Gems (1988)

Seeking to monetize its Aerosmith back catalog in the wake of their renewed popularity, Aerosmith's original label, Columbia, compiled this follow-up to their original 1980 Greatest Hits set. It's the kind of compilation I've rarely seen, where few if any of the tracks were hits, and many of them weren't released as singles, but all represent the strength of the band's deep cuts - the "hidden gems" as it were. While songs like "Walk This Way," "Sweet Emotion" and "Dream On" built the band's legend up, the tracks on this album are what solidified them. Every Columbia album, including Rock in a Hard Place, is represented here, as is the non-album single "Chip Away at the Stone" on LP in its studio form for the first time. It's incredibly hard to argue with the quality or consistency of these songs, although perhaps they should be in chronological order... going from "No Surprize" to "Mama Kin" is a bit jarring.

Still, this is 100% pure Aerosmith brand rock & roll, between the thunder of "Nobody's Fault" and "Round and Round," the raunch of "Lick and a Promise" and "Critical Mass," or the inimitable grooves of "Mama Kin" and "Train Kept a-Rollin." It manages to represent what Aerosmith is to a large portion of its fanbase, to create a thorough narrative about what they do. It's still available as a budget disc under the name "Collections," usually for $8-$10, but stymieing many potential buyers who are put off by the lack of name brand recognition.

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.

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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.

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 (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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Greatest Hits (1980)

In hindsight, Aerosmith's first Greatest Hits compilation is woefully inadequate. You could fill an entire album with the songs they'd already recorded that weren't there (and later, they did, 1988's Gems.) But since Aerosmith wasn't really a band that lived on the charts, it's hard to argue with what is there. If their 1970's run could only be known for 10 songs, the only one you could argue against is "Remember (Walking in the Sand)" which could be swapped out for "No Surprize" to give the album more consistency. Still, "Remember" is at least a good track to go out on. Even "Kings and Queens," which I said was a bit of an oddity in the context of the Draw the Line album, stands tall here. The only real problem with the album is that the songs are sometimes a bit chopped-up radio edits, with the most glaring loss to me being the intro to "Sweet Emotion," whose existence is exactly what sets Aerosmith apart.

In a way, this album has become outdated, both because the story kept going and because there were new ways of looking at it. There's a few double discs out there that incorporate tracks from both the 1970's era, when they recorded for Columbia, and the 80's/90's, when they were with Geffen, but none of them have enough space to give either era its due. That's sort of why I wanted to do this site. Nothing about this band feels inessential to me, every album is like a chapter in a book, every track either a payoff or a build to one. Even the frustrating, lackluster moments have a character and importance to the story.

But what its ten "greatest hits" show is a confident, competent band writing and performing that great rock and roll story of bravado, energy, youth, desire and need, whether it's yearning for success in "Dream On" or home sweet home on "Last Child..." whether learning how to "Walk This Way" or getting "Back in the Saddle." Most importantly, seeking that "Sweet Emotion" while learning how to "Draw the Line." It's pure and simple and never dull.

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Night in the Ruts (1979)

In a way, this album, and its follow-up, are tainted by history. For the story of Aerosmith to reach maximum compelling factor, they have to plummet into a creative and commercial abyss. To a degree this is accurate: Aerosmith recorded their worst records between 1978 and 1983, and were rewarded with dwindling sales. True, all true.

And yes, it's no surprise (italicized for pun-emphasis) this album is lackluster. Turmoil, drugs, fighting, creative exhaustion... 5 years of professional drug use and rock stardom will take its toll. They weren't a band that could record an album business as usual, crank out a hit and go tour. Even judging from the difference between Rocks and Draw The Line, this band has to move in some direction. And here, even if the results aren't the most gratifying, there's an effort to try something. As on Draw the Line, there's a strong reliance on the rhythm section, with Joe Perry leaving during the course of recording this. The guitars don't suck on it, but there's a less defined guitar identity than any other Aerosmith album. Which is probably why it was considered to be such a failure by critics, being that it is a hard rock album and all.

