Arts and Lifestyle Wednesday Presented by Cinematic Visions-Bad Boys From Boston Backstories
The Grammy Awards are this Sunday, popular music’s biggest showcase. The last couple of weeks as Kansas City has been consumed with Chiefs playoff football, tens of thousands in this area have actually watched LIVE television of their Chiefs, which means that they have actually had to consume commercials and promotional announcements on CBS. So countless times, unless they were headed to the refrigerator or the bathroom, fans have viewed Grammy promos, and prominent among the stars hyped for the event has been Aerosmith.
That’s right, a band that is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary featuring five men right around seventy years old, is seen as a needle pusher among the brightest young stars in the industry. Obviously, it is in part a way to get a different demographic to tune in, but it also says something about the staying power and quality of the band.
I first saw Aerosmith live in a high school gymnasium in 1973. I lived in Framingham, Massachusetts, and the next town over was Wayland. It was a pretty darn fancy gym, actually a dome, where you could play softball indoors and have a full bore running track. Aerosmith had just put out their first album of the same name, and had a regional hit with the iconic “Dream On’”,which didn’t really break nationally, reaching only #59 the first time it was released. The place was packed with at least two thousand young people, and Steven Tyler, Joe Perry and the boys tore the place apart.
The band was a Boston sensation, but wouldn’t really take off nationally until their third album “Toys in the Attic” featuring “Sweet Emotion”, their first top forty hit, and “Walk This Way. (They then re-released “Dream On” and this time it was a Top Ten smash). But that night had me hooked for a while as a devotee of the band. Tyler, although he would suffer in some circles the criticism of being just a knock-off Mick Jagger., was a dynamic front man with an amazing rock and roll screamer voice that also could be soulful and nuanced. The band was tighter than they often would be later, even with their rougher edges and jangly guitar work, and it worked magically.
Aerosmith’s career would be a crazy roller coaster that featured ludicrous highs and lows, with high something you could use in multiple