Aerosmith Levels Up With ‘Same Old Song and Dance’

Aerosmith leveled up dramatically on their sophomore album, Get Your Wings, and they proved that evolution with the discharge of lead single “Same Old Song and Dance” on March 19, 1974.

The Boston rockers’ self-titled debut arrived with a whimper in January 1973, displaying competent bar-band boogie (and a future mega-hit in “Dream On”) however failing to seize the vitality of their dwell present. Columbia Records was near dropping Aerosmith, however they gave the group one other shot, enlisting stalwart Alice Cooper producer Bob Ezrin to helm Get Your Wings.

Ezrin was lower than smitten by Aerosmith (“Bob Ezrin came and saw the band and wrote, ‘They’re not ready,'” Steven Tyler remembered in his 2011 memoir Dose the Noise in My Head Bother You?) however engineer Jack Douglas noticed their potential and took over the manufacturing of Get Your Wings. He was powerful however perceptive, making a number of ideas to tease out the band’s swagger and sensuality.

“On ‘Same Old Song And Dance,’ I told them that we should bring in some horns to bring out their rhythm and blues side,” Douglas instructed MusicRadar. “They definitely had that kind of style and sound already. We got the Brecker Brothers to play on that. The sax solo is Michael Brecker.”

READ MORE: Top 20 Aerosmith Songs

Who Played Lead Guitar on ‘Same Old Song and Dance’?

Douglas’ different main innovation was bringing in session guitarists Dick Wagner and Steve Hunter (who had beforehand labored with Cooper and Lou Reed) to play lead guitar in lieu of Joe Perry and Brad Whitford on sure Get Your Wings songs — most famously “Train Kept a Rollin'” but in addition “Same Old Song and Dance” and “S.O.S. (Too Bad),” amongst others. Whitford confirmed to Guitar World in 2023 that Wagner laid down the scorching leads on “Same Old Song and Dance.”

“The big challenge for the band was that Joe and Brad were not the guitar players they had in their mind to be,” Douglas later mentioned at NAMM. “They wanted to play these solos like Jeff Beck and Eric Clapton, but they didn’t have the technical expertise to do that. I suggested that for a number of tracks we bring in someone else to play the leads.

“They needed to kill me,” Douglas continued. “‘What! On our personal report. Some of an important leads on our personal report?’ I mentioned, ‘But nobody will ever know. We aren’t going to announce it. There can be no names on the report.’ I introduced in Steve Hunter and Dick Wagner. One man turned Brad and one man turned Joe, and they performed crucial solos throughout that album. Steven, by the best way, was completely with me on this.”

Listen to Aerosmith’s ‘Same Old Song and Dance’

Tyler, for his part, weaved a streetwise tale of debauchery and bad love, with evocative lyrics like “Gotcha with the cocaine they discovered together with your gun / No smooth-face lawyer to get you undone.” It was dark fiction informed by real experiences. “We relied on the medicine for recording, touring, partying fucking — something in any respect, actually,” Tyler recalled. “But we already knew there was a darkish facet to all this, as within the lyrics to ‘Same Old Song and Dance.'”

Although “Same Old Song and Dance” failed to scrape the Billboard charts, it became a fan favorite and set list staple for decades to come. Rigorous touring pushed Get Your Wings to gold status within 13 months and set the stage for Aerosmith’s rise to stardom with their third album, Toys in the Attic. By that point, Perry and Whitford needed no outside help to bring their visions to life.