Toys in the Attic (album)

Background

For Aerosmith's previous album, 1974's Get Your Wings, the band began working with record producer Jack Douglas, who co-produced the album with Ray Colcord. In the liner notes to the 1993 reissue of Greatest Hits it was said by an unnamed member of the group that they "nailed" the album. At the beginning of 1975 the band started working at The Record Plant in New York City for the album that became Toys in the Attic. The sessions for Toys were produced by Douglas without Colcord - the album was engineered by Jay Messina with assistant engineers Rod O'Brien, Corky Stasiak and Dave Thoener. The songs for Toys were recorded with a Spectrasonics mixing board and a 16-track tape recorder. By this point, Aerosmith had fully matured as a band and Steven Tyler made sex the primary focus of his songwriting on the album.

According to producer Jack Douglas, "Aerosmith was a different band when we started the third album. They'd been playing Get Your Wings on the road for a year and had become better players - different. It showed in the riffs that Joe [Perry] and Brad [Whitford] brought back from the road for the next album. Toys in the Attic was a much more sophisticated record than the other stuff they'd done." In the band memoir Walk This Way, guitarist Joe Perry concurs, "When we started to make Toys in the Attic, our confidence was built up from constant touring." Preproduction took place in the attic at Angel Studios in Ashland, Massachusetts.

Recording and composition

Aerosmith's third album includes some of their best known songs, including "Walk This Way", "Sweet Emotion", and the storming title track. "Walk This Way" starts out with a two measure drum beat intro by Joey Kramer, followed by the well known guitar riff by Joe Perry. The song proceeds with the main riff made famous by Perry and Brad Whitford on guitar with Tom Hamilton on bass. The song continues with rapid fire lyrics by Steven Tyler. The song originated in December 1974 during a sound check when Aerosmith was opening for The Guess Who in Honolulu. During the sound check, Perry was "fooling around with riffs and thinking about The Meters", a group guitarist Jeff Beck had turned him on to. Loving "their riffy New Orleans funk, especially 'Cissy Strut' and 'People Say'", he asked the drummer "to lay down something flat with a groove on the drums." The guitar riff to what would become "Walk This Way" just "came off [his] hands." Needing a bridge, he:

played another riff and went there. But I didn't want the song to have a typical, boring 1, 4, 5 chord progression. After playing the first riff in the key of C, I shifted to E before returning to C for the verse and chorus. By the end of the sound check, I had the basics of a song.

When singer Steven Tyler heard Perry playing that riff he "ran out and sat behind the drums and [they] jammed." Tyler scatted "nonsensical words initially to feel where the lyrics should go before adding them later." When the group was halfway through recording Toys in the Attic in early 1975 at Record Plant in New York City, they found themselves stuck for material. They had written three or four songs for the album, having "to write the rest in the studio." They decided to give the song Perry had come up with in Hawaii a try, but it didn't have lyrics or a title yet. In 1997, Perry recalled that the idea for the funky, James Brown-influenced "Walk This Way" was inspired by the film Young Frankenstein, which the band had gone to see around the time they were working on the track:

At the hotel that night Tyler wrote lyrics for the song, but left them in the cab on the way to the studio next morning. He says: "I must have been stoned. All the blood drained out of my face, but no one believed me. They thought I never got around to writing them." Upset, he took a cassette tape with the instrumental track we had recorded and a portable tape player with headphones and "disappeared into the stairwell." He "grabbed a few No. 2 pencils" but forget to take paper. He wrote the lyrics on the wall at "the Record Plant's top floor and then down a few stairs of the back stairway." After "two or three hours" he "ran downstairs for a legal pad and ran back up and copied them down." The lyrics, which tell the story of a high school boy losing his virginity, are sung quite fast by Tyler, with heavy emphasis being placed on the rhyming lyrics.

