Sweet Emotion: Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic at 50
Looking back on the Boston band’s most successful ’70s LP
Having progressed from a state of desperation, Aerosmith still hadn’t made its breakthrough.
Toys in the Attic, released 50 years ago this week, changed that.
The band’s self-titled debut contained one of their classic rockers in “Mama Kin” and the ground zero of power ballads, “Dream On.” But the album sold a mere 30,000 copies initially.
“Dream On” tanked as the single, which would change in the future. But for the moment, Aerosmith needed to do something or risk being dropped by Columbia.
The first thing the band did was relentlessly hit the road, opening for the likes of Mahavishnu Orchestra, The Kinks, Slade, Black Sabbath and Mott The Hoople.
The result was an ego-driven bettering of their craft through all those accumulated hours onstage.
“We were very competitive,” bassist Tom Hamilton told Classic Rock in 2016. “There’s a lot of bands I like and respect now, but back then all I did was think of them as the people we wanted to blow off the stage.”
The other key element would be a guy who’d been a musician, but started as a janitor when he went to the studio side. Staying at New York’s Record Plant, Jack Douglas worked his way up to engineer, working with a plethora of big names who came through, including John Lennon and Alice Cooper.
It was his work on School’s Out and Billion Dollar Babies that led Cooper’s producer, Bob Ezrin, to suggest that Douglas move up to producing.
Douglas was leaning in that direction, having become the de facto producer of the New York Dolls’ debut due to his temperament being a better fit with the band than Todd Rundgren.
Taking Ezrin’s suggestion to go up to Canada, he picked up his first official production credit, for the band Crowbar. It led to his being brought in to co-produce Aerosmith’s follow-up, Get Your Wings.
Douglas may have understood the artistic temperament, but he also wasn’t about to bullshit the band. He felt singer Steven Tyler’s voice was becoming affected and challenged him to stop it. He also felt guitarists Joe Perry and Brad Whitford weren’t there yet.
“The big challenge for the band was that Joe and Brad were not the guitar players they had in their mind to be. They wanted to play these solos like Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, but they didn’t have the technical expertise to do that,” Douglas said at a NAMM presentation in 2018. “I suggested that for a number of tracks we bring in someone else to play the leads. They wanted to kill me. ‘What! On our own record. Some of the most important leads on our own record?’”
Douglas got his way, but Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner, who played the solos in question, didn’t just play and leave. They worked with Perry and Whitford on how to play them, valuable instruction that paid off on the road
when Aerosmith toured Get Your Wings. There would be no suggestion of ghost players for Toys in the Attic.
The producer wasn’t going to put up with egos getting out of hand in other ways. Early on, Perry was hit with a loud burst of feedback in his headphones and let out a stream of expletives and questioning the competence of every one with Ezrin and label execs present.
“Jack walks up to me, kind of squats down next to me, pulls the headphones off my ears, and he goes, ‘If you want to talk to me, let’s go in the other room, but if you talk to me like that again in public, I’m going to have to bust you in the jaw.’ That’s when I got my first lesson in studio etiquette. Ever since then, we’ve been buddies,” Perry said at NAMM.
Douglas also used more upbeat tactics. “Jack was good for positive reinforcement,” Whitford told SPIN in 2015. “He was like a coach: ‘That’s good, go with that. Work it, work it!’ It was fun.”
The result was a better, more consistent album than the debut, containing band standards like “Same Old Song and Dance,” “S.O.S. (Too Bad)” and the cover of “Train Kept a Rollin” as well as underrated classics like “Seasons of Wither.” The album wasn’t huge, but it did the job of buying the band time.
When the band entered the studio again in January, 1975 sharpened by more months on the road and with ideas from a week’s worth of December jam sessions with Douglas (who was becoming a sort of sixth member of the band), it was confident, improved and ready.
For all they’d shown, they hadn’t had a big hit song. This was about to change, even though the songs came together well into the six-days-a-week, 16-hours-a-day recording sessions.
VIDEO: Aerosmith “Sweet Emotion”
The first came from a soon-to-be memorable bass riff that Tom Hamilton had in his pocket (along with some guitar ideas) for a couple years. Not being one of the band’s main songwriters, he was shy about sharing it at the time, until the opportunity presented itself.
“In New York, we had finished the basic tracks and had an extra day in the studio, and Jack says, ‘Does anybody have any ideas that we haven’t tried yet?’ I raised my hand and we started working on it. We cut the song the same day, and everybody was saying, ‘Nice one, man!,'” Hamilton told Classic Rock.
Tyler married the track with lyrics at least partially about Perry’s soon-to-be-wife, who was the girlfriend who the guitarist moved in with a few years earlier, meaning the singer no longer lived under the same roof as his friend and chief collaborator.
Perry and Tyler later handled the overdubs while the rest of the band went back to Boston. Hamilton was blown away by the finished song, boosted by nasty guitar work and by the fully realized rock star swagger Tyler brought to it. He was surprised and thrilled when it became Aerosmith’s first pop hit and classic rock mainstay. The song? “Sweet Emotion.”
