Toys in the Attic is the third studio album by American rock band Aerosmith, released on April 8, 1975, by Columbia Records. Its first single, "Sweet Emotion", was released on May 19 and the original version of "Walk This Way" followed on August 28 in the same year. The album is the band's most commercially successful studio LP in the United States, with nine million copies sold, according to the RIAA. In 2003, the album was ranked No. 228 on Rolling Stones list of The 500 Greatest Albums of All Time. The album's title track and their 1986 collaboration with Run-DMC on a cover version of "Walk This Way" are included on the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame list of the "500 Songs that Shaped Rock and Roll".
Background For Aerosmith's previous album, Get Your Wings, the band had begun working with record producer Jack Douglas, who co-produced that album with Ray Colcord. In the liner notes to the 1993 reissue of Greatest Hits, it was said by an unnamed member of the group that they "nailed" the album.
According to Douglas, "Aerosmith was a different band when we started the third album. 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 Joe [Perry] and Brad [Whitford] brought back from the road for the next album. Toys in the Attic was a much more sophisticated record than the other stuff they'd done." In the band memoir Walk This Way, guitarist Joe Perry stated, "When we started to make Toys in the Attic, our confidence was built up from constant touring." In his autobiography, Perry elaborated:
Writing Aerosmith's third album includes some of their best-known songs, including "Walk This Way", "Sweet Emotion", and the title track. The band entered the sessions with just three or four songs, and for the first time, wrote most of the material while recording. Prior to the sessions, the group booked rehearsal time to write material, shape the songs, and prepare for the recording sessions. Douglas explains,
Tyler would write lyrics as the music was completed. Douglas explains, "Steven was a tormented lyricist — a brilliant lyricist, but absolutely tormented, and as time went on, he became more and more tormented to come up with lyrics. The band, and particularly Joe, could just rip out these great riffs. Steven was a brilliant lyricist, and funny, and self-deprecating and aware of what was going on in the world and what was going on in the streets, but he had set a bar for himself that was so high that it was really difficult for him. Perry continues, "It is really hard to have everything make sense, tell a story rhythmically, rhyme, fit in the fabric, and he's got his own demons that he has to satisfy. He would basically take the tracks, and put headphones on and just walk around wherever he could, whether it was walking around the block in New York or at his house walking around the yard, or walking around the neighborhood, and he would just kind of sing along to it until he got something."
Perry remembers their creative process during the sessions, and writing the title track, "Toys in the Attic": "Toys was the first time we went in the studio without a whole album's worth of songs. We had to write some in the studio. Jack Douglas said: 'We need one more rocker.' And I sat on an amp and just started playing a riff. It was the riff to the song "Toys In The Attic". Tyler adds, "Joe was jamming a riff and I started yelling, 'Toys, toys, toys...' Organic, immediate, infectious... I just started singing and it fit like chocolate and peanut butter. Joe plays his ass off on that song."
"Uncle Salty" is credited to both Tyler and bassist Hamilton, who came up with the riff. He explains, "I came up with it within the first year the band was together. Then we didn't use it until the third album. That's typical with me. I'll come up with a musical idea and be very reluctant to show it to people. I guess it's just inhibitions that I've got to work on breaking down, because it usually works out really well when I finally do get up the gumption to show it to people." Tyler recalls writing the lyrics in his 2001 autobiography, "Here I was thinking about an orphanage when I wrote those lyrics. I'd try to make the melody weep from the sadness felt when a child is abandoned." Tyler continues, "Salty worked in a home for lost children and had his way with this little girl. That's what it's about. I'm the little girl, the orphaned boy. I put myself in that place. I'm Uncle Salty too."
Of the biblical "Adam's Apple", Tyler says, "I don't remember anything except I arranged it and must have fought for credit. And I originally wanted to call the album Love at First Bite after the line in the song."
The album also features a cover of Bull Moose Jackson's "Big Ten-Inch Record", a risque R&B hit recorded in 1952 and first heard by the band on a tape of Dr. Demento's radio show on KMET. Tyler explains, "Years ago I had this friend who would send me tapes of his radio show, and that's how we ended up covering 'Big Ten-Inch Record.' Demento is a wonderful guy." Rather than produce a rock reimagining, Aerosmith's cover largely stays true to the original song, down to its jazz-style instrumentation. Brad Whitford explains, "We heard the original and played it for laughs. We played it for our producer and he said 'Let's do it. Not only that, let's do it like they did it then, with the horns and everything'. We thought, 'Hey, that might be a good idea'."Classic Cuts. 1987.
