Get Your Wings is the second studio album by American rock band Aerosmith, released on March 15, 1974. The album was their first to be produced by Jack Douglas, who also was responsible for the band's next three albums. Three singles were released from the album, but none reached the singles charts.
The album has been released in stereo and quadraphonic, and certified triple platinum by the RIAA.
Background
In January 1973, Aerosmith released its debut album to little fanfare. As guitarist Joe Perry recalled in the 1997 band memoir Walk This Way, "There was no nothing at all: no press, no radio, no airplay, no reviews, no interviews, no party. Instead the album got ignored and there was a lot of anger and flipping out." In response to the album's lack of success, the group toured extensively and built their fanbase, taking a break in December 1973 to record their follow up album. The group recorded the album at New York's Record Plant, with Jack Douglas serving as the producer. Douglas would go on to record several albums with the group.
Writing
Like their first album, the group began the sessions with several of the songs already written. Their cover of "Train Kept A-Rollin" had long been part of their concert repertoire, and the group had been playing new songs "S.O.S. (Too Bad)" and "Pandora's Box" in concert since September 1973. "Seasons of Wither" and "Woman of the World" also predated the sessions, while "Spaced" and "Lord of the Thighs" were written during the sessions. In 1997, Perry explained to Aerosmith biographer Stephen Davis:
"Lord of the Thighs" was the last song written for Get Your Wings. The band needed one additional song for the album, so they locked themselves in Studio C at the Record Plant in New York City and came up with this song, based on the unsavory characters near their hotel on Eighth Avenue. In his memoir, Tyler explains that the song's lyrics "came from the seedy area where we recorded the album. "Lord of the Thighs" was about a pimp and the wildlife out on the street." Tyler plays the piano on the track, the opening beat of which is similar to the one Kramer would play a year later in "Walk This Way". The title was a pun on the famous William Golding novel Lord of the Flies, and "the critics hated us for this. We weren't supposed to be smart enough to use literary references."
The cover of "Train Kept A-Rollin'" was previously made popular by one of Aerosmith's favorite bands, the Yardbirds. Steven Tyler, Joe Perry, and Tom Hamilton had performed the song prior to joining Aerosmith. Perry stated that "Train" was the one song "we all had in common when we came together." Steven's band had played 'Train' and Tom and I played it in our band ... It's a blues song, if you follow its roots all the way back ... I always thought if I could just play one song, it would be that one because of what it does to me". Perry's band began performing the song regularly after he had been moved by the performance of "Stroll On" in Blowup; Tyler recalled his band opened for the Yardbirds in 1966: "I had seen the Yardbirds play somewhere the previous summer with both Jeff Beck and Jimmy Page in the band ... In Westport [at their supporting gig on October 22, 1966] we found out that Jeff had left the band and Jimmy was playing lead guitar by himself. I watched him from the edge of the stage and all I can say is that he knocked my tits off. They did 'Train Kept A-Rollin'<nowiki>'</nowiki> and it was just so heavy. They were just an un-fuckin'-believable band. The song was an early feature of Aerosmith's concerts and a frequent show closer, including for their first gig in 1970. Notable for its start/stop groove, the song became a core part of the band's live set for a time, and still occasionally ended concerts late in their career. In 1997, drummer Joey Kramer explained to Alan Di Perna of Guitar World that its unique rhythmic feel originated "probably just from jamming on it at soundcheck and experimenting with putting a James Brown kind of beat behind it. I played with a lot of R&B-type groups before joining Aerosmith."
Tyler recounts writing "Seasons of Wither" in his memoir: "When I wrote the music to "Seasons of Wither" I grabbed the old acoustic guitar Joey found in the garbage on Beacon Street with no strings. I put four strings on it, which is all it would take because it was so warped, went to the basement, and tried to find the words to match the scat sounds in my head, like automatic writing. The place was a mess, and I moved all the shit aside, put a rug down, popped three Tuinals, snorted some blow, sat down on the floor, tuned the guitar to that tuning, that special tuning that I thought I came up with. He continues, "Seasons of Wither" was about the winter landscape near this house I was living in with Joey near an old chicken farm. I used to lie in my bed at dawn, listening to the wind in the bare trees, how lonely and melancholy it sounded. One night I went down to the basement where we had a rug on the floor and a couple of boxes for furniture and took a few Tuinals and a few Seconals and I scooped up this guitar Joey gave me, this dumpster guitar, and I lit some incense and wrote "Seasons of Wither"."
The closing "Pandora's Box" was originally written by Kramer, who recalled in 1997: "The summer before, we'd rented a farmhouse in East Thetford, Vermont, while we were rehearsing in New Hampshire, and that's where I wrote the melody of 'Pandora's Box.' Steven wrote the lines about women's liberation, a big new issue in those times." According to Douglas, the clarinet at the start of the track is a union engineer playing "I'm in the Mood for Love".
Recording
Get Your Wings was recorded at the Record Plant in New York City between December 1973 and January 1974. Jack Douglas served as producer and Jay Messina engineered the sessions. Douglas, a Record Plant engineer, had previously worked with The Who, John Lennon and Patti Smith. Douglas was asked by Aerosmith's managers Leber and Krebs to produce the sessions after success engineering the debut for one of their other artists, The New York Dolls. Douglas lived in Greenwich Village and hung out at Max's Kansas City and had close relationships with the Dolls, Patti Smith, Lou Reed and other members of that artistic community. After successfully reigning in the rambuctious and drug-addled New York Dolls, Douglas remembers Aerosmith's managers asking, "'Maybe you'd like to take a look at our baby band?' which was Aerosmith. 'We don't know if they're going any good or not!...' I said 'Sure, send me off to Boston hear them!' Because of my love for the Yardbirds, after the show, we sat down, we started to talk about [Jimmy] Page and Eric [Clapton] and the guitar sound, the influence of the band. It turned out that we had so much in common, the band and myself, that we just hit it off. And so we started a very long relationship." According to Perry, Columbia had wanted the band to work with Bob Ezrin, who was also a producer with Alice Cooper. It was Ezrin who introduced the band to Douglas, and for "all practical purposes, Jack became our producer. Ezrin might have shown up three or four times, but only to make suggestions, like bringing in additional musicians to augment our sound." Perry continues,
Prior to the sessions, the band moved into an apartment in Brookline and began intensive rehearsals in a dungeon-like basement of a store called Drummer's Image on Newbury Street. Douglas later recalled, "To the best of my memory, the preproduction work for Get Your Wings started in the back of a restaurant that was like a Mob hangout in the North End. I commuted there from the Copley Plaza Hotel and they started to play me the songs they had for their new album. My attitude was: 'What can I do to make them sound like themselves?'" The rehearsals gave the group time to write additional material and finalize the songs for the album prior to going into the studio. Douglas explains,