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Their third album, Toys In The Attic, had changed everything for Aerosmith in 1975, going Gold and rising to No. 11 in the Billboard chart. In 1976, with the follow-up, Rocks, the band would take things to yet another level.

While the Toys… album has subsequently outsold it two to one, notching up eight million sales thanks in a large part to it containing Sweet Emotion and Walk This Way, Rocks actually charted higher, peaking at No.3, and highlighted a year when the band had five hit singles.

With hindsight, the albums used the same template and play like twins. Rocks, though, is the lyrically darker and musically heavier. Its songs chronicle the band’s growing stature as a touring act as well as an unhealthy level of drug abuse.

After years when critics regularly lambasted the Boston five-piece as the poor man’s Rolling Stones, influential US music magazines Rolling Stone and Creem finally began showering Aerosmith with compliments. The audiences (dubbed The Blue Army by the band due to the prevalence of denim in the arenas they were playing) grew exponentially and started behaving almost as outrageously as their heroes – boozing, popping pills and throwing firecrackers.

Aerosmith had always liked to drink, but during the nine-month, 99-date Toys In The Attic tour (which never left the North American continent), cocaine was everywhere – thanks often to a crew who were as keen on it as the band.

“We drank a lot because of the blow and we got blown a lot because we drank a lot,” shrugged singer Steven Tyler. The backstage term “production meeting” was slang for going somewhere to do a load of lines. Come the sessions for Rocks, as their buddies The Faces had observed a year earlier, what were once vices were now habits.

Guitarist Joe Perry told me in 2014: “The main influence that the drugs will have had was that we were partying too much and didn’t notice the kind of money we were spending or take care of the decisions we were making – I don’t think we could have spent that much on drugs…”

They didn’t, of course, as Perry’s fellow guitarist Brad Whitford recalled.

“My bank account started to grow and I felt very wealthy all of a sudden,” Whitford later said of the sudden upswing in the band’s income. “I wasn’t, but $10,000 felt like a million. I was 22. I thought, ‘Man, I can buy the kind of car I’ve always dreamed about. That’s when I got my first Porsche. I think that’s when we all got our first Porsches.”

On December 30, 1975, after the third of three shows at the 14,000-capacity San Diego Sports Arena, Aerosmith finally drew breath. At the suggestion of co-manager David Krebs of the band’s management company Leber-Krebs Inc, Columbia had re-released Dream On, the power ballad from their self-titled 1973 debut that had always been a hit with audiences on tour. Three years earlier it peaked at No.59 on the Billboard chart. This time, it sailed to No.6 following its release in January 1976.

Basking in this glory Aerosmith took January off and investigated their new “clubhouse”, purchased for them in the autumn of ’75 while they pinballed around North America. It was sourced for them by Ray Tabano, the guitarist who co-founded the band with Tyler and Perry before being replaced by Whitford in 1971. Since then, Tabano had run the fan club and done anything else management asked of him.

One such task was identifying premises that could serve the band as a lock-up, offices and rehearsal space. Up a cul-de-sac on an unassuming residential street in Waltham – a city suburb about 10 miles east of the band’s apartment in Beacon Street in the centre of Boston – Tabano found it.

Krebs checked over the empty corrugated-iron-clad warehouse, designated 55 Pond Street, and agreed a $40,000 deal. That investment saw the upstairs space converted into a lounge and offices, from where Tabano ran the lucrative merchandising business, installation of some state-of-the-art wiring and the construction of a stage.

The band christened the building, big enough for them to park their flash new cars in, the Wherehouse. They hung drapes from the high ceiling to improve acoustics and ambience, and adorned the walls with heroes – a huge montage of Mick’n’Keef images, alongside Chuck Berry, Rod Stewart and more. When Aerosmith weren’t in residence, fellow Leber-Krebs outfits Ted Nugent and Mahogany Rush would also use the space. It also provided a launchpad for up-and-coming local band Boston – the future AOR superstars played a showcase there that got them their deal.

In February, the Record Plant’s mobile unit backed into the Wherehouse and when the door closed behind it, work on Rocks began in earnest. Jack Douglas – who had co-produced Aerosmith’s second album Get Your Wings and was at the helm for Toys In The Attic – unsurprisingly got the job again, although this time the band took a co-production credit.

