AEROSMITH: No Easy Answers

AEROSMITH: No Easy Answers

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Chuck Eddy

Have to start this out by noting that I really hate “question and answer format" interview articles, because they make writers lazy—firstly, they require you to use a tape recorder when you’re doing the interview, which means you don’t have to take notes, which means you end up relaxing more than you ought to, which means you keep losing your train of thought. Second, they allow you to get away without analyzin’ the subject when you’re composin’ the story, which (especially in rock writing, which ain’t worth beans unless it’s as biased and subjective as all heck) can make for extremely dry and dull reportage. Only reason I’m writing this piece as a Q&A is because I'm gonna be doin’ all my analyzing in a CREEM feature based on the same interview—if I were you, I'd read both. Last Q&A story I did was an interview with Father Stanley Milewski, chancellor of Orchard Lake St. Mary’s Seminary and good buddy of Pope John Paul II, for Spinal Column Newsweekly in Walled Lake, Michigan, in the summer of 1980; the occasion was the 25th anniversary of his ordination as a priest. This one’s about Aerosmith; the occasion is their new album, which they were just finishing work on (in Vancouver) on the Saturday in May when the following conversation took place. I left out the boring (and obscene) parts and the parts where I stuttered a lot.

METAL (Me): Did you guys not like Done With Mirrors (the previous ’Smith studio album, released in ’85)?

JOE PERRY (who plays guitar, and will hereafter be referred to as “Joe”): I think at the time we liked it, because it was what we did, it was the best thing we did—know what I mean? But it was, like, finding our place again as far as writing and the direction we wanted to take the band. Things have grown up a lot since then.

What really amazed me about Done With Mirrors is that you guys came back (from breakup and oblivion), and it was the hardest record you’d made since Rocks (76); it was just basic, straightahead stuff. And technically, / guess the new one (which I’d just heard a tape of) is pretty amazing, but do you think it’s as straightahead as Done With Mirrors?

JOE: Well, as far as straightahead, just sittin’ up in the studio and playin’, just a hard rock album, I don’t think so. But that’s not what the band is: we always like to have a couple songs with teeth in it, a couple songs that—whatever. The new one is more musical, I think; there’s more songs.

You guys are doin’ bluesier stuff than you’ve done in ages, though—that’s obviously conscious, right?

JOE: No. When we first started doing “Hangman Jury,” we laid an acoustic track down, and that’s when it started to take that direction. We didn’t set out to write a Delta Blues-type song.

I listen to the first couple tracks on the record, and I hate to say this, but I almost get the idea that you guys are wanting to • be these bands that I think are influenced by Aerosmith—you know, Bon Jovi and Ratt. It sounds like radio rock.

JOE: Well, “Magic Touch" is definitely a pop-metal song, I guess. What we wanted to do is probably reach out to more of an audience—there’s probably 300,000 hard-core Aerosmith fans out there, but there’s a lot of people who’ve never heard of Aerosmith, who don’t know where Cinderella copped their style. That pisses me off a lot.

So at least as far as “Magic Touch” goes, you ’re trying to reach out to this audience who listen to Cinderella, Ratt, Bon Jovi, Poison, Motley Crue—bands that took Aerosmith ideas, took out all the rhythm-and-blues, took out all the cleverness that was in Aerosmith's lyrics—and then watered it down. It bothers me that you would want to pander to that audience. STEVE TYLER (who sings, who just walked into the room, and who we’ll call “Steve”): If we don’t, we re not gonna be heard. So we took the song, and we knowingly, purposely, gave it a little flavor. You gotta realize, we could have made “Magic Touch” into a real formula thing, but that song’s drenched in our sound.

When you toured to support Done With Mirrors, did you get the idea that you were basically playing to old Aerosmith fans? JOE: If not old Aerosmith fans, fans who remembered us from 10 years ago—kids who were hip enough to know what was going on. They’d remember “Walk This Way," they’d remember “Back In The Saddle,” but I want ’em to know me for my album now. Those bands you’re talking ’bout, whatever you think about ’em, are shaping what radio is right now. I’ll be surprised if a song like “Magic Touch” makes it—Tyler’s screeching all over it! STEVE: The only thing that bugs me about that song is what I did with the chorus line (he sings it)—melody lines, for me, are a little white. I like the minor mode a little more.

