“Rag Doll” by Aerosmith

"Rag Doll" was the last single Aerosmith pulled from Permanent Vacation, their 1987 album, arriving in 1988 after "Angel", and it struts like a brass band that wandered into a hard rock bar. Joey Kramer counts it in with a stomping one-two beat, Joe Perry lays slide guitar over the riff he came up with, and a horn section arranged by Tom Keenlyside honks and blares, with producer Bruce Fairbairn even blowing trumpet himself. Co-writer Jim Vallance, who wrote the bass line and most of the words with Steven Tyler, adds organ, and the second verse's melody tips its hat to the Rolling Stones' live take on "I'm Movin' On".

It nearly had another name. It started out as "Rag Time", but John Kalodner didn't care for that, so Holly Knight was brought in to fix the lyric, and she landed on "Rag Doll", a title Tyler and Vallance had already been kicking around.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.