It was bassist Tom Hamilton who came up with the main lick on "Sweet Emotion". In 1997 during a band interview with Alan Di Perna of Guitar World the members discussed the evolution of the song, which owes a debt to the Jeff Beck composition "Rice Pudding":

Many Aerosmith fans believe that Tyler wrote all of the lyrics to "Sweet Emotion" about the tension and hatred between the band members and Joe Perry's wife. Tyler himself has said that only some of the lyrics were inspired by Perry's wife. It was stated in Aerosmith's tell-all autobiography Walk This Way and in an episode of Behind the Music that growing feuds between the band members' wives (including an incident involving "spilt milk" where Elyssa Perry threw milk over Tom Hamilton's wife, Terry) may have helped lead to the band's original lineup dissolving in the early 1980s. Hamilton and Tyler also collaborated on "Uncle Salty", with Tyler recalling in his 2001 autobiography, "Here I was thinking about an orphanage when I wrote those lyrics. I'd try to make the melody weep from the sadness felt when a child is abandoned." Of the title track, Tyler added, "Joe was jamming a riff and I started yelling, 'Toys, toys, toys...' Organic, immediate, infectious...I just started singing and it fit like chocolate and peanut butter. Joe plays his ass off on that song."

Perhaps the most ambitious recording on the album is "You See Me Crying", a complex piano ballad that was heavily orchestrated. Jack Douglas brought in a symphony orchestra for the song, which was conducted by Mike Mainieri. The song itself was written by lead singer Steven Tyler and outside collaborator Don Solomon. Some of the band members became frustrated with the song, which took a long time to complete, due to the many complex drum and guitar parts. The band's label, Columbia Records, was nonetheless very impressed with the song and the recording process. Bruce Lundvall, then-president of Columbia Records walked in on the recording sessions for Toys when the band was working on the song and remarked: "You guys got an incredible thing going here. I just came from a Herbie Hancock session and this is much more fun". While Aerosmith were planning the "Back in the Saddle" concert tour and recording the "Done with Mirrors" album during 1984, a radio DJ played the song. Steven, who was suffering memory loss at the time from years of drug use, liked "You See Me Crying" so much, he suggested his group record a cover version, only to be told by his bandmate Joe Perry, "It's us, fuckhead." The album also features a cover of Bullmoose Jackson's "Big Ten Inch Record", first heard by the band on a tape from Dr. Demento's radio show on KMET (In the liner notes to Pandora's Box, Steven Tyler insists that he sings "'cept on my big ten inch..." not suck on my big ten inch," but laments that no one on earth believes him. In the 1997, Tyler shared his memories about writing and recording several of the LP's tracks with author Stephen Davis:

Joe Perry has also stated that he wanted to call the LP Rocks, which would be used for their next studio album.

The album would gain renewed attention in 1986, eleven years after its release, when the hip-hop group Run DMC covered "Walk This Way", which helped revive Aerosmith's then-flagging career as well as propel rap music to the mainstream.

Reception and legacy

When Toys in the Attic was released in April 1975, it eventually made #11 on the Billboard 200, a full 63 positions higher than Get Your Wings. The single release of "Sweet Emotion" became a minor hit on the Billboard Hot 100 reaching #36 in 1975 and "Walk This Way" reached #10 on the Hot 100 in 1977. The album also introduced to contemporary audiences a rock n' roll cover of "Big Ten Inch Record," which was originally an old R&B song recorded by Bull Moose Jackson in 1952. Rather than produce a rock reimagining, Aerosmith's cover largely stays true to the original song, down to its jazz-style instrumentation. For his review of Toys in the Attic for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine called the album's style a mix of Led Zeppelin and The Rolling Stones riffs, and said it was filled with songs about sex with a different style than there ever was before. Greg Kot called the album a landmark of hard rock. For the Blender magazine review, Ben Mitchell called Toys in the Attic cocaine-influenced and mentions the songs "Toys in the Attic", "Walk This Way", and "Sweet Emotion" as "standout tracks".

Aerosmith make reference to the album and its lyrics in the song "Legendary Child". The line "But we traded them toys for other joys" refers to the title of the album and their struggles with addiction. It may also be referring to the title track of the same name. The line "I took a chance at the high school dance never knowing wrong from right" references lyrics from the songs "Walk This Way" and "Adam's Apple" respectively.

Personnel

Per liner notes

Production

Cover versions