Whitford explained why their working relationship with Douglas proved so fruitful. “The thing about Jack was he was there living with us in Boston, working, playing drums, a little pot/blow/beer,” said the guitarist “He’d try anything, and it inspired us. He was a mad genius but so solid.”

Douglas was also a joker, as drummer Joey Kramer recalled: “Jack convinced me that if I ate nothing but greens for two weeks I’d smell like a freshly cut lawn. This went great until I got really constipated, then Jack had me drink a quart of prune juice to push it all through. He hid a prototype sound-activated tape recorder in the bathroom. When he rewound the tape there was a full day of horrible gas and flushing toilets…”

Whitford: “When you’re in the studio with Jack you laugh, roar, do silly shit – it’s loose. I’d throw ideas back and forth with him and leave it up to Steven to come up with a great lick and a vocal.”

On Rocks the lyrics, almost exclusively written by Tyler, came last and usually infuriatingly late. All the band knew, though, that the singer made Aerosmith unique and that came at price. Bassist Tom Hamilton told me of his respect for the singer’s wide range of input.

Steven, musically, has so much knowledge,” said Hamilton. “Not schoolbook knowledge just built-in knowledge from growing up with his father being a classical pianist…”

Douglas, meanwhile, saw the strengths of the others and encouraged them to write. On Toys In The Attic that encouragement prompted Tom Hamilton to deliver Sweet Emotion and Uncle Salty, while Whitford chipped in with Round And Round. For Rocks the pair stepped up to the plate again.

In the Wherehouse, as the band tracked through February and into March, the character of the two guitarists was highlighted on their respective songs. Jack Douglas has subsequently described Joe Perry as a great improviser; Whitford more a technician, methodical and dedicated – recording take after take if needed.

On Rocks the pair of them got to shine, although predictably, Perry’s contributions were the flashier. Joe conceived Rats In The Cellar as a counterpart to Toys In The Attic’s title-track, as he would later quip: “We were getting lower down and dirty. So the cellar seemed like a good place to go.”

Tyler’s lyrics were clearly about the influx and impact of drugs on Aerosmith: “Things were coming apart, sanity was scurrying south…” When he sang about “losing my connection” in the third line of the song he was referring to a dealer who supplied top-purity heroin to Perry – until the dealer was killed in nefarious circumstances.

In his 2014 autobiography Rocks: My Life In And Out Of Aerosmith, Perry paid the dealer some kind of compliment when he recalled the genesis of Back In The Saddle.

“I was in my bedroom, flat on my back, fucked up on heroin, playing my six-string bass,” he recalled. “The music flew out of me – all the parts, all the riffs. It came in one special-delivery package. I was still in the stage when drugs were opening doors to my imagination…”

Two of Perry’s other songs – Lick And A Promise (about the band’s efforts at winning an audience) and Get The Lead Out (Tyler’s exhortation for them to get up and dance) – were both brutal and fast-paced, the products of a restless mind as well as his habit. “In some sense all these songs were about movement,” the guitarist later reflected.

His fifth, Combination, written alone, nails the band’s health and wealth in the lines: “Walkin’ on Gucci, wearin’ Yves Saint-Laurent, Barely stay on ’cause I’m so Goddamn gaunt.”

Whitford, meanwhile, conceived the funky Last Child – the album’s first and biggest-selling single, complete with folk musician Paul Prestopino on banjo – and Nobody’s Fault. The latter starts with the sound of Perry and Whitford’s guitars playing odd chords loud and in sync – Tyler’s idea as the song didn’t have an intro. Seventeen seconds in the vocal mic picks up the noise of a door opened by the union “engineer” Columbia Records insisted was present at all sessions – Tyler’s idea to leave it in as he doubted he’d better his take. That kind of loose flexibility was common.

Perry recalled Tom Hamilton writing Sick As A Dog on guitar, “so when we recorded it he played it on guitar with Brad. I’m in the control room playing bass listening to what I was doing. Then it needed a solo so I gave the bass to Steven and went back into the studio to play guitar. So the end is three guitars and Steven playing bass…”

Long before he ever wrote a finished lyric, Tyler’s fingerprints were over every song. Eventually they had an album almost complete, but relocated to Manhattan’s Record Plant studios to finish. There – as he had done on the previous three albums – Tyler came up with a piano-led power ballad, this one called Home Tonight. Better loved, though, was opener Back In The Saddle, the singer’s “nostalgic harkening to every Spaghetti Western I ever saw”.

