I love this record. It’s perhaps my favourite bootleg; I’ve owned a CD copy of it for years before finally finding it on vinyl a few weeks ago. Dating back to April 1973 (the sleeve incorrectly dates it to March), when the band were touring in support of their first album, it’s the holy grail of live performances for Aerosmith fans.
Excerpts from the show first appeared officially on 1978’s Live! Bootleg, Columbia Records’ attempt at putting a live album in the marketplace to battle against all of the unofficial bootleg performances – including this one – that were switching hands by the late ‘70s.
Most of Live! Bootleg is stadium rock, together with a couple of club performances, but the real highlight is the two tracks from the Paul’s Mall performance – Jimmy Reed’s I Ain’t Got You and James Brown’s Mother Popcorn.
It might seem odd that they’d play these two songs while touring their first album – and perhaps odder still that they’d include the two tracks on an official live album – but there’s method in the madness.
I Ain’t Got You was written Calvin Carter, a songwriter at Vee Jay Records, one of the labels that initially signed the Beatles before Capitol stepped up to the plate. The song was released as a single by both Jimmy Reed and Billy Boy Arnold in 1955, but it was the Yardbird’s 1964 cover of the song (as a b-side to their Good Morning Little Schoolgirl single) that interested Aerosmith.
The Yardbirds were one of the band’s shared influences when they formed in 1970, and it’s nice to see that they were still paying songs from their heroes three years later (they would even record a cover of Think About It on 1979’s Night In The Ruts).
The James Brown cover also betrays the band’s early influences. Prior to joining the band as their stalwart drummer, Joey Kramer was the drummer of a Meters-style funk band. The only white guy in a band full of black funk musicians, his really must have been worth his shit. Aerosmith would of course dabble in funk throughout the ‘70s, on tracks like Walk This Way and Last Child, and their cover of James Brown’s 1969 funk workout should be viewed as an early forerunner of these songs.
The only problem with this bootleg is that it splits the two songs – one appears at the end of side one, the other at the beginning of side two – and presents them in the opposite order in which they were recorded (and presented on Live! Bootleg), presumably for space reasons. As a result, the Kramer kick-drum / Steven Tyler scat segue between the two songs is ruined. Bloody bootleggers, eh?
The rest of the performance is just as strong, with the band cruising through the majority of their first album, and even providing a blast through Tiny Bradshaw / Johnny Burnette’s Train Kept A-Rollin’, which they would record for 1974’s Get Your Wings – again another song that was popularised by the Yardbirds in the 1960s.
Hit: Walking The Dog
Hidden Gem: Mother Popcorn
Vinyl Stylus 