What they end up with is about half a good album. A few songs are quite good, a few are almost there, and a few are junk to some degree or another. If nothing else, all these mediocre-to-okay songs sound like they go together, and not like they're just re-writing old songs. I often say the worst thing a rock album can be is boring, and it isn't that, so... away we go.

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Live! Bootleg (1978) "Chip Away At The Stone" & "Come Together"

Although the main purpose of this album is to chart Aerosmith's existence as a studio recording and songwriting band... it can't be denied that a great deal of their existence was spent as one of the top live acts. They've released a lot of Live albums, and I've always liked them as a way of highlighting their real essence. It's great to see what songs are picked, what gets done with them, and what gets done with them. Note the slow, oozy "Lord of the Thighs," the talkbox on "Walk This Way," the incorporation of "Strangers in the Night" into "Train Kept A Rollin." It's also a testament to the validity of those album tracks like "Sick as a Dog" or "Sight For Sore Eyes" that crop up here and there as vital parts of the show.

Most of the album hails from their late-70's days when they were just sliding off the top of the world. The drugs and tensions seem to make the performances just unpredictable enough to justify paying for them again - no polish here - but fortunately they're not in any way lifeless or otherwise wrong. Taken out of the studio, they don't miss a beat and jettison anything they don't need, while adding a lot of flourishes here and there.

The album also contains some really cool, unique moments. Near the end are two olde-tyme covers from the early days of their act, "I Ain't Got You" (Yardbirds) and "Mother Popcorn," (James Brown) which feature Steven using his weird "first album voice." It also has Aero fans' first glimpse on record of "Chip Away At The Stone" which was released in as a single and would later be on compilations.

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Chip Away is a pretty cool song, and I think you could be forgiven for thinking it was either an obscure cover, a la "Big Ten Inch Record," but it was written for them by outside collaborator Richie Supa. Compared to the albums released on either side of it, it feels out of place, more in the mode of their Toys in the Attic days, with its crisp, ringing riff and consistent lyrical theme. It's a level of songwriting the band wasn't getting to anymore, which then allowed them to open up and rock out.



Their cover of "Come Together" is one of those great moments when a rock classic is covered, given new life, but not fundamentally altered. I think it's because Steven Tyler and Joe Perry were pretty much born wrapped inside the late-era Beatles mode, and were thus one of the few bands capable of reaching this mode of funky grit. Steven in particular is one of the few vocalists, like John Lennon, capable of delivering words like "He rollercoaster / He got early warnin / He got muddy water / He got mojo filter... totally naturally like they mean something, and the rest of the band just takes up residence right inside that riff, making it their own without changing the structure. The Beatles are almost never outdone by covers - and this one may not quite outdo the original - but it does what a great cover should, combining the two acts into a seamless blend. It was also pretty much the best thing about the misbegotten Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band movie. Years later, in his book, Steven would bemoan being killed by Peter Frampton.

Draw the Line (1977)

Every album Aerosmith recorded is a chapter in the story. They are statements of time an place, charting the band's rise, peak, fall, and re-climb, to rock greatness. So the story goes, what goes up must come down. If you could graph the band's artistic quality, popularity, and emotional health, each point on the timeline marks progress in one direction or another: up or down.

Draw the Line is where that downward trajectory begins, which didn't cease until the late 1980's. In an interview on the documentary "The Making of Pump," bassist Tom Hamilton relates the experience of Aerosmith in the 70's: There was a streak, from 1973 to 1976, where each album was a step up from the last, an improvement, a progression. Draw the Line was the first album they did where they did not feel like they had bettered themselves.

Draw the Line is for sure a different album. I think I can hear frustration setting in... the motivating factors that drove songs like "Last Child" and "Back in the Saddle," as well as "Sick as a Dog" and "Lick and a Promise" have turned oppressive, stifling. There's a street level sloppiness marking this album. The songs feels more jammy and less distinguished. It's either the sound of the band shrinking away from a challenge (and into drugs,) or just trying to fall back on what feels natural. Creatively it's easy to see this album as a disappointment, and yet...