It was a big production number full of sound effects: coconut shells as horses hooves; a whip effect produced by Tyler whirling a guitar chord overhead close to strategically placed mics; and multi-tracked foot-stomps for which he wore an old pair of boots he’d had in high school boosted by a tambourine gaffer-taped to them by David Johansen, who dropped by, the New York Dolls having befriended Aerosmith earlier in the year.

Rocks – a title Perry had originally proposed for Toys in The Attic – was released on in May 1976, after the band had already been touring the US for a month. Its black sleeve featured a band logo and five diamonds perched on a mirror, representing both the five members and the cocaine slang of the title. It pretty much set the tone for the hedonism that would follow.

Tyler: “The stadiums we played were getting bigger. Backstage set-ups became more elaborate. When we performed at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, there were pinball machines and ridiculously slammin’ naked mannequins that lined the hallways from the stage to our dressing rooms…”

Back at the hotels, Tyler’s room was party central. “We threw the TVs out of the window into the pool,” he wrote in his autobiography, Does The Noise In My Head Bother You? “If you kept the extension cords on the TVs, when they hit the water they exploded like depth charges.”

The singer was arrested more times than he can remember. He was incarcerated in Memphis after “repeated profanities” on stage, in Lincoln, Nebraska for setting off firecrackers in a Holiday Inn, and in Germany with new girlfriend Bebe Buell for blowing hash in the face of a customs officer at the airport.

The whole touring party’s reliance on drugs made crossing international borders a high-risk enterprise. For Rocks, in addition to 74 dates in the States – including their first big outdoor headliner to 80,000 at Michigan’s Pontiac Stadium in June – they played 14 shows in Europe (four of those in the UK) and seven in Japan. But brushes with the law like the one in Germany meant that apart from two dates in 1977, including the Reading Festival, Aerosmith wouldn’t need a passport again until touring Pump in 1989. The album, though, knew no barriers.

The last word goes to Joe Perry. “I have a theory that with any kind of art you go through phases, periods of creativity – then periods where you have to work at it,” he said. “Sometimes you just wake up and explode, others you have to make yourself do it. There’s an ebb and a flow – especially in a band where not everyone is going to be in the same place at the same time.

“In the ’70s, when we were learning how to be recording artists, Rocks was arguably the peak, when everybody was firing on all cylinders. We were in a really creative space and everybody was in that space at the same time. That’s why it worked.”

Imagine being a rock fan in October 1969. You’ve got 30 shillings in your pocket, and your local record emporium has several new releases in stock. Albums out that month included Led Zeppelin‘s second, Frank Zappa‘s Hot Rats, Willy And The Poor Boys by Creedence Clearwater Revival, and the debut album by Free.

Then, in the ‘K’ section, you spot something terrifying. There’s no band name on the cover, just a haunted, screaming face.

It is, of course, the debut album by the relatively unknown King Crimson, In The Court Of The Crimson King. And it’s an album that changed music.

It really did. Robert Fripp’s meticulous, fleet-fingered guitar. Greg Lake’s baritone vocals, as powerful as they were mournful. Ian McDonald’s sweeping Mellotron. Michael Giles’s jazz-inflected drumming. Peter Sinfield’s surrealist lyrics. It all coalesced into a collection of songs so far from the summer of love it may as well have been packaged with shards of shattered glass.

From the proto-metal fury of 21st Century Schizoid Man to the symphonic majesty of the title track, the album offered a dystopian, beautifully complex alternative to traditional rock. It was heavy, intelligent, entirely unprecedented and, the best part of six decades later, still King Crimson’s best-selling album.

Whether you’re a casual listener marvelling at the eerie serenity of I Talk To The Wind, a muso obsessed with the shifting time signatures of Epitaph, or a vinyl collector who knows every detail of Barry Godber’s iconic cover art, this quiz is designed to test your knowledge of In The Court Of The Crimson King.

Let us know how you get on in the comments.

After a seven-year gap between studio releases, Yes returned in 20210 with 22th album The Quest. It followed the relative failure of previous title Heaven & Earth, and the death of bassist Chris Squire. Steve Howe and Geoff Downes told Prog why reinvention was so important to a band with 53 years of history.

