Permanent Vacation
Although Permanent Vacation was a pivotal release for the band and generally accepted as the record that brought Aerosmith back to the top of their game and into the mainstream, its phenomenal success came as a direct consequence of Run DMC’s Toxic Twinsenhanced 1986 cover of Walk This Way. Orchestrated by Def Jam Records maestro Rick Rubin, who recognised the rap-presaging lilt of Aerosmith’s original version (the second single from their 1975 album Toys In The Attic), the success of Run DMC’s Walk This Way’s was immediate, universal and seismically influential on both rock and rap. It also revitalised Aerosmith’s stalled career in a way that their official 1985 ‘comeback’ Done With Mirrors simply hadn’t.
Prior to the collaboration, Run DMC had never heard of Aerosmith, yet, as Joe Perry saw it, “rap sounded like an offshoot of the blues and a very natural thing for us to come in and play on”.
However, Perry is not about to take credit for changing the course of history, admitting: “It was pretty thrown together. We had no idea of the importance of what we were doing.”
Not only were Aerosmith thrust back into the forefront of everyone’s consciousness by the success of Walk This Way
– enjoying MTV ubiquity with the biggest radio hit of the previous year – they were also newly clean and sober.
Taking advantage of his uncharacteristically reasonable charges being freshly open to the concept of an unlikely collaboration, Geffen Records A&Rman John Kalodner suggested core writers Steven Tyler and Joe Perry work with outside songwriters. The rest, as they say, is chart history.
Working with producer Bruce Fairbairn and, on the tracks that truly mattered – Angel and Dude (Looks Like A Lady) – co-writer Desmond Child, the band captured a polished line in lascivious, licentious, loose-lipped, snakehipped, funk-fuelled chutzpah that turned their flagging fortunes platinum and came to forever define them.
Elsewhere on the five-millionselling, appositely titled Permanent Vacation, Bryan Adams’s songwriting partner Jim Vallance provided lead hit Hangman Jury and, along with diva-armourer Holly Knight (who also supplied Tina Turner and Pat Benatar with ballistic hits The Best and Love Is A Battlefield respectively), Rag Doll.
Permanent Vacation marked a turning point in Aerosmith’s previously flatlined career and, lest we forget, Dude (Looks Like A Lady) brought them their first ever UK Top 50 chart single. IF
‘Lascivious,
licentious, loose-lipped, snake-hipped, funkfuelled chutzpah.’