Big Ten Inch Record by Bull Moose Jackson (1952)

Benjamin Clarence Jackson was a tenor saxophonist from Cleveland who played in Lucky Millinder's band and earned the nickname Bull Moose for reasons that are lost to history and easy to guess at. In 1952 he cut this for King Records, the Cincinnati label that would later sign James Brown: a jump-blues shuffle, all walking bass and horn stabs, about a girlfriend who only wants him for one thing. That thing is his "big ten inch", "record", of course, and Jackson's delivery is more of a shrug than a leer.

Aerosmith recorded it for Toys in the Attic in 1975, wedged between Walk This Way and Sweet Emotion, with a harmonica and a shuffle that made it sound dug out of a jukebox, because it had been. Steven Tyler's version is tribute, not reinvention: same structure, same pause, same grin. The album went nine times Platinum, which is how most people met the measurement.

Its afterlife is the pause. It is a joke that only works out loud, with timing, which is why it never reads as filthy on the page and always does in the room. Play the two versions back to back and a joke survives intact across a quarter of a century; play it after Detachable Penis and you hear the difference between a song that says the word and a song that makes you say it.