Music has its share of instant hits, where everyone is hit by the proverbial lightning bolt and knows it has something huge. Then there’s the other side. Famously, Rod Stewart thought of leaving “Maggie May” off Every Picture Tells a Story and his label put it out as the B-side of “Reason To Believe.” Then disc jockeys started flipping the single over to play it instead, turning the song into a No. 1 hit.
In Aerosmith’s case, the most impactful hit they ever had was the last song finished for Toys in the Attic, one Douglas feared might wind up as an instrumental or left off the album altogether.
Perry, wanting to play something funky, came up with the greasy riff and the chords at a soundcheck in Hawaii. Drummer Joey Kramer, who’d played in R&B bands before Aerosmith, came up with a drum part that paired with it perfectly.
By the time they were well through recording, they had much of what would be “Walk This Way.” What they didn’t have were finished lyrics (Tyler had a habit of scatting for rhythm and feel before he had the words) or a hook.
“This was a time when we discovered that Steven was a tormented lyricist — a brilliant lyricist, but absolutely tormented, and as time went on, he became more and more tormented to come up with lyrics,” Douglas said. “The band, and particularly Joe, could just rip out these great riffs. Steven was a brilliant lyricist, and funny, and self-deprecating and aware of what was going on in the world and what was going on in the streets, but he had set a bar for himself that was so high that it was really difficult for him.”
Perry recalled the rest of the band and Douglas taking a break to see Mel Brooks classic Young Frankenstein for the first time. They came back to the studio still laughing, with Douglas quoting the scene where Marty Feldman’s Igor goes down steps with a cane, telling Gene Wilder’s Frederick Frankenstein to “walk this way” before handing him the cane to imitate the stair walk. Tyler had the light bulb go off over his head.
The singer said he’d finished the lyrics that night, only to absent-mindedly leave them in a shoulder bag in a cab he took to the studio, possibly while high, never to be seen again.
The band thought Tyler hadn’t written the lyrics. He went upstairs from the studio and wrote out the lyrics on a wall from memory. They were a stream of consciousness tour of high school libido with double entendres sly enough to make it past the censorship-minded (“you ain’t seen nothin’ ’til you’re down on the muffin,” “hey diddle diddle, put your kitty in the middle,” etc.).
“David Johansen (of the New York Dolls) said it was one of the raunchiest songs he ever heard on the radio. And coming from David Doll, pretty high compliment,” Perry told SPIN.
It was a downright irresistible song, catchy and funky. Yet again, it was resisted. It did nothing as the album’s second single.
It got a second chance, re-released during the singles cycle for the band’s 1976 album Rocks, this time peaking at No. 10 on the Billboard singles chart for two weeks in the winter of early 1977, when the top songs were the classic disco of “Car Wash” and the painful anti-funk of “Torn Between Two Lovers.”
VIDEO: Run DMC x Aerosmith “Walk This Way”
Years later, Aerosmith was in a down phase after years of addiction and ego clashes. They’d reunited for 1985’s Done With Mirrors, but despite some good reviews, the album flopped, the rock audience seemingly having moved on.
Run-DMC, meanwhile, was building its audience with rap partially informed by rock. DJ Jam Master Jay had been cutting “Walk This Way” on his turntable for years and Run had rapped over it since he was a teenager. Their producer, Rick Rubin, had the idea for them to cover it and bring in Perry and Tyler.
Skeptical at first, the duo agreed and came to Manhattan. It took just one day for the track to come together, neither side knowing what would happen next.
The Run-DMC version peaked at No. 4 at the end of September 1986. The trio had gone from being the only rap group on the bill at Live Aid the year before to having the first rap single in the Top 10 of the pop charts.
But while hip hop’s ability to cross over and become the dominant cultural force it became seems inevitable, an Aerosmith comeback felt less likely.
The collaboration’s success, with the video (picture Tyler literally breaking through the wall, mic and stand in hands) being a MTV smash, was the needed jumpstart. Starting with 1987’s Permanent Vacation, the band entered its multi-platinum second era that would carry them through the ’90s.
Toys in the Attic was hardly just two huge hits and a batch of filler. The title song opened the album with a burst of furious energy, built on a riff Perry came up with on a 1955 Les Paul that Johnny Thunders had recently given him.
Tyler’s stream of consciousness struck again. As he later put it, ““Joe was jamming a riff and I started yelling, ‘Toys, toys, toys’,” Tyler said. “Organic, immediate, infectious …fucking amazing. Once again, the Toxic Twins ride off into the sunset …this time, the sunset of the attic. … I just started singing and it fit like chocolate and peanut butter. Joe plays his ass off on that song.”
Lyrical naughtiness entered the picture well before Tyler entered the picture. One can go down a YouTube rabbit hole to find old songs like “Shave ‘Em Dry” that could make him seem like Kidz Bop.
A friend of Whitford’s used to tape Dr. Demento’s radio show to give to him. In this case, he wanted the guitarist to hear Bull Moose Jackson’s 1952 song “Big Ten Inch Record,” a double-entendre on the size of the vinyl format at the time.
