Songfacts®:

• This was the title track to Aerosmith's fifth album. By that time, their lifestyle had caught up with them and their drug use was hindering their productivity. Tensions were high when they rented an estate in Armonk, New York to record the album, and the band got very little work done in their six weeks there.
  
  Most of the album was recorded at The Record Plant in New York City. The group's producer, Jack Douglas, says the title was an indicator of what the band was going through: "the coke lines, heroin lines, drawing symbolic lines, and crossing them - no matter what," he said. Aerosmith guitarist Joe Perry, who wrote this song with lead singer Steven Tyler, said, "we were drug addicts dabbling in music, rather than musicians dabbling in drugs."
• Steven Tyler's lyrics are loaded with vaguely debaucherous images that tell of a wild time with a girl named Carrie. When Rolling Stone asked him about the line "she was a wet-nap winner," Tyler explained: "A wet-nap is something that you wipe babies' asses with. Back in the day, if you were lucky enough to grab a stewardess on a plane and you came out of the bathroom, all you had to clean up with was a wet-nap. The best lyrics are like the scrambled eggs you have in your head about a situation. And I've got this uncanny way of weaving s--t together."