Aerosmith

Despite being, on this very blog, largely glowing in my praise of AC/DC's Bon Scott fronted albums, and also at heart, very much a rock music fan, I have to admit to disliking, hating even, 70s rock.  Partly this is, I'm sure (and as I noted in the comments of my post on 5000 Volts), because I don't really know a lot of 70s music, certainly when compared to my knowledge of early 80s music, so there's little to challenge my view of the genre as being tedious, bland, self-indulgent dullardry.

Which brings me to Aerosmith.

I don't like Aerosmith, but it's hard not to be hugely impressed by the tenacity and sheer dogged resilience of the band.  Having formed in Boston, Mass. in 1970, they became, by the late 70s, one of the world's biggest rock bands, with a string of platinum selling albums behind them.  The late 70s and early 80s sea-change in popular music largely sounded the death-knell for the bloated, solipsistic excesses of the 70's biggest rock bands, for whom Aerosmith could have been poster boys and as a result, the early 80s were a lean period for the band.  Commercial success was harder to come by (although, to their credit, they maintained a hardcore of loyal fans) and in classic faded rock behemoth style, guitarists Joe Perry and Brad Whitford both quit the band to pursue other projects, only to return to the fold after a few years. 


From the depths of my memory, as a fan of mainstream rock at the time, by the mid-80s they were an irrelevance.  Rock music had moved on, dragged forward by the likes of Iron Maiden and Metallica and survivors from the 70s were those who had learned to rock harder - AC/DC, Dio, Gary Moore.  Blues rockers like Aerosmith were dinosaurs, relics of another era.  All of which makes their renaissance and rise to rock behemoth status once again, one of music's great comeback stories.  Run DMC, though - who saw that coming?


I don't think I have Run DMC's fantastic cover of Walk This Way, but I do have the original, the second single from the 1975 album Toys In The Attic.  It's ok:

The Run DMC version/collaboration is better, I think - it's got more meat about it, particularly in the chorus.


Run DMC's Walk This Way revival in 1986 was a huge slice of luck for Aerosmith, not just because it made the mainstream aware of them again, but the timing could hardly have been better.  Their return to prominence co-incided with the rise of the second wave of glam rock and the band rode on the coat tails of Motley Crue, Guns 'N' Roses, et al - bands they'd directly influenced - to become the 5th best selling rock act of the 80s in the USA.  Which is not bad for a bunch of washed up 70s dinosaurs.


Even hair metal's death and the rise of grunge in the early 90s failed to kill them off - far from it, in fact.  The 90s saw the band have a string of hit albums and chart singles, culminating in their sole number 1 in 1998 with the song I Don't Want To Miss A Thing, from the Armageddon soundtrack.


They're still actively recording and touring and have a new album slated for release later this year.  Impressive tenacity.


I have one other Aerosmith song besides Walk This Way, its predecessor as a single, also from Toys In The Attic, Sweet Emotion.

Again, it's ok, although I hardly think it deserves its all-time-classic status - I mean, the groove and riffs are decent, but they do appear to accidentally play the chorus from a different song.


As an aside, this particular mp3 was a victim of my inadvertent drive wiping/recovery incident.  I first became suspicious that something was wrong when I saw a file size of around 16MB, and playing the file revealed the song to be truncated at both ends and slowed down and pitch shifted so it sounded like a 78 played at 33rpm.  In mono.  I had a fun half hour with Audacity trying to guess at the correct pitch and speed, but when I thought I had it and compared it to the original on YouTube, I wasn't even close.