

“That was an unbelievable feeling,” Hamilton says of …Emotion’s single success. Not only did Toys In The Attic fly up to No.11 in the US after its spring 1975 release, Sweet Emotion also crashed the Top 40, issued as a single with another Hamilton/Tyler co-write, Uncle Salty. I loved it, although I didn’t understand half of the lyrics.” When we got our tape and I heard Sweet Emotion, I freaked out. That’s Steven’s idea – the intro riff turned into a monster, basically. “At the end of the song it gets really heavy. I’m a huge Led Zeppelin and Who freak, so I’m a sucker for a rock song that starts out with a quiet, dreamy, shadowy beginning and then bursts into some huge thing. That whole intro, and the way Joe plays on it, is something I’ve always loved. “Joe and Brad learnt the parts I’d written, and expanded on them. Not until later do you think: ‘Oh my god, that came out fucking unbelievably’. We didn’t know the magnitude of it until later.


The best songs start out as little tidbits. As for the others, it was, ‘Hey, that’s pretty cool’, or whatever. “We had all the basic tracks down for the other songs, and Jack Douglas, the producer, said: ‘You’ve got an extra day booked. We felt that we were growing into the studio we were really progressing. It was one of the peak experiences of my time in the band. Returning to the Record Plant, they “did all the material that had already been put together for Toys In The Attic. Maybe I’m just a self-doubting kind of person.” Again, for months and months, I was the only one who ever heard the song. I really loved the funky energy of the bass playing on that record, and I guess I was trying to do my version of it. One was Jeff Beck’s Rough And Ready album. That I came up with because when we all lived together, back before we ever had a record contract, there were certain records we listened to in our apartment. By now Hamilton had added to his Sweet Emotion bass riff: “There’s a part after each verse, where the band kinda jams out for so many bars. Released in 1974, Get Your Wings stalled at No.74 in the US chart, but by then Aerosmith were already at work on songs for their third album, which became the superstar-making Toys In The Attic.