But again, that’s just that one song. This is probably your blackest record, at least since Toys (In The Attic, ’75.)

STEVE: Why I like this album more than the last one is because I had 10 times more fun doin’ it, and also because we let the songs mature. We spent another month on it, and a month is a long time to get to weed out stuff, play it better, accentuate on it.

JOE: With Done With Mirrors, I just felt a lot of pressure, a lot of tension.

STEVE: Done With Mirrors was a good record for an Aerosmith fan, but it’s not what Aerosmith can be.

OK, lemme ask you this about the new album—/ don’t hear the Tallahassees and ladies ’ powder rooms and J. Paul Getty’s ears and Betty Boops (of old) in the lyrics. Again, I’ve just listened to it once. . . STEVE: Yeah!—you have no idea! You don’t know what’s in there. Next album, you’re gonna say “I don’t hear the J. Paul Getty’s ear, I don’t hear the dude looks likes a lady (from the new LP’s ‘Dude’).” You’ll hear it!

JOE: When you hear “St. John” again, some of the stuff on there is like, L.A. TV horror—lyrically, I think this is together.

Yeah, then again, I am still trying to figure out “Last Child”. . .

STEVE: Which verse? I’ll tell it to ya right now. . .

The one with J. Paul Getty’s ear. STEVE: It goes, “Yes sir, no sir, don’t do nothin’, it ain’t no good when bossman’s stuffin’ ya down their throats with paper notes,” then it goes, “Stand up, sit down, don’t come close to my home sweet home, can’t catch no dose from no hottail poon-tang sweetheart sweat who could make a silk purse out of J. Paul Get and his ear.” (Actually, this recitation is close, but no cigar.)

And do you think there’s any verses that good on the new album?

JOE: Oh yeah—there’s some great stuff on there.

Let’s talk about the “Walk This Way” thing with Run-D.M.C. Did it surprise you that a rap group would do that song? STEVE: No, because if you take the guitars out, it’s a rap song!

Did it piss you guys off that the D.M.C. version didn’t get on rock stations? It was on black stations, it was on pop stations, but it wasn ’t on stations that consider Asia and Bruce Hornsby “rock.”

JOE: It was kinda like what we expected. And we got a lot of flack from some of our hard-core fans; we got some phone calls, and we got some bummed-out letters, but that’s to be expected—not everybody’s as free-thinking as all of us.

So when a rap group got ahold of you and asked you to appear on their record, you didn’t think to yourself, “Well, old Aerosmith fans won’t stand for this’’? JOE: No we didn’t, because it was new and challenging, and we wanted to see what a heavy metal band like Steven and I would do to a rap song. If R.E.M. had called us up and said, “Listen, you wanna play on (their cover of) Toys In The Attic’?,” we wouldn’t have done it. Rap is young kids doin’ street-music, and that’s what I think about it—it’s young and punky.

The other thing is, you guys always made dance music, whether all those people in the stadiums wanted to admit it or not. Did that ever bug you back then? STEVE: Yeah! ’Cuz of the rawness, they thought it couldn’t be danced to! We were doing “Walk This Way” and “Walkin’ The Dog” (Joe interjects: “And James Brown, ‘Mother Popcorn’ ”), and they would fire us—we’d pull into Bunraty’s (a Boston bar), and we were real starving, and they’d say, “No, we can’t dance to your stuff. You should do other people’s music.”

A couple more rap questions. What do you think of the Beastie Boys?

STEVE: It’s fun to watch a little kid take his first step, and you hope he can make another one. (Lots of guffaws at this point.)

Were you aware that they took one of your lines from “No More No More’’— “ain’t seen the daylight since we started this band’’?

STEVE: I heard about it once before, but I never looked into it. I think it’s real cool, are you kidding? I gotta tell you—the thing about rock ’n’ roll music, or any music for that matter, is to learn it from who you got it from, then take it one step further.

What do you think of the Cult’s album? STEVE: They could have made it sound bigger. And they’re not mature—it’s like you take the pie out before it’s done, and sure, you can lick the berries out of it, but you can’t eat the crust. I like the band;

I think that guy’s voice is just a little weird—you don’t sing that way over ballsy-ass rock ’n’ roll.

