Get Your Wings
Studio album by
Aerosmith
ReleasedMarch 15, 1974[1]
RecordedDecember 17, 1973 – January 14, 1974
StudioRecord Plant, New York City
Genre
Length38:04
LabelColumbia
Producer
Aerosmith chronology
Aerosmith
(1973)		 Get Your Wings
(1974)		 Toys in the Attic
(1975)
Singles from Get Your Wings
  1. "Same Old Song and Dance"
    Released: March 1974
  2. "Train Kept A Rollin' (single edit)"
    Released: October 1974[4]
  3. "S.O.S. (Too Bad)"
    Released: February 1975

Get Your Wings is the second studio album by American rock band Aerosmith, released on March 15, 1974. The album was their first to be produced by Jack Douglas, who also was responsible for the band's next three albums. Three singles were released from the album, but none reached the singles charts.

The album has been released in stereo and quadraphonic, and certified triple platinum by the RIAA.[5]

Background

In January 1973, Aerosmith released its debut album to little fanfare. As guitarist Joe Perry recalled in the 1997 band memoir Walk This Way, "There was no nothing at all: no press, no radio, no airplay, no reviews, no interviews, no party. Instead the album got ignored and there was a lot of anger and flipping out."[6] The band had been somewhat nervous recording their first album, with vocalist Steven Tyler going so far to alter his singing voice, and they had very little chemistry with producer Adrian Barber. The band moved into an apartment in Brookline and began intensive rehearsals in a dungeon-like basement of a store called Drummer's Image on Newbury Street.[7] By the time they began recording Get Your Wings, however, Jack Douglas had agreed to work with the band, beginning a long and successful studio collaboration. According to Perry, Columbia had wanted the band to work with Bob Ezrin, who was also a producer with Alice Cooper. It was Ezrin who introduced the band to Douglas, and for "all practical purposes, Jack became our producer. Ezrin might have shown up three or four times, but only to make suggestions, like bringing in additional musicians to augment our sound."[8]

Recording and composition

Get Your Wings was recorded at the Record Plant in New York City between December 1973 and January 1974. Jay Messina engineered the sessions. Douglas later recalled, "To the best of my memory, the preproduction work for Get Your Wings started in the back of a restaurant that was like a Mob hangout in the North End. I commuted there from the Copley Plaza Hotel and they started to play me the songs they had for their new album. My attitude was: 'What can I do to make them sound like themselves?'"[9]

In 1997, Perry explained to Aerosmith biographer Stephen Davis:

The tracks were the stuff we'd been working on at our apartment on Beacon Street in the summer of '73. I wrote the riff to "Same Old Song and Dance" one night in the front room and Steven just started to sing along. "Spaced" happened the same way in the studio, with a lot of input from Jack. "S.O.S." meant "Same Old Shit" and came from the rehearsals at the Drummer's Image ... "Lord of the Thighs" and "Seasons of Wither" were Steven's songs. Of all the ballads Aerosmith has done, "Wither" was the one I liked best.[10]

In his autobiography, Tyler writes that some songs like "Seasons of Wither" had been "germinating in my head for a long time, but the other more sinister tracks, like 'Lord of the Thighs', came from the seedy area where we recorded the album. 'Lord of the Thighs' was about a pimp and the wildlife out on the street."[11] Tyler plays the piano on the track, the opening beat of which is similar to the one Kramer would play a year later in "Walk This Way". He stated that the title was a pun on the famous William Golding novel Lord of the Flies, and "the critics hated us for this. We weren't supposed to be smart enough to use literary references."[12]

Tyler remembers, "When I wrote the music to "Seasons of Wither" I grabbed the old acoustic guitar Joey found in the garbage on Beacon Street with no strings. I put four strings on it, which is all it would take because it was so warped, went to the basement, and tried to find the words to match the scat sounds in my head, like automatic writing. The place was a mess, and I moved all the shit aside, put a rug down, popped three Tuinals, snorted some blow, sat down on the floor, tuned the guitar to that tuning, that special tuning that I thought I came up with.[13] He continues, "Seasons of Wither" was about the winter landscape near this house I was living in with Joey near an old chicken farm. I used to lie in my bed at dawn, listening to the wind in the bare trees, how lonely and melancholy it sounded. One night I went down to the basement where we had a rug on the floor and a couple of boxes for furniture and took a few Tuinals and a few Seconals and I scooped up this guitar Joey gave me, this dumpster guitar, and I lit some incense and wrote "Seasons of Wither"."[14]

