It’s almost as if they were trying to create an album of singles, a ready-made Greatest Hits compilation. The album has no less than seven singles (released over a fourteen-month span), and this is where the album loses focus. As a result, the band sound less and less like the 1970s classic rock versions of themselves, and more and more like something created in a school for performing arts. With Get A Grip however, Aerosmith put almost all of the album – thirteen out of fifteen songs – into the hands of ‘song doctors’.
But Pump, the more successful of those albums, still had a decent proportion – 60% – of self-penned songs. Over their two previous records, Permanent Vacation (1987) and Pump(1989), Aerosmith showed that they could succeed by employing external songwriters. It sets the scene well, with a heavy riff and a ballsy production by Bruce Fairbairn aimed at a grunge / alternative rock audience. A snippet of their well-known Walk This Way riff completes the heavy-handed reference to the band’s crossover hit with Run-D.M.C., before making way for some Polynesian drums and the first song proper, Eat The Rich. Things don’t start well, with Tyler rapping – yes, rapping – over a drum loop. Their eleventh studio album, Get A Grip shows that Perry has all but given up in the struggle against Tyler’s proclivity towards slower, commercial songs. Either that or his accountant has managed to point out how many Ferraris and swimming pools Tyler’s ballads have paid for in the intervening decades. Twenty years on, and Perry’s principles have been left behind in rehab with his various drug addictions. Billboard Top 200 upon its re-release as a single in 1976. It was a high point on the band’s self-titled 1973 debut, eventually becoming one of the band’s biggest hits, peaking at #6 on the U.S. Perry was somehow won over (overruled? blackmailed?) by Tyler and they recorded the song in late 1972.
During their formation in the early 1970s, Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry initially rejected Steven Tyler’s proto-power ballad Dream On, believing that the only type of slow song the band should play was a slow blues.
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