Rocks In The Attic #153: Stereophonics - ‘Performance And Cocktails’ (1999)

I’m never been a huge fan of this band. I loved this album - and most of its singles - when it came out, but then fame and success seemed to do something to the band, and all of a sudden they started doing really lame stuff like singing Handbags And Gladrags on talk shows, sat moodily on stools.

In other words, they sold out. Their first album set themselves up as a rock band in the vein of early Manic Street Preachers; then this album, their second, pushed them over into the mainstream - mainly because of the five Top-20 singles that were pulled from the album. Unfortunately Performance And Cocktails follows the usual trend that record companies employ - stack all the singles on side one, and stick all the filler on the flip-side.

I don’t think they were even on my radar until I saw them performing Just Looking on TFI Friday. Not a bad song, I thought. I then caught their music video for The Bartender And The Thief, and I was impressed. That song in particular speaks to the rocker in me.

I’m always sceptical about music videos and the role they play in music these days, but the videos they made to promote this album are well worth a watch. The Bartender And The Thief pays homage to the Suzie Q / entertaining the troops scene of Apocalypse Now, Pick A Part That’s New parodies The Italian Job, I Wouldn’t Believe Your Radio does the same for Easy Rider and Hurry Up And Wait takes inspiration from M*A*S*H.

I regret not seeing the band in their prime, supporting Aerosmith in 1999 at Wembley (I went to my first Glastonbury festival instead). I did catch them in New Zealand a few years ago, at the Powerstation - a tiny venue compared to the sort of places they would play in the UK. They might not have played Handbags And Gladrags, and they might have been dressed in leather jackets, but they still played a few too many of their catchy, post-2000, pop singles for my liking.

Hit: Just Looking

Hidden Gem: She Takes Her Clothes Off

Rocks In The Attic #137: The Joe Perry Project - ‘Let The Music Do The Talking’ (1980)

I’d like to say this is better than anything that Aerosmith was doing in 1980 - because Joe Perry is Aerosmith, right? - but it’s really not. It sounds like a solo album from just one aspect of Aerosmith, which of course is what it is. As much as I love Joe Perry - and regard him as the most kick-ass part of Aerosmith, this album really proves that he is just one element of that band, and that on his own he has trouble reaching the same peaks.

This album was released after Joe Perry left Aerosmith - following a backstage arguement involving spilt milk, of all things - and put together relatively quickly compared to the marathon recording sessions that were plaguing Aerosmith at the time.

It’s pretty cheesy, but I love the album cover. The front has a photograph of Joe, guitar slung over his back, delivering the master tape to a board meeting of executives sat across a ridiculously large glass conference table. The rear cover has a shot of Joe, sat at an ornate desk in near-darkness like a private detective, cigarette in hand, overlooking 8”x10” black and white photographs of his band. Love it!

Hit: Let The Music Do The Talking

Hidden Gem: Shooting Star

Rocks In The Attic #130: Guns N’ Roses - ‘G N’ R Lies’ (1988)

I’ve never been overly enamoured with this album. It’s yet another shocking record company cash-in, something to keep the tills ringing between the success of Appetite For Destruction and their follow-up studio albums. Half of the album is made up of previously released material - four songs from the pre-Appetite EP release Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide - together with four ‘new’ acoustic songs (one is an alternate version of a song from Appetite).

I’ve never been a huge fan of this band. Appetite is a good record, but it’s vastly overrated, and mostly subscribed to by girls who claim to be rock chicks but don’t actually listen to any other rock albums. The Use Your Illusion records have their moments but I have trouble seeing behind their pomposity.

Lies is an odd release, capturing the band live a year before their debut album was released, and then again in the year following the spectacular success of Appetite. The band pays homage to Aerosmith twice on the Live ?!*@ Like a Suicide tracks - namechecking Permanent Vacation in the first song Reckless Life, and then following this with a great cover of Mama Kin.

