Dance" that is all fireworks, and a version of the Done With Mirrors single "Let The Music Do The Talking" that is better than the studio one. Conceptually, the album hangs together because it spans from the earliest song to the most recent without ever revealing a crack of daylight between them.

"Walk This Way" with Run-DMC

You can be crass and look at it as one of the best promotional moves by any band in history. Or you can be romantic and think of it as a watershed moment in the careers of two groups - and by extension their genres.

Personally I think it was just a moment of inspiration for producer Rick Rubin, a longtime rock fan who was helping build hip hop into a viable genre, who brought Run-DMC and Aerosmith together. Did Run-DMC need the approval of an aging 70's rock band? Did Aerosmith need to pursue Run-DMC's audience? Maybe not - but they both needed to get on TV.

Not only does this song sound good, but it marks the beginning of Aerosmith's visually arresting music video career. They'd done modest video clips as far back as Night in the Ruts, which felt claustrophobic and did nothing to highlight their energy. The one music video for Rock in a Hard Place, for "Lightning Strikes" saw the band in Grease thug costumes playfighting in darkness. The clip for "Let The Music Do The Talking" was okay, but still a bit tepid.

But Aerosmith is a visual band: Steven Tyler cultivated his insane rock gypsy post-hippie image, complete with head-tripping dance steps and scarf-laden mic stand, to stand out from jeans-clad bar rockers. Meanwhile Joe Perry stood by his side coolly working his guitar without a care. Their appearance while performing should speak for itself, and the music shouldn't be that hard to visualize either.

It was important that they finally got it right on MTV, but also notable that they had to go back to and shine up an old chestnut to do so. There was some essential quality in a song like "Walk This Way," beyond being easy to rap to. All the band needed was to prove they hadn't lost that quality, that it was in them. That didn't necessarily mean turning into a rap group, but it did mean moving forward in some direction.

Two years later, the rest was history...

"She's on Fire" "The Hop" & "Darkness"

Although Done with Mirrors sags a bit in the middle (I have love for "The Reason a Dog" but did not feel too bad I couldn't find videos for other songs) it ends with a trio of tracks that gets the album set right. They represent a lot of great things Aerosmith could do with an album cut. "She's on Fire" has an almost mystic slide groove. What's more it sounds utterly fresh for the first time in about 8 years for the band.



Likewise, (mind the live recording) "The Hop" isn't much more than a somewhat poppy, somewhat hooky rock song, maybe a bit cleaner than their 70's work but still energetic and with a hell of an upside.



"Darkness" is probably my favourite track on Done with Mirrors. It's a real burst of inspiration for this otherwise competent-but-by-numbers album. It rests of Steven Tyler's still capable vocals and a darkenesd jazz-blues atmosphere. The last three tracks on this album are not only high quality but quite distinct. They showed a promising focus and direction, but promise wasn't going to get this band back to the top.

Compared to future efforts, this one was a bit of a half-hearted attempt at a comeback. In a way, like its predecessors, that makes the music itself tough to talk about, and while there are successes, there are too many songs that fall flat. While Rock in a Hard Place is not necessarily as bad as it's supposed to be, this one never quite gets good enough to become a hidden gem.

They had skill. They had it together. They could do something. They just needed to give people a reason to care.

"Let The Music Do The Talking," "My Fist Your Face" & "Shame On You"

The first track, and lead single, from Aerosmith's first reunited album for Geffen was actually a cover of the title track to the first Joe Perry Project album. Steven Tyler reportedly liked it so much he felt inspired to go and write a whole new set of lyrics to make it their own (tellingly, the song is now performed at Joe Perry Project gigs with the original lyrics.) It's a pretty striking song, and gets the album off to a striking start. Longtime fans could be easily won over by an album full of songs of this calibur. From that very opening tease, through the riff, and finally the lyrics and especially the chorus, it's got a type of chemistry the band hadn't had since Draw the Line - and it equals almost everything on that album (not for nothing though, it incorporates the title track's riff.)



Likewise, "My Fist Your Face," while not much of an artistic triumph, shows the band is game. It has a kind of basic appeal, a good groove and a decent hook. It's still a fair bit removed from the glory years, but it exemplifies the backbone and rock-solidness of Mirrors, which even the worst, most forgettable tracks have. And in fact, this song has a dirty weird boogie that the next album lacked. This song itself represents one of the best obscure Aerosmith tracks: good, basic functional rock. The fundamentals in play.



Y'know, I said I'd talk about every Aerosmith song, and I've kept to that, but this is one I just have so little to say about. It's not bad... a pretty funky riff, a sort of good clean cut that the band lacked on Ruts and Hard Place... yet it lacks. It doesn't do anything, it's just there as filler, albeit filler with a decent riff.

Done With Mirrors (1985)

So after Rock in a Hard Place further cemented Aerosmith's distance from the charts and popular taste, they spent another couple of years in the woods, touring with Crespo and Dufay before Joe Perry and Brad Whitford rejoined the fold. (The story goes that Crespo was preparing to write new material and Dufay helped initiate contact between Perry and Tyler - they did not like each other.) But the first lost period of Aero history was not quite over yet.

There are a few moments in the band's discography that are cut and dried. Everyone with an interest know Toys and Rocks and Pump are great, and that Ruts and Hard Place are the dregs. While you've seen me argue against the validity of this dichotomy, I'm willing to recognize its validity. It's easy and not entirely inaccurate. But there are also those moments, as plentiful as the black-and-white ones, where the truth is a bit more gray. They tend to mark the midway points on Aerosmith's parabolic arcs... the first album and Draw the Line are two examples I've already discussed. There are more down the road, but Done With Mirrors has such a strange place in the Aero narrative that it almost doesn't exist. It was their first album for Geffen Records. It was supposed to be their comeback statement. It really wasn't.

Those that think of it at all have a lot of praise for it, but lacking era-defining hits means it's sunk into obscurity. My own thoughts are that it's a rehearsal for their real comeback, or even a farewell to their 70's selves. The material has more appeal than that on Hard Place, at the expense of being less distinguished. At times inspired but at times plain and overly clean-sounding, this just wasn't an album that was going to send this band from obscurity back to the top. It's a low risk, low reward album, a rarity in the Aero canon - if nothing else, Rock in a Hard Place and Night in the Ruts had risks. They needed a blockbuster, they wound up with an also-ran.

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"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?