Rock in a Hard Place - Aerosmith (CD 1993)

Lost in the dark ages of Aerosmith's drug-fueled breakup and rapid decline in popularity during the late 1970s and early 1980s is perhaps the most eclectic and experimental effort of the period, "Rock in a Hard Place."

Often unfairly maligned as the worst album in the band's catalog, the album was barely a blip on the radar screen when it was finally completed and released in 1982. One single, Lightning Strikes, got moderate radio airplay. That was about it. RIAHP failed to go platinum by a good margin (but finally reached that status years later when the reunited band's revival sparked interest in its back catalog).

Unfortunately, in the mid-80s Aerosmith had gained the reputation of being the real-life Spinal Tap (the famous mockumentary "This is Spinal Tap" came out two years after Rock in a Hard Place failed).

The superficial coincidences to Tap were eery. Spinal Tap members included Derek Smalls (Harry Shearer) and David St. Hubbins (Michael McKean). Meanwhile Aerosmith guitarist Brad Whitford quit the group to form a band with Derek St. Holmes. At the same time Tap was making audiences laugh with their ill-fated attempt to revive their "classic" song Stonehenge, Aerosmith's Rock in Hard Place an album depicted Stonehenge on the cover. And behind the scenes, the fallout between Steven Tyler and Joe Perry mirrored the David St. Hubbins and Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest)rift, feuled by the Aerosmith lead singer's feud with Perry's infamously pushy wife, Elyssa.

But once you actually give RIAHP a chance, you'll discover a funky little album steeped in Aerosmith's traditional blues-tinged hard rock sound, but which throws many a curveball at you.

Album background

A hodgepodge of sounds, rhythms, and mood swings, Rock in a Hard Place reflects its prolonged, often frustrating gestation period that actually spanned parts of three years.

The process started shortly after lead guitarist Joe Perry left the band and Jimmy Crespo replaced him. But the project was soon derailed by a serious motorcycle accident involving lead singer and primary songwriter Steven Tyler.

As Tyler recuperated slowly from the accident, he sank deeper and deeper into his already out-of-control drug addiction and alcohol abuse. Now living in squalor in a seedy New York hotel he favored because of its proximity to his favorite heroin and cocaine dealers, Tyler by his own admission had descended from a musician messing with drugs into "a drug addict dabbling in music."

Months went by with little to no progress made on the album. Most days, only various combinations of Tom Hamilton (bass), Joey Kramer (drums), Whitford (rhythm guitar) and Crespo (lead guitar) would show up at the studio. A few times, only Hamilton showed up.

Tired of wasting his time, Whitford announced his resignation from what was left of the band. He played some gigs with Joe Perry's new band, the Joe Perry Project, and then started his own band with St. Holmes, simply called Whitford- St.Holmes. Whitford's contributions to the furthest-developed RIAHP track prior to his departure(Lightning Strikes) remained on the finished project.

Hamilton, Kramer and the extremely underrated Crespo also considering bolting (leaving Aerosmith a one-man "band") but decided simply to take time off to see what happened.

Finally, in 1982, the sessions got moving again, relocated from New York to Florida. Although Tyler's death-defying drug and alcohol consumtion continued, he drew some writing inspiration from the change in scenery and his mixed emotions about Perry (the final album includes a few unsubtle lyrical jabs at the guitarist).

At the recommendation of the band's longtime producer Jack Douglas, the band recruited little-known guitarist Rick Dufay (a friend of Douglas)to replace Whitford. Although Dufay played very little on the Rock in a Hard Place album, he's credited as a full band member. Mostly, Dufay hung out around with Tyler, getting high with him on a regular basis but also temporarily keeping him away from his most dangerous addiction (heroin).

Weighing all of 120 pounds and often dope-sick (Tyler looks almost ghost-like in the band's Lightning Strikes music video), Tyler finally got moving on his lyrics and vocals, forming a good team with Crespo. As on the Draw the Line album, Douglas provided writing help to Tyler; fleshing out half-developed ideas and feeding him rhyming words. Several other tracks were penned by Tyler's longtime running buddy, Richie Supa, either in collaboration or solo.


Incredibly, the finished RIAHP product turned out to be a more-than-credible collection of hard rock, piano and harmonica blues, funk, acoustic gentleness and sonic fury and even some very Eighties electronica.


Track list

The album starts out with Jailbait, arguably the best song the Tyler-Crespo combination produced. The closest contender is "Chiquita" from the Night in the Ruts album. Even Perry later said he was jealous of Crespo's incendiary lead riffs on Jailbait.