If you were a fan of Appetite when this was released, it would probably disappoint you, but then again wouldn’t everything else in Guns N’ Roses’ subsequent career?

Hit: Patience

Hidden Gem: Mama Kin (Live)

Rocks In The Attic #123: Aerosmith - ‘Permanent Vacation’ (1987)

Although essentially this is where the rot set in for Aerosmith - when they started to employ outsiders as songwriters - this album also marks their revival to the second age of their career. It’s a cracking album - a little too much of its time, so I don’t know how it will sound in 10 or 20 years - but it’s got a level of energy that was unheard of from the band up to this point.

This album also hints at their penchant for novelty songs - Dude (Looks Like A Lady) would soon be joined by the likes of Love In An Elevator and Aerosmith would forever be associated with the crazily titled rock song, and for a whole new generation of rock fans (and subsequent generations), this would be the only thing they would know the band for.

This album - or more truthfully, the promotion for this album - would also be the first time they would have great success with music videos, storming their way into the party held over at the house of the MTV generation (their parents must have been out of town). The videos that accompany this album are all very enjoyable (well, Dude and Rag Doll are - I still can’t take the video - or the song, for that matter - of Angel seriously), and at least the band look relatively young. Young enough not to look too much out of place hanging around with hot chicks half their age (compared to now where they’ll star in videos with hot chicks a quarter of their age - ugh).

Years after first hearing Hangman Jury - the band’s one and only real jaunt into roots music - on MTV Unplugged and loving it, I was lucky enough to see the band play it live in Dublin, with the intro played just by Tyler and Perry on acoustic guitar and harmonica, sat at the end of the ego-ramp, mere yards away from where I stood. Fantastic.

Hit: Dude (Looks Like A Lady)

Hidden Gem: Hangman Jury

Rocks In The Attic #112: Aerosmith - ‘Live! Bootleg’ (1978)

This album is overlong. The performances are sloppy. The mix is pretty murky. But I love it.

Of all of the Aerosmith albums that I initially bought when I got turned onto them, this one represented the ‘way in’ to their back catalogue. Other than 1980’s Greatest Hits and 1991’s Pandora’s Box, there wasn’t really any other comprehensive Aerosmith compilations available in the early 90s when I started to listen to them. Now it’s gone the other way and I believe that when I last counted, their (officially released) compilations and live albums were just about to overtake their count of studio albums. That’s a pretty bad statistic, but proof that record companies will plunder and plunder an artist’s back catalogue, endlessly re-releasing the same songs over and over again, as long as there’s a willing public to buy them.

In terms of chronology, this 1978 release comes between 1977’s Draw The Line and 1979’s Night In The Ruts - in their only fallow year (up to this point they had released a studio album every year since their 1973 debut). If Draw The Line didn’t signal the end of the band due to their over-reliance on drugs, this surely did.

Aside from the hits (Walk This Way, Sweet Emotion, Dream On, Back In The Saddle), the set covers a heap of decent album tracks which wouldn’t see the light on Greatest Hits and in most cases would have to wait until Pandora’s Box to get the attention they deserved.

But the real treasures of the album are those live tracks not recorded in stadiums and arenas like the majority of the material. There’s Last Child, recorded in a Boston Club; a stunning cover of Come Together, recorded at the band’s rehearsal space; and in I Ain’t Got You and Mother Popcorn, two covers showcasing the band’s R&B influences, recorded for a radio performance in 1973 when promoting their first album. I have that 1973 Paul’s Mall performance in its entirety on CD - a fantastic set - and a true live bootleg album, unlike this one which is CBS Records’ attempt to capitalise on the trend of professional-sounding bootleg albums in the late 70s.

There’s just one more reason I love this album: the photos on the gatefold showing Joe Perry playing his red BC Rich Bich -  truly awesome, and in terms of body-shape, the best looking guitar I’ve ever seen.

