Janie's Got A Gun

This song is about a girl who shoots her father because he is sexually abusing her. Steven Tyler, who wrote the lyric, explained in the Walk This Way autobiography: "That song is about a girl getting raped and pillaged by her father. It's about incest, something that happens to a lot of kids who don't even find out about it until they find themselves trying to work through some major f--king neuroses.

Steven Tyler started writing the song in his basement, which was when he came up with the line "Janie's got a gun." He then sat on it for months, "waiting for the oracle door to open." Tyler told Rolling Stone it only became a song about child abuse after, "I looked over at a Time magazine and saw this article on 48 hours, minute by minute, of handgun deaths in the United States." He continued: "Then I got off on the child-abuse angle. I'd heard this woman speaking about how many children are attacked by their mothers and fathers. It was f---ing scary. I felt, man, I gotta sing about this. And that was it. That was my toe in the door."

The line, "He jacked a little, bitty baby" was written as "He raped a little, bitty baby," but Steven Tyler changed it at the request of John Kalodner, an executive at Aerosmith's record company who looked out for their commercial interests - he thought radio stations wouldn't play the song if it was too graphic. According to Tyler, Kalodner also asked him to change the line "put a bullet in his brain" to "stand out in the pouring rain," but he refused.