The first vinyl records, released around 1900, were 10-inch, 78 RPM records. This song is specifically about the Blues recordings found on those records. "Big Ten Inch Record" was composed by Fred Weismantel and on the R&B charts during 1952 for tenor-sax player Bull Moose Jackson.
It was Aerosmith's drug dealer Zunk Buker who introduced them to this song. He heard the Bull Moose Jackson version on the Dr. Demento radio show and sent the band a copy of the song. Steven Tyler was struggling to come up with lyrics for the Toys In The Attic tracks, so adding a cover to the set took some pressure off of him.
Aerosmith used a horn section on this song, which included a bass saxophone played by Stan Bronstein. They also brought in Scott Cushnie to play the piano. Cushnie got the gig because he used to play in a band with Aerosmith's producer Jack Douglas. The band planned a more contemporary version of this song when they set out to record it, but that plan changed when they got in the studio. "We were basically just doing it as a two-guitar, rock and roll approach," guitarist Brad Whitford said in an interview, "We were up in the studio recording it, and we were listening very heavily to the original version of the song, which was very similar to what we ended up with when we ended up bringing the horn section in. We decided, 'Let's actually make it sound a little more period. Let's have the horns on it and make it sound more like the original version that we heard.' So that was quite a transformation, going from this straight-ahead guitar thing to almost a big band sound. And it really worked."
I had no idea, I thought it was an aerosmith original. Thank you for the heads up.
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