Hit: Walk This Way

Hidden Gem: Mother Popcorn

Rocks In The Attic #100: Aerosmith - ‘Toys In The Attic’ (1975)

It only seems apt that as I covered Aerosmith’s Rocks as the 50^th entry in this series, I would need to do Toys In The Attic as the 100^th, completing the name of the blog which took inspiration from these two albums.

So the story goes that not long after I was first exposed to Aerosmith - via an Aerosmith music video weekend on MTV - I went on holiday with my parents to Cornwall. I had, by this time, bought Pump on CD - in fact, I think I bought it the following weekend after that MTV weekend, from the Our Price that used to be next to Boots on Market Street in Manchester.

These, however, were the days before CD players in cars had become commonplace. I think we travelled down to Cornwall with a taped copy of Pump playing on the car stereo. When we landed in Newquay, the first thing we did after checking in at the Bed & Breakfast, was to walk down the road and pop into the little adjoining row of shops. In that row of shops was a second-hand record store, and in the row of tapes on the counter was a second-hand copy of Toys In The Attic. I snapped it up, and alongside Pump - which I’d probably played too much on the journey down - Toys In The Attic became the soundtrack to that holiday.

To me, Toys In The Attic and Rocks are very much like Rubber Soul and Revolver - two back-to-back albums with a very high watermark, and indistinguishable enough to be double albums in their own right - hence Rocks In The Attic as the name of this blog (or I guess to take the song from Rocks, the alternative to this would be calling it Toys In The Cellar).

Of the two, I believe Rocks is the better album, but I prefer Toys In The Attic. It’s a little looser, and has a bit more light; whereas Rocks is the shadier, more serious of the two. Rocks really doesn’t let up, and you can almost hear the cocaine on it. Toys on the other hand, sounds like it was only made with the assistance of a joint or 200.

I love this album so much, I have it on CD twice - one of those being the 1994 collector’s edition gold disc version from Sony’s Mastersound 20-Bit Super Bit Mapping Series; and I also have it on LP twice - one of those being a Japanese pressing with an Obi strip. I probably still have that worn-out copy on cassette that I picked up in Cornwall too.

Hit: Walk This Way

Hidden Gem: Big Ten Inch Record

Rocks In The Attic #97: AC/DC - ‘High Voltage’ (1976)

My love for AC/DC was founded on the international versions of their early albums, with this being a collection of songs from their first two Australian releases. Now that I live at this end of the world, I keep meaning to hunt down their Aussie originals.

After I bought their 1992 Live album and decided to get the rest of their back catalogue, my OCD collector’s attitude urged me onto buying their albums in order, so naturally I started with this, their (international) debut.

On first listen, I remember thinking that compared to the crunch and bombast of Live, that it sounded pretty weak. Each successive album gets closer to that raw live sound, but here it almost sounds like a different band - like a poorly produced bad covers band playing AC/DC material through cheap instruments. It does have a certain charm though.

To give you an idea of how formative this album was for me, The Jack was the first song I learnt to play on the guitar. I didn’t start with something by Aerosmith - who I’d been listening to for a few years by then - I started with a Blues in E, by AC/DC. To this day, I can’t listen to the song without picking up my guitar and ripping through the solo.

As far as album covers go, the front cover of this is a classic - with a nice drawing of Angus clutching his SG, and an early version of the band’s logo evident in the top left corner - but the back cover is slightly disconcerting. Alongside publicity photos of each band member are fictional letters from the likes of worried parents and school teachers, concerned about the band’s latest exploits with their teenage daughters. At the time, I’m sure this made them sound edgy and dangerous, but in the 21^st century with a touch of added hindsight it makes the band sound like a group or marauding paedophiles, parading through Australian suburbs just as the school bells ring out. To further add fuel to this fire, Bon Scott namechecks Gary Glitter in the banal lyrics to Little Lover; and of course the album cover features the band’s lead guitarist dressed as a schoolboy. Oh dear.

Hit: T.N.T.

