Author: fgt

After 32 years in the shadows, Katatonia finally allowed sunlight to pierce their darkness with Sky Void Of Stars. In 2023 vocalist Jonas Renkse refused to call their 12th album happy, though

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Katatonia have always been a serpentine band. With each new album, they
shed their skin to unveil an evolving creature underneath. It’s something that’s earned them countless accolades as they’ve grown from death metal upstarts to cinematic, prog rock veterans. Despite their progressive evolution, however, the Swedes, who celebrated their 30th anniversary in 2021, have always kept a shroud of darkness overhead. What makes their 12th album, Sky Void Of Stars, so intriguing then, is that those shadows now seem to be dissipating. The masters of melancholia have never sounded as upbeat and hopeful as they do here. Just don’t call it a happy album.

“The album is very energetic and uptempo for us,” admits vocalist Jonas Renkse. “It’s straight to the point, but I wouldn’t say it’s a happy record. It’s still sad in its heart.”

Many albums were written while the world was locked down, but for Sky Void Of Stars’ predecessor, City Burials, Katatonia had the unexpected experience of releasing it into that isolated world. Instead of packing their bags and traversing the globe in support of the record, upon its release, their momentum faded
away. While fans sat at home soaking up its musical contents, for its
writers, there was a strange sense of ‘What’s next?’

“Since we couldn’t tour, we didn’t really promote the album,” says Renkse. “But instead of just lying on the couch and waiting for something to happen,
I decided to start writing again.

“It was me doing the album alone because I wasn’t sure what it was going to be in the beginning,” he reflects. “I was certainly writing for Katatonia, but the uncertainty of the state of the world at the time just made me keep writing. I was keeping the music to myself in the beginning because I was just writing for myself, to keep myself occupied. It wasn’t until I started to have a good set of songs that I started sharing my ideas with Anders [Nyström, guitarist] to hear his opinion and see if he had any production ideas, and then to the rest of the band.”

As the musical plot lines of the record’s 11 songs were being weaved together by Renkse, playing to a live audience felt like a distant idea. To an extent, then, the album is a love story to the stage and spurred on by a longing to return to it. While Renkse is dismissive of Sky Void Of Stars being a happy album, the upbeat energy and immediacy that drives it derives from a craving to feel even just a hint of the irreplaceable adrenaline rush that live performance brings.

“Writing music that was a lot more immediate felt like an important thing to do. I was missing being onstage and being on tour. I was missing every aspect of live music. So, I found myself writing songs that I would love to perform live. Playing live onstage is a very unique experience, it’s a totally different universe from being in a studio. So, having the adrenaline of playing live in mind when writing, even if it was a little bit subconscious, was very comforting for me. It definitely shaped the sound of the album.”

Fuelled by that fresh immediacy, lead guitars are more prominent on this record than any previous release under the Katatonia moniker, adding to the adrenaline rush chasing that underlines its creation. For that, guitarist Roger Öjersson is to thank.

The musician, who entered the fold in 2016, has a colourful history, having performed in both blues and death metal bands. He was also part of Pain Of Salvation’s live line-up in 2013 and appeared on their 2014 acoustic album, Falling Home. Now his sumptuous playing adds an evocative and incendiary new dimension to Katatonia’s sound.

“Roger is a super guitarist, so it would be a shame not to use his capability of doing these kinds of solos that we maybe didn’t do so much back in the day,” Renkse says. “It’s important we write music that lets him loose, especially on this kind of record, where guitar solos really add that extra something. I think it’s also good for him to be part of the creative process. He hasn’t really written any music for Katatonia yet, so solos are where he can really express himself.”

When Öjersson isn’t strutting his stuff, Renkse is steering the sound.

“With the songs being snappier and more uptempo, it called for the record to be more vocal driven,” he explains, “but it also came from the spontaneity I was feeling when writing the vocal melodies and the lyrics. These days, I tend to write the lyrics at the same time as I’m writing the song. Writing spontaneously, as opposed to really thinking about what I want to sing about or how I want the vocals to feel, is much more rewarding for me as everything comes together much quicker. It made me feel more connected to the music and the moment.”

The spontaneity of the writing process, Renkse adds, helped diversify the topics his lyrics would broach. It became much more subconscious, like a psychiatrist unpicking his true self one song at a time.

“To me, the record title is about having a lack of navigation, the feeling of being lost somewhere, but each song is very individual, and I definitely don’t expect people to interpret these lyrics the same way as I do,” he says. “What those lyrics meant to me as I sang them may mean something completely different to how the listener perceives them. Everyone else’s version is unique and as interesting as mine, probably, so that’s the beauty of the written word and how it connects people and how it talks to different people in different ways.”

Speaking to Prog around the release of their B-sides album, Mnemosynean, in late 2021, Renkse talked fondly of his songwriting partnership with Nyström and their telepathic connection when it came to turning vision into music. So, while his bandmate and longtime friend hasn’t contributed directly to the writing of the record, their connectivity has still greatly influenced the visage of these songs.

