round 2

(1) RUN DMC/Aerosmith, “Walk This Way”
broke
(9) Johnny Cash, “Rusty Cage”
178-180
and will play on in the sweet 16

Read the essays, listen to the songs, and vote. Winner is the aggregate of the poll below and the @marchxness twitter poll. Polls closed @ 9am Arizona time on 3/12/22.

The Song That Almost Didn’t Happen: Allison Renner on “Walk This Way”

It seems strange to write an essay about a cover song done by the original artists. It’s even stranger to step up to bat for a song I didn’t like when I first heard it. But when I say I was a teenage Aerosmith diehard, I’m not exaggerating. I worshipped Aerosmith in their purest form, and other artists diluted this song.
Picture this: I had so many Aerosmith t-shirts that I could wear a different one every day for two weeks. And that’s excluding the one that featured a virtually-naked Joe Perry centaur and the one with the Toxic Twins skull and crossbones. The latter guaranteed I’d get pulled out of line to walk through the metal detectors at the entrance of my high school.
I bought singles, imports, and the Steven Tyler issue of Playgirl through eBay back when “buying online” meant mailing concealed cash and crossing your fingers that the other person cared about their seller feedback.
Despite owning every album, I listened to the classic rock stations and recorded the tail end of Aerosmith songs. I wanted to hear the DJ say “Aerosmith” because it gave me a thrill—that’s my band! I eventually utilized the dual cassettes of my stereo to record each mention of Aerosmith onto its own compilation tape. Because obsessing is what you do when you’re thirteen and in love for the first time.

* 

I’d argue “Walk This Way” is as much of a cover as when Aerosmith performed the Beatles’ “Come Together” for Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. In their autobiography, Walk This Way, there’s a story about Steven Tyler not recognizing “You See Me Crying,” a song from the same album as “Walk This Way.” Aerosmith was plotting their comeback in the early ‘80s, listening to old tracks when Steven said, “We should cover this. Who is it?”
“It’s us, fuckhead,” Joe Perry replied.
My theory is that, if Steven wanted to cover a song that was his own without knowing it was his own, it’s not far-fetched to posit that he might not have remembered “Walk This Way” was his just a few years later.
And it’s not like the lyrics are personal enough to be memorable. It was written when the band hit a roadblock in the Toys in the Attic recording process. They took a break and went to see Young Frankenstein. So delighted with the joke of Igor telling Dr. Frankenstein to “walk this way” using his cane, the band told Tyler to use the phrase as the song title and write the lyrics from there.
Despite being an Aerosmith devotee (I mean, I own the previously mentioned Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band on VHS), I didn’t see Young Frankenstein until I was in my twenties. When I rewatched it as “research” for this essay, I pictured a group of twenty-something boys, likely high, watching it in the theater. I imagined them fixating on this one line—was it really that funny?—and taking it home to put to music. That movie-going experience created one of the most recognizable rock songs, which eventually became crucial to bridging the divide between rock and rap.

*

 Though “Walk This Way” was never my favorite Aerosmith song, I appreciated that I could turn on any classic rock station and have a 75% chance of hearing it. Despite being well-known, “Walk This Way” never topped the charts. But the cover came close.
Aerosmith recorded Toys in the Attic, their third album, at the end of 1974. “Walk This Way” was released as the album’s second single on August 28, 1975, and didn’t make the charts. “Sweet Emotion,” the album’s first single, was the band’s breakthrough Top 40 Hit and pushed them to re-release “Dream On,” a song from their debut album in 1973.
On November 5, 1976, Aerosmith re-released “Walk This Way,” which peaked at #10 on the Billboard charts. (Aerosmith never had a #1 single until “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” in 1998, which was written by an outside songwriter who had Celine Dion in mind so we’re going to back away from this little digression.)
Almost ten years later, on March 9, 1986, Run DMC, Steven Tyler, and Joe Perry got together to re-record “Walk This Way.” Call it a cover, call it a collaboration, call it coercion—it was released as a single against Run DMC’s wishes on July 4, 1986 and shot to #4 on the Billboard charts.

