Unloaded
Aerosmith just push on
By Matt Ashare
Steven Tyler would like to know whether it would be possible to
print the word "period" with a certain expletive placed between the second and
third syllables. So, as his four long-time bandmates listen to their lead
singer weigh in with his thoughts on the lyrics to several prime cuts on their
new album Just Push Play (Columbia), the Aerosmith front man heads off
on a brief little phonet-
ic excursion. "Pee-ree-fucking-id," Tyler says, with playful determination.
"Can you print that? Pee-ree-fucking-id," he repeats, carefully sounding out
each syllable.
Printing it's not the problem. Conveying some sense of how remarkably pleased
with himself Tyler looks and sounds as he says it -- or how, well, charming it
is to watch the rock legend in action at times like this -- is the hard part.
For Tyler, it seems, the difference between the gypsy-scarfed persona who's
been taking the stage in front of thousands of cheering fans since 1973 and the
person you get at four in the afternoon in a suite at Boston's Four Seasons
Hotel is only one of degree. The band (Tyler, guitarists Joe Perry and Brad
Whitford, bassist Tom Hamilton, and drummer Joey Kramer) have even brought
along a collection of Eastern-patterned blankets and tapestries to hang on the
walls and drape over the sofa and chairs, as well as half a dozen
crushed-velvet pillows and a few large candles to create some Aerosmith
ambiance in the little room that they're holding court in. It's been Tylerized.
And, with only a week to go before the March 6 release of Just Push
Play, and a little over two weeks until Aerosmith will have the honor of
being indicted, or, ah, inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Tyler
clearly has a lot of reasons to be pleased with himself and his band.
For starters, there's the MTV-produced Super Bowl halftime blowout, which
placed Aerosmith amid a supporting cast that included 'N Sync, Britney Spears,
Mary J. Blige, and Nelly, and drew a record-breaking 86.5 million viewers. That
helped lay the groundwork for the breakout success of the band's new single,
"Jaded," by bookending it with two songs that have put Aerosmith on the top of
the charts in the past -- "I Don't Want To Miss a Thing" (the number-one hit
from the 1998 Armageddon soundtrack) and the seminal "Walk This Way"
(the '70s hard-rock classic that helped revive the band's career in the '80s
when Tyler and guitarist Joe Perry re-recorded it with the rap group
Run-D.M.C.). The band, and Tyler in particular, looked pretty damn good up
there, surrounded by all that youth. Now the only question is how many millions
of units Just Push Play is gonna move. Six? Eight? Ten? Twenty? It's all
good. Especially when you consider that Aerosmith practically invented the
rise/fall/redemption blueprint for VH-1's Behind the Music series. Shit,
they should get a royalty check every time a bad-boy rock band loses it all to
drugs, alcohol, and ego indulgence before hitting the comeback trail. Only most
of those stories don't have nearly as happy an ending as Aerosmith's. Tyler,
who turns 53 on March 26, may still look the part of the renegade rocker when
he takes the stage, but bad behavior for him these days doesn't go much beyond
being hooked on fucking phonics. Pee-ree-fucking-id.
Living clean doesn't mean playing clean, and Just Push Play is one of
the dirtier-sounding Aerosmith albums in quite some time. Sure, "Jaded," with
its string arrangements and tender melody, is a pretty tune in the vein of
"Janie's Got a Gun," and even the band's slickest recordings -- Nine
Lives, for example -- were outfitted with plenty of the knotty blooze
riffery that's been crucial to the Aerosmith mix since day one. But the guitars
here, even on "Jaded," have a nastier tone, and often so does Tyler's voice.
More telling, perhaps, is the conspicuous absence of an obvious follow-up to
Nine Lives' "Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)" and Pump's
"Love in an Elevator," two of Aerosmith's glossier hits from the band's modern
period that came just shy of being novelty numbers. And even after the stunning
success the band had with the Diane Warren-penned "I Don't Want To Miss a
Thing" (#1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for four weeks in '98), her name
doesn't appear anywhere on the song credits.
Tyler and Perry have continued to rely on outside experts to help polish the
tunes they write, but there really does seem to be a subtle bit of something
missing -- a touch of bluesy soul, perhaps -- from the one track on Just
Push Play written without Tyler or Perry's input, the feel-good power
ballad "Fly Away from Here." It's a fine song that'll probably make a good
second or third single, and it's a tribute to Tyler's way with words that he
can make a bland string of clichés like "Our hopes and dreams are out
there somewhere/Won't let time pass us by/We'll just fly" sound as soulful as
he does. But even Perry can't bend a guitar string far enough to bring any
dirty blues to the Hallmark party. In contrast, the riffs and, particularly,
the lyrics elsewhere on Just Push Play find Tyler and Perry drawing
freely from the raw and gritty side of the Aerosmith legacy: the disc's title
track -- which Tyler refers to as "Fucking A" for reasons that a close listen
to the lyrics makes perfectly clear -- even features a snippet of "Walk This
Way" and a few rather blatant drug references ("Sweet leaf dreamer/Smokin' up
the ganja").
It's good to hear Tyler sounding like Tyler again, singing about the things he
knows rather than editing out the blasts from his past that have gotten Just
Push Play slapped with a parental-advisory sticker. And Tyler knows it.
