It was chemical winter in New York, and the kind of job I usually get from those prima donnas in Detroit — collecting a piece of garbage someone else has turned down. Check out these punks from Boston.

"Aerosmith," said Detroit's doyen of the underground, "We got to have the information."

"No way," I said. "It would be easier to interview Howard Hughes, and more fun."

"Hughes is dead," said the voice from Detroit.

"So are 'pop stars' and the 'Mersey beat,"' I said. But tell that to Aerosmith's management. I tried to get this done last year for another organization. Called for some product. This chick with a voice like a Catskills Rona Barrett put me on hold for a fortnight then told me she was just too bizzy bizzy bizzy to be bothered with me. You'd have thought Princess Radziwill was in her office, keeping three balls in the air at the same time.

"You gotta try," said the voice on the other end of the line. "These people can't be all that bad."

"Look what they did for the New York Dolls!" I said.

There was silence and then: "You have the sweetest little aunt who lives here in the Motor City. I'd hate to see anything happen to her."

I said I would try, but I didn't guarantee anything.

It was a big surprise when Miss Rona said she was bizzy, bizzy, bizzy and put me on hold. When Prince Phillip got off the other line, she popped back to me and said, no she didn't have any records for me to listen to but she would see if the "boys" would mind too much doing an interview. She would call me back Wednesday. I schlepped down to Korvettes and bought the bleeding records. Good thing I did. I got to listen to them till Thursday when I called her back. She was bizzy bizzy bizzy. Christine Keeler and Mary Quant were on the other line. On Thursday she said we would do the interview on Friday. On Friday she said we would do the interview on Saturday. On Saturday she said we would do the interview on Sunday. On Sunday she called to say was I lucky. I admitted that I was. Not many full-grown professional journalists get to sit around for five days watching TV waiting for a voice from the past. No, No! I was lucky because I was going to get to interview.. .actually sit within speaking range of the creative nucleus of Aerosmith! (She made it sound like an atomic submarine.) I mean, Joe Perry and Brad Whitford, guitar players and even Steven Tyler, she allowed, in the flesh. The only pop star to come out of Boston since the Strangler. I asked her if it was black-tie and she said dress was informal. The interview would be held in the bar at the Warwick Hotel, which is less public than the skating rink at Rockefafeller Plaza, but only just. A lot of out-of-town groups stay at the Warwick and every night they hold a Stephen Stills look-alike contest there. You also get to hear a lot of musicians lingo being bandied about, like "Kickback," "Overdose," "Blow-job," and "Smith & Wesson." A lot of kids who can't afford Seconal hang around there just for the downer.

Chemical rain, and Fifty-first Street going across town is a gutter, twenty stories deep; the cab-driver, having cleared me of Arab sympathies and made several racial slurs against Japs, settles into pathological silence while I try to get my head into condition to meet the troops. If you earn your living inside the fantasy machine you have to constantly realign your perspective. All the more in this case because I find Aerosmith a thoroughly admirable group of musicians: they occupy a peculiar position, if you happen to seed bands like tennis players. Gifted enough to be completely out of the Gutter-Snipe-Boogie-Band league from which they have sprung, yet not quite hip enough to be a real heavy band — a threat to the manners and morals of our society. Basically this is the problem of the lyricist Steven Tyler who has a genuine and very rare talent for writing rock-and-roll lyrics. But he lacks the self-knowledge and selfconfidence to use his talent, rather than being used by it.

A lot of people have compared Tyler onstage to Jagger, (and he does have nigger-lips), but the difference is telling because Jagger is the master of his own words, he uses them like ammunition, and Tyler is a slave to his words, a puppet. The banality of the lyrics simplifies and restricts his stage personality; makes him into a Kewpie doll, whereas Jagger lyrics, often equally banal, tend to complicate his stage persona since he has control of them. Nevertheless, I have nothing but admiration for any group of young men who can escape from Boston as jolly vulgar hetero-punks unscathed by the Harvard, Busing, Bruins, MIT, Folksingers, Celtics, Kennedys or Lacecurtain respectability. (I've often thought that Boston and Birmingham, Alabama should be declared bicentennial national parks, "Lest We Forget.") And it ain't easy; nothing but an almost messianic committment to teenage sex, cars, and guitars-you-canplug-in could have brought them thru. Look at J. Geils, for Christ sake, for all their flexed triceps, over-driven amps and David Frost hipness, they still stink of Educational Television and Folkways records. Getting out of Boston without this disease is like getting out of old Max's without hepatitis.

But the reason for my repsyching myself has as much to do with the times as the band. Times have changed and the troops know it. The bright crusade which set out in the Sixties to recapture the holy land with rock-androll has settled into a bitter death march. The road where the Magic bus rolled on its magical Mystery Tour stone-bound for Oz has been replaced by Gregg Allman's road, which goes on forever. People are dying out there, and they aren't worrying about being stars, they're worrying about perforated septums, kidney failure, embolism. Nobody worries about getting busted any more, they look forward to it. It's a chance to get some sleep, to get away from Holiday Inn food, to score. Of course, the troops know it; war correspondents, like myself, know it; the generals with their balance-sheets and sunlamp-tans, know it. But for the noncoms and junior officers (in their Bloomingdemins and FONDLE ME tshirts, in their poster-covered offices with push button phones, postage meters and Xerox machines) it's still 1967, Carnaby street, Fab Four, working class poets, Georgy Girl and kicky, kinky fun, and isn't Ringo wonderful — he's so sensitive you know.

