[Meta-note: feeling
much better this week, thanks. I'll be
retooling last week's head-full-of-phlegm Get Your Wings piece sometime later on this week.]
In some ways, I feel about Toys in the Attic as I did about Cheap Trick at Budokan when I was writing about that band's albums:
yes, it's great. Every bit as great as
it's cracked up to be, in fact. But what
can I possibly tell you about it that you don't already know?
That's a good question.
We'll start with the obvious: I'll assume that, given the fact that
you're savvy enough in the ways of the world to have gotten online and found
this blog, you already know everything about every last beat, note and howl of
"Walk This Way" and "Sweet Emotion." If by some strange collision of events in
your life you don't have every note of either song branded into your gray
matter, go forth and be dazzled by the funky beats, facile riffs, and lyrics
that blow past merely clever and head straight on 'til morning. Some classic rock becomes classic merely
because it's on the radio all the damned time.
These two songs were birthed as classics; I can only picture some teen-dork
listening to the album for the first time sometime back in '75 and knowing what
he was going to be hearing all summer long.
Were I not one year old at the time, said teen-dork could well have been
me.
I mentioned beats twice in the last paragraph, so let's take
a moment to give the drummer his due. If
I claim that Joey Kramer was the first drummer in a loud, badass rock band to
consistently bring the funk behind the kit, I'm sure somebody will immediately
bitch that so-and-so did it first. So I
won't. Instead, I'll say that Joey
Kramer was the first drummer in a loud, badass rock band to master consistently bringing the funk
behind the kit. There's a clear
through-line from Kramer's groundbreaking work to otherwise dissimilar bands
like Killing Joke in the '80s or Therapy? in the '90s who also thought it might
be a good idea to wed their sledgehammer rock to beats you could do something
other than march to.
But what of the rest of Toys
in the Attic? The other two
semi-hits were the speedy title track and the blues cover "Big Ten Inch
Record." The former is a favorite;
as you may well have surmised by now if you've nosed around elsewhere in this
blog, I'm a sucker for the fast-and-punchy ones. "Big Ten Inch Record" is an enduring
fan favorite with good reason, but somehow I've never really grown to love it. It's great, don't get me wrong - it does
exactly what it sets out to do - but it's just never clicked with me for some
reason. Weird, I know, but our ears are
like that sometimes.
What else have we got on this platter? Well, there's "Round and Round",
one of those Brad Whitford-helmed monsters that I just love, that I thought was
the HEAVIEST GOD DAMNED THING I'D EVER HEARD when I first encountered it as a
teen-dork in the late '80s, at least until I heard the follow-up to it on their
next LP (relax, we'll cover it in full next week). There's "Uncle Salty" and
"Adam's Apple", great rockers with the sort of brilliantly crafted
lyrics Steven Tyler just kinda left on the vinyl as though it was no big deal
in those days, only they still dazzle writers like me all these decades later. There's "No More No More" a clever
slice of life-in-the-band that sends Jon Bon Jovi and his steel horse a-packin'
ten years before the fact. Lastly,
there's the grand finale: "You See Me Crying." It's funny that seemingly-identical ballads
would become a thorn in Aerosmith's artistic side a couple of decades down the
road, because in the '70s they were one of the few hard rock bands who knew how
to make 'em, and make 'em count.
"You See Me Crying" isn't "Dream On", which isn't
"Seasons of Wither", which isn't "Home Tonight" - and none
of those songs' respective parent albums would be quite as good as they are
without them. The fact that I was in the
crowd at Jones Beach the only time "You See Me Crying" was ever
played live in its entirety remains one of the cooler concert moments in my
live-gig history.
The crazy part of all of this? This isn't even their best album. We get to that
one next week.
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