“I know what the guys each like to play, how they want to play things. We all speak the same musical language, so when I’m writing, I’m writing for those guys, too. It helps me write music I know we will all love.”

On Impermanence, Renkse receives some wonderful vocal support from Soen frontman Joel Ekelöf. It’s an emotive and evocative progressive ballad that sounds more in keeping with the band’s back catalogue than the brighter tones that preside over much of this album. The pair’s voices coalesce wonderfully and it’s a collaboration that’s been on the cards for a while.

Says Renkse: “It’s something we’ve been talking about doing for some time; just loose talk when we see each other. When I was writing Impermanence I knew this was the song where he must be featured because he could do wonders with his voice. Especially when we are doing it together, letting the voices meet. Everything fell right into place.”

Executed with an unfamiliar urgency, Sky Void Of Stars’ songs are still typically bleak but there’s a hint of a happy ending, at long last, for some of the twisted tales. It feels that hope springs eternal in the immediacy of these songs, even if Renkse swerves the topic. The band’s constant evolution has always been unpredictable; it would have been impossible to guess how the brazen death metal of their beginnings would mature into such intelligent and alluring but dark sonic explorations. Yet, for a band who have so stylishly built a reputation for unpredictability, it’s hard to imagine that anyone foresaw their signature darkness one day sounding as paradoxically hopeful as it does on this impressive and, for Renkse, necessary new album. Don’t expect it to last, though, as Katatonia’s skin will begin to shed again soon.

“I hope for the next album,” he reveals, “the rest of the band will come back into the songwriting process. I want to build on the nice chemistry that we have. The teamwork is something that I missed with the album, even though I am super-happy with it.”

You can usually find this Prog scribe writing about the heavier side of the genre, chatting to bands for features and news pieces or introducing you to exciting new bands that deserve your attention. Elsewhere, Phil can be found on stage with progressive metallers Prognosis or behind a camera teaching filmmaking skills to young people. 

Joni Mitchell – Ladies of the Canyon

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David Bowie – Ziggy Stardust

“Also, there’s something about David Bowie in that era, and with Marc Bolan and glam rock in general, where it’s very simple, but he gets across so much with so few chords. I’m always bowled over by the simplicity and catchiness of it, and it showed me that if you get the right guitar tone on a song, you don’t have to put down 100 guitar tracks.”

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Minnie Ripperton – Les Fleurs

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Wild Man Fischer – Merry Go Round

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Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention – Camarillo Brillo

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Led Zeppelin – Tangerine

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Billy Bragg – A Lover Sings

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Simon and Garfunkel – America

“My mum had a lot of cassette tapes, and among them was Simon and Garfunkel’s live album, The Concert In Central Park. I love the whole album, but specifically America, which is also the opening song on the Almost Famous soundtrack. Ever since hearing Ladies of the Canyon, I was like, I want to live in LA, I had this obsession with wanting to go to America, and it never stopped. So then America by Simon and Garfunkel became kinda the theme of that. One day I was on my way to Vegas to marry a French boy, and I was listening to this song, and I was like, I’m living the dream! And then he didn’t marry me.”

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A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne’s private jet, played Angus Young’s Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.

Widely acknowledged as the first studio double LP by a major artist, Blonde On Blonde is one of the defining records of the 60s and of Bob Dylan’s career. It was, Dylan said, “the closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my head” – something he described with a typically poetic turn of phrase, “that wild-mercury sound.”

With this album, Dylan completed a transition from folk to rock artist, a journey begun on his two albums from 1965, Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited. Save for one track, the whole of Blonde On Blonde was recorded in just seven days spread over two sessions in Nashville, with Dylan backed by a loose ensemble of high-class musicians including keyboard players Al Kooper and guitarist Robbie Robertson.

And among the 14 songs are a number of era-defining classics: I Want You, Just Like A Woman, Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat, the stoner anthem Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 and the stunned post-apocalyptic love story that is closing track, Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands.

It also marked the end of an era, followed as it was by the near-fatal motorcycle accident that sent Dylan into semi-permanent exile. He survived, but the “wild mercury sound” didn’t.

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Every week, Album of the Week Club listens to and discusses the album in question, votes on how good it is, and publishes our findings, with the aim of giving people reliable reviews and the wider rock community the chance to contribute.