Douglas suggested the band stick to the original’s jump blues style, rather than do a rock version. It was a smart choice, working as a knowing hat tip midway through the album at the end of side one.
Meanwhile, Tyler later corrected people who thought he wasn’t singing “‘Cept for my big ten inch [pause] record of the band that plays the blues” towards the end.
Fair enough, but given who we’re talking about and the enunciation, it’s easy to see how people heard it as “Suck on my big ten inch!”
Aerosmith dipped back into power ballad territory for album closer “Now You See Me Crying,” which Tyler put together with Dan Solomon, the keyboardist and other singer from his first band, the Strangeurs/Chain Reaction.
The song, with piano and orchestral backing is lovely enough. It sounds in some ways like the type of ballads that hired gun writers would hand them in their second hit era, only more ambitious with less of a hook.
Released as a single that cut around 40 percent of its runtime, it did nothing. It wasn’t the easiest song to put together, thus it was only played live once at a 2009 show where the band played Toys in full, attempting it because it was one of Tyler’s daughter Liv’s favorites.
Nine years later, when the band was putting together a reunion tour, Tyler and Perry heard a Boston disc jockey playing a series of Aerosmith deep cuts that included it.
The singer, who was still not sober, reacted enthusiastically saying the band should cover it. Perry reportedly gave him a look and said, “It’s us, fuckhead.”
AUDIO: Aerosmith “No More No More”
“No More No More,” arguably Toys’ most underrated track, is an early band entry into the “Golly, life on the road sure is difficult for a rock band” canon. Propelled by terrific lead guitar work and piano from Scott Cushnie, who also played on “Big Ten Inch Record,” Tyler paints a portrait of endless Holiday Inns and dubious decision making when it comes to female companionship.
A seamier musical cousin to “Same Old Song and Dance” with a tinge of Monkees’ style psychedelia in the way Perry sings “Oh, it’s a sunny day outside my window,” “Uncle Salty” is like if Fancy wound up doing the same thing, only she’d been abandoned to an orphanage instead of being directly pimped out by her mother telling her not let her down.
Whitford had taken turns playing lead before, as he did on “Round and Round.” But the murkier song, co-written with Tyler, marked his first writing credit. If not as immediate as Aerosmith is elsewhere on Toys, it’s a perfectly serviceable piece of hard rock.
The original Record Plant was on West 44th Street, right in the area of Times Square. This was the era of Taxi Driver, when one had to keep an eye out for muggers and hustlers rather than the mediocre themed chain restaurants and annoying costumed Elmos that proliferated after then-mayor Rudy Giuliani pushed to turn the area from a den of decadence into a sterile Any City USA theme park for tourists.
Aerosmith was already no stranger to indulgences, both with women and drugs. They’d experienced enough success to afford better blow, as evidenced by the recording breaks taken while putting Toys together.
It was no surprise then, that Tyler turned to the original tale of temptation in “Adam’s Apple,” infusing the winning midtempo rocker with his attitude and pre-fatherhood dad joke wit (“Before Cain was able”).
Tyler wanted to call the album Love At First Bite, after a line in “Adam’s Apple.” Perry wanted to call it Rocks. The singer eventually went with the title they used to evoke a quality of timelessness tinged with insanity. Thankfully, his cover idea of a teddy bear with stuffing coming out of its slit “wrists” was rejected.
The band and Douglas were pleased with the final results. “Everybody just really wanted to go and kick ass,” Hamilton told the Long Island Pulse decades later. “If you look at the changes between Get Your Wings and Toys in the Attic, you can see how much better we were at it.”
Whitford said, “One of our best albums ever without a doubt. I’m just really proud of that record and what we did. The whole thing was just a cool experience from the pre-production to the tracking and mixing. “
The album would become the band’s biggest seller, a preeminent slab of sleazy, smart hard rock.
Toys in the Attic did well enough that the label brought “Dream On” out of mothballs, releasing it as a single at the end of 1975. It methodically climbed the singles charts, stopping at No. 6 the following April, its status as a band classic and influence assured.
Aerosmith followed with its next classic, the darker, dirtier Rocks as they moved into headliner status. From that point, the drugs and egos grew tougher to manage. If you told me that select copies of 1977’s Draw the Line were made of compressed cocaine and heroin encased in vinyl, I might believe you.
Perry quit the band during the sessions for 1979’s Night in the Ruts. Whitford did the same during the recording of the band low point Rock in a Hard Place a couple years later.
The band individually and collectively got sober in the ’80s. That, along with management-suggested usage of outside songwriters like Desmond Child and Jim Vallance, opened the door for their revival, even if staying sober remained a battle that required occasional restarts.
Toys in the Attic remains one of the band’s best, the product of a well-produced band with growing skill and confidence, still able to walk the high wire of the rock-and-roll lifestyle like a bunch of Wallendas on handtruck fuel.
Creating an album’s worth of songs, with none pre-tested live, for the first time, Aerosmith achieved the non-Peruvian hit it deserved.
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