Aerosmith’s career resurgence was in full force by the time Pump was released on 12 September 1989. The original band collapsed in the first half of the 1980s due to drug use and burnout, but got back together for Done With Mirrors (1985).
What got them huge mainstream attention was when lead singer Steven Tyler and lead guitarist Joe Perry guested on Run DMC’s cover version of the Aerosmith classic Walk This Way (1986), which was a gigantic crossover hit and brought Aerosmith back to MTV in a major way.
They managed to kick the drugs and return to chart success with Permanent Vacation (1987). Pump was going to be the icing on the cake.
The intention with the album was to explore a rawness that had been glossed over for a more commercial sound in Permanent Vacation – to get back some of the edge they had in their heyday.
Joe Perry declared that “When we went to do this album, we knew what we wanted: to strip off the fat we felt on our last one. We didn’t say ‘We need a drug song or a child abuse song,’ but when they appeared and fit, we used them. That’s Aerosmith: we aren’t bound by any rules.”
The “drug song” that Joe Perry is referring to is Monkey On My Back. It was written by Tyler and Perry, and is a reasonably straightforward song about how the band lived through and overcame drug abuse and addiction – in other words, about how they got the “monkey off their back.”
That phrase, which gave the song its name, refers to something being a burden that you carry with you that weighs you down, which is how they came to view their drug use.
Monkey was the first song Tyler and Perry wrote for the Pump album. They composed it in November 1988 about two months after their Permanent Vacation tour ended. Guns n’ Roses had been their opening band. It is a testament to Aerosmith’s dedication to stay clean that they didn’t get sucked into GnR’s drinking and drugging antics. On the contrary, it may have cemented the subject matter and their resolve that much more, and Tyler is very explicit in the warnings he put into the song.
I made believe the devil made me do it
I was the evil leader of the pack
You best believe I had it all and then I blew it
Feedin’ that fuckin’ monkey on my back
Part of the band’s recovery was owning up to their drug-fuelled years, and around this time they were very open about that aspect of their background. They frequently talked about how it nearly ruined the band and themselves. Hearing them talk about how sobriety had given them new perspectives and joys was especially satisfying.
A lot of these perspectives can be found in the documentary The Making of Pump where Steven Tyler said “It used to be ‘Aerosmith’s lost weekends,’ where I would go somewhere with half a bag of dope, and I wouldn’t know who I was come Monday morning, who I was with, or where I was. And now I leave for the weekend with a song in my heart and a smile on my face, and it becomes a hit. That’s really cool.”
Joe Perry was especially excited about reconnecting with that rush he used to get from music: “The bottom line is I enjoy music when I am straight now, and I didn’t think I could enjoy it when I was using drugs. I have to enjoy it first before I can write it and play it.
“When I first started listening to music I was straight. I was a teenager. And I felt that rush and then you know, you start mixing it with alcohol. Booze and parties and playing to loosen up… and it becomes part of it. But then you kind of lose that kind of first hit in the morning feeling – when you wake up and put on Smoke On the Water or Highway Star, and get that rush of adrenaline… you lose that, you know. It gets masked. Over the years you start relying on drugs more and more, and I did, and it got to the point where I felt I could not write, or play, or enjoy music unless I was jacked on China White. You have to re-learn that pure feeling again.”
Tyler added: “What really pisses me off… to think that I’m 42 years old. And I’ve been around for so long and I think I’m supposed to know all this stuff. And they say that from the time you started taking drugs to the time when you stop, all those are lost years. So when you stop taking drugs, you go back to when you’re twenty… in my case, what… 16? So I’m three years sober… I’m nineteen years old. Heh heh!”
Then he wraps it all up by making Mark Twain’s immortal words his own: “Of all the things I’ve ever lost, I miss my mind the most.”
All of these feelings of regret, lost years, and warnings were poured into the song. In addition, the track is beaming with musicality. It opens with an intro featuring a lot of slide guitar, and while the song is solidly driven forward by an insistent rhythm section, the slide element remains strong and really is what makes the song, with a lot of tasteful licks especially in the verses.
