Aerosmith- Toys in the Attic- Steven Tyler, Brad Whitford, Joey Kramer, Tom Hamilton, Joe Perry
We dust off Toys in the Attic, the breakthrough third album for Aerosmith in April 1975. Toys in the Attic was the foothold for Aerosmith to climbing the sales charts on their way to becoming America’s most popular and influential hard rock band. Containing perennial favorites “Walk This Way”,”Sweet Emotion”, the first anti-child abuse song “Uncle Salty”, the circular contagion of “No More, No More”, a swingin’ cover of Bullmoose Jackson’s bawdy “Big Ten Inch”, and the riff rock title song, Toys in the Attic showed that my guests Steven Tyler, Brad Whitford, and Joey Kramer, along with bassist Tom Hamilton and lead guitarist Joe Perry, were not toying around.
Contrary to what you might assume, through their first two albums Aerosmith struggled to get noticed. In this classic rock interview, Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer reminded me that “Dream On” from their debut by then had been released as a single three times, and flopped twice. Sure, a few of us intrepid radio deejays played it plus by several songs on Get Your Wings (my efforts were confirmed years later in the band’s autobiography Walk This Way when Aerosmith noted that, outside of the Boston base, their next biggest crowds & sales circa 1973-74 were in Marion, Ohio), but Toys in the Attic changed all that in Spring 1975, eventually racking up over eight million copies sold and a ranking of #229 on Rolling Stone magazine’s Top 500 Albums of All Time list. –Redbeard
(Rock stars do homework, too: L-R Alice Cooper, Mick Fleetwood, Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler, and Sammy Hagar inspect Peter Green’s original hand-written lyrics for Fleetwood Mac’s “Rattlesnake Shake”)
