FEATURES

Yes, we’re all metalheads here, and yes, that means we’ve all been a little disconcerted with Aerosmith as of late. But if yer old school like me (first Aerosmith album bought as a new release – Get Your Wings), the band’s new live album Rockin’ The Joint should get you walkin’ that way once again.
Despite there being only 11 tracks to the thing, the album goes and goes for 58 minutes, meaning some jamming ensues. And trust me, you’ll be diggin’ it, except (heh heh) for the “orphan,” which, you know… there’s that little button on your stereophonic player, the one with the two little arrows and the line: just press skip.
“Yeah, you know, it's funny,” muses long blonde animal Tom Hamilton, “a lot of things you don't realize when you're in the midst of it, but just now I was sort of looking around on our site, looking at song listings, and it dawned on me (laughs), it's like, ‘I Don't Want To Miss A Thing’ is like this orphan, you know? (laughs). The rest of it, you know, I'm psyched - it's a headphone album.”
Well, headphone album might be a little inappropriate, ‘cos this is more of a drinking with your friends album. Best move is that Rockin’ The Joint includes the two heaviest songs from Just Push Play, rocked up and grinding, versus the gloss put on them on that way over-commercial platter. Second best move – obscurities everywhere, including No More No More, Big Ten Inch Record and the band’s best ballad ever, ‘Seasons Of Wither’. Third best move – ‘Draw The Line’, arguably the greatest song ever written (commits me, in writing, on page 486 of my Top 500 Songs book).
“’Same Old Song And Dance’ is a challenge because I do a semi solo on the end of it,” says Tom, when asked about personal highlights or hard bits of the current set list – Aerosmith is indeed out rocking various joints right now, live. “We go into the ending part of the song, and just keep it going and going and going, and we build the energy, and what happens is, the band cuts out at the end of the main body of the song. Steven does some cool vocal stuff over Joey's… you know, he keeps going, playing twos and fours, and then when we come back in, everybody keeps playing, but I'm kind of playing a lead bass guitar kind of thing. So that's a challenge every night to make that work and not make it too planned and play off the top of my head but play some coherent stuff. So that's a challenge. It's also physically challenging because it's all triplets, so it's kind of an endurance song.”
As happily alluded to, the two heaviest songs off of Just Push Play are on here. Does that tell us anything about where the next album is going to go?
“I think it's us saying, ‘Look, you know, we would love it if people would listen to these songs’ (laughs). It's a funny thing. When the Just Push Play album came out, it like went into a void. And I was kind of surprised. There are all kinds of different reasons why people love or don't love an Aerosmith album, but I thought song-wise, it was a really good album. And I heard the version of ‘Beyond Beautiful’ that's on the new album, two years later. And I hadn't heard that version for a couple of years. No one had, because they were just kind of sitting in a vault. And the song was just so heavy. It really goes with some of our vintage material. We wanted to present that to our fans and say, ‘Look, it does go with it’ (laughs). By the way, that song, it's not in the set right now, but that's very challenging; that's a hard song to play.”
As I chided Joe a few months back, I brought up the band’s bigger and bigger productions. Still, with Honkin’ On Bobo comparatively stripped down and raw, I wondered if some of that might matter to the next Aerosmith platter…
“I think it's going to be Bobo-influenced. You can look at... you know, as far as where Joe's at, he's got an album that he put out earlier in the year, which is sort of a ‘how Joe feels about the guitar’ album. It's cool. I feel like a return to fundamentals, but at the same time, we love to play with the studio. To us it's just fun, because we come from the psychedelic era, and it's just a lot of fun to do all these cool little things. Even our earlier albums had a lot of little studio creative things going on. So, I don't know, maybe we should restrain ourselves, find a happy medium.”
Like I say, hearing the band tear a strip off ‘Draw The Line’ is definitely a personal highlight on this record. Tom walks through the origins of this legendary 1977 anthem.
“Well, we recorded that at a place called The Cenacle, which was a former nunnery in upstate New York. And I was just up there, the engineers and a couple of other people, Jack Douglas. Joey and Brad and I had already done about a month rehearsing, just the three of us. Steven and Joe were kind of unfindable during that period but then we all moved into The Cenacle; everybody was there. But you know, people talk about a band's self-indulgent period. That was it, where we had a couple of successful albums so we were really wallowing in the sort of rewards of the flesh, if you know what I mean. And you know, that album took a ridiculously long time to make, and the sessions started at 10 o'clock at night. It was just disorganized. But in the midst of it, it was a statement of where we were at the moment. Joe was really into the punk thing. You can hear that in just the flailing of ‘Draw The Line’. It took the longest time. We never really played it, and we just started playing it again - well, we've played it for the last seven years. And it serves its purpose. It's really fun for the band. You flail a way at your guitar. It's very simple. You know, you can play it on one string if you want, and actually I'm going to try it on Sunday night. You can like strum away on the string, and play percussion on the bass. But it's fun for that, and it's rah rah energy and Joe does these spectacular slide guitar solos, so it's just an energy moment.”
“It's a complex set of relationships that evolves over time,” ventures Tom in closing, asked about his position on the whole outside songwriter situation, another thorn in the side of senior citizen Aerosmith fans. “It ebbs and flows, and you have moments like we had when we made Get Your Wings, Toys, Rocks-era records. And then we kind of like trashed ourselves and came out of it slowly, and the creative process… when we did the Done With Mirrors album, we said, look, let's jump-start the creativity in here. Let's do something to shake it up, instead of just sitting there in the studio, you know, wishing for it, for something from the past to come back. I don't know if you've seen the movie Some Kind Of Monster. It's amazing, because when I saw that movie, it was almost painful to watch them go through something that I remembered. So we said, to hell with it, we’ll probably get trashed, but let's work with other people outside the band, and it got the engine going, and we put out the Permanent Vacation album. But, you know, these are Aerosmith albums. These guys... none of these people ever came in and said, 'Here's a song - play it.' I mean, there are a couple of exceptions. ‘I Don't Want To Miss A Thing’ is maybe one of say, two or three. But the vast majority of material that we've come up with with outside writers is Aerosmith music. It gets co-written primarily with Steven and Joe, and then the whole band puts their take on it and we make it an Aerosmith song. There's been a lot of stuff along the way that we didn't use because somebody came along and said, 'Well, this can be a hit.' And we'd say, wait a minute, we're not doing it just for that. It's great to have hit songs. Every band has to have hits at some point if they want to continue what they're doing. And that could also mean deep cut obscure hits, because that's what your core fanbase wants.”