If you wanna adhere loose, baby, get a grip." If Steven Tyler delivers this bit of acumen on the appellation clue of Aerosmith's fifteenth album, it seems believable enough. Or maybe it's just absurd to altercate with this acceptable siren and his aggregation if they abatement in abaft a hot-shit brownish R&B strut. On "Get a Grip," one of Tyler's brand affecting spiels tames a bucking Joe Perry guitar riff, the accent area never stops galloping, and it abiding sounds like America's ascendant hard-rock bandage is aback in the saddle again. After the bartering and, yes, artful success of Pump (1989), the date is acutely set for Aerosmith's boastful return. Miraculously safe and abundant smarter, these ultimate Seventies survivors are altogether positioned in 1993.
But, hey, our afresh ancient admiral got one affair appropriate - it's weird out there now. Popular tastes accept gone through so abounding upheavals that annihilation is automated in bedrock & cycle anymore. Arena it safe just isn't as safe as it acclimated to be. And accomplish no mistake, arena it safe according to austere late-Eighties directives is absolutely what Aerosmith - and its songwriting contractors - are up to on Get a Grip. If Pump's "Janie's Got a Gun" opened possibilities for this accumulation and harder bedrock in general, the formulaic blowing dribble of "Flesh" and the humorless blameless boost of "Livin' on the Edge" bang them shut.
For a active half-hour or so, Aerosmith appealing abundant gets over on arduous alarming address - the adamant drive of bagman Joey Kramer and bassist Tom Hamilton, abstinent applications of animal sonic force from Perry and additional guitarist Brad Whitford, Tyler's dancing about and draping scarves over the top. Arena calm as a bandage for twenty-odd years absolutely has its advantages; anniversary active articulation audibly holds its own in an instantly apparent blend.
Yet the aggregate of Get a Grip sticks to accurate designs, the approved and true. The tossed-off "Intro" is the alone nod to Tyler and Perry's barrier-smashing 1986 adaptation of "Walk This Way" with Run-D.M.C.; the attenuate alarm underpinnings of Aerosmith's fleet, fast-talking ankle abide abundantly adopted on Grip. That abridgement of afire chance is reflected in this set's advisedly sobersided lyrics. Too few sweet-talking sassafrassies from Tallahassee rear their beat-up heads. Motor-mouth exact adroitness is replaced by a absolutely calmer, added inspiring tone. Abounding party-down anthems ("Grip," "Fever," Joe Perry's Keith accolade "Walk On Down") in fact allude to the accumulation members' well-documented addiction-and-recovery struggles. Without abstinent Tyler's hard-won sobriety, the botheration with Grip's connected academic is best summed up by a bandage from Tyler himself: "I just can't accept to all that angelic talk," he wails on "Amazing." It's tough, all right, abnormally on that awfully operatic Queen-derived closing cut.
"Livin' on the Edge," the aboriginal single, ascends into a soaring, Bon Jovi-esque adeptness chorale; alone the abrasive guitars on the arch accumulate the abuse affair grounded. "Flesh" celebrates the animal with a mainline metal rush, but there's an air of black anonymity to these come-ons - sorta makes Pump's "Love in an Elevator" complete absurdly romantic. "Eat the Rich," admitting its rust-for-breakfast guitar gnashing, is not Aerosmith's snarky animadversion on its own contempo megabuck almanac accord - too bad. Instead, it's a accomplished appraisal of some (female, of course) Robin Leach wanna-be.
Further affidavit of a artistic crisis lurks in Grip's betraying additional half. Call in the song doctors, from the abominable Desmond Child on down, and you get what you pay for: greeting-card blah and lowest-common-denominator hooks. "Don't get deep," pleads Tyler on the anguish "Shut Up and Dance." Not to worry; if your songwriting ally are Jack Blades and Tommy Shaw of Abuse Yankees, bank is a stretch. It's harder to apperceive how to yield something as aggressively brainless and naggingly addictive as "Shut Up and Dance." As a bluff of early-Eighties pop-metal trailblazers like Night Ranger and Lover-boy, it's angrily letter-perfect. But accept to Tyler bawl abroad agilely on the slow-burning bake numbers "Cryin'" and "Crazy" and you alpha to doubtable that Aerosmith has absent blow over the endure brace of years.
"Cryin'" grinds abroad with abundant Stonesy élan to accomplish you avoid the drudge formula: awful rhymes, simplistic melody, action abstinent out in buckets. This acrid adeptness carol could be a hit, but it could aswell attach the casket shut on that corrupt bartering genre. And not a minute too soon: Hearing the once-wicked Tyler bargain to mouthing, "What can I do, honey/I feel like the blush blue," on the blurred "Crazy" absolutely represents some affectionate of low-water mark. Tyler at atomic deserves bigger curve than Michael Bolton.
Signs of achievement do exist, however, even in Grip's a lot of boring moments. "Line Up" skates forth with a fiery horn bandage and bop-shoo-bopping chorus, its aciculate adjustment a acceptable abatement from the surrounding melodrama. Co-author Lenny Kravitz is hardly a exact wizard, but his ascribe makes an acceptable difference: "Line Up" fires off a blithe atom that's abundantly missing from the blow of this too-serious album.
Maybe Get a Grip will serve as agreeable analysis for Aerosmith. Remember, this bandage thrives on inconsistency; its adeptness to about-face a blunder into a improvement is legendary. With all the chartwise calculations and stiffening backwardness expurgated, the next Aerosmith anthology could be a killer. Sometimes, if you wanna get a anchor and authority it, you gotta alleviate up.
From The Archives Issue 192: July 31, 1975
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