"When you first get sober you want to spread the word," he notes. "You do. You
want people to know that if they got a problem, like I did, there's hope. And,
yeah, a lot of us took it really seriously, because we literally saved our
lives by not going down that road. So there are references in `Fucking A' to
smoking dope. I'm not saying you should or you shouldn't. And, yes, I had some
questions in my own head about those lyrics. But you gotta be truthful. You
gotta be honest. It's nothing I don't tell my kids about. I don't go into depth
with them. But I do tell them that Mommy and Daddy both had a problem with
that, we drank too much, so we just don't anymore. And they know we don't.
That's all they need to know until they get a little older.... You know, you
can taste heroin, but you don't have to do it forever. And you can be an
asshole, but you don't have to be one forever."
The loosening up that's apparent on Just Push Play clearly had a lot to
do with the fact that, rather than hiring a big-name producer like, say, Glen
Ballard, the producer and song doctor who helped make Alanis Morissette one of
the best-selling artists of the '90s and then co-authored a couple of notable
tracks -- "Pink" and "Falling in Love (Is Hard on the Knees)" -- on Aerosmith's
last album (1997's Nine Lives), Tyler and Perry opted, for the first
time in the band's long career, to take the production reins themselves. (They
were assisted by two pro engineer/producers, Mark Hudson and Marti
Frederiksen.) And rather than relocating to a big-name studio in Florida or New
York -- or, as was the case with Nine Lives, Florida and New York
-- they decided to stay at home, which, even after all these years, remains in
reasonably close proximity to the city they're most closely associated with:
Boston.
"I live about a mile away from where I lived when the band was first starting,"
bassist Tom Hamilton points out. "I go to the same hardware store now that I
did back then. And the same pizza place."
"And three of us live on the same street," drummer Joey Kramer adds.
"Our second houses are all in other parts of the world," counters Perry with a
wry grin, before anyone has a chance to reveal any addresses.
Ground zero for the Just Push Play sessions was the Boneyard, a
state-of-the-art studio Perry built at his South Shore home. That was another
first for the band. "We've had the nerve to do just about everything else,"
Tyler jokes. "We ruined our career, we bought in to people who were bad for us.
And there comes a point where you go, `Do we have the nerve to do this
ourselves?' And we do."
"In the old days you had to go to New York," Tyler continues. "You went to the
big-name studio in the big studio with the big producer. When we were in
Florida for the last record it was an incredible lesson to me, because if you
go somewhere nice like that, you'll never write. We redid it in New York and,
as Joe said before, it was a million and two for three months just for the
hotels. It was fun walking across town, but man ... "
"We wanted a great record and we'll spend whatever it takes," says Perry. "If
the only place to do it was New York, we'd go to New York. But we've learned
that it's really about having a really good song and the right vibe. You can
catch that anywhere."
"It's easy to be spontaneous when you're not paying five grand a night for
hotel rooms," Hamilton notes.
"These guys started doing demos down in Joe's basement," Kramer remembers,
pointing to Perry and Tyler, "and the demos sounded so good it was like, `Why
re-record Steven's vocals or Joe's leads?' So, eventually, we all came in, put
on our parts, and the demos turned into a record. We used to do demos, then I'd
go and learn the arrangement, re-cut it again, and then everyone would have to
put their parts over that again."
"And I'd have my fingers crossed that it would be in the same tempo and the
same key so that I could fly my solo over from the demo," Perry adds. "Because,
inevitably, I'd always go into the demo thinking that I've just got to fill up
some space here and I'll figure out a real solo later. But those are always the
best takes. So I'd either have to try to fly them over from the demo to the
final version, or I'd have to try to reproduce them. Which is why we ended up
putting so much into that studio to do the demos, so at least the guitars would
sound good. But it ended up being a monster bigger than that. Any idea we had
we tried, from pulling the hurdy-gurdy out on `Love Lies,' which was in tune, I
might add, to the track ... "
"So was the telephone," Tyler interjects, referring to the dial tone that kicks
off the first track on Just Push Play.
"Yeah," Perry agrees, "I was making a phone call and Marti was running the
track and I picked up and the dial tone was in the key of the song. So I told
him to record it. It's D, the saddest of all keys."
"We're open," Tyler adds. "We're open to suggestions. One of the greatest
lessons this band learned was to be open. You know, fuck it, just try it. We
got so much great stuff from songs that came together bit by bit by bit. And it
just builds. Where's the stopping? Where's the wall? Where is the `where' we
can't go? As long as there's a melody, we can keep doing this. I mean, look
what we did with `Jaded.' You know what I mean. It's a beautiful melody, and
the way it slams into the chorus, it's flipped out. And for us that wrote it,
to sit there and look at it and see it dancing already by itself ... wow
... "
Steven Tyler speechless. It's a rare enough event that it's worth savoring. And
he's right: "Jaded" is a pretty great song. The way the verse starts sliding
toward the chorus and then slams up against it is rather remarkable. And
so is the fact that after almost 30 years together, Aerosmith themselves really
don't seem the least bit jaded at all.
"We've already been through our jaded period," Hamilton says.
"Yeah," Perry adds. "After you really lose everything, and you have the luck to
get it back, you kind of tend to appreciate it every day."