I shamble into the Warwick bar, on time, like a good money-player; everyone turns and looks for .2 seconds,, which rates four on a scale of fifty.' (Robin Trower gets a twenty-seven; Linda Lovelace is the only known fifty.) The creative nucleus of Aerosmith is late (stars are always late according to Sixties publicity theory). Finally I notice a reluctant, blonde-headed gentleman crossing the lobby accompanied by what appears to be a five-foot charging waterbed in horizontal stripes. I know who it is, because the water-bed looks bizzy bizzy bizzy.

I am introduced to Brad Whitford, who plays lead and rhythm guitar for Aerosmith and wrote "Round and Round," which is one of my favorites on Toys in the Attic. He takes a seat, orders a beer and falls into a silence which is simultaneously bored, tired, shy and embarrassed. The waterbed, popping peanuts into her mouth with metronomic regularity, tells me that everybody is just crazy about Aerosmith, that they are just the biggest thing since oral contraceptives, that everything they touch turns to gold and . that (by implication) they owe it all to her.

"What kind of guitar do you play?" I ask Whitford.

"Les Paul."

...and the biggest crowds everywhere...

"'Round and Round' has some real Hendrix touches," I say. "Are you a Hendrix freak?"

"Oh yeah," Whitford says. "You really think it's got that sound? Huh? That's interesting. I never thought of it."

...and radio play! Why you just wouldn't believe it...

"What's taking so long with this album?" I ask.

"Too much road, I guess," Whitford says, "It's really Steven's problem since he writes the lyrics. You get on the road and you're just cut away from reality. It's not hard to find musical ideas for songs, but not much in the way of lyrical ideas. You can only write so much about the road, and Steven is a storyteller really. You come off the road and your brain is just empty. Then we hit New York and it all just rushes in and there's song material everywhere. It must be pretty traumatic."

...why just the other day the president of Columbia records was telling me...

At this point, Joe Perry approaches the table and I am introduced.

"Hpw do you like this album?" I ask.

"Just fine, if Steven ever gets the words together," Perry says.

...oh he will, he will, Steven is a genius and such a darling...

"Actually we're getting to where we should be. The songwriting is pretty well divided up among everybody in the band, and nobody but members of the band play on this record, which is how it should be. When we started together, the idea was that everybody contributed and nobody outside did anything," Joe Perry says.

"What about your producer, Jack Douglas," I ask.

Perry says: "Jack is really a member of the group by now. He started with us, and he's grown as we have. With Toys in the Attic both Jack and the rest of the band sort of simultaneously found our groove. I can't imagine using another producer. Although it'xs in our contract that we have to use Columbia staff producers. So everytime we go into sessions there are these two old guys who sit around and drink coffee and get paid full producer rates for talking about Johnny Mathis."

Great management, I am thinking when the waterbed leaps to her feet and says, "Must run! Bizzy-bizzy-bizzy! Got another band in town. Oh by the way! Steven won't be able to make it today. He just didn't really feel like an interview. So he'^ resting."

"Thanks, lady," I say. When she is gone, Perry and Whitford and I have a pleasant enough conversation about studios and cars and hotel rooms. Both of them refer to the absent Tyler with a kind of bemused affection, when I say that I admire his total commitment to the vicissitudes of adolescent sex. Perry says, with a smile: "Well that's Steven. He's never been any different. Brad and I are married and everything, but not Steve. He hasn't changed anything but his clothes since we st3rted the band."

"That's interesting," I say, "Oh, by the way, do you all ever play with J. Geijs? Do you know any of those guys?"

There is a silence as Perry and Whitford try to interpret my tone. Do I like J.

. Geils? Is this a trick question? Finally Perry says: "Well, we know those guys, and we even tried to play with them a couple of times. It seemed natural both being from the area but they..."

He pauses, searching for words, or at least a polite description of what must be a cool relationship.

"Well..." Perry continues suddenly, "We're just from a different school."

"Yeah," Whitford says, "High school."

The next day Aerosmith's enthusiastic management informs me that: no, I cannot meet Steven Tyler. I might just be lucky enough to get a phone call from th'e great man. And no I cannot meet Jack Douglas. The office is just too bizzy bizzy bizzy to arrange it. And no, emphatically, no. No journalist may speak to any member of the band without a waterbed present.

I gave some thought to disregarding this Dick-and-Liz showbiz shit and going on over to the studio where I had been invited, but thought better of it. If I got a good story, those turkeys would only take credit for it. To hqll with them. A band good enough to survive this kind of bullshit obviously needs no help from me.

The next day I am out in the suburbs interviewing another rock and roll singer, when I mention that Tyler didn't bother to show up for the interview.

"Oh, I can tell you why," he said, "Cause Steven was out here fucking around wi' me all afternoon."

"How was he?"

"Crazed. 'E's suddenly got all this money flying in the windows and doors and 'e doesn't know 'ow to cope with it. Steven's suddenly decided that 'e's evil."

"He'snot, is he?" I said.

The rock singer shook his head a little sadly. "No, I'm afraid not. 'E's just another rocker."