Even so, it’s one of the band’s very best – just a notch down from Toys In The Attic and Rocks. Joe Perry walked out on Aerosmith halfway through the making of their 1979 album Night In The Ruts. Reefer Head Woman (Night In The Ruts, 1979)
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Rock In A Hard Place is full of killer songs, none better than Bolivian Ragamuffin, with a cranking, badass riff that’s quintessential Aerosmith – a dagger to Joe Perry’s heart. Never mind the Stonehenge cover art: Spinal Tap before Spinal Tap. And while Tyler was by own admission strung out at this point, he roused himself to perform at optimum level. Amazingly, the two guitarists that came into the group, Jimmy Crespo and Rick ‘The Doof’ Dufay, sounded just like the real thing. No Aerosmith album is as underrated as Rock In A Hard Place, recorded after Joe Perry and Brad Whitford had left the band. Bolivian Ragamuffin (Rock In A Hard Place, 1982) The Bad Boys from Boston never sounded badder. Somehow, from the murk they pulled out a half-great record with a frantic, frazzled title track, a moody epic in Kings And Queens and, in I Wanna Know Why, a gloriously whacked-out, high-octane rock’n’roll song. I Wanna Know Why (Draw The Line, 1977)īy 1977, when Draw The Line was released, Tyler and Perry were pretty much gone – deadened by heavy drug use, they were running on empty, the band fast unraveling. And in this were the seeds of the great funky songs that Aerosmith made in the mid-70s – Walk This Way and Last Child. Tyler gets into it without resorting to parody. For a bunch of white boys, they had an intuitive feel for the song. It eventually surfaced five years later on the double live album Live Bootleg. And Aerosmith were as funky as any rock band of the era – as proven by their version of Mother Popcorn, a song originally written and recorded by the Godfather Of Funk, James Brown.Īerosmith cut the track in 1973 for a Boston radio broadcast. There were rock’n’roll bands that got the funk – Free, Skynyrd, Trapeze. In the early ‘70s it was the golden age of funk, with bands such as Parliament, The Commodores and The Ohio Players laying down the law with the heaviest grooves. And what Steven Tyler brought to this version – smarter lyrics, and super-sized rock star charisma – took it to a whole new level. But it was always, in sound and spirit, an Aerosmith song. Let The Music Do The Talking was originally recorded by The Joe Perry Project in 1980. There was just one great song on the album, and even that wasn’t new. And while their producer Ted Templeman had so many cut great records in the past – notably with Van Halen and Montrose – this was one turd he couldn’t polish. Although the original line-up reunited for Done With Mirrors, they struggled to recapture that old magic. If ever a comeback album fell flat on its arse, it was the one that Aerosmith released in 1985. Let The Music Do The Talking (Done With Mirrors, 1985) With Steven Tyler blowing harmonica, it is, in the parlance of the times, a blast. And among the deeper cuts is Write Me A Letter, a funky rock song rooted in rhythm and blues. Another, Mama Kin, was later covered by Guns N’ Roses. For Aerosmith, the ballad Dream On became a signature song. Write Me A Letter (Aerosmith, 1973)Īerosmith’s first album was one of a number of classic American hard rock debuts released in 1973, alongside those by Montrose and the New York Dolls and Lynyrd Skynyrd. File next to ZZ Top’s Heaven, Hell Or Houston as one of the strangest songs ever made by a major rock band. What it proved is that Aerosmith didn’t need drugs to get totally out there. The one voice that is heard is not Steven Tyler’s – instead, it’s a woman speaking in an arcane language, reported to be Gaelic.
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The Movie is essentially an instrumental jam, built around a heavy, hypnotic riff.