JOE: What you’re lookin’ for is another Highway To Hell, but it ain’t there. It’s thinsounding, and some stuff bothers me the way the vocals bother Steven, ’cuz he doesn’t like that English warble above the hard stuff. But that’s a style; it’s very English to do that. There’s other stuff that bothers me about it, but I think they made a good attempt, and if they keep going in that direction they’ll get it better. And also I gotta say I respect that band for changin’ their whole style around. I think that’s really cool. I respect ’em a lot more than I do a lot of other bands who just go out there and play that straight and narrow road—that’s really boring. That’s why I like the Stones—they always have that blues feel through their stuff, but there’s always different stuff. One album has a lot of horns; another album has a lot of acoustic guitars. Zeppelin was like that, too.

Have you guys heard much speedmetal stuff—does it come your way? How does it hit you?

STEVE: It’s pretty funny. Some of it’s great when I’m in my Porsche at 110 miles an hour, and when I’m in the mood, but it’s not the kind of thing you can take all the time. It definitely needs to be there; it’s great, it’s something that no one ever did. But again, it’s when you’re young, and you’re upstairs, and the only way you can think of sex is to jerk off and come real fast. You get a little older, and you start to take it easy a little bit.

JOE: I think the stuff we heard was Slayer, the one that Rick Rubin produced. It was OK; I thought it was interesting for a couple minutes. But once you’ve toured with the (New York) Dolls and toured with AC/DC, you’ve seen it, know what I mean? The Dolls had so much attitude to go with that; they didn’t just stand in the mirror and be stylized. And AC/DC, they’ve lived it and breathed it, especially on the first couple tours.

When punk happened, you guys had been making records for three or four years, and in retrospect, to me, Rocks and Toys In The Attic sound more genuinely “punky” than most stuff that passed as punk. Did you laugh at that music like you laugh at speedmetal now?

STEVE: Yeah! I thought it was, like, undone.

You say “undone," but some people would say “raw, ” right?

STEVE: Yeah, right, raw. But not that it should have been polished; it’s just that if you have a song and the beat falls out, why bother having a drummer? Get a machine. When the beat falls out, when the guitars are out of tune, is that music? It is to some people, but I don’t like it like that.

Fine. Let’s get back to Poison and Bon Jovi. Does it ever amaze you that Aerosmith influenced a generation out there; that this new record is gonna compete with records by kids who used to smoke dope to “Sweet Emotion” in high school parking lots?

STEVE: I love it. I think it’s funny as shit. And I think some of that stuff out there’s good—Bon Jovi’s good. I admit—maybe it intrigues me because I’m so afraid of it.

I don’t really want to dwell on other people’s music, though. I was wondering what your favorite Aerosmith songs are. STEVE: The “St. John” on this new album, and in the past, the “Lord Of The Thighs,” the “Same Old Song And Dance,” the “Back In The Saddle”— those things jump out to me. There’s a thing that’s just so cool that Aerosmith can do, I don’t know where it comes from, where you take the weirdest thing, like a six-string bass, and Joe will pick it up and say “let’s write a song on this,” and he figures out the throating of it, where it sits best on the keyboard, and then we start talking. “Dream On” is a thing of its own; there’s nothing else like it. Then again, I was just listening to “Lord Of The Thighs” and “Same Old Song And Dance,” and I would have loved to make the drums fatter.

I’ll say this about the new album— you’ve got a great drum sound. They sound like drums, not synthesizers, and that’s something you never find anymore. STEVE: We put our foot down; we don’t like synthesizers at all. Most producers these days don’t know how to get a real good sound—it’s a lost art.

How come you guys have done so many songs about dogs—“Sick As A Dog, ” “Walkin’ The Dog, ” “The Reason A Dog”?

STEVE: I don’t know—it’s the Dog Trilogy. I don’t know, I really don’t—I have no idea. Plus, we talk about soup bones in a couple songs.

So, now that the album’s done, does the band have a tour planned?

JOE: The album’s cornin’ out August 15; maybe there’ll be a single in July. Then we’re doin’ the Texxas Jam, which is gonna be a great show with Tesla, Poison, Whitesnake and Boston headlining. There’s a little disparity there, ’cuz we’re a killer live act, and they’ve sold about eight million records in the last 10 months, but they haven’t been onstage for 10 years. So it should be interesting.