*

It’s not surprising that “Walk This Way” bridged the gap between rap and rock. A lot of Steven Tyler’s vocals are as clever, sly, and rapid-fire as rap lyrics. He uses his voice like percussion on countless songs.
“Eat the Rich” comes to mind, mostly because I chose to rap it as a final project for my freshman Social Studies class. No, I didn’t use it to make a commentary on social injustice or unfair taxation. I wrote lines about weather patterns to rap over the song.
To this day, I can’t explain why. It just felt right, the way things feel when you’re young and obsessed and want to inject this delightful part of your life into something mundane. I wanted everyone in that 6th-period class to know that I loved Aerosmith.
Except… I couldn’t stand the idea of rapping in front of my classmates. I was a mere freshman, a cripplingly shy one at that, and there were sophomores in there!
I decided to record myself the night before and bring in a portable tape player. But when I tried to rap alone in my room, my voice shook with nerves. It seemed like there was no solution, and no time to start and complete another project. I was going to fail.
My mother came to the rescue, volunteering my brother’s vocal cords. He had escaped the torture of high school and was safe in college. He recorded the rap without worrying what people would think of him.
That night, lying awake in bed, I felt good about my project. Bringing Aerosmith and rap together again, in a way no one would expect. I felt like a trailblazer—almost (aka not at all) as cool as Run DMC.
None of those good vibes were with me as I stood in class, listening to my brother rap:

Well I woke up this morning
On the wrong side of the bed
And how I got to thinkin'
About the rain on my head
About all the weather patterns
And how they make you sick…

I cannot express how awkward it was to stand there with my face burning, trying to ignore all the blank stares of my classmates. Thankfully, the combination of rap and rock by true professionals turned out much better, changing the scope of the music industry. But if you watch the MTV coverage of the actual recording, you’ll get a good sense of the awkwardness that seems to encompass the blending of these two genres.
The VJ is asking questions no one really knows the answers to—but they also know they can’t be honest. By now, both acts understand how huge this could be. So of course the guys on Run DMC’s team will exclaim that Aerosmith is their favorite band. Steven Tyler, on the other hand, will say “Yeah, we’ve heard ‘em,” when asked if he likes Run DMC’s music.
“I guess I called up Run…” Tyler says, though they all just admitted it was the first time they met. “He asked Joe and I to come down and do a cameo thing.”
There are several different versions of who contacted whom to make this thing happen, but it’s pretty obvious that Steven Tyler didn’t call up a rapper and suggest collaborating. And Run DMC wouldn’t have gotten in touch with Aerosmith, because they didn’t even know who was behind the song. All they knew was that they liked to rap over the first few seconds of “track 4, Toys in the Attic,” which could have been the band’s name, for all they cared.
Run DMC didn’t even want to cover the song. They were done recording Raising Hell when Rick Rubin mentioned it to them. They figured they’d use a sample and riff over the rest. But Rubin insisted the rappers learn the original lyrics, so they listened to the song over and over, transcribing the words by hand. Before they knew it, Steven Tyler and Joe Perry were in the studio, ready to record.
“Is this something that you might want to do again?” the VJ asks.
Run DMC answers as diplomatically as you would if someone you’re not into asks you on a second date. “We just trying to make this one work right now. We ain’t thinking about the future.”
Nowadays, DMC says he doesn’t think the song would have been as big if they just sampled it and wrote their own rap, or even if they covered it without Aerosmith. “Because we did it with them, changed everything,” he says. And you can’t argue with that.

*

I have five live versions of “Walk This Way” on my iPod. I know all the words, even when Steven Tyler yells “Get the fuck off of the fence!” over the drum beats on the one from A Little South of Sanity. Or “What are ya tryin’ to say?” as he holds the mic up to Joey Kramer’s drums on the bootleg copy of their New Year’s Eve 1999 performance in Osaka, Japan.
But I only have one version of “Walk This Way” with Run DMC—the studio version. And I don’t know all the lyrics, though I know Run DMC changed some because they deemed it “country bumpkin bullshit” and “hillbilly gibberish.” I don’t even have the Run DMC single of “Walk This Way,” where the B-side is an instrumental version with Steven Tyler randomly singing one chorus.
It feels weird to be a 30-something white woman, once a die-hard classic rock fan, now dipping her toes into ‘80s rap, but here I am. I’m defending a song I didn’t originally like. I didn’t understand its impact because, by the time I heard it, “radio rap” was mainstream. I was familiar with Juvenile, Nelly, and Sisqó. I could hear rap booming from the speakers of my high school classmates’ new Jeeps as I walked by the parking lot every morning. (I’d argue that they didn’t like rap either, but rather the counterculture it represented in our little bubble.)
Which is exactly who Russell Simmons was aiming to hook when he proposed Run DMC cover a rock song. He wanted to bring rap into the mainstream—and he did.
DMC has since gone on record saying this experience taught him to “always be open to try something new because it might not just change your life, it could change the world.”
Which is certainly a beautiful sentiment. But I keep picturing those 22-year-old rappers huddled in the corner, eating McDonald’s. They’re more interested in their Big Macs than the 30-something rock legends standing nearby. Thirteen-year-old me couldn’t believe their audacity, but now I’m older. I get it. They were pushed to do something they didn’t want to do, and they just wanted to eat their burgers. If that’s not a #mood, what is?