Hidden Gem: Live Wire

Rocks In The Attic #86: The Wildhearts - ‘Earth Vs. The Wildhearts’ (1993)

Aside from older bands - Aerosmith and AC/DC specifically - The Wildhearts were probably my favourite contemporary band when I first started listening to music. I really don’t remember why but I bought the Suckerpunch CD single - still one of my all-time favourite singles mainly due to the strength of its B-sides - and I was hooked.

I could never understand - as you never do when you’re young and you don’t really understand the music business - why The Wildhearts weren’t more popular than they were. In the mid-nineties, they were the darlings of the British rock press, and their singles were sold in enough quantities to usually make the Top 10, securing them a spot on Top Of The Pops. Fans didn’t just like The Wildhearts - they loved The Wildhearts. Once at Rio’s in Bradford, I was let into the club for free by the bouncer, simply because I was wearing a Wildhearts T-shirt.

When touring this album, their set at 1994’s Reading Festival was memorable when their bass player - Danny McCormack - dislocated his knee doing a star jump during the first song Caffeine Bomb. Instead of stopping, he was propped up onto a flight case, and played the rest of the set (in blinding pain). I think it’s things like that which really made them real. Can you imagine Jack White doing that? Or the Kings Of Leon?

Their other big draw is that their B-sides were just as good - if not better - as the material they would put on their albums. So fans were rewarded by decent songs every time they released something, whether it was a full album or a single (or even a fan-club only album like the very limited original version of Fishing For Luckies, which I still have on CD and always look up in Record Collector to see how much it’s worth these days).

In that decade, out of all the bands I liked, I must have seen this band play live the most. I rushed out and bought tickets to their tours, even when they didn’t have an album out to support. Unlike most bands, they used to tour continually, and their gigs were always well attended by fans in black smiley-bones T-shirts with the ironic catchphrase ‘Demand The Right To Be Unique’ scrawled across the back in white lettering. I can’t remember how many times I saw them, but it must have been something like 6 or 7 times within the space of 3 or 4 years.

I even had a pen-pal (a pen-pal!) around this time - who I met (I don’t know where) through our mutual love for the band. Unfortunately for her, living in the USA, she didn’t get to see them play live too often - if at all - so I used to report back to her every time I saw the band play, and we would share bootleg tapes of their shows. Ultimately I think we lost touch when the internet replaced such archaic forms of communication.

When I went to University, and my musical tastes broadened, I fell out of touch with what the band were doing. I still bought their stuff, but 1997’s industrial-sounding Endless, Nameless turned me off them completely. I saw them live again in the early 2000s, and thankfully they had gone back to their early days, wearing leather jackets on stage and playing material from their early years.

Just listening to this album brings back so many memories - probably just because I went to see them play live so often. I remember driving to Warrington to see them play once - at Parr Hall - and we pulled over to ask a couple of locals who looked like rockers for directions. They said they didn’t know where the venue was, so we eventually found it ourselves, and ended up standing in the queue behind the guys we had just asked for directions (seems that Warringtonians either aren’t too friendly, or they’re not great at giving directions). Another time, I saw them support AC/DC in Manchester - one of my all-time favourite gig line-ups - and I was amongst a very small group of people (there were maybe 5 or 6 of us) moshing to them amongst the older AC/DC fans.

This album is dedicated to Bowie guitarist Mick Ronson, who died not long after it was recorded. He plays a guitar solo on the great My Baby Is A Headf*ck - his final recorded appearance.

Hit: TV Tan

Hidden Gem: Everlone

Rocks In The Attic #81: Aerosmith - ‘Honkin’ On Bobo’ (2004)

Aerosmith really know how to disappoint. When I first heard about this record - that it was going to be a back-to basics Blues record, produced by their old-time 70s producer Jack Douglas - I was so excited. After almost twenty years of trying to rewrite their past, and becoming a shadow of their former selves, this idea seemed to make sense. They’ve realised that their Geffen output was sub-par! They’re going back to their Blues influences! And just to make sure it all works, they’ve got Jack Douglas back on board to produce the record! What could go wrong?