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Other albums released in June 1966

• Soul Sister – Aretha Franklin
• Gettin’ Ready – The Temptations
• Freak Out! – The Mothers of Invention
• Red Rubber Ball – The Cyrkle
• Animalisms – The Animals
• The Incredible String Band – The Incredible String Band

What they said…

“Blonde On Blonde is an album of enormous depth, providing endless lyrical and musical revelations on each play. Leavening the edginess of Highway 61 with a sense of the absurd, Blonde On Blonde is comprised entirely of songs driven by inventive, surreal, and witty wordplay, not only on the rockers but also on winding, moving ballads like Visions Of Johanna, Just Like a Woman, and Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands. (AllMusic)

“The combined presence of trusted hands like organist Al Kooper and Hawks guitarist Robbie Robertson with expert local session men including drummer Kenneth ­Buttrey and pianist Hargus “Pig” Robbins created an almost contradictory magnificence: a tightly wound tension around Dylan’s quicksilver language and incisive singing in barrelhouse surrealism.” (Rolling Stone)

“One point which both sceptics and believers can all agree on however is the extent to which Dylan is utterly at ease with himself here. Credit also, should go to the crew backing him up. And if their backing is at times a little hurried or patchy, the improvisatory nature of their trying to keep up with the man at the microphone is also a part of this album’s overall charm.” (BBC)

What you said…

Steve Pereira: This is “my” Dylan album. The first Dylan album I owned, and the first I really got into. I have loved it over the years, and I am reluctant to concede its number one spot in my heart to any other Dylan album, though Blood On The Tracks, Highway 61, and Freewheelin’ are all contenders these days. However, for many reasons, this is the best Dylan album.

It is the pinnacle of his first, most sustained, most important, and most significant creative period. After recording this (with some difficulty, until switching studios to Nashville, and mostly using Nashville session musicians plus a few trusted musicians such as Al Kooper and Robbie Robertson) Dylan went on the infamous 1966 tour where he was subjected to abuse from his audiences, particularly in the UK, the country where he had been most respected, and never again would he work and produce with such free and inspired creativity. He entered a long and lean period, notwithstanding the occasional charming release such as John Wesley Harding, until the brief creative surge in the mid-Seventies starting with Blood On The Tracks.

Sad Eyed Lady was my way into the album, and my way into Dylan. I was seduced by the haunting, hypnotic music, the melancholic and beautiful organ, the repeating, insistent, drum tapping, the sways and weaves, the little pauses and retreats, only to come back again, like a gentle tide on the sand. And I was enthralled by the lyrics. Nobody had written a love song like this before (or since). It was utterly audacious, stunningly intelligent, and literate. It came from the past – from the Romantic poets, from Rimbaud, from folk songs going all the way back to the Anglo-Saxon “Wulf and Eadwacer”; and it was of the very present – a trembling, heart felt offering, written in the Chelsea Hotel for his wife Sara; and it pointed to the future – a future in which writers would take seriously the writing of “pop” songs, rather than dashing off another simple boy loves girl rhyme during the 9 to 5 hours in the Brill Building. It’s not for nothing that Dylan received the Nobel Prize for Literature – the only songwriter to do so. The richness of the lyrics, like a tapestry of love and longing, was unique then, and is still unique now, despite many writers having taken up Dylan’s challenge, and paid more attention to themes, images, structure, literary influences, and sheer bravado with the language.

I was bowled over by the combination of the music, the lyrics, Dylan’s crooning voice, the confident, easy skill of the musicians, and the chemistry of the moment. Something that other serious musicians, like Neil Young, have paid attention to. Playing live in the moment in unison in connection with musicians that “get it”. They don’t have to be skilled, as Neil Young, and The Kingsmen, have proved. But it helps if they are. As the musicians on the album were – legendary Nashville session men. The most respected and admired session players in the business.

Blonde On Blonde was started in 1965. A stunning year for Dylan. He had recorded and released Highway 61 and Bringing It All Back Home that year. He was at the height of his creativity and confidence. He had moved from acoustic folk into electric folk-rock. He was the voice of a generation, and the true future of rock and roll. There is the pop and rock world before Dylan, and there is what comes after, totally inspired by him. At the top of his game, brimming so much with confidence and ideas that, even after creating two classic albums that year, he still has enough energy to make another – indeed, so much that it spills over into a double album of new and original songs. Something that had only been done once before, and that was Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads back in 1940.

The individual songs on Blonde have become familiar classics in their own right, but it is the sprawling and timeless entirety of the album that impresses. That we get song after song after song which is bright, playful, cutting, inspired, funny, and reflective. It is a generous offering. Dylan’s voice so well matched to his songs. His singing, understated but powerful. It’s a voice that comes from you and me. Proud, cynical, questioning, mocking, delighted to be alive. It’s a masterly voice of timing and stress – matched only by Sinatra.

With all his confidence and creativity he produced the greatest album of the Sixties, one of the greatest and most influential albums of all time. From here he could go anywhere. But, unfortunately, he went on tour to the UK, and encountered such bitter hostility that he was never the same again. That moment in Manchester Trade Hall when an oik shouts out “Judas”, hit him hard. He reels back. He doesn’t know what to do. He shouts back “I don’t believe you”. But he knows that’s not enough. He comes back to the mic -”You’re a liar”. And he knows that’s not enough. So he turns to his band and says to them, defiantly, with the true spirit of rock, “Play it fucking loud!”, then launches into a blistering Like A Rolling Stone.

