The truth is simple: any band with any sort of balls to
their music at all learned something from these thirty-five minutes. It’s rock without genres: arena-rock, metal,
blues-rock, punk, you name it. The
common denominator is right here.
Alright, I can hear you mulling the thought from here: Punk?
Really? AEROSMITH? Yes indeedy, inquisitive listeners: it’s
got all the ingredients. Velocity? Check.
Subject matter of dubious moral value?
Check. Singer who sneers it like
he lives it? Big check. Songs with hooks as monstrous as their
swagger? Biggest check of all. Look, as anyone who’s ever sifted through my
record collection can attest, I’m a man who’d know. It’s funny that so much of the music writing
on this blog is about classic (hard) rock, given that old-school punk is just
as much my musical bread and butter. So
trust me as knowledgeable when I tell you this: Johnny Rotten and his little
pals never, ever came up with a rhyme as brilliantly punk as “Yves St. Laurent”/”so goddamn gaunt”. It’s the absolute truth.
I could break down the album track by track, but I'd simply
be cutting into your precious listening time.
It's a perfect record: not a note is out of place, not an ounce of fat,
not a single second shorter - or longer - than it should be. Everything is placed for maximum impact, and
Jack Douglas' heavy, raw, but also crystal clear production has ensured that
it's dated beautifully. I don't really
care if you don't think you like Aerosmith.
I don't care what your opinion of their more pop-oriented success in
later decades might be. If you've not
fully immersed yourself in this record, I simply cannot take your opinion of
rock 'n' roll all that seriously. If you
have immersed yourself in it and still don't feel its genius, maybe we'd better
not go out for drinks anytime soon.
Going back to the parallel I made in the opening of this
post, this was one of two albums, along with Cheap Trick, that made me demand more than I'd previously known I
could ask from music. Together, they
taught me that music could be felt as well as heard, that it could make you
want to go out and live rather than simply
tap your toes to yet another pop song about cars and/or girls. Why sing about cars when you could crash
one? Why sing about girls when you could
be with one? Why deal with some poser
with perfect hairspray when there's real trouble to be gotten into? As a mid-teenager, this music blew my little
mind. I wasn't by nature a trouble-bound
kid, but listening to Rocks made me
know I had to break the shy-kid cocoon at least a little bit and find out what
the big bad world really had to offer. I
didn't even know exactly what it was that I wanted to try: no thanks on the
heroin, maybe on the booze, certainly
on the sex, but I wanted to try something...well, something more than I'd seen
in my room or my high school, damn it.
It made the process of that discovery seem irresistibly enticing - hell,
even downright seductive. This is
exactly what great rock 'n' roll is supposed to do when you're that age, and
it's also what great rock 'n' roll should remind you of the feeling of once
you're older and more experienced.
It also nudged me towards the punk rock I was talking about
- and comparing it to - above. Once
you've fallen in love with music so fast, so swaggery, so clever and so
downright dangerous, it's really hard to go back to listening to the likes of
Jon Bon Jovi prattle on about steel horses or whatever other nonsense. More,
louder, faster, NOW!
It's one of the truly seminal albums in my life. It belongs in your life, too.
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