Songoftheday 3/13/21 - I want to be your lover, I want to wrap you in rubber...
"Pink" - Aerosmith
from the album Nine Lives (1997)
Billboard Hot 100 peak: #27 (one week)
Weeks in the Top-40: 6
Today's song of the day comes from the veteran rock band from Boston, Aerosmith, whose return to Columbia records finally came to fruition in the late 1990s, with their twelfth studio album Nine Lives, which topped the sales chart and already spun off one top-40 pop/#1 rock hit in the spring of 1997 with "Falling In Love (Is Hard On The Knees)". The title track "Nine Lives" also popped on to the Mainstream Rock radio chart in Billboard magazine for a week that April at #37. The second single from the record, the ballad "Hole In My Soul", made it to #4 on that Mainstream Rock list, but stalled out at #51 on the official Hot 100 pop chart. That was a very unwelcome surprise for the band, whose pattern that song followed to the letter that gave them success after success in songs like "Crazy" and "Amazing". Maybe it was overload of a template, even though I thought it was an improvement on it. So after a pause, the band released "Pink" as the third offering from the set. Written by lead singer Steven Tyler with "song doctors" Glen Ballard and Richie Supa, the lasciviously-intended title (most likely referring to a woman's, say, "area", it's a lowest-denominator ditty that was sold more in its music video, which had a stark white background with a lot of CGI effects that put the band's heads on everything from a woman model to a bodybuilder to a child to a centaur...
"Pink" went to to surpass the success to the first single, reaching a little higher on Billboard's pop chart in March of 1998. The song was an even bigger success on rock radio, topping the Mainstream Rock format list for four weeks. Internationally, the single made the top-40 in Britain at #38, while just missing the mark in Canada at #42. At the Grammy Awards in 1999, Aerosmith won their fourth time for Best Duo/Group Rock Performance, while also being nominated for Short Form Music Video, which went to Madonna's "Ray Of Light".
A final track from the record promoted to radio, "A Taste Of India", actually stood out quite well from the rest of the album, and reached #3 for two weeks on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart (it wasn't released as a single, and missed the pop list).
(4/10)
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Here's the band performing the song for Dutch television...
and finally, an acoustic take from the Howard Stern Show...
Up tomorrow: A piano man heads to the doctor.
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