This is an album I remember doing the rounds during my undergraduate days, and there a couple of songs on here that I recognize – the delightfully smutty Love In An Elevator (“Why, hello Mr Tyler. Going … down?” as the female voice (Catherine Epps) states at the beginning). Do some places still have lift operators? This one’s probably dressed in “sexy bellboy” outfit and red lip gloss like a woman in a Robert Palmer video. The other familiar track was the power ballad that closes the album, What It Takes, where Steve Tyler gives his voice a good workout in an emotionally wrought end-of-relationship cri-de-coeur. I had both these tracks on a "hair metal primer" compilation tape that my friend Gar W put together for me back in university.
Throughout, Aerosmith return to their Toys In The Attic roots – bringing a blues-rock sound to hair metal; Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry look at Axl Rose and Slash and say “Yeah, we were snorting coke and playing that stuff when you were still babies. Watch this”. There are some solid bluesy rockers going on, updated versions of the old swamp rock / Southern rock kind of sound. Tom Hamilton gives some gloriously dirty bass on Monkey On My Back. Interspersed throughout are short interludes / introductions on a range of strange instruments (water harmonica, didgeridoo, and a Northern Thailand gourd mouth organ, all played by Randy Raine-Reusch). Longest is a little bit of country-folk, the Dulcimer Stomp. Most well-blended is the ethereal sound of the water harmonica on The Water Song, leading into probably the most mature song on the album, Janie’s Got A Gun.
This is a track about a daughter that kills her abusive father, and ends up charged with murder. For all the sexual innuendo laced throughout the album, this one is a surprising cry for social justice, an interesting reverse on the traditional murder ballads of old (where it’s always the girl who dies). But actually, unlike much of the macho posturing of Guns ‘N’ Roses or AC/DC, here Tyler and Perry’s lyrics on the sexual songs (like Elevator) tend more towards the playful. The singer and the girl are both willing partners in a bit of fun, rather than her being awed by his manly prowess.
Coming at the end of a lengthy run of guitar-based albums, this could have been annoyingly more of the same, but Aerosmith really pull out the stops, and the tracks are varied enough not to turn into a blur of heavy metal sameness. Justly praised as one of their better albums, I think.
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