The period of Aerosmith’s history that the band’s own members have described most consistently as the least fully documented in their own memories is not a period of creative decline — it is the period of their greatest commercial achievement and some of their most significant musical output. The years between approximately 1975 and 1980, during which the combination of creative momentum and pharmaceutical chaos produced a specific environment that the people inside it experienced as both extraordinarily productive and increasingly difficult to sustain, are the years that generated the material that defined what Aerosmith was to an entire generation of listeners.
Steven Tyler has spoken about this period with the honesty of someone who has been sober long enough to examine it without the defensive strategies that the active period requires. He has said there are recordings from those years that he has listened to in the decades since and that he does not remember making — not in the sense of a vague memory requiring effort to recover, but in the sense of a genuine absence, a blank where the experience of recording should be.
1. Back in the Saddle (1976)
The opening track of Rocks — the album that many serious critics and many serious musicians consider the finest hard rock album of the 1970s. Tyler has said the recording of Back in the Saddle is among the ones he has the least reliable memory of — he knows the song, has performed it thousands of times, has studied the recording the way a musician studies their own work, and cannot consistently locate the specific experience of making it. The vocal on the track is one of the finest in his catalog. The relationship between the quality and the memory is the specific quality of the period.
2. Last Child (1976)
The guitar riff that Brad Whitford brought to the Rocks sessions — Tyler has said Whitford arrived with the riff and he responded to it with a lyric that came quickly, in the specific way that lyrics come when the music has already done most of the work. The recording captures something that the live performances of the same era captured — the specific quality of a band that was functioning at a level of collective musical intelligence that the individual members’ personal circumstances did not suggest was sustainable, and that turned out not to be sustainable for very much longer.
3. Draw the Line (1977)
Tyler has described the Draw the Line recording sessions as among the most chaotic of the band’s career — and the band’s career during this period contains sessions that set a high standard for chaos. The title track emerged from those sessions with a quality of barely controlled energy that the production choices of the period — recording live, minimal overdubs, the sound of a band in a room rather than a band assembled through studio technology — made into something that cleaner productions would not have produced.
4. Nobody’s Fault (1976)
The most musically adventurous track on Rocks — a piece of progressive hard rock that demonstrated the band’s interest in complexity that the simpler singles from the same period did not reveal. Tyler has said this song is one he consistently discovers new things in when he hears the recording — that the density of what Joe Perry and Brad Whitford were doing in the guitar arrangement contains elements that he did not register in the making because the making was not something he was fully registering.
5. Rats in the Cellar (1976)
The track that most completely captures the specific energy of the Rocks era — played at a tempo and with an intensity that the technical requirements of sustaining that tempo and intensity reveal, retrospectively, as something that the musicians were either pushing past normal physical limits to achieve or were operating in a state that made the normal physical limits unavailable as a constraint. Tyler has said performing this song live in the current era — with the full memory and awareness of a sober man — is a different experience from performing it in 1976 when the making and the performing occupied the same state of consciousness.
Tyler has been sober since 1988, with periods of relapse that he has addressed publicly with the honesty that characterizes his accounts of everything about this period. He has said the recordings from the years he cannot remember are the ones he is most grateful for — not despite the circumstances that produced them but in complicated relationship to those circumstances, in the way that people are grateful for things that came from places they would not choose to return to.