But he’s been hurt. And he will withdraw totally from touring, and largely from recording. And when he does start to come back, he is a lost force – as evidenced by the appalling Self Portrait album. That it’s almost ten years before he’s able to make another great album (Blood On The Tracks) shows how damaged he had been. Who knows what would have come after Blonde if the Brits had not been so shitty to him. Maybe nothing. Maybe he was exhausted anyway. After all, how many people can record eight sides of timeless classic songs in little over 12 months without feeling a little bit spent.

Anyway, of course, I am giving this 10. It is a unique album, bursting with intelligence, creativity, and shining musicianship, and it is a watershed in the history of music. There are not many albums as brilliant, as historic, and as influential as Blonde On Blonde.

Dale Munday: The third album of an almighty groundbreaking trilogy. Dylan was so prolific at this time, which also found him at the top of his game.

Chris Elliott: For a long time I had a Greatest Hits album and thought that was more than enough. As I got older I slowly discovered Dylan via the sales. In reality it wasn’t until I reached 50 I really got Dylan.

Between 63 and 69 there isn’t a bad album and his reputation was built – this one took the longest to really appreciate. For a long time I thought it was a self-indulgent poor cousin to Highway 61 – and to a degree I still do – the difference being I realised there’s a truly great album in there as well. The first signs of believing his own myth are creeping in – lose 10 minutes and there’s a magnificent album.

This improves with each listen.

Greg Schwepe: For the longest time my perception of Bob Dylan was formed by the most unlikely sources. Every documentary I saw about the “turbulent 60’s” and all that was going on at the time in the U.S. included some clip of Dylan playing, or one of his songs in the background while you saw a scene of a helicopter taking off in Viet Nam. And if not that, it was some goofy morning DJ bit or some comedian with their imitation of Dylan. Probably the one I remember most on the radio was a “commercial” for a fictional Bob Dylan Unplugged album. You heard a nasally out-of-tune “Dylan” singing, then a bit of a ruckus and the sound of a mic being unplugged, and then him singing again; but now you could barely hear him. Get it? I got that joke, but never really “got” Bob Dylan at that point.

Then came the Traveling Wilburys, and while I bought the album mainly for George, Tom, and Jeff, turns out I really liked the Bob Dylan songs way more than I thought I would. Like, a lot. So finally took a deep dive a few years ago to really check out Bob Dylan. And found out that there’s way more to him than what I’d thought. “What? This guy with the nasal voice is supposed to be this great lyricist and voice of a generation?” Turns out, yeah, he is!

In listening to Blond On Blonde again for this week’s review I again realized what I found out during my Dylan deep dive a few years ago. There’s a lot more to like than dislike. If you really give the guy a chance and don’t let your Dylan stereotypes get in the way, he has a lot to offer.

A big part of the Dylan style is acoustic guitar and harmonica. And while I like harmonica (but more in a J. Geils Band or Huey Lewis & The News vein), the songs I liked the best on the album seemed to have less harmonica. I seem to have the same ‘harmonica meter’ in my head just like my ‘pedal steel meter.’ I reach a point where it gets a bit too much for my tastes. Good thing is that Blonde On Blonde contains enough songs that don’t trip that meter.

While I enjoy memorable lyrics and like how writers can express something, I’ve never been one to really sit down and try to exactly determine the mindset of the writer. “Why did they write this? How were they feeling? What emotions are they trying to convey? What are they really trying to tell me?” Don’t care! If it’s something clever that sticks in my head, that’s enough for me and that’s what Dylan does here.

Favourite tracks on this one are Visions of Johanna, Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, Absolutely Sweet Marie, Temporary Like Achilles and One Of Us Must Know (Sooner or Later). And I’m thoroughly convinced that radio stations around me played Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 just so listeners could giggle while hearing “…everybody must get stoned…”

I listened to Blonde On Blonde about three times before writing this review, and each time I grew to like it a little more. Each time more stuck with me and maybe my harmonica meter didn’t get triggered as much. But overall, I’ve found I was more of a fan of his 70’s output more than the 60’s stuff. A lot of the “folkie stuff” from the 60’s not as appealing. 7 out of 10 for me on this one.

Jim Carson: Blonde On Blonde is a monumental achievement, showcasing Bob Dylan’s unparalleled lyrical brilliance and groundbreaking sonic innovation. It captures the essence of Dylan’s creative zenith and redefined the boundaries of rock, folk, and blues with seamless finesse.

Tracks like Visions Of Johanna,” with its haunting imagery, and the epic Sad-Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, an ode brimming with emotion, epitomize Dylan’s mastery of intricate wordplay and vivid storytelling. The album’s eclectic soundscape and enigmatic lyrics invite listeners into a world where poetry and music intertwine effortlessly.

Blonde On Blonde has earned its place as a timeless masterpiece, leaving an indelible mark on generations of musicians and fans. Whether you’re a devoted Dylan aficionado or discovering his work for the first time, this album is an essential journey into the heart of his innovation and expression. Oh, and it was done in 1966!

