Draw the Line

The fifth studio album was written and recorded in 1977 at the Cenacle, a de-consecrated monastery near Armonk in Westchester County, New York, where the Record Plant installed a studio. Manager David Krebs had suggested the retreat to keep the band away from drugs, and Tyler recalled that dealers delivered. Perry said later that he and Tyler wrote only Draw the Line, I Wanna Know Why and Get It Up together, while Tyler and Whitford wrote The Hand That Feeds. Producer Jack Douglas wrote the lyrics to Critical Mass from a dream he had at the Cenacle, and Kings and Queens was recorded in the chapel with the drums on the altar and Douglas hitting the snare from the confessional. Perry sings lead on his own Bright Light Fright, and the closing Milk Cow Blues is a Kokomo Arnold song the band had played live earlier in the decade. Al Hirschfeld visited the sessions to draw the caricature of the band on the cover.

Reviews at the time were mixed. Billy Altman of Rolling Stone called it a truly horrendous record, and Robert Christgau thought the band out of gas. Kerrang! later placed it at number 37 on its list of the 100 greatest heavy metal albums, and AllMusic's Greg Prato called it the last true studio album from the original lineup for nearly a decade. It went platinum in its first month, reached number 11 on the Billboard 200 and eventually sold two times platinum. Perry has called it the beginning of the end.