One of the most well-known tracks is a cover of "Train Kept A-Rollin'", made popular by one of Aerosmith's favorite bands, the Yardbirds. According to Douglas, the crowd noise at the end of the track was taken from a "wild track" from The Concert for Bangladesh, which he had worked on.[12] The single version omits the echo and crowd noise. Notable for its start/stop groove, the song became a core part of the band's live set for a time, and still occasionally ended concerts late in their career. In 1997, drummer Joey Kramer explained to Alan Di Perna of Guitar World that its unique rhythmic feel originated "probably just from jamming on it at soundcheck and experimenting with putting a James Brown kind of beat behind it. I played with a lot of R&B-type groups before joining Aerosmith." In the same interview, Perry stated that "Train" was the one song "we all had in common when we came together."[15]

The closing "Pandora's Box" was originally written by Kramer, who recalled in 1997: "The summer before, we'd rented a farmhouse in East Thetford, Vermont, while we were rehearsing in New Hampshire, and that's where I wrote the melody of 'Pandora's Box.' Steven wrote the lines about women's liberation, a big new issue in those times."[16] According to Douglas, the clarinet at the start of the track is a union engineer playing "I'm in the Mood for Love".[12]

In 2014 Perry reflected, "We all put in endless hours, fueled by whatever substances were available ... I knew the album, in spite of a few bright spots, still didn't capture the power of the band. We were better than the record we were making. And yet I didn't know how to get there. I didn't know how to get from good to great."[17]

"On the second album," Tyler noted, "the songs found my voice. I realized that it's not about having a beautiful voice and hitting all the notes; it's about attitude."[18]

Critical reception

Professional ratings
Review scores
SourceRating
AllMusic[19]
Blender[20]
Christgau's Record GuideB−[21]
Collector's Guide to Heavy Metal10/10[22]
The Rolling Stone Album Guide[23]

Contemporary reviews were mostly positive. In his article for Rolling Stone, Charley Walters praised the LP, writing that "the snarling chords of guitarists Joe Perry and Brad Whitford tautly propel each number, jibing neatly with the rawness of singer Steven Tyler, whose discipline is evident no matter how he shrieks, growls, or spits out the lyrics."[24] Billboard reviewer called the music "derivative", but added that the band's "tough and nasty rock'n'roll vision" could be successful with the help of the right producers.[25] Music critic Robert Christgau wrote that the band were "inheritors of the Grand Funk principle: if a band is going to be dumb, it might as well be American dumb. Here they're loud and cunning enough to provide a real treat for the hearing-impaired, at least on side one."[21]

In a retrospective review for AllMusic, Stephen Thomas Erlewine declared that Get Your Wings was when Aerosmith "shed much of their influences and developed their own trademark sound, it's where they turned into songwriters, it's where Steven Tyler unveiled his signature obsessions with sex and sleaze ... they're doing their bloozy bluster better and bolder, which is what turns this sophomore effort into their first classic."[19] Ben Mitchell of Blender had the same impression and wrote that Aerosmith locked into their "trademark dirty funk" and "firmly established their simple lyrical blueprint: smut and high times" on this album.[20] Canadian critic Martin Popoff praised the album and called it a "rich, inspired and consistently entertaining rock 'n' roller, a record much more intelligent than much metal to this point in time".[22]

Track listing

Side one
No.TitleWriter(s)Length
1."Same Old Song and Dance"Steven Tyler, Joe Perry3:53
2."Lord of the Thighs"Tyler4:14
3."Spaced"Tyler, Perry4:21
4."Woman of the World"Tyler, Don Solomon5:49
Side two
No.TitleWriter(s)Length
1."S.O.S. (Too Bad)"Tyler2:51
2."Train Kept A Rollin'"Tiny Bradshaw, Howard Kay, Lois Mann5:33
3."Seasons of Wither"Tyler5:38
4."Pandora's Box"Tyler, Joey Kramer5:43

Personnel

Charts

Chart (1974) Peak
position
US Billboard 200[28] 74

Certification

Region CertificationCertified units/sales
Canada (Music Canada)[29] Platinum 100,000^
United States (RIAA)[30] 3× Platinum 3,000,000^

^ Shipments figures based on certification alone.