Allison Renner, pictured here with Steven Tyler’s outfit from the “Love in an Elevator” video, is an editor for Flash Fiction Magazine and the Publicity & Reviews Manager for Split/Lip Press. Her fiction has appeared in or is forthcoming from the Daily Drunk, Six Sentences, Rejection Letters and Versification. She can be found online at allisonrennerwrites.com and on Twitter @AllisonRWrites. And yes, she still owns the homemade cassette of local DJs saying “Aerosmith” over and over. Because why not.

KIRK WISLAND ON JOHNNY CASH’S “RUSTY CAGE”

Is there a more muscular three-note acoustic guitar riff in the history of rock music?
You wired me awake, and hit me with a hand of broken nails…
Faxness: what is the point of the cover song? Singing someone else’s song was in fact the default setting of the early music industry. The era of the singer-songwriter, the creator-performer all-in-one package is a relatively recent phenomenon. Sinatra co-wrote a handful of songs, but none that mattered. Elvis never wrote a song. The early work of the Beatles and the Stones were mostly covers of American bluesmen. There were stables of songwriters scrawling away like Dickensian poets huddled over their coal stoves, and somewhere out there on the road were the singers and performers who sang those words for guts and glory.
In our modern singer-songwriter era, the cover song has often been a strategic career-oriented decision by the aspiring star. While the up-and-coming artist would lose, financially, by singing someone else’s lyrics, the attention garnered might be worth the tradeoff. Get play by covering someone else; get paid when those people who heard you singing someone else’s song tune in to the rest of your catalog.
By the time Johnny Cash begins covering contemporary artists in the late-90s and early aughts, in the waning years of his life and career, these covers are essentially an honor. Validation of a particular song as decreed by Johnny Cash, the baritone Professor Emeritus of American Music. Cash singing U2’s “One,” Tom Petty’s “Won’t Back Down,” and Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” is the sonic Pulitzer or Nobel Prize bestowed.
The art of the good cover is in doing it different. How to hew true to the initial vibe of the song while stamping it with something new. Cake’s excellent cover of I Will Survive works so well because it is slowed down, virtually stalled, Diana Ross’s soaring disco dancefloor triumph replaced by John McCrea’s laconic-depressive musings.
Much terrible Faxness exists because of artists whose version of a cover is simply karaoke. Tune in to hear Artist Y sing Artist X note for note! One of my great disappointments of the 1990s era of CD shopping was Stone Free—a 1993 Jimi Hendrix cover album featuring mostly flaccid note-by-note reproductions of Jimi’s work(*). The greatest individual tragedy of Stone Free was Eric Clapton—long before my respect for him cratered as Clapton devolved into an angry old anti-immigrant anti-vaxxer yelling at kids from his porch—recording a version of “Stone Free” so true to the original that it appeared he was merely trying to prove that he could do what Jimi had done.
The karaoke covers transport me back to my brief tenure in the music world as an aspiring sound engineer in Minneapolis, 1996—the same year Cash sang “Rusty Cage”—listening to a supremely talented guitarist wow the combined student and faculty of Music Tech with a virtuoso note-by-note performance of Purple Haze. I gave him props as a technician, while also yawning (interiorly at least) because who cares? You can play Hendrix? Good for you—enjoy your karaoke life.
(*Side note: the best cover from the otherwise limp Stone Free is the Cure’s version of Purple Haze, which works because it nails that perfect cover song blend—true to the original, but strained through a more sinister, gothic Cure treatment).
Cash’s “Rusty Cage” isn’t a cover. There is no other version. Yes, there is theoretically an original by Soundgarden, from 1991’s Badmotorfinger. But this is a rumor, a myth, a sonic rip in the fabric of reality, like all those people who insist that there’s a 90s Sinbad movie called Shazaam, like the altered world revealed by the black cat dejavu in The Matrix. I had never heard that other “Rusty Cage” until a few years ago.
Wait.
This statement—which feels true—is likely impossible, because I distinctly remember getting high in my dorm in the late fall of 1991 and listening to my cool-if-arrogantly-certain musichead neighbor Mitch play Badmotorfinger while assuring we fellow toker-musicheads(*) that Soundgarden was in fact going to be the next Led Zeppelin, a statement that earned a serious eye roll—albeit one that would seem much less ridiculous three years later when I was practically melting my Sony Discman with Soundgarden’s Superunknown on repeat. But I only remember hearing Outshined in the dorm—vividly remember the sludgy-stoner 7/4 meter chugging through Mitch’s of course annoyingly high-end stereo.
(*side note: it is amusing to acknowledge how much of my undergrad-era drug use was determined primarily by functional accouterments: Who has the best stereo? Best Christmas lights? Best CD collection? Best room for getting high in)?
So in excavating the past it seems impossible that I had never heard the Soundgarden version of “Rusty Cage,” unless Mitch had simply skipped that first track and gone straight to Outshined. Let’s put that at a 10% possibility. Whatever the empirical truth might be, I have no memory of the Soundgarden version of “Rusty Cage” until after hearing Cash.
But I digress. Again, “Rusty Cage” is not a Soundgarden song: it is a Johnny Cash song.

