Aerosmith - “Let The Music Do The Talking”
1985
A comeback from back when comebacks still mattered, you gotta love the sheer Orwellian audacity of Aerosmith starting off their Done With Mirrors album with a cover of the best song from the Joe Perry Project. (Joe Perry is a member of Aerosmith, Joe Perry has always been a member of Aerosmith.) Like an aging boxer throwing haymakers in a one-last-defense-of-the-title match, it harks back to classic Aerosmith raunch. Outstanding rumbling rhythm, that swagger, Perry’s slide guitar. The lyrics also swagger, they tap into Carl Perkins' "one for the money, two for the show…" but take it somewhere else.
Perkins' rock ‘n’ roll take on a nursery rhyme started the song which put him on the map. (Though many associate it with Elvis Presley. This was a critical moment in a WKRP in Cincinnati episode when Johnny Fever realizes he has truly sold out when he credits “Blue Suede Shoes” to Presley rather than Perkins.) It takes me back to a short story in Boys' Life in the mid-seventies about the free spirit quarterback of the football team who is a flake - and a winner - and once calls out the signals by singing: ”One for the money, two for the show....” Boys' Life had some great short fiction, stories I would read again and again. They had a whole series about these kids who found a time machine and had adventures in time travel. One brilliant story here was when the narrator devises a way to place a phone call to himself in another timeline. Man, that story blew me away.
Then there was the story about this regular kid who is recruited by his high school’s chess team coach to play on the team because he knows how the game is played and the coach needs a body to fill out the roster. This kid works and studies at chess, becomes not half-bad, ends up scoring victory after victory (a forfeit may have been involved) in a tournament, then ends up in the championship against the Local Teenage Chess Terror, a character obviously based on Bobby Fischer. Our hero figures his magical run is over, but early in his match against the prodigy, he realizes Fischer Junior has fallen into playing the losing side of a past grandmasters’ match he has long memorized. The protaganist is also familiar with this match and realizes his opponent is on an autopilot losing mission. He has an inner debate: Is it ethically okay to claim this easy victory? And does he want the attention of being the local chess champion when he will undoubtably be exposed as a chess fraud in the next tournament? Wish I had kept some of those issues or at least cut out the stories that I loved.
But I daydream. Back to Aerosmith and “Let The Music Do The Talking”: They outdid the Joe Perry Project version and you can give equal shares to Tyler’s personality and the band for their inspired playing. Me, I see PRODUCED BY TED TEMPLEMAN and you might guess at what kind of rambling I’m going to concoct after enough listens, enough coffee, and sudden memories of the mid-seventies, the mid-eighties, and a lifetime of reading.