Philip Qvist: I’m not a huge fan of Bob Dylan. A great songwriter but not a great singer in my opinion, so I was initially going to give this week a miss. Needless to say though, curiosity got the better of me and I decided to give it a listen.

While it doesn’t alter my view of the artist’s singing or that he plays too far much harmonica for my liking, I liked large parts of Blonde On Blonde. I was also quite familiar with many songs on the album; such as Rainy Day Women, I Want You, Just Like a Woman and One Of Us Must Know.

Visions Of Johanna and Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat are probably my favourite tracks on the record, while the album finishes on a high with Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands. The lyrics are quirky, as are some of the song titles – and with musicians such as Joe South, Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Al Kooper and Kenneth Buttrey around, you can’t go wrong with the backing music.

I get why so many people have rated this album so highly, and I expect many will give this one a 9 or a 10 this week. Having said all of that, I will put this one down as a pleasant surprise and award a 7, mainly due to the songwriting and musicianship

Mike Fildes: Up there with Exile On Main Street and the White Album as the best double album of all time, flawless.

Wesley Winegarden: Blonde On Blonde is easily a 10/10 album which is amazing considering it doesn’t have any of Dylan’s best songs and isn’t even his best album. It’s unfair how good of a musical craftsman Bob Dylan is.

Mike Canoe: Bob Dylan has reached the point in his career and life where he is more myth than legend. His music has been reinterpreted by hundreds of artists in hundreds of genres. As we used to say in the news biz, the recent Dylan biopic provides a “news peg” to actually appraise Dylan doing Dylan. And as some t-shirt slogan somewhere reads, “Go big or go home.”

So the double album Blonde On Blonde seems a logical choice. It’s namechecked as the first double album of the rock era as well as the first rock album to devote a full side of vinyl to one song, the gentle and elegiac Sad Eyed Lady Of The Lowlands, clocking in to modern ears at a suspiciously short 11:23. But at this point in his career, it seems that what Dylan wanted, Dylan got.

The truth is that Blonde On Blonde doesn’t have as many hits as I thought it did. A big part of that is because I’ve gotten used to Dylan song titles often having no relationship to the actual song – see below. Side three is a mystery to me although Absolutely Sweet Marie and Obviously Five Believers stand out for me on repeated listens, as does Visions of Johanna from side one.

The album does contain five bona fide classics, starting with opener, Rainy Day Women #12 & 35 aka the lurching, ramshackle “Everybody must get stoned.” Part of the album’s charm is that the musicians do sound stoned – but still intuitively connected. I Want You indicates Dylan could write brilliant pop songs at will and Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat has him out-Stonesing the Rolling Stones. Side two closes with the musically sweet, lyrically misogynistic ballad, Just Like a Woman.

But the ultimate reason I chose Blonde On Blonde out of a discography of forty studio albums is the second song on side two, Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again. While it generally doesn’t break into the top 40 when publications rank Dylan songs, I think it’s his best and most definitive song and encompasses everything I love about Dylan. It has the rambling storytelling full of metaphors and allusions sung in a weary and bemused rasp and backed by a band that, as mentioned above, can miraculously sound tight and shambolic at the same time. The lyrics convey a feeling of finding one’s self, literally and figuratively, like they are in the wrong place at the wrong time – most of the time. It could be a metaphor for my twenties. Heck, I feel that way sometimes now.

While there are arguably more easily digestible Dylan albums, none make me feel the way Blonde On Blonde does.

Andrew Cumming: One of the best and most iconic rock albums of all time. Just classic after classic. Rainy Day, Johanna, Stuck Inside of Mobile, Leopard Skin, Just Like A Woman etc etc. One of those albums that’s almost a Greatest Hits in its own right. Classic.

Final score: 7.42 (52 votes cast, total score 386)

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A few years ago, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler was asked about his band’s aspirations when they got together in the wilds of Massachusetts all those years ago.

“We weren’t too ambitious when we started out,” came his reply. “We just wanted to be the biggest band on the planet.”

It was typical Tyler: funny but honest, and brimming with bulletproof confidence. Most bands would have said the same, and those who didn’t were lying. But the difference was that Aerosmith delivered on that promise. Eventually.

The band’s stellar history is well documented. The commercial, artistic and chemical highs of the 70s; their against-the-odds resurrection in the 80s; the ongoing five-way soap opera that sporadically simmers, boils over then calms down again.

But their early years were a different matter. They might have wanted to be the biggest band on the planet, but they weren’t going to get there without a fight. There were obstacles and setbacks, failures and fights. And there were drugs. Lots of drugs.

Aerosmith made it, of course. But that bulletproof confidence would be tested to the limit.

They might be the ultimate Boston band, but three of Aerosmith’s founding members were New York born and bred. Steven Tyler grew up in the Big Apple with original guitarist Ray Tabano, where they both ran with the same teenage gang. Tyler and drummer Joey Kramer were in different years at the same school in Yonkers, though it was pure coincidence that they ended up in the same band 200 miles up the coast a few years later.