Among the most fascinating aspects about Yes is the band’s perpetual state of transience. De facto directors have come and gone as each chapter of their saga unfolds. Following the loss of co-founding bass player Chris Squire in 2015, Steve Howe has emerged as the group’s latest leader. Now into a third spell as a player, the guitarist produced and pretty much drove the bus as the post-Squire incarnation of the band laid down their inaugural statement – their 22nd studio album.

Howe’s mission with The Quest was simple. “I wanted to help Yes reinvent itself,” he explains. The 1990s and beyond, as Howe readily admits, “was a bit of a spotty period of Yes. You take the 1970s – need I say more? And you take the 1980s – again, need I say more? But the 90s was a mixed bag. I don’t know how successful I’ve been, but I was trying to build a new model of Yes.”

Cards on table time: this writer has interviewed Howe many times, both as
a part of Yes and during his heady days with Asia, and Howe can be a bit of a crotchety old so-and-so. As a musician’s musician he would rather play music than talk about it. However, today there’s something evangelical about the guy.

It’s a suggestion that Geoff Downes, the keyboardist who knows Howe very well from those Asia times and his own multiple tenures with Yes, is in firm agreement with. “Steve is galvanised,” he says. “The chains are off; he’s a man unleashed. At 74, I don’t know how he does it, but Steve is very motivated. It wasn’t exactly bestowed upon him; it’s just something he has stepped up to.”

Like every other band over the Covid years, Yes faced an additional foe. Howe had got together with singer of almost a decade’s standing, Jon Davison, to compare song ideas in the autumn of 2019, but under lockdown Davison was largely stuck in Barbados, while drummer Alan White and bass player Billy Sherwood remained at their homes in Seattle and Los Angeles respectively. With Howe and Downes both based in England, there were times when groups of one or more could visit the studio they called ‘Yes HQ’ in Sussex, although for the most part the album was made in isolation.

“The process of making The Quest was like no other Yes album, but it was also quite fun,” Howe confides. “Artistically and creatively speaking, it [Covid] didn’t block us at all.”

“It wasn’t too difficult actually, because Downes Braide Association [his project with singer Chris Braide] also work remotely,” Downes agrees. “One of the positives of the pandemic is that, for bands of a certain maturity, being together in a studio and thrashing it out is no longer mandatory. We’re used to trading files and ideas.”

The pair both expect additional levels of scrutiny given that The Quest is the first Yes album to be made without Squire. “Yeah, certainly, we can’t avoid that fact,” the guitarist nods calmly. “There was a real need for Billy to step up, and he did that. You can hear him on The Ice Bridge. With the way that we balance the band, the bass is a very key instrument and we hope that we have brought credit to Chris and his legacy.”

Both cheerfully acknowledge that The Quest had to offer a marked improvement over its predecessor, 2014’s Roy Thomas Baker (Queen, Journey, Hawkwind)-produced Heaven & Earth, which was far too lacklustre for its own good.

“I would agree with that completely,” responds Howe before breaking into a smile.
“I won’t keep this a secret any longer – I said to Roger [Dean, illustrator]: ‘The sleeve is better than the record.’ Heaven & Earth was a troublesome record to make, and that’s because the producer is responsible for more than the way the record sounds; they control the atmosphere, the [inter-band] feeling and the progression and development of the music.”

“We can’t deny that Heaven & Earth was not well received,” Downes agrees. “It was a linear type of album; it lacked the dynamics of this one.”

“We made The Quest in a fruitful and happy way, which wasn’t true of Heaven & Earth,” Howe elaborates. “The same applies to Fly From Here [2011], Magnification [2001], The Ladder [1999] and Open Your Eyes [1997]. In the past there have been a lot of headaches around the making of Yes records; I wanted to dispel that.”

The Quest certainly doesn’t sound like the handiwork of a band plagued by in-fighting or self-doubt, even if its promotion began with a massive own goal. Upon the unveiling of a first YouTube song, the three-part suite The Ice Bridge, they were forced to add a belated credit for Francis Monkman due to similarities with the former Sky and Curved Air keyboardist’s own 1978 piece The Dawn Of An Era.

“That caused a certain amount of contention,” says Downes, who’d discovered the basic song idea an old work tape and mistakenly took it for something of his own, originally co-authoring it with Davison. “But having said that I think we created a very powerful piece of music.”

