Joe Page 228
"I wrote the original riff to "Toys In The Attic" at Black Angus Studios, Andy Paley's converted barn off Route 9 in Ashland, which is where we worked with Jack(Douglas) on that album before we moved to the Record Plant. This is where we started to come into our own in the studio, using it as our palette, writing more in the studio as opposed to them just turning on the machines for us to play. We started to become recording artists instead of having our albums being a record of us playing live.
"Walk This Way", for example.
I was into funky stuff, had played James Brown songs over the years, and at times was listening to lots of the Meters from New Orleans, one of the best bands in the country, and I was asking, "Why don't we write our own songs that have that feel to them? Let's try to write something funky so we don't have to cover James Brown." At the sound check in Hawaii, I came up with that riff, added it to another one I came up with while watching a Godzilla movie-- one of my favorite compositional methods-- and Steven wrote the lyrics in the stairwell of the Record Plant."
Tom Page 228
"We were working on this song and we took a break to go to the movies in Times Square, Young Frankenstein, and we came to the part where Marty Feldman as Igor limps down the steps of the train platform and says to Gene Wilder, "Walk this way," which Gene does with the same hideous limp. We fell all over ourselves laughing because it was so funny in a recognizably Three Stooges mode. The next day at rehearsals we tell Steven, "Hey, the name of this song is Walk This Way." He says, "Whaddaya mean, I didn't write the lyrics yet!" But we said, "Trust us.""