Bassist Tom Hamilton came up with the main riff on "Sweet Emotion", partially inspired by the Jeff Beck composition "Rice Pudding". Hamilton explains its history: "Believe it or not, the intro to the song and the bass part that I play during the verses, were written while I was in high school. I just kept it in the back of my mind for years... at the end of the recording for the tracks for Toys in the Attic, we still didn't have that song. That song was never planned to be on the album. Our producer one day said, 'It's jam day, we got the tracks done, so if anyone has any extra ideas floating around, lets hear it now.' I said, 'I've got these parts,' and I showed the guitar players how to play the guitar parts I wrote. By the end of the day we had the music done and Steven then put on the vocals."Metal Shop. 1987 He continues, "I wrote that line on bass, and I realized I should think of some guitar parts for it if I was ever going to get a chance to present it to the band. I didn't think I ever would... Steven had the idea of taking that intro riff, which became the chorus bass line under the "sweet emotion" part, and transposing it into the key of E, and making it a really heavy Led Zeppelinesque thing. Producer Jack Douglas recalls, "He had that bassline. And when Joey Kramer came in, he played on the twos and fours instead of the ones and threes, so he was playing on the backside of it. When we heard that, we went, 'Oh, boy! Magic.'" The song's lyrics, particularly the first verse, were inspired by Tyler's acrimonious relationship with Perry's then-wife, Elyssa. Tyler explains, "I was angry at Elyssa because she stole my boyfriend, my significant other, my partner in crime. It was like losing a brother. So now there was jealousy, this dark undercurrent humming along. And I put it into Sweet Emotion, which I pointed at Elyssa directly."
Tyler explains that "No More No More" was inspired by "life on the road: boredom, disillusion, Holiday Inns, stalemate, jailbait. My diary." "Sometimes I start thinking about having a wife and child, but the group is my carriage, pulling me right along, so I have no time for that now."
The most complex production on the album was "You See Me Crying", a piano ballad that was heavily orchestrated. The song was written by Tyler with credit given to former Chain Reaction bandmate Don Solomon. Tyler had written the opening and closing piano melody years earlier, having played it during the coda to "Dream On" on 1971: The Road Starts Hear.
"Walk This Way"
In interviews, the band and Douglas have extensively detailed the writing of "Walk This Way" and each stage of its development. The song originated in December 1974 in Honolulu, Hawaii, where Aerosmith was opening for the Guess Who. During a soundcheck, Perry was "fooling around with riffs and thinking about the Meters". Loving that band's "riffy New Orleans funk, especially 'Cissy Strut' and 'People Say'", he asked drummer Joey Kramer "to lay down something flat with a groove on the drums", and the guitar riff to what would become "Walk This Way" just "came off [his] hands." Needing a bridge, he "played another riff and went there. But I didn't want the song to have a typical, boring 1, 4, 5 chord progression. After playing the first riff in the key of C, I shifted to E before returning to C for the verse and chorus. By the end of the sound check, I had the basics of a song."
When singer Steven Tyler heard Perry playing that riff he "ran out and sat behind the drums and [they] jammed." Tyler scatted "nonsensical words initially to feel where the lyrics should go before adding them later."
When the group was halfway through recording Toys in the Attic in early 1975 at Record Plant in New York City, they found themselves stuck for material. They had written three or four songs for the album, having "to write the rest in the studio." They decided to give the song Perry had come up with in Hawaii a try, but it did not have lyrics or a title yet. Douglas explains, "I told the band we needed one more up-tempo track, and Joe plays a burner, a thing so hot and hard and heavy that we're just totally blown away. It was the last track and Steven was struggling. We recorded it, and we couldn't come up with a lyric or a rhyme or a rhythm for a vocal. There was just no way that it had anything we could use. We thought we were going to have to lose the track, or maybe make it an instrumental, but it was so good and funky." Deciding to take a break from recording, band members and producer Jack Douglas went down to Times Square to see Mel Brooks' Young Frankenstein. Returning to the studio, they were laughing about Marty Feldman telling Gene Wilder to follow him in the film, saying "walk this way" and limping. Douglas suggested this as a title for their song. But they still needed lyrics.
At the hotel that night, Tyler wrote lyrics for the song, but left them in the cab on the way to the studio next morning. He says: "I must have been stoned. All the blood drained out of my face, but no one believed me. They thought I never got around to writing them." Upset, he took a cassette tape with the instrumental track they had recorded and a portable tape player with headphones and "disappeared into the stairwell." He "grabbed a few No. 2 pencils" but forgot to take paper. He wrote the lyrics on the wall at "the Record Plant's top floor and then down a few stairs of the back stairway." After "two or three hours" he "ran downstairs for a legal pad and ran back up and copied them down."
The lyrics, which tell the story of a teenage boy losing his virginity, are sung by Tyler with heavy emphasis being placed on the rhyming lyrics. Douglas remembers, "Steven came back with the whole thing. He started with the chorus, 'Walk this way,' and then he came up with the most off the wall verse, which was early rap, maybe the first rap ever. Be-bop-dooty-dot-dan-bot-bot boddy-da-doot-ba-bada-da-dow. I mean, where did it come from? Clark Terry, Count Basie, you know? Steven had those roots, mind you, because he had a big musical catalog, so he had a lot of that stuff upstairs, but that he went for that was amazing."