Tyler came from a musical family. His Italian grandfather, Giovanni Tallarico, had been a classical cellist, and his father Victor was a Julliard-educated pianist. The young Steven cut his teeth playing drums with his dad at social events. “Girls would come in, look at the band and go, ‘Ugh,’” he recalled. “I’d try to look over at them and go, ‘No, look, I’m cool, check it out, don’t leave.’”

The polite world of classical music and natural born wild-child Tyler were always going to be a bad fit for each other. He began listening to The Beatles, the Stones and The Yardbirds, dropping acid, smoking pot and taking speed while he did it. The social events fell by the wayside. “In my mind I was always a rock star,” he recalled.

It wouldn’t be long before he was making that dream a reality. Or trying to. An early band, the Yardbirds-inspired The Chain Reaction, had released a couple of singles, but it hadn’t led anywhere. The fame Tyler craved remained tantalisingly out of reach.

All that changed in the summer of 1969. Tyler’s family owned a holiday lodge in the small Massachusetts town of Sunapee, and he split his time between there and New York. It was in Sunapee that Tyler was invited to watch a covers trio with the unpromising name The Jam Band playing a gig at a local club, The Barn.

Tyler grudgingly accepted the invitation. The Jam Band featured a lanky blond bassist called Tom Hamilton and a singer/guitarist with a mop of thick black hair and a jaw that could crack concrete by the name of Joe Perry.

“They were horrible, but the way they did [Fleetwood Mac’s] Rattlesnake Shake was something else. Joe was really into [Ten Years After frontman] Alvin Lee,” Tyler remembered. “And I went, if I can get this groove with this guy and start writing songs…’”

Perry and Hamilton knew who Tyler was. He would regularly come up to Sunapee to stay at his parents’ lodge and make like he owned the place. Sometimes he’d be with whatever band he was in at the time. Joe Perry worked at a local diner, and he’d sigh whenever Tyler and his crew came in.

“They’d be wearing clothes from Carnaby Street and real long hair,” said Perry. “They were loud and obnoxious, behaving like rock stars are supposed to behave – especially when they’re in a little town and nobody knows how not-so-big they really are. They’d come in and throw food and shit, and I’d have to clean up after them.”

When this fast-talking brat approached Perry about getting a band together, the guitarist was understandably reticent, but some underlying ESP stopped him from telling Tyler to go screw himself. For starters, they were drinking from the same musical well: the British invasion bands, American R&B singers, blues rock pioneers like The Yardbirds and The Animals. It didn’t hurt that Perry and Hamilton shared the same burgeoning chemical proclivities as Tyler – the bassist had even been arrested as a teenage for dealing acid.

Perry and Hamilton didn’t take a lot of persuading. Within a few months, they had moved with Tyler down to Boston, then the centre of a burgeoning rock’n’roll movement headed up by local heroes the J. Geils Band. The trio were joined by Tyler’s old buddy Ray Tabano on second guitar. Not long after that, the singer’s former schoolmate Joey Kramer – who had moved to Boston to study at the Berklee College Of Music – had agreed to play drums. They had a band, and, in a shared apartment at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue, a base.

What they didn’t have was a name. At one point they considered calling themselves The Hookers. Another time, they talked about calling themselves Spike Jones, after the 50s comedian and bandleader. The words ‘spike’ and ‘jones’ both had drug connotations – whether that was coincidental or not isn’t clear, though it did dovetail neatly with the band’s growing pharmaceutical activities (Tyler and Tabano had graduated to injecting cocaine, though they would ultimately prove to be early adopters rather than outliers within the group).

In the end, it was Kramer who gifted the band their name. He was a fan of Harry Nilsson’s 1968 album Aerial Ballet, and loved the sound of the word ‘Aero’. An old band of his back in Yonkers had called themselves Aerosmith, but they’d split up a few years ago. Why waste it? It didn’t mean much, but it was still better than The Hookers.

Aerosmith made their live debut at the Nipmuc Regional High School in Upton, Massachusetts in late 1970. They didn’t bother hiding their influences: the set consisted of Stones and Yardbirds covers, including their version of the latter’s take on the old blues number Train Kept A-Rollin’. During the gig, Tyler and Perry got into a ruck over the volume of the guitars. “So began an Aerosmith tradition,” a wry Tom Hamilton later said.

That tension would fuel Aerosmith from the start. Tyler was older and gobbier; Perry quieter and more stubborn. They frequently butted heads, but both knew it was for the greater good of the band. The same couldn’t be said of Ray Tabano. The guitarist was lagging behind his bandmates musically, but that didn’t stop him making a play for control of Aerosmith in the summer of 1971. “Ray gives the band this Looney Tunes ultimatum that he was taking over,” said Tom Hamilton. “He said, ‘Either you line up behind him [Tyler] or you line up behind me.’ From that moment on, Ray was gone.”

Tabano’s replacement was 19-year-old guitarist Brad Whitford, a friend of a friend from Reading, Massachusetts who was playing with a band named Justin Thyme. They didn’t know it, but the classic Aerosmith line-up was in place.

