‘Toys In The Attic’: Aerosmith’s Evergreen Third Album
The band’s commercial breakthrough, the record featured a wealth of classic rock songs.
Aerosmith has sold upwards of 150 million albums and won music’s biggest prizes, but the band’s success was by no means preordained. Despite including fan favorites like “Dream On,” “Mama Kin,” and “Same Old Song And Dance,” their first two albums failed to set the charts alight. That all changed with 1975’s Toys In The Attic.
Five years of constant gigging in small clubs had significantly honed the Boston quintet’s songwriting skills and – at this crucial point in their career – it meant they were able to write their most potent set of songs to date.
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“Aerosmith was a different band when we started the third album,” producer Jack Douglas recalled in Stephen Davis’ Walk This Way: The Autobiography Of Aerosmith. “They’d been playing the Get Your Wings songs on the road for a year and had become better players. It showed in the guitar riffs that Joe [Perry] and Brad [Whitford] brought back from the road for the next album. Toys In The Attic was a much more sophisticated record.”
This new-found finesse was immediately apparent in the variety of the new material, which included songs as diverse as the innuendo-laden rockabilly of “Big Ten Inch Record” and the heavily-orchestrated ballad “You See Me Crying,” both of which Aerosmith dispatched with confidence and verve. While these songs reflected the group’s burgeoning versatility, Toys In The Attic primarily showcased a great hard rock band doing what it does best. Indeed, the record’s tracklist included some of Aerosmith’s most evergreen rock anthems courtesy of “Sweet Emotion,” the gritty, Rolling Stones-esque “Adam’s Apple,” and the irrepressible “Walk This Way.”
The latter song was inspired by Mel Brooks’ film Young Frankenstein. “There was this one scene where one of the movie characters says ‘walk this way’,” Joe Perry explained in an Ultimate Guitar interview. “Jack [Douglas] began fooling around with that line and did this imitation of it from the movie. It became a great title for the song and then Steven [Tyler] went ahead and wrote the lyric.”
The ineffably funky “Walk This Way” immediately sounded like a hit and so it proved, when it rewarded Aerosmith with a well-deserved U.S. Top 10. With “Sweet Emotion” also making the Top 40 of the Billboard Hot 100, Toys In The Attic was their commercial breakthrough. First released in April 1975, it peaked at an impressive No. 11 on the Billboard 200 and it eventually went platinum nine times over in North America. With all that in mind, it’s no surprise that Aerosmith still look back fondly on this album that Rolling Stone accurately described as “a landmark of hard rock.”
“We really did put everything we had into Toys In The Attic,” bassist Tom Hamilton told Metal Hammer in 1998. “We had the perfect combination of great songs and the kind of fired-up spirit that you get after a lot of touring. We were like a well-oiled machine at that time and had lots of dynamite songs, so no wonder the album came out sounding the way it did.”