The song's undeniably sleazy lyrics about lusting after an all-too-willing girl who turns out to be underage could easily offend, especially in these more sensitive times, yet somehow they don't.

The key is Tyler's urgent, sassy delivery. Take it or a-leave it on a Saturday night. If what you see is what you get, then gimme a bite" he crows. Later he sings, "Take it, leave it, roll the doll, she's hot as hell, I'm cold as ice... Ain't complainin', b*tch's brew, Girl's a lover, never knew she's jailbait."

Amazingly, the song retains its lusty intensity all throughout, backed by the band's always dead-on rhytm section and includes a stuttered chorus refrain of "J-J-J-Jail-bait' that somehow really works well.

The breakneck pace of the tune never has a lull. That sets this tune apart from something like "Sight for Sore Eyes" from Draw the Line, which starts out like a house of fire and then sputters out midway.

Up next is the Supa-penned Lightning Strikes, the only song that features the departed Whitford on rhythm guitar.

The songs starts out sounding a little bit like the classic (and superior) Nobody's Fault, blended in with a now-dated synthesizer. But that melts away and the song quickly becomes a very serviceable hard rock tune. Lyrically, it's sort of a rocked out West Side Story tale of two New York street gangs clashing.

At the time of the album's release, the song was chosen as a single and Aerosmith recorded one of its first music videos (and a terrible one at that, featuring the band hamming it up as street punks). The video received very little MTV airplay -- video killed the radio star, you know -- and mercifully disappeared, only to seen again on an Aerosmith video compilation released by Columbia after the band reunited and left for a lucrative revival on Geffen Records. Today, Lightning Strikes is featured at Tampa Bay Lightning hockey games and receives occassional airplay on classic rock stations, mostly during Aerosmith blocks.


The Lightning Strikes coda blends into the intro of the next tune, "B*tch's Brew." The song is the album's first miss, slogging through a chaotic and uninspired Crespo lead, half-baked lyrics and an unusually thin, bleating vocal performance from an obviously strung-out Tyler.

How lame are the patched together lyrics? Try these on for size "I've been thinkin', ran my hands through the sands of time," bleats Tyler, "Yeah and I've been drinkin', just to make this here salt and brine" (often misheard as the arguably more fitting "make this here song rhyme").

The next cut Bolivian Ragamuffin packs a heavy punch of sheer guitar-driven hard rock and a slower, funky bass line and, like Walk This Way or even Sight for Sore Eyes, tightly rhymed street-wise lyrics: "Standin' on the seashore, lookin' at the city, see the streetlight, dog bite your lady on the t*tty, at the wax museum and nobody gets to see themselves, there's others there to see ya, but nobody wants to be ya, baby."

Much like Sight for Sore Eyes, Bolivian Ragamuffin falls apart when it hits its uninspired chorus, in this case taking sexualized license from a popular fast-food commercial of the era ("hold my pickle, hold the lettuce, special orders don't upset us"). But unlike the previous tune, Ragamuffin recovers from its mid-song lull, reeling you right back from the bridge to the coda.

Tyler, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of music of all types, always loved Julie London's rendition of the jazzy torch song Cry Me A River, and convinced his bandmates and Douglas to give a go at covering the song on Rock In a Hard Place.

The band agreed, perhaps because it had a minor hit with another unlikely cover on its last album; succesfully reinterpreting the Shangri-Las 1960s girl group hit "Remember (Walking in the Sand)" on Night in the Ruts.

Fueled by Tyler's failed marriage to Cyrinda Foxe and hurt over Perry leaving the band, the singer pours his heart into the vocal performance. The first half of the song features a soft, sensitive jazz feel, as Tyler's voice oozes pain and regret.

Midway through, the song ramps up with blistering electric guitars and Tyler's aching regret turns into seething anger, fairly screaming the last "now you say you're sorry, for being so untrue. Well you can cry me a river... cry me a river. I cried a river over you."

All in all, an interesting experiment for the band and the gamble pays off, in my opinion.

Speaking of experimental songs, the electronic, acoustic, hard rock epic Joanie's Butterfly is arguably the most experimental song in the entire Aerosmith catalog up to that point.

While the end result is wildly hit-or-miss, the band (and Tyler in particular) deserves major kudos for not playing it safe. They attempted something extremely ambitious- a progressive rock tune on a hard rock album- that they knew some people simply wouldn't like.

The song's title is a double entrendre. Primarily, it's based on a psychodelic dream Tyler had-- inspiring the genesis of the story. Tyler has never confirmed or denied whether the unnamed third character in the dream (there's Tyler himself, a woman named Joanie and a character he refers to only as "you-know-who") was the estranged Perry.
The title is also a sly reference to a type of sex toy, called a Joanie Butterfly.