I chose to write about “Rusty Cage,” even though “Hurt” is probably the best known cover of Johnny Cash’s late-career catalog. “Hurt” is even arguably the most affecting of the Cash covers: I still feel the hair on my neck stand on end, and the tears well in the corner of my eyes when Cash’s Hurt crescendos and distorts in that final sonic reckoning: if I could staaaaaaaarrrrt again, a million miiiiiillles away...
I chose “Rusty Cage” because this sonic blast was Cash’s reemergence, his first foray back into my contemporary consciousness, the historical artifact reborn. And also, perhaps in a subconscious sabotage of the current game at hand, I chose “Rusty Cage” because of my need to be contrarian? When weighing which Cash cover I wanted, my inner critic immediately piped up with EVERYBODY knows that cover of “Hurt.” Be original, man. I will thus also note here that I kind of suck at these competitions: my history in the annual Xness tournaments is that of the glass-jawed high-seed that goes down easy, the sonic Duke or Kansas waiting to be knocked off by some barely-D1 song.
I liked Johnny Cash before “Rusty Cage,” much in the same way that I still liked some Elvis, and some Beatles and some (old) Stones circa 1996—as a fan of the musical legend, as a necessary building block in the musical library: Elvis-Cash to Beatles-Stones to Prince-U2. A necessary brick in the wall, a pleasing historical patina. But Cash’s “Rusty Cage” blasted through that wall of musical history like Sultan Mehmet’s Dardanelles cannon laying waste to Constantinople. Cash’s “Rusty Cage” was an exuberant young West German taking a sledgehammer to the Berlin Wall, searing into my consciousness the same way the opening rumble of U2’s “Zoo Station” had five years earlier. “Rusty Cage” blasted Johnny Cash into the present day of 1996. “Rusty Cage” was a cover of purpose, a flag planted, a statement.
I remember thinking: Return of the King. “Rusty Cage” was the banished hero returning to reclaim the throne.
Unfortunately, I don’t remember where I first heard Cash’s “Rusty Cage.” On the radio? Highly unlikely circa ‘96. At my favorite cafe? More likely. From somebody I knew? Hey man, holy shit—have you heard this?!? This genesis is unimportant, and yet I obsess over it, seeking my Saul of Tarsus sonic memory moment—as if knowing that specific detail will render my take on “Rusty Cage” more authentic. But if I don’t remember the where, when or why, I remember the how. How I felt when I heard that muscular three-note opening guitar riff. How I felt when I heard Cash’s baritone bellowing I’m gonna break myyyyyyyyyyy, gonna break my rusty caaaaage and run…  How I feel, a quarter-century later, closer now to Cash’s age when he sang “Rusty Cage.” How I feel, still listening, still singing along.