It's not all that unpleasant to listen to in its entirety. There's a lot less lofty reaching (the one track that does aspire to high art seems very out of place.) A lot of the tracks tread the same ground, but in a way that's the album's saving grace because it's at least consistent. It has a dirty up-front-ness to it that none of the previous albums had, showing the band's debt to the New York Dolls a bit. It's a mess, but a very direct one.

There's a thing I sometimes find myself saying at my other blog. As a critic, I know this album is not perfect. I know it's a frustrated, messy album that takes a lot of missteps and isn't nearly as rich of a listening experience as Rocks or Toys. It's flawed. And yet, I still can't stop listening to it. With 9 tracks, not one of them is certifiably bad. Mostly they sit together perfectly well, and carry a charm that a "bad" album shouldn't have. If you're an Aerosmith fan, if you're likely to be reading this blog, you can't write this album off at all. We know this band is capable of so much more, and yet, when you take it all away, if this is what's left, it still works.

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Rocks (1976)

This album has had complete hold of me since I was about 12 years old. I remember making the decision to sit down with this album. Up until then I was mostly a "greatest hits" guy. I had a lot of the later Aerosmith albums and several compilations and live recordings. Through this, I was familiar with the first two tracks, "Back in the Saddle" and "Last Child," which will be discussed soon. I was 12 years old and just getting into the internet and would read reviews on sites like Allmusic, which pointed to Rocks as the definitive peak of the band's early career. Maybe it was my age, but the way the world seemed to open up before me after "Last Child" ended and "Rats in the Cellar" began was a feeling that will always remain with me.

There's no escape on this album. There's no moment of breath. There's no safety or comfort. It is a gloomy, hectic, extremely crushing album. Whereas the previous one was built on levity, and a desire to transcend, Rocks feels stuck on Earth, mired in darkness. There's a lot of angst, dissatisfaction with one's situation and other people, consequences to negative actions, regret, fear, panic... it's the dark side of a good time, something the band would've been well acquainted with by 1976.

It's not exactly a lecture on morality. It's a great album because the points, such as they are, are demonstrated through the music itself, through mood and execution. I've praised the songwriting up until now as very in-the-moment, very modernist, very point of view. They're not telling stories, they're capturing moments. That's a very powerful thing to do, and is rarely done to such a great degree in rock music, then or now.

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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.

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Get Your Wings (1974)

In hindsight, Get Your Wings is one of Aerosmith's most consistent (and satisfying) albums. Even their best albums tend to pursue a lot of different directions, but from beginning to end, this one works as a very straightforward hard rock piece. The whole thing sounds like it came together a lot easier, more intuitively, like they're no longer guessing about what kind of band they can be. While there's a bit of disconnect between "Movin' Out" and "Somebody," or "Dream On" and "Make It," all the tracks on the second album feel like they belong together, whether they're about a crime gone bad, having sex on a train, outer space, bad weather, or having sex on a beach. If all the songs weren't great, you might say it's repetitive, but even after their next few albums, Rolling Stone once referred to Wings as their best.

Although it doesn't have all my favourite songs, Get Your Wings is probably my favourite Aerosmith album to listen to from beginning to end. The best tracks are excellent, and the lesser-known ones do a great job reminding you of their worth.

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Aerosmith (1973)

Aerosmith's self-titled album has a reputation of being formative: the sound of a band finding itself, with a commendable but not exceptional album. I'd agree, to a point. It's clear now that Aerosmith's best days were ahead of them, for songwriting and performance, but even the weakest tracks on this album have merit as Steven Tyler and Joe Perry hammer out the terms of their songwriting partnership. There's also a thinness to the production that downplays Tyler's spacier instincts, leaving the album feeling a bit cozy, about the size of the small clubs they were playing rather than the stadiums they'd letter sell out. Tyler also admits, in his autobiography, to throwing on a half-assed "black" voice in the studio, when it wasn't his natural way of performing, leading to a sort of self-sabotage.

In the end, the album's main strengths are in its potential: Tyler and Perry aren't necessarily writing their best songs, but they are demonstrating a good sense of songwriting. Tyler's vocals are uncharacteristic on most of the songs, but the musicianship is there, if perhaps a bit too tight and clean. The album has a streetwise boogie to it that was always there on later albums, but doesn't feel explosive.

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