The prelude to Joanie is an electronically garbled poem written by Tyler:

At first we three thought
'twas the "biblical" cord of life
Then noticing 'twas connected to his head

How strange, not to be believed
I reached out to feel, and the pony s eyes opened
The cord got hard, the head looked around
And You-know-who pushed and gushed
in the waters of life
First two hooved feet, then the shine of his fur

But at first to my eyes only
Feather - feathers - wings
The butterflies flew up in such colors
Exploding all around us

The rest I did not see
till there he stood
all eyes in wonder
Who me - who you

Look

The prelude flows into a dreamy, acoustic lead backed by electronic background sounds and soft, sensitive lyrics from Tyler: "The waters stilled the night we met the pony. It was so dark that we could hardly see. It smelled so sweet. Me, you-know-who and Joanie; so many butterflies one could not see."

Midway through the song-- right after Tyler softly declares "no butterfly should be denied its wings" -- the song immediately kicks into overdrive and morphs into thrashing hard rock, as the once tiny, tottering pony sprouts wings and morphs into a "kicka$$ rocking horse... a one-horned unicornicopia."

While this cornicopia of a song is in equal parts inspired, muddled and now badly dated in places, it absolutely shines in its finest moments.

Critics of Joanie, however, have said the song causes the album to veer permanently off course, especially when listened to directly after the equally unexpected Cry Me a River cover.

Not too many songs could follow Joanie successfully, but the title track, Rock In A Hard Place (Cheshire Cat) does so by getting back to a more bread-and-butter Aerosmith sound, with crunchy lead by Crespo, well arranged backing rhythms and a neat little chorus (She was a real top manner, lyin' ol' conniver. Heart pumpin' floozy, late night driver. Her second hand clothes, smilin' like a cheshire cat.

Up next is a funky little shuffle called Jig Is Up featuring Tyler's trademark scats, yelps and lusty lyrics. While there's little distinctive about it, the song is a nice, solid B-list type of song that, because it keeps things simple, stands up well a quarter century after it was first recorded.

The album closes with the vicious Push Comes To Shove . Sounding very much rooted in Aerosmith's early bar band blues sound, Tyler attacks the piano and harmonica ferociously, and even plays percussion (Tyler got his start as a drummer in his pre-Aerosmith days) and sings in an inebrieted after-hours yowl.

Lyrically, the song is basically a nasty FU message to Joe Perry from Tyler, telling him Aerosmith would survive while he went down the tubes. Of course, Aerosmith was in no better shape than Perry was, but Tyler wasn't ready yet to admit they still needed one another to be succesful.

In an obvious reference to the Joe Perry Project's "Let the Music Do the Talking," Tyler taunts, "Lookit here, babe, I'm talkin' 'bout you without a doubt. Said the music does the talkin', but all you do is talk about it." Later, Tyler snickers, "You talk about it, we rock about it."

Perry, lost in the throes of his own raging addictions, was on the outs with his wife Elyssa by the early 1980s, living on his new manager, Tim Collins', couch. Tyler, who absolutely detested Elyssa, gets in a few gleeful digs, crowing "Can't be in love, when you live alone. Push comes to shove when you b*tch and moan." He also declares "her candle of youth was burnin' low, and me and the boys knew someone had to go."

The song makes plenty of references to past Aerosmith songs recorded with Perry in happier times, ranging from Toys in the Attic to Back in the Saddle to Get it Up.

While even casual Aerosmith fans will catch the analogy made in the the lines "the girls are all left behind, when forty women all spend time, with me and the boys and the toys in the attic," the others are harder to catch. One Push Comes to Shove line refers to a woman named Sukie (a Back in the Saddle lyric goes, "I'm lookin' for old Sukie Jones"), another mentions a woman called Nancy (Get It Up features "C'mon, Nancy" exhortations, as Tyler and Karen Lawrence trade vocals in the chorus).

Rather than fading out gracefully on Tyler's rollicking blues piano, the track ends with a symphony of shattered drinking glasses and what sounds like a heated argument between Joe Perry and his bandmates that was captured on tape (it sure sounds like Perry's voice, in any event).

So ends what many critics predicted would be the last anyone heard of Aerosmith. Five years and two albums later, with the classic lineup reunited and clean and sober for the first time in their adult lives, Aerosmith kicked off the second half of their Rock'n'Roll Hall of careers with the hit-laden "Permanent Vacation."