“Rusty Cage” was simultaneously Cash’s rocket blast of renewed relevance and the opening bars of his swan song. His voice would never again sound this full, this powerful. By the time we heard American III, Cash’s next album—four years later, in a new century, a new millennium—the autonomic neuropathy that would eventually overwhelm him was already deflating the defining fullness of that baritone. A bout of pneumonia in 1998 caused irreparable damage to his lungs, leading to the creaky raspings of his final albums—a veracity both defiantly honest, and intensely sad.
The Soundgarden version of “Rusty Cage” is mainlined early-1990s stoner rock speed and energy—which I can still appreciate on occasion, as I did thirty years ago. But it is a relic now of a specific moment, inseparable from bongwater and flickering lights and Mitch’s subwoofer pulsating reverberations and declarations off cinder block walls.
Perhaps the story of this cover is simply Cornell’s Rusty Cage Allegro versus Cash’s Andante.
Chris Cornell’s “Rusty Cage” is the wailing rage of youth, adrenaline and angst, charging the horizon, Hunter S. Thompson’s suicidal werewolf-motorcyclist finding the edge, trying to break on through. Cornell’s vocals are sheathed in psychedelic effect, slithering in and out of the track, crescendoing to tremelos at impossibly high registers.
Cash’s “Rusty Cage” is about the way a man, having evolved beyond that excess energy of youth, finds a slower but more assured pace. Where the young man is obsessed with destination, with the seeking of his strut, his elder flaneur-self enjoys the hard-earned swagger of his stroll. We experience this symbolic pace change viscerally in “Rusty Cage,” at that abrupt mid-song tempo shift from loping gallop to restrained trot, in those two seconds of silence between Cash singing caaaaaaaaage…and ruunnnnn. Linger on the way Cash sings and ruuuunnnn, the stalling vocalization contrasted with the implied speed of the word a pleasing oppositional harmonic, similar to Cash famously singing down down down up the vocal register in “Ring of Fire.”
The Cash version of “Rusty Cage” is stripped of artifice, his voice unfiltered, raw, resonant. There is a flinty biblical(*) clarity to Cash’s vocalization, in particular after that mid-song rubato. It’s raining icepicks on your steel shores in Cash’s baritone sounds like the ghost of Jim Morrison, swaying god-vision poetry.
(*Side note: in the frighteningly frequent footage of California burning, in those harrowing images of cars running gauntlets of fire, my interior soundtrack always defaults to Cash’s Old Testament rumble: when the forest burns along the roooaad…like God’s eyes in my headlights…)

What is “Rusty Cage” but an update of Cash’s “Folsom Prison Blues?” Soundgarden’s wasteland vision of cages and chains, sonically amped up through the intervening thirty-four years, Cornell’s screech the diamond produced by the downward geological pressure of those decades of war, assassination, mass-incarceration, American stagnation.
Cash’s “Rusty Cage” is not just sonic obliteration of the original song: Cash’s version is a thematic refocusing. Cash is singing himself free of the accreted life, the cage of his own legend, which had nearly killed him in his youth, and then merely destroyed him spiritually in his middle age. This sonic and thematic clarity is a product of maturity, the basic equation of Survival + Time: Johnny Cash at age 64, versus Chris Cornell at age 26. Of course Cornell—like Cobain, Staley, Weiland, those other lost Gods of Grunge—won’t survive until age 64, will never know the trials, tribulations, and resurrections of that Third Act. Cornell’s “Rusty Cage” is the thrashing energy of youth, powerful but ungainly and undisciplined, a young colt trying to jump the corral. As a man ages he sometimes misses that easy fountain of energy that he took for granted at twenty-six. But the man at 64 (or 49) recognizes the value of slowing down, the life gained through moving more efficiently, with a calm and resolute stroll—and dare he hope?—genuine wisdom.
This is why Cash’s “Rusty Cage” resonates: he is the ghost of a future Cornell recognizing that the cages we envision in our youth are imaginary, too young to be real, let alone rusty. Cornell in ‘91 couldn’t know about the Rusty Cage. Johnny Cash did—by the time he stepped up to the mic to record his version he had just broken free of his rusty cage—had only recently emerged from the creative and spiritual malaise of his fifties. Cash’s baritone bellow breaks through the cage of his past, and triumphantly plants a flag in the zeitgeist of the last gasp before the millennium. Cash’s “Rusty Cage” is a perfect distillation of everything he had ever been, but resurrected for that third and final act, the phoenix rising, the prophet returning from his desert exile, eyes blazing. Cash, singing “Rusty Cage,” is the most Man in Black he had been in the nearly-three decades since he sang “Folsom Prison Blues” to those momentarily-uncaged Folsom inmates.

Kirk Wisland is a PhD Candidate in Creative Writing at Ohio University. He may even be Dr. Wisland by the time you read this. His essay collection, The Melancholy of Falling Men, was selected by Roxane Gay as the winner of the 2015 Iron Horse Chapbook Contest. He has some other work scattered about in print and online, including at Brevity, DIAGRAM, Proximity, The Normal School, Electric Literature, and Essay Daily. Kirk lives in Tucson, where he teaches writing at the University of Arizona.