Aerosmith were still looking for a hit album in 1975. Their first two LPs didn't quite make into the Top 100, but dogged determination, relentless touring and a fresh set of songs led to their first true classic, Toys in the Attic.
Tracked during a New York City winter at the Record Plant, the album was released on April 8, 1975, and peaked at No. 11 that September on the strength of the singles “Sweet Emotion” and “Walk This Way.”
“Aerosmith was a different band when we started the third album,” recalled producer Jack Douglas in the 1997 book Walk This Way: The Aerosmith Autobiography. “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 [guitarists] Joe [Perry] and Brad [Whitford] brought back from the road for the next album. Toys in the Attic was much more sophisticated than the other stuff they’d done.”
It also helped that the band was getting more quality drugs as their popularity and income rose, particularly with “high-velocity un-stepped-on Peruvian cocaine,” according to Perry, which built their confidence and, in the case of bassist Tom Hamilton, was used “as an energizer and mind-clearer.”
Lyrically, singer Steven Tyler found another gear, indulging in his soon-to-be notorious sexual energy and fascinations, coupling them with the more elemental aspects like the name of the LP.
“I came up with the title because of its obvious meanings and since people thought we were fucking crazy anyway, what did it matter?” he said in 2004's Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: A Rock ‘n’ Roll Memoir. “I wasn’t hip to the 1960 Tony Award-nominated Broadway play of the same name or its 1963 Oscar-nominated film adaptation. Didn’t matter if I had been. This was Aerosmith’s Toys in the Attic … singular, sexy and psychosensational.”
To this day it’s a tossup among old-school Aerosmith fans as to which album is their best: Toys in the Attic or its hard-rocking follow-up, 1976’s Rocks. Below we break down their watershed record, track-by-track.
“Uncle Salty”
Tom Hamilton laid down the foundation for “Uncle Salty” on guitar, giving the bass player one of his two writing credits on the album. “[He comes up] with these slippery, slimy, melodically delicious out-of-the blue bass lines from practice,” Tyler said. “He’d play stuff so down and dirty just from warming up, and it would turn into a song.”
The singer has said he took a two-pronged approach to the subject matter of the song, making it about both an orphanage and a bordello, where he puts himself in the role of a madame and the titular character, who sexually assaults a little girl.
“That ‘When she cried at night, no one came / And when she cried at night, went insane’ - here I was thinking about an orphanage when I wrote those lyrics,” Tyler said. “I’d try and make the melody weep from the sadness felt when a child is abandoned. I pretended to know the headmaster to get inside his head, and what I heard was Uncle Salty told me stories of a lonely baby with a lonely kind of life to lead.
“No More No More”
Tyler went to the familiar musician's reservoir of life on the road when it came to put down lyrics for the poppy “No More No More.” Hotels, reviews and women - all the familiar aspects of being a touring rocker that a bunch of young guys find thrilling at first, but soon turn routine.
"No More No More" stands out because of its arrangement. Perry plays the song in open-E tuning but, according to the guitarist in his memoir, the structure of it needed a solo in traditional tuning: “To solve that, we arranged the song with a breakdown near the end, allowing me to play the bulk of the song with the E-tuned guitar before switching, in the blink of an eye, to a totally different guitar to take the song out.”
“Round and Round”
“Round and Round” is one of the heaviest and darkest compositions in the Aerosmith catalog, even though it's often overshadowed by more accessible and popular songs. It was co-written by Tyler and Whitford, with the latter playing lead guitar. It's the first song for which the guitarist received a songwriting credit, but not the first time Whitford played lead. He’d done the same on a quartet of Get Your Wings tracks, including “Lord of the Thighs” and “Seasons of Wither.”
From: https://ultimateclassicrock.com/aerosmith-toys-in-the-attic-songs/
