Aerosmith: Toys in the Attic [UME]

Why you'll love it

This remastered pressing brings back the album that turned Aerosmith from Boston club heroes into arena headliners. It is their best-selling studio album in the US, with nine million copies, and Rolling Stone placed it on its 500 Greatest Albums list.

This edition

• Remastered
• Original nine-track album

About the album

Aerosmith walked into the studio for their third album with three or four songs and a deadline. The first two records had been built from material they'd played in clubs for years; this time they had to write on the spot, with producer Jack Douglas acting, as Joe Perry put it, as the sixth member of the band. A year of touring Get Your Wings had made them tighter and braver, and it shows in every riff.

The title track was born when Douglas asked for one more rocker and Perry sat on an amp and started playing. "Sweet Emotion" grew from Tom Hamilton's bass line, "Uncle Salty" was a riff Hamilton had kept to himself since the band's first year, and "Walk This Way" gave Steven Tyler a tongue-twisting rhythmic workout over Perry and Brad Whitford's funky guitars. "Adam's Apple," "Round and Round" and the closing ballad "You See Me Crying" round out a record with no slack in it.

Eleven years later, Run-DMC's version of "Walk This Way" with Tyler and Perry knocked down the wall between rock and rap. An awful lot of people in very different trousers discovered the riff that year, and it fitted them all.

Also at Kops: more Aerosmith on vinyl · browse Rock

Tracklist

Listen

On Columbia / UMe (cat# B0037629-01), a reissue of the 1975 album.