I think of Tom Scholz as a mad scientist or something.

JOE: It’s gonna be fun, 'cuz we know those guys. Not much though, because he hardly ever comes out of his cellar. Then again, I hardly ever come out of mine, either. Anyway, we’re doin’ that, then we’re probably gonna go to Europe in September, then we’re gonna start in the States in October.

Another thought on pop-metal. It seems to me that the big difference between the current wave of hard-rock bands and the ones of the early '70s is that the new band’s roots don't go deep enough. Like I said, they start at Aerosmith or whatever, but they just stick to the surface. There's no blues.

JOE: They get Steven’s scarves right, though; that’s what it’s really all about, I guess. But as for the soul that we try to put into it, they just don’t have the roots that go back that far.

So do you have tons of old blues records?

JOE: Not tons. I have some, but I have a lot more funk records. Meters, Junior Walker, James Brown, stuff like that. Some of that stuff is amazing—Graham Central Station, Sly, know what I mean?

Wow! Do you hear funk in rap, like Run-D.M. C. ?

JOE: Oh yeah, for sure.

What about in disco, like in “Disco Inferno'1 by the Trammps?

JOE: Sure, in some of it. Like that one.

There’s a band down in Ohio, three white guys, one black guy, called the Royal Crescent Mob; they say two of their biggest influences are the Ohio Players and Aerosmith. One of the white guys used to mow the Ohio Players’ guitarist’s front lawn when he was a kid.

JOE: You’re kidding!

No, I'm not. Tell me about Classics Live (vinylized live tapes suspiciously released by Columbia in '86, long after 'Smith’s departure to Geffen.)

JOE: Our ex-manager has control of all those tapes, as much control as we do. So if he tells us he’s gonna put a record out, there’s nothin’ we can do about it. I hadn’t seen that record, didn’t know it was coming out, ’til it was in the stores.

I guess it’s an OK representation of the band, but it’s not what I’d call our best tapes. And there’s another one coming out in four weeks, Classics Two, which is better. It’s got “Walk This Way,’’ “Draw The Line,’’ “Movin’ Out,” songs from every album. We had a little more control over it, but not as much as I’d like.

I still haven’t talked to you about the breakup and reunion. What was it like getting back together; was there a lot of trial and error at first?

JOE: It took a while. Steve and I had been talking to each other on the phone a couple times a year, even right after we broke up. Then, like the last year before we got back together, I was tired of doing what I was doing (with the Joe Perry Project, with whom he released three albums.) The band wanted me back with them, and Steve and I wanted to get back together. It was just a long process; we went through a lot of changes when we were apart, for the better. Done With Mirrors was the best record we could do at the time, but it wasn’t the best record we can do. We should have had a month with those tracks as they sit on that record, instead of having one week, which is what we had.

“Stand up, sit down, don’t come close to my home sweet home, can’t catch no dose from no hot-tail poon-tang sweetheart sweat who could make a silk purse out of J. Paul Get and his ear." —Steve Tyler

Do you guys go out in public much these days, or is that too much of a hassle?

JOE: In Boston, it’s not that big a deal. It’s like, when I go see Stevie Ray Vaughan, I don’t go sit in the audience when the lights are up; I wait ’til the lights are down.

Do you mind talking about giving up alcohol? In a way, I think it’s none of my business.

JOE: No, I don’t mind. I used Antabuse (a drug which, when taken in conjunction with alcohol, makes the drinker nauseous), and I went through a rehab program. I don’t think Antabuse is worth that much, because you can always decide not to take it. It’s a state of mind; for people like me and Steve, who’ve been drinking and drugging so much for so long, it’s just a matter of breaking a psychological habit. Steve didn’t have as much a problem with drinking as me; we both had the same problem with heroin.

So have you guys kicked all of that now?

JOE: Yeah. We’re not into drooling on the floor anymore.

You’re still tearing apart hotel rooms though, right?

JOE: Yup. Still!

So it hasn’t affected your creativity in

that respect, then?

JOE: No, not at all. The bottom line is sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll; no drugs leaves more time for the other two. And that’s no bullshit—you feel better. All morning, when you suffer from a hangover and try to figure out what you did the night before; you don’t have to put up with that. You get up, you’re ready to get started aaain. It’s great.