Joe Perry revealed that what he comes up with is often related to the guitar he is playing on any given song: “When Steven and I first start writing the songs, we both have an individual idea about what sounds we’re going to go for. For me, a lot of how I write the songs and the riffs comes from the guitar sound. If I have a guitar that has a really cool sound or has a good colour to it and I want to play it on stage, I write a song around it.”
When the band gets together to tackle the rough sketch of a song, everybody will pitch in ideas.
Guitarist Brad Whitford: “I can’t tell you how many times Steven goes, ‘What was that? What did you play?’ This is how we found out that we had to have tape recorders running all the time. Being a guitar player, you’re just playing stuff, so I say “I don’t know, Steven!” He goes, “well, what was it? You just played it!” And I don’t know! Sometimes I just play around. Like an artist, you just doodle. There are flashes of brilliance happening all the time, you know!”
Tyler: “It is almost impossible to have a tape rolling and be able to take it and play it back because you got 6 or 7 hours on it. So we decided to put 1-1 on the first tape, that was the first day. Anything on that first cassette was the first day. We figured if we did that for 2-3 months we’d have the album. And we did. 1-1 was a song called Monkey On My Back.”
The band had a long list of song candidates when they eventually went into Bruce Fairbairn’s Little Mountain Sound Studios in Canada to start proper recording of the album, just as they had for Permanent Vacation (and just as they would for the Get A Grip album some years later).
One of the first things they did was going through a process where songs were split between an ‘A-list’ (songs that could be hits and songs they felt very strongly about) and a ‘B-list’ (songs that needed more work, lacked hooks, etc.). As seen in the documentary movie The Making of Pump there were some pretty intense discussions about the fate of some of the songs on the B-list.
Surprisingly, for a long time Monkey On My Back was one of the songs on the B-list. In the mentioned “making-of”-documentary, you can see Tyler debate quite fiercely in favour of the song, at a later point saying “We would not even have looked twice at that song if I hadn’t gone ‘AAARGH!’”
Aerosmith’s record company A&R guru John Kalodner was very happy with the album when he got to hear it, but he asked Steven Tyler to soften some of the language here and there. He had the band’s best interests at heart. He saw a strong commercial potential in a lot of the songs and didn’t want to see potential radio and TV play ruined over a few words. Some of the words were indeed changed, but Tyler put his foot down and refused when he was asked to remove the profanity from the line “Feedin’ that f*ckin’ monkey on my back.”
“I painted this picture of how I got somewhere,” Tyler said passionately on this subject. “And I got there by feeding that fuckin’ monkey on my back. You don’t throw those four letter words which are in every – and I mean every! – teenager’s vocabulary. And he’s using that four letter word. Why? Because he can. It’s the same reason a dog licks his balls – because he can. It’s a cool thing. And mom doesn’t like it, but I’m gonna say it ‘cause she doesn’t like it. So I use those words, because they’re very descriptive. It’s my orange and blacks and fuchsias in my painting of my art.
“And no Tipper Gore or any of those people are gonna tell me I can’t use that. Besides which, if they agree with me that drugs is a big problem in the United States, and I ought to know because I did it for enough years, and killed myself doing it, almost. If they agree with me on that, then they are gonna have to listen to me on how to tell my story. Because you’re not gonna do it by saying no. Just saying no is like saying “just cheer up” to a manic depressive. It’s much deeper than that. And so feeding that fuckin’ monkey on my back is gonna make your kids ears perk up, and maybe listen to the lyric. And those two out of ten who would otherwise just lollygag along and do nothing, are gonna maybe get what I am talking about in that song, which is therefore doing a lot more to the drug problem in the United States than just saying no.”
Despite not letting go of the profanity in the song, Monkey On My Back was released as a promotional single to rock radio in 1990, where it reached #17 on the Mainstream Rock Tracks chart.
It would not get a commercial single a-side release, but was used as the b-side on the single for What It Takes.
This was (and is) obviously an important song to Aerosmith, and was routinely performed on the Pump Tour from 1989–1990 (as well as other tours throughout the 1990s). The track was included on the 1998 live compilation A Little South of Sanity.
More notably, this was the only track from Pump that was performed at their MTV Unplugged performance on 18 September 1990.
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