Last Child

The Zoo Crew has got the needle down on a strut that still smells like a barroom floor and a Marshall stack left on overnight. Last Child is the second cut on Aerosmith's 1976 album Rocks, and it is Brad Whitford's moment in a band that usually lets Steven Tyler and Joe Perry hog the spotlight. Whitford came up with the riff after a rehearsal, Tyler hollered that he loved it and jumped behind the kit, and Perry tossed in a couple of chord changes, a D sliding into an A, then spiced the chord up a little. Tyler plays drums differently from Joey Kramer, looser and a bit jazzier, and Whitford later said it was a kick to work with. That little after-hours jam became the first single off Rocks, backed with Combination, and it climbed to number 21 on the Billboard Hot 100 while landing at 26 in Canada. Not a monster chart grabber, but the kind of record that made the room lean forward.

Tyler has been generous about the credit. He has said Brad wrote the line about being taken back to sweet Tallahassee, home sweet home, and that whatever Whitford put into Last Child is his forever. The rhyme that follows, sassafrasse, is pure Tyler mischief, the kind of street-corner wordplay he was already famous for. The song is a funk-rock swagger about the road, about wanting the porch light and the familiar town after too many nights of buses, motel ice machines, and somebody else's city. Band and crew had a running courtesy near the end of a tour. Husbands and boyfriends would cool it on the way home so they did not bring trouble back to the people waiting. Tyler folded that life into the lyric without making a sermon out of it. Home sweet home never sounded so restless.

There is a banjo on the track, and it is not a studio gag. Producer Jack Douglas brought in Paul Prestopino, a multi-instrumentalist who had played with the folk group The Weavers, and overdubbed the part after the band had cut the song. It sits in the pocket like a wink, a little country dust on a Boston boogie. The guitar solo is another story the magazines got wrong for years. Folks assumed Joe Perry played it. Whitford has said he wrote it and played it himself, on a Les Paul through a Marshall. When Melody Maker reviewed Rocks and compared that solo work to Jeff Beck while handing the credit to Perry, Whitford admitted he was a little angry that day. He has laughed about it since. Joey Kramer once compared the band to a clock: Tyler and Perry are the hands everybody watches, and the gears in back are what make the thing keep time. Last Child is one of those gears you can actually hear.

Rocks landed on May 3, 1976, the follow-up to Toys in the Attic, cut while the band suddenly had a budget and a record company that believed in them. Tom Hamilton has recalled recording in their own rehearsal space just outside Boston, with the Record Plant truck parked in the garage and heavy curtains dividing a big room into a studio. Arrangements got hashed out with Douglas in a long sitting, then cut the next day. The album was one of the first to ship platinum and has since gone quadruple platinum. The band's own site still lists the running order with Last Child right behind Back in the Saddle: Rats in the Cellar, Combination, Sick as a Dog, Nobody's Fault, Get the Lead Out, Lick and a Promise, and Home Tonight. Guitar players from the next generation, including Slash, James Hetfield, and Kurt Cobain, have pointed at Rocks as a reason they picked up an instrument. You can hear why on this cut. It swings harder than it shouts.

Before any of that vinyl, these five were a collision waiting to happen up in New Hampshire and down in a cramped Boston apartment. Steven Tyler, out of Yonkers, had already been fronting local bands under names like the Strangeurs and Chain Reaction, and he started as a drummer who wanted the microphone. Joe Perry and Tom Hamilton were holding down the Jam Band, a loose blues outfit. The spark goes back to the summer of 1966 around Lake Sunapee, where Perry was working a part-time counter job and Tyler caught him playing something like I'm a King Bee at a spot called The Anchorage. Attitude matched the chops. By the fall of 1970 the camps had merged. Tyler refused to stay on the drums. Joey Kramer, who knew Tyler from Yonkers and had been at Berklee, took the stool so Steven could prowl the front of the stage.

Kramer also named the band. In high school he used to scribble the word aerosmith across his notebooks, a phrase that had popped into his head after Harry Nilsson's Aerial Ballet, with its cover art of a circus performer leaping from a biplane. They moved in together at 1325 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston, a roach-ridden pad later treated like a shrine by fans. Perry has said every room turned into a party room, and the hallway was so jammed with amps that you had to walk sideways to reach the bathroom. Afternoons sometimes meant getting sideways and watching the Three Stooges, then arguing about what to call the group. Their first paid gig was November 6, 1970, in the gym at Nipmuc Regional High School in Mendon, Massachusetts. Perry's mother, who worked at a nearby school, helped line it up. Ray Tabano was still on second guitar. The band got fifty dollars, which they later said covered the rent. Tyler swiped a school T-shirt from the locker room and wore it onstage. He and Perry argued about guitar volume before the night was over. Some habits start early.

Tabano did not last. Brad Whitford, formerly of Earth Inc., stepped in, and the lineup that cut the early Columbia records locked into place. They scraped club dates, high school gyms, and frat parties through 1971 and 1972, Tyler picking up bakery work on the side, until Columbia signed them. The debut album arrived in 1973, raw and living-room loud, the sound of a band that had been writing in that Commonwealth Avenue apartment because there was nowhere else to go. Dream On was already in the bag. Toys in the Attic and the second life of that ballad made them famous. Rocks, and Last Child with it, is what they did once the money showed up and the habits got louder. Whitford's riff still cuts through all of that history like a backroad at dusk.

If you want the long trail of the bad boys from Boston, the official home base is Aerosmith, where the band still marks the anniversary of Rocks and keeps the catalog in plain sight. Their social posts live on Facebook, Instagram, and X. The Blue Army has a long-running public hangout in the Aero Force One group, the kind of room where set lists, old ticket stubs, and arguments about who played the solo get passed around like a well-worn lighter. Aero Force One started as the band's own fan club back in the Toys in the Attic years, run for a spell by Ray Tabano out of the Wherehouse in Waltham, and the name stuck with the faithful.

That is the groove spinning for the Zoo Freaks right now on THE ZOO. Last Child does not ask permission. It rolls in on a Whitford riff, tips its hat toward Tallahassee, and leaves the banjo and the Les Paul to argue about who owns the night. Turn it up. The Crew will be here when the side ends.