Aerosmith
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The Boston band's first album was a solid slab of hard rock that initially attracted little attention outside of New England. This album and the song "Dream On" became a hit only after the release of Aerosmith's third album, TOYS IN THE ATTIC. Columbia re-released AEROSMITH in 1976 and put out "Dream On" as a single, 3 years after its original release.
After entering a partnership with Frank Connelly, David Krebs and Steve Leber invited members of two record labels – Atlantic Records and Columbia Records – to view an Aerosmith concert at Max's Kansas City. Clive Davis, the president of Columbia, was impressed with the band and Aerosmith signed with Columbia in the summer of 1972. Although lead singer Steven Tyler had been in several previous groups, most of the band members had never been in a studio before. The band was heavily influenced by many of the British blues/rock bands of the 1960s, including The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, the Yardbirds, and Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac.
Get Your Wings
Get Your Wings: Tour Dates 1974
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By the time Aerosmith released its second album, the band was still a year away from its first top-40 hit. GET YOUR WINGS was the first time the five-piece band hooked up with eventual long-time producer Jack Douglas, and the result was an eight-song juggernaut of slashing guitars, pounding rhythms, and in-your-face attitude. Keeping in touch with its roots, Aerosmith recruited the horn section from Elephant's Memory to back them on the sassy "Same Old Song and Dance" and "Pandora's Box." The band's homage continued on a scathing cover of Tiny Bradshaw's "Train Kept a Rollin'" (originally done by Aerosmith's heroes, the Yardbirds), a track that became a fixture in the band's live set.
True street survivors, Aerosmith also included songs about the prostitutes strolling outside the band's New York City recording studio "Lord of the Thighs" and the edgy inevitabilities of living on the wrong side of the tracks "S.O.S. (Too Bad)". The band's best and most overlooked song on this record and in its canon is "Seasons of Wither," a melancholy epic penned by Steven Tyler during a windy winter day in New Hampshire.
Toys in the Attic
Toys in the Attic: Tour Dates 1975
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A truly inventive Aerosmith album, still suffused with a gloriously raspy sense of the blues, but quietly evocative in its timbre and approach. It showed Tyler working out lyrics that were so much more than simple cars and girls fodder, 'Adam's Apple' theorizing that creation could quite possibly have occurred with an alien mothership landing on earth and setting the wheels of the human race in motion. 'Sweet Emotion' throbbed slowly into life, 'Big Ten Inch Record', a salty R&B work-out, while 'You See Me Crying' was heightened and given body by a warm orchestration. A clear steeple of great work amid a skyline of repeating successes.
According to Jack Douglas, "Aerosmith was a different band when we started the third album. They'd been playing Get Your Wings on the road for a year and had become better players - different. It showed in the riffs that Joe [Perry] and Brad [Whitford] brought back from the road for the next album. Toys in the Attic was a much more sophisticated record than the other stuff they'd done." In the band memoir Walk This Way, guitarist Joe Perry stated, "When we started to make Toys in the Attic, our confidence was built up from constant touring.
Rocks
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One of the reasons why Aerosmith, after a number of creatively lean years, are still given legendary credence and an eager ear with each new release, Rocks encapsulated the very essence of rock 'n' roll. They may have been the target of detractors who still pinned them as nothing more than a poor man's Rolling Stones, but Rocks pioneered a strength and swagger and real depth that remains very nearly unsurpassed.
Many Aero fans will point to Toys as the band's quintessential album (it contained two radio/concert standards after all, "Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion"), but out of all their albums, Rocks did the best job of capturing Aerosmith at their most raw and rocking. Like its predecessor, a pair of songs have become their most renowned -- the menacing, hard rock, cowboy-stomper "Back in the Saddle," as well as the downright viscous funk groove of "Last Child." Again, even the lesser-known tracks prove essential to the makeup of the album, such as the stimulated "Rats in the Cellar" (a response of sorts to "Toys in the Attic"), the Stonesy "Combination," and the forgotten riff-rocker "Get the Lead Out." Also included is the apocalyptic "Nobody's Fault," the up-and-coming rock star tale of "Lick and a Promise," and the album-closing ballad "Home Tonight." With Rocks, Aerosmith appeared to be indestructible.
Affilitates
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