References

  1. ↑ "Get Your Wings".
  2. ↑ Prato, Greg. "Steven Tyler | Biography & History". AllMusic. Retrieved May 28, 2021.
  3. ↑ "The 20 best rock albums of 1974". Classic Rock. August 11, 2020. Retrieved May 28, 2021.
  4. ↑ Billboard (October 12, 1974). "Top Single Picks: Pop – Recommended". Billboard. Vol. 86, no. 41. p. 51. ISSN 0006-2510. 1st mention of 'Train Kept A Rollin' in Billboard
  5. ↑ "RIAA Gold & Platinum Database: search for Aerosmith". RIAA. Recording Industry Association of America. Retrieved January 28, 2016.
  6. ↑ Davis & Aerosmith 1997, p. 181.
  7. ↑ Perry & Ritz 2014, p. 130.
  8. ↑ Perry & Ritz 2014, p. 131.
  9. ↑ Davis & Aerosmith 1997, pp. 212–213.
  10. ↑ Davis & Aerosmith 1997, p. 213.
  11. ↑ Tyler & Dalton 2011, p. 114.
  12. 1 2 3 Davis & Aerosmith 1997, p. 217.
  13. ↑ Tyler, Steven. 2011. Does the Noise in My Head Bother You?: The Autobiography. HarperCollins UK.
  14. ↑ Davis, Stephen, and Aerosmith (Musical Group. 2003. Walk This Way : The Autobiography of Aerosmith. New York: Harpercollins.
  15. ↑ Di Perna, Alan (March 1997). "Aerosmith". Guitar World. Vol. 17, no. 3.
  16. ↑ Davis & Aerosmith 1997, p. 215.
  17. ↑ Perry & Ritz 2014, p. 132.
  18. ↑ Brannigan, Paul (September 2013). "Aerosmith". Classic Rock. No. 188. p. 56.
  19. 1 2 Erlewine, Stephen Thomas. "Aerosmith – Get Your Wings review". AllMusic. Retrieved January 28, 2016.
  20. 1 2 Mitchell, Ben. "Backcatalog: Aerosmith – Get Your Wings". Blender. Archived from the original on October 26, 2004. Retrieved January 28, 2016.
  21. 1 2 Christgau, Robert. "Get Your Wings". Robert Christgau.
  22. 1 2 Popoff, Martin (October 2003). The Collector's Guide to Heavy Metal: Volume 1: The Seventies. Burlington, Ontario, Canada: Collector's Guide Publishing. p. 17. ISBN 978-1894959025.
  23. ↑ "Aerosmith Album Guide". Rolling Stone. 2004. Archived from the original on June 28, 2011. Retrieved January 28, 2016.
  24. ↑ Walters, Charley (June 6, 1974). "Get Your Wings – Aerosmith". Rolling Stone. Retrieved January 28, 2016.
  25. ↑ "Aerosmith – Get Your Wings". Super Seventies Rocksite. Superseventies.com. Retrieved February 17, 2012.
  26. ↑ Molenda, Michael (December 14, 2017). "Who Really Played Aerosmith's "Train Kept A Rollin'" Guitar Solos?". Guitar World. Retrieved July 31, 2018.
  27. ↑ "The Official Dick Wagner Website". wagnermusic.com. Archived from the original on September 29, 2018. Retrieved October 1, 2012.
  28. ↑ "Aerosmith Chart History (Billboard 200)". Billboard. Retrieved April 22, 2018.
  29. ↑ "Canadian album certifications – Aerosmith – Get Your Wings". Music Canada.
  30. ↑ "American album certifications – Aerosmith – Get Your Wings". Recording Industry Association of America.

Bibliography

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