There were few places in Boston that let groups play original material, and Aerosmith had too much ambition to play sets full of covers for too long. They hit the frat parties and high school dances instead. Occasionally they headed down the Eastern seaboard to New York to check out the competition.

“When we started I imagined that these people like Rick Derringer were like Lord High Doodledums who sat in the corner with servants pickin’ their toes,” scoffed Tyler. “But we played Max’s Kansas City with some of those guys and I knew we had more than they had.”

Aerosmith had picked up a manager along the way. Frank Connally was a Boston promoter with some shady friends. Joey Kramer recalled walking into a run-down greeting card shop run by associates of ‘Father Frank’. “It took me a while to realise it was actually a bookie joint and that they were basically gangsters,” said Kramer. “I think they loaned Frank money to finance our management.”

It wasn’t just mobsters that Aerosmith were mixing with. “Our best friends were drug dealers,” said Perry. “We identified with them because we felt like outcasts, outlaws, menaces to society.”

The dealers liked Aerosmith too, mainly because they were such good customers. But the music industry was taking longer to warm to them. Labels came to check out Aerosmith, only to pass on them, deciding that they weren’t ready or, worse, that they sailed too close to the Rolling Stones.

But their perseverance eventually paid off. In 1972, they finally bagged a deal with Columbia Records after label boss Clive Davis caught a show in New York. Davis was the music industry power-player who had turned Janis Joplin and Santana into stars, and a good man to have in their corner. The $125,000 the band received for signing didn’t hurt either.

“God, I know we stayed up all night,” remembered Hamilton, “but we weren’t looking down the road. I don’t think anybody thought that everything was going to be fine from now on, and that we were going to have a thirty-year career just because Clive Davis said so. We still had to get up the next day and get to the next gig.”

Joe Perry would describe Aerosmith’s self-titled debut album as “the stuff we had been playing in the clubs. We just left out the Yardbirds songs.” The fluid songwriting partnerships that would help turn them into one of rock’n’roll’s biggest draws were yet to be established. Instead, Tyler was responsible the lion’s share of the songs, taking sole credit for five of the eight tracks that would eventually appear on the album. Among them were Mama Kin, written on a warped acoustic guitar Joey Kramer fished out of a garbage can, and Make It, a song that found Aerosmith wearing their ambitions on their voluminous sleeves.

But best of all was a showstopping slowie titled Dream On that Tyler had written in his parents’ living room in the lodge at Sunapee. He knew it was promising, but it was only when he brought it to Perry and Whitford that he realised how special it was. “Sitting there working it out on guitar and piano, I got a little melodramatic,” he said. “The song was so good it brought a tear to my eye.”

Aerosmith were a razor sharp live band, but they would quickly find out there was a big difference between the stage and the studio. The five men who stepped into Boston’s Intermedia Studios in October 1973 to record their debut album were greenhorns in that situation.

“The band was very uptight,” remembered Tyler. “We were so nervous that when the red recording light came on we froze. We were scared shitless.”

Matters weren’t helped by tensions with producer Adrian Barber. The Yorkshire-born Barber had been the in-house engineer at Hamburg’s Star Club when The Beatles played there in the early 60s, before going on to work with the likes of Cream and The Allman Brothers Band. But he was oscillating on a different wavelength to these wired Yanks.

“Our producer was practically useless,” Perry later claimed. “When I heard the playback, I kept thinking, ‘We’re better than this. We should sound better than this.’”

Tyler: “It was like being with a retarded child in there, and I’m not sure if it was because he was so high, or because we all were.”

The singer wasn’t afraid to take matters into his own hands, albeit with a little chemical assistance. “I put the string section on Dream On sitting at this Mellotron while a friend of mine kept laying out lines of crystal THC that I was snorting while I was playing,” he admitted.

The finished album was a promising start, if not a great one. The bones of the band they would become are in place, but the muscle was missing. Much of this is down to the sluggish mix that irked Perry so much: One Way Street and the choogling Write Me A Letter are decent songs that sound like they’re dragging great bags of wet laundry behind them.

Weirder still is Tyler’s voice. The future Demon Of Screamin’ decided at the last minute to rework his singing style, swapping out his jive-talking rasp for a mangled attempt at old-beyond-his-years authenticity. “I changed my voice into Kermit the Frog, to sound more like a blues singer,” he later rued.

For all that, Aerosmith was far from disastrous. Make It and Someday were cocksure enough to paper over any cracks, while their cover of Rufus Thomas’ Walkin’ The Dog was a textbook example of early 70s white-boy R&B. And it possessed two out-of-the-gate classics in Mama Kin and Dream On. Ironically, Perry was initially unimpressed by the latter – a song which would eventually become one of the band’s signature numbers and draw up the template for the modern power ballad.

