Seasons of Wither: Aerosmith’s Get Your Wings at 50
Looking back on the Boston legends’ sophomore classic
Every once in a while, someone in one of my social media feeds will pose the question: “What is the greatest three-album run in rock history?”
Plenty of great bands and answers spring immediately to mind: Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon, Wish You Were Here, Animals), Talking Heads (Fear of Music, Remain in Light, Speaking in Tongues) and U2 (War, The Unforgettable Fire, The Joshua Tree) are just a few examples.
Not mentioned as often: Aerosmith, who kicked off an amazing three-album run on March 15, 1974, with their second release, Get Your Wings.
The record almost didn’t happen. Columbia wanted to drop the band after their eponymous (is that word ever used anywhere other than articles about record albums?) debut failed to make as big a splash as they’d hoped. “Dream On,” that album’s megatrack, did well enough in Aerosmith’s native Boston, but didn’t really break out nationally until it was re-released in late 1975. Besides, Columbia was far more interested in promoting their “New Dylan,” some guy named Springsteen. Wonder whatever happened to him.
Anyway, Columbia kept Aerosmith and asked Jack Douglas to produce. Douglas, a touring musician for half a decade (he backed Chuck Berry, among others), was working at the legendary Record Plant studio and engineering the debut album from the New York Dolls when he got the call.
“The big challenge for the band was that Joe [Perry] and Brad [Whitford] were not the guitar players they had in their mind to be,” Douglas recalls as part of a Record Plant history project. “They wanted to play these solos like Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, but they didn’t have the technical expertise to do that. I suggested that for a number of tracks we bring in someone else to play the leads. They wanted to kill me.
“I brought in Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner,” Douglas continued. “One guy became Brad and one guy became Joe and they played very important solos across that album. Steven [Tyler], by the way, was totally with me on this. … I insisted that Steven sing with his real voice. On that first album he had this voice that wasn’t even him. It was like a made-up voice that he thought sounded English or something.”
With Douglas at the helm, and with the band having toured extensively to strengthen their chops following the first album, Aerosmith delivered a rock-solid album that is arguably their true debut.
Get Your Wings kicks off with “Same Old Song and Dance,” as pure a dose of great ‘70s Aerosmith as exists anywhere. A powerful rocker built for raucous arenas with a singalong refrain – “It’s the same old story, same old song and dance, my friend” – the lyrics about a slanted legal system tend to get lost in the stomping beat, the screaming guitars and Michael Brecker’s terrific sax solo.
Up next is “Lord of the Thighs,” the last song written for the album. As Tyler explained in his autobiography, Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?, the lyrics “came from the seedy area where we recorded the album. ‘Lord of the Thighs’ was about a pimp and the wildlife out on the street.” It works as a self-referential brag for Tyler, too. And check out Joey Kramer’s drums that kick it off – one beat less in the pattern and you have the kick off to “Walk This Way” from the following year’s Toys in the Attic.
Much has been made of “Train Kept a Rollin’,” often referred to as a Yardbirds song, but actually a tune first recorded by Tiny Bradshaw in 1951. Johnny Burnette took Tiny’s jump-blues version and reshaped it as a rockabilly track in 1956. The Yardbirds revisited it in 1965 as a psychedelic blues and again a year later with Jimmy Page for the 1966 movie, Blowup. After moving on from the Yardbirds to form Led Zeppelin in 1968, Page used the tune as a concert opener (here’s an example from 1969). With all of that song’s pedigree, it’s pretty remarkable that Aerosmith’s version, the second track on side two, is considered by so many as the best.
VIDEO: Aerosmith performs “Train Kept A Rollin'” on The Midnight Special 8/16/74
“Train…” is followed up on side two by “Seasons of Whither,” inspired by the winter landscape near a Massachusetts house Tyler was living in. “I used to lie in my bed at dawn, listening to the wind in the bare trees, how lonely and melancholy it sounded,” Tyler wrote in his autobiography. “I was pissed off about my taxes and getting mad helps me to write, so one night I went down to the basement where we had a rug on the floor and a couple of boxes for furniture and took a few Tunials and a few Seconals and I scooped up this guitar Joey gave me, this dumpster guitar, and I lit some incense and wrote ‘Seasons of Wither.'” When Aerosmith kicked off their aborted Peace Out tour on September 2, 2023, in Philadelphia, “Wither” was the only song from this album included in the 18-song set.
The other most notable of the eight tracks here is the album closer, “Pandora’s Box,” which lent its name to the band’s 1991 three-CD compilation of previously released and unreleased songs, live versions, alternate takes and remixes. It’s co-written by Tyler and drummer Joey Kramer, who scored his first writing credit with the track that’s a great example of not-so-subtle hard-rock euphemism.
It all adds up to an album that would eventually be certified triple-platinum in America. Douglas, quickly dubbed the sixth member of the band, stuck around for production duties on the next three albums, and continued to produce Aerosmith on and off through 2006’s Honkin’ On Bobo.
But it was the band’s third and fourth releases, 1975’s Toys in the Attic and 1976’s Rocks, that, along with Get Your Wings, completed a superlative three-album run – shooting Aerosmith into the stratosphere of rock stardom forever.
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