This album is so bad it’s offensive. Everything sounds so clean and polished, they end up sounding like the resident jazz band on the Starship Enterprise. Any indication that they were going back to their roots was then completely swept aside when they went out on tour to support the album. The accompanying tour DVD - You Gotta Move - shows them getting massages and travelling to shows separately in private jets.

If there is one good thing to come out of all this, it’s the fact that they started playing their older material on tour. During their Geffen days they pretty much only played Geffen material live. When I first saw them touring Get A Grip in 1993, and then twice touring Nine Lives in 1997, they pretty much only played their Geffen singles, plus a few album tracks from the respective album they were touring, rounded off with an encore of their three big Columbia singles - Dream On, Sweet Emotion and Walk This Way. Since they reacquainted themselves with their older material for Honkin’ On Bobo, they now tend to play roughly a 65/35 split - with their older stuff still taking the minority - but at least they’re playing a decent amount of 70s material and not acting as though it doesn’t exist.

Hit: Baby Please Don’t Go

Hidden Gem: The Grind

Rocks In The Attic #74: Various Artists - ‘Air America (O.S.T.)’ (1990)

Of all the film soundtracks I have in my record collection, this is probably the film I’m least familiar with. I think I’ve only seen it once, and it doesn’t ever seem to be played on TV (well, not on New Zealand television at least).

I bought this as it has an Aerosmith song on it - a cover of The Doors’ Love me Two Times, presumably recorded during the Pump sessions.

The rest of the album isn’t bad - a random collection of pop rock mainly from the late sixties and early seventies. Aside from Do It Again by Steely Dan - which always sounds good - the real treasure on the album is Rescue Me - Fontella Bass’ 1965 single on Chess Records.

On a negative point, this album goes a long way to showcase how poorly made vinyl records were in the early 90s. On both sides, the run-in groove has been cut into the record incorrectly so that when you put the needle down it doesn’t actually run onto the first song - it’s just goes around in a circle without the songs starting. Idiots.

Hit: California Dreamin’ - The Mamas & The Papas

Hidden Gem: Rescue Me - Fontella Bass

Rocks In The Attic #50: Aerosmith - ‘Rocks’ (1976)

Seeing as this is the 50^th entry in this particular blog, I thought I’d cover an album I really, really love - and one that lends its name to (half of) the blog’s title. Looking back, I regret not doing something similar for the silver posting at #25, which was taken by Lionel Richie’s Can’t Slow Down. Oh dear - perhaps subconsciously I like Lionel Richie solo albums more than I give myself credit for.

Rocks is Aerosmith’s fourth studio album and the creative peak of their classic 70s period. This is the album that was heard by a young Slash and turned him onto rock music, essentially giving birth to Guns ‘N Roses. Of this album, and its predecessor Toys In The Attic, I probably prefer the earlier album as it has a little more light on it. That’s not to say Rocks is a dark album - it’s just darker than Toys... and is very no-nonsense.

Credit also has to be given to the producer, Jack Douglas - now practically a sixth member of the band. The production specifically on the opening track Back In The Saddle is fantastic, building up to a release with sound effects perfectly complimenting the lyrics to conjure up a dusty saloon in the old west.

It’s all the rage these days for bands to play their classic albums in their entirety. I guess this maybe started with Pink Floyd playing Dark Side Of The Moon in its entirety on their Pulse tour. I read somewhere that back in 2009, Aerosmith played Rocks from start to finish as the centrepiece of their live show - after giving Toys... the same treatment went down well with the fans. Now normally I’d love to see the band play either of these albums in full, but I’m not really sure I want the 21^st century version of Aerosmith spoiling my love of these two great albums.

I used to love Blondie, but seeing them live at Glastonbury in 1999 really turned me off them, and it took me a very long time to start appreciating them again. I have an almost religious love for the Toys... and Rocks albums and I wouldn’t want that to be destroyed. Sometimes nostalgia should be left in its box.