The Ice Bridge is one of several songs recorded with a 47-piece orchestra, and if readers listen carefully enough, in keeping with its theme of global warming, there’s a literal moment of ice-breaking. “Yeah, that was one of my kinky ideas,” Howe chuckles. “We found this sound of an iceberg breaking up and everybody liked it, so it got used. I’m not shy of sound effects.”

In a practical sense, the task of adding orchestration to songs such as Dare To Know and Minus The Man wasn’t easy, given that the classical musicians were thousands of miles away in Macedonia, and recording was slated to last a single day. It helped that Yes had implicit trust in the scores supplied by their arranger Paul K Joyce.

“This is not an orchestral album,” Howe stresses. “We used the orchestra for added augmentation. Dare To Know has a 16-bar section where the band stops playing and the orchestra continues with the theme, and that provides a great moment.”

In stark contrast to its one-dimensional predecessor, the album’s sweeping palettes of light and shade offer nods to the band’s past.

“One thing I didn’t want was a pastiche of something we had done before,” says Howe.

Downes agrees: “If people are expecting Part Two of Close To The Edge, well it’s not that, but there are elements of 1970s Yes. I used a lot of Hammond organ, acoustic and electric piano, Minimoogs and a Mellotron, but in many ways it’s also an album that sits in quite a modern setting.”

The two-CD set is broken down into eight tracks that comprise the ‘main’ album, complemented by a further three presented on a separate disc. However, Howe becomes a little agitated by Prog’s use of the term ‘bonus tracks’. “Those are tainted words,” he insists. “I cannot overstate the fact that those three songs are not rejects or throwaways.”

In fact, another of its finest tracks, the Davison/Howe-penned Sister Sleeping Soul, falls into the ‘bonus’ category.

“It’s by no means inferior, it’s a fresh and beautifully constructed song,” agrees Howe. “I’m using a Portuguese guitar, which places it in the area of Wonderous Stories [from 1977’s Going For The One] or Your Move [The Yes Album, 1971].”

So it’s fitting that The Quest marks Yes’ debut for InsideOut, a real progressive rock label for a real progressive rock band.

“This is where we belong,” Howe enthuses. “Thomas Waber [label co-founder] is hard to please, but the great thing about his company is that they give a shit. Just like us, they’re not farting around.”

Howe has been a part of Yes since replacing Peter Banks for the watershed set The Yes Album, logging up some 38 years of service in total. Having joined briefly with fellow former Buggles conspirator Trevor Horn for the controversial Drama, leaving and rejoining with Fly From Here, Downes is now into an 11th year on board. Regardless, within the 2021 line-up original members are conspicuous by their absence. Without sounding glib… does it even matter?

“Well, I like to think that we still have contact with Bill Bruford [co-founding drummer] and Tony Kaye [keyboardist], and I’m still friendly with Jon [Anderson, vocalist] and the other guys who are around, but there’s a limited number of original members sharing the planet with us at the moment,” Howe responds after a moment’s pause. “And I definitely think that there is support for a band that carries the name forward.”

Howe admits to occasionally meeting fans who tell him the band shouldn’t be continuing without Chris Squire. “There will always be naysayers, and to a degree I understand where those thoughts come from,” he states. “We are sticking our necks out with The Quest; it isn’t a given that it will be successful, but I’m hopeful that we can cross that bridge and reignite [the belief of] some of those fans.”

In the grand scheme of things, is it important that Yes should continue? “Well, the alternative option is that it doesn’t,” Howe responds. “Keeping things going doesn’t come without challenges, but we’re holding onto the gauntlet and we have a huge respect for the original members.”

Downes: “I see no reason why the band shouldn’t continue. Maybe some people think we should just bash out the old songs and behave like a circus act, but I disagree. After 53 years we are still putting out new albums. I believe that Yes still have a lot to offer.”

Right now, with a record as satisfying as The Quest to show the world, Planet Yes seems like a pretty good place to be. “Well, we’re making it so,” Howe replies sagely. “The challenge is to meet the expectations of others, and I still feel that there’s a place for Yes. The band has such a fantastic history and we are doing our utmost to carry that into the future.”

“We’ve had a couple of years of gardening leave, but the band are ready to go and anxious to begin the next chapter,” Downes concludes. “The Quest isn’t the last album you’ll hear from us. We’re already talking about the next one.”