CoronaVinyl Day 321 (A): Rocks by Aerosmith

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Today's CoronaVinyl category is back at "A," and let's fucking rock out, no pun intended, with Aerosmith's fourth studio album, 1976's Rocks.

This is one of the albums that's hanging up in my office, so I can only give you the inside sleeve, but maybe I'll see it again in person before 2023.  But seriously, this is one of the great hard rock records that's ever been laid on wax.  Coming off of 1975's masterpiece, Toys in the Attic, the guys in Aerosmith were jumping further into the hard drugs and further into the hard rock, cementing themselves as the best American hard rock band at the time.

Rock is, top to bottom, a phenomenal record.  There are only nine songs on the album, and there's not a bad one in the bunch.  It features the band's third and fourth Top 40 songs on the Billboard Hot 100 (and two Aerosmith classics), "Last Child" (#21) and "Back in the Saddle" (#38), as well as one other song that charted, "Home Tonight" (#71).  This was the band's first Top 10 album on the Billboard album charts, reaching #3.  It would be their highest-charting album until 1993's Get a Grip, which hit #1.

This is a band peaking, both on drugs and musically.  Having read their biography, I know that heroin was becoming a major factor, and the band began to be more focused on the smack than the rock.  But thankfully, they still had the rock on their mind when they made this one.

The album was #176 on Rolling Stone's initial 500 Greatest Albums of All-Time list (though it fell to #366 in the 2020 edition, which is probably bullshit), and it's cited by various musicians, from Slash to Kurt Cobain to James Hetfield to Nikki Sixx, as a major influence.  Listen to it.

Favorite song from Side 1:  "Rats in the Cellar"
This song very much foreshadows the New Wave of British Heavy Metal that would come a few years later.  It's a frenetic hard rock song with a punk rock feel.  And it's about rats in New York.  Here's a thought.  Maybe don't put your trash on the sidewalk and you wouldn't have so many rats.

Favorite song from Side 2:  "Sick as a Dog"
Another one that rocks hard and screams hard rock and heroin, "Sick as a Dog" starts off the second side with a pleasant bang.