Hit: Last Child

Hidden Gem: Combination

Rocks In The Attic #41: Aerosmith - ‘Done With Mirrors’ (1985)

This was supposedly Aerosmith’s comeback album - their first with Joe Perry and Brad Whitford back in the band, and their first on Geffen records - the glitzy record label that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere in the 1980s. Unfortunately for everybody involved, they would have to wait another two years to release their real comeback album - Permanent Vacation - an album that rightfully put them back at the top of the tree.

This isn’t a bad album, it’s just poorly produced (by Doobie Brothers and Van Halen producer Ted Templeman). It feels very flat - and while the sound is very clear, there’s nothing special to grab your attention. This would have been the first studio album that Aerosmith would have released on compact disc, and possibly they were so taken with the new technology that they forgot to actually make a decent album.

The other thing this album has to work against is the fact that some bright spark at the record label decided to get creative with the name of the album. On its release, all text on the sleeve including the name of the album - and even the name of the band - was printed in reverse, and could be read normally by holding up to a mirror. Now I like this, it’s something different, but I’m very aware that a large proportion of rock fans tend to be cerebrally challenged - so this surely would have been commercial suicide. It’s okay when you’re the biggest band in the world and you put out a record without your name on it (eg. Led Zeppelin IV), but if you’re on the comeback trail it might make a bit more sense to actually make it loud and clear who you are.

David Geffen really must have started rubbing his hands with glee during the 1980s. Not only did he have Aerosmith on his new record label by 1985 - but he’d very soon have Guns ‘N Roses joining them, and after that Nirvana. There used to be a time when I could quite happily pigeon-hole an Aerosmith album as good or questionable depending on which label the record was on. Records on their original label Columbia were mostly good, while the stuff on Geffen was always questionable. This no longer works however, as they went back to Columbia in 1997 and have released mainly rubbish ever since.

Hit: Let The Music Do The Talking

Hidden Gem: Shela

Rocks In The Attic #1: Aerosmith - 'Aerosmith' (1973)

“Good evening people, welcome to the show...”

It’s perhaps fitting that I should start this blog with a review of an album by Aerosmith, the band that first turned me onto music. I had toyed with music before I discovered Aerosmith, but once I heard this band it was like an addiction.

I can’t remember what I first heard this album, their debut. I can get very anal when collecting music, and I’ll tend to collect a band’s back catalogue in chronological order where possible. I remember buying 1989’s Pump first - on CD - followed by 1975’s Toys In The Attic - on cassette while on holiday. I had a well-thumbed article on them from a music magazine (published around 1993) which listed all of their albums, and this probably sent me back to Aerosmith (1973) next, to hear how it all began.

It’s an odd album in comparison to the rest of their 1970s output. The most startling thing is Steven Tyler’s voice - sounding very different to the raspy vocals he would later be known for, and sounding more like a black vocalist. Thankfully he had dropped this by the time of their sophomore effort, 1974’s Get Your Wings.

The songs are a solid bunch of R&B rockers, more in the style of English rock n’ roll than the post-Woodstock tired psychedelia coming out of the rest of America in the very early 70s. Like other debuts, the material sounds very grounded and you can imagine the band having toured the hell out of these songs before they even stepped near a recording studio.

I have a great bootleg of the band doing a radio performance of this album just after its release in 1973 (the same radio performance that lends I Ain’t Got You and Mother Popcorn to 1978’s Live! Bootleg). It’s fantastic, and really shows that they knew the songs inside out by the time they were promoting the album.

There must be loads of albums like this from the 1970s - solid rock n’ roll efforts showing a lot of promise but maybe haven’t endured long enough to survive into the digital age. Upon release this album only did local business - enough to keep the band on tour and afloat until they could get back in the studio - but Dream On was re-released in 1976, hit the US Top Ten and by then Aerosmith was one of the biggest rock bands in the country.

Hit: Dream On

Hidden Gem: One Way Street