“To me, rock’n’roll’s about energy and putting on a show,” said the guitarist. “I didn’t really appreciate the musicality of it until later, but I did know it was a great song, so we put it in our set. We also knew that if you played straight rock’n’roll you didn’t get played on the radio and, if you wanted a Top 40 hit, the ballad was the way to go.”

At least that was the idea. Aerosmith was released in January 1972, and Dream On came out as single that July. Both were greeted with deafening silence by radio DJs and the public alike. The album shuffled embarrassedly to No.166 in the US charts.

“There was no nothing at all: no press, no radio, no airplay, no reviews, no interviews, no party,” said Perry. “Instead the album got ignored and there was a lot of anger and flipping out.”

The band had no choice but to hit the road. They toured with everyone from Mott The Hoople to jazz-rock pioneers Mahavishnu Orchestra. “[Mahavishnu leader] John McLaughlin and the band would meditate before they started playing,” remembered Tom Hamilton. “And as you might imagine, we weren’t really into meditating. We’d already found our own ways to meditate, chemically.”

The album hadn’t gone completely unnoticed. In the mid-west, future Guns N’ Roses guitarist Izzy Stradlin’ had fallen hard for it.

“Growing up in Indiana, I loved fucking Aerosmith, man,” said Stradlin’, whose vagabond image and Olympian drug intake owed a debt to Joe Perry. “Smoke a joint, listen to the first record.”

Aerosmith might not have flown out of the traps at the first time of asking, but at least they were doing something right.

It was Bob Ezrin who hooked Aerosmith up with the man who would help turn them into the superstars they wanted to be. Ezrin was the wunderkind Canadian producer who had helped mould Alice Cooper into America’s favourite bogeyman, and Columbia wanted him to work his magic on Aerosmith. Ezrin declined the offer, but suggested his friend Jack Douglas was the ideal man for the job.

“Bob said, ‘They’re two years away from being anything, they’re too raw, they’re just too much work for me, I can’t do it,’” Douglas later said. “But I like to get in on the ground floor with a group, and I’m an old Yardbirds fan.”

The first time Douglas saw Aerosmith play was at a high school dance outside of Boston. He was instantly sold. “It was full of sweaty kids going crazy,” he said.

The failure of their debut album had lit a rocket under the band’s collective backside. The biggest change was that Tyler and Perry had begun writing together. The first fruits of their labour would become the album’s opening song, the strutting Same Old Song And Dance, written in one drug-fuelled night in the front room of the apartment they were sharing.

Most of the groundwork for Get Your Wings was laid in an unlikely environment. “The preproduction work started in the back of a restaurant that was like a Mob hangout in the North End [of Boston]. 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?’”

The band put in the hours in the studio, fuelled by whatever substances were available. “We had some hassles because we had some people there that shouldn’t have been there,” according to Douglas.

The band’s extra-curricular activities impacted on the recording process. Perry was otherwise indisposed when it came to recording the cover of The Yardbirds’ Train Kept A-Rollin’, so Douglas enlisted session musicians Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner to play on it instead.

“For some reason Joe wasn’t there to do it and I never really questioned it,” Hunter later said. “Jack called me up at like ten o’clock in the evening and I went in and did it and that was it.”

Studio stiffness and the occasional unavailability of some of its chief participants aside, Get Your Wings was more confident and recognisable as an Aerosmith record than its predecessor. Same Old Song Dance, Lord Of The Thighs and Pandora’s Box ramped up the grooves and, in the case of the latter, the not-so-subtle innuendo that would become a ’Smith’s hallmark. Seasons Of Wither was another killer ballad, though the uplifting optimism Of Dream On was replaced by an altogether darker vibe – something that presaged the deep narcotic hole the band would soon find themselves in. And despite not featuring Perry, Train Kept A-Rollin’ remains a cornerstone of their set more than 45 years on.

Tellingly, Get Your Wings found Tyler reverted to his natural singing style. “On the second album, the songs found my voice,” he said. “I realized that it’s not about having a beautiful voice and hitting all the notes; it’s about attitude.”

But that attitude still wasn’t enough. To their annoyance neither the songs nor the attitude supplied Aerosmith with the hits theywanted and needed. “We were angry as fuck at radio stations who weren’t playing Aerosmith,” said Tyler. The media had started to notice them, but most of the write-ups drew unfavourable comparisons with their idols the Rolling Stones, only compounding their frustrations. “I got pissed,” admitted Tyler. “I was using drugs at the time, so I was in denial.”

There was a silver lining, and that was that Aerosmith were becoming a popular live draw beyond the East Coast. Audiences were getting bigger and louder, and the band were only too happy to head to any town with a venue and a drug dealer or two.

“We were the guys you could actually see,” says Joe Perry. “It wasn’t like Zeppelin was out there on the road in America all the time. The Stones weren’t always coming to your town. We were America’s band – the garage band that made it real big, the ultimate party band.”

The guitarist was getting ahead of himself. It would be another few months before Aerosmith became “America’s band”. But they were well on their way. And once they got there, there would be no stopping them.

Originally published in Classic Rock Presents Aersomith

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.