Eat The Rich – Aerosmith

Things start with a big tribal introduction on this one. Massive beats that are surrounded by squawking and SFX. On the album its just called Intro and has this sort of rap attack bit where Tyler tell you “You ain’t no Babe Ruth” among a couple of dozen other things. It’s not exactly F.I.N.E from Pump (it does borrow a line from there though) but it is a good taster of how it’s about to go down. There’s a sniff of the Walk This Way riff and then it all rolls out before Joe Perry tips in and slams out a weighty blues riff indebted to the heavy rock scene of the previous 20 years. Aerosmith at this stage are one of the worlds biggest marquee names in heavy metal for a second time. Joey Kramer’s contribution to the bands sound is not to be underestimated. His hefty drum sound pummels behind the open chords while there are fills a plenty fleshing it all out.

1993 was a watershed year for me. I listened to my shop bought cassette copy of Get A Grip on the drive to my university interview and repeated the tape-play-rewind-play cycle incessantly for the whole year. I saw the band play on the supporting tour for it three times in the following two years (in two different countries no less). They headlined Castle Donington on this tour (with Sepultura, Biohazard, The Wildhearts, Pantera, Terrorvision and Therapy? (among others) opening the show). They played a stadium in Madrid where I caught them while on an exchange trip in the same week. It was a very Aerosmith summer. The videos this album dropped were becoming formulaic but played to the bands ubiquity and the emerging celebrity culture. Alicia Silverstone became famous in a trilogy of short films that saw her skip out of school, break up with her boyfriend and go on a wild road trip with little Liv Tyler now all grows up and ready to get into shit.

This kinda spelled the beginning of the end too. The band were becoming more about things other than laying down killer rock and roll records. They’d brought in big guns for writing and studio help before. From ’87 onwards this band was a think tank of industry heads as much as it was the five guys in the band. By ’93 it really really showed. Get A Grip was perhaps the last solid Aerosmith album. It did suffer from CD bloat. It did have too many MTV ballads on it. But it still had the odd flash of brilliance like Eat The Rich.

Also in these troubled times as maxims go. Eat The Rich? It ain’t a bad idea.