A Month On The Road And I'll Be Eating From Your Hand

A Month On The Road And I'll Be 'Eating From' Your Hand

Saw this via a Slash post this morning, Aerosmith have put out a video of their concert at the Summit in 1977, basically a Toys In The Attic/Rocks tour with a Draw The Line preview.

The audio here is pretty good for the Summit; we saw them 20-something years later on the Nine Lives Tour (I was a little young for the 1977 tour, and mom couldn't stand the Toxic Twins anyway) and the Summit echoed like mad. We all walked out of there with headaches from the bass return off the back wall.

Toys In The Attic is probably my favorite Aerosmith album, Nine Lives is a favorite of the later albums.

If you've ever wondered how Steven Tyler still has a voice, you'll want to watch this one. Notice that after Back In The Saddle, Steven mostly stays away from the vocal theatrics, except for a few flourishes, until a stretch of Draw The Line in the home stretch. Otherwise, he's pretty clean vocally; they all sound and look great here.

There's a couple of continuity glitches, wardrobe shenanigans (I don't think Tom changed from a white silk shirt in one song, to a t-shirt in the next, then back to the same white silk shirt for the final, for ex) indicating they spliced in a couple of other performances.

I'm curious about Joe's Les Paul set up... but that's his '59, now that I dig around for comparisons online.

On Toys In The Attic, watch for the chorus parts at the end, when Steven walks over and shares his mic with Joe. Joe comes in off the key and doesn't hear it, watch how Steven manages this, first singing into the mic, then singing directly into Joe's ear.

Yes, there's a bottle on the drum stand. Steven grabs a pull just after Back To The Saddle (I think, 1st couple of songs, anyway). Not that I can blame him, no matter how well prepped you are the set intro here is rough on the chords. Otherwise the band's just grooving for an hour, I don't even see cups of beer or other wet supplies out where the gang can grab a quick sip. For a contrast to show why it sticks out to me, see if you can find video from Queen's live set at Montreal, 1981, and you'll see how many cups of both beer and water/soda are laid out. I wonder how Aerosmith were tackling their troubles (which were going to get much worse not long after this) at this point.

Let's see, for me of this performance it's Mamma Kin and Draw The Line for the highlights here, and Sweet Emotion is interesting for some of the ways Steven's playing with rhythm. The whole set is good and tight, and only a little of the "right up to the edge" showing, otherwise everyone's all just right there for each other and sounding good.

Well worth taking an hour to listen to if you're interested in Aerosmith. I think it says somewhere that they'll pull the video in a week, so if you are interested you'd best catch it soon.

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Yeah, ok, so the official line is "eating from your hand", and I'm sure Steven sings it that way more often than not.

But (ahem spelling deliberately chosen given the realities of search engines) "coming in your hand" is a lot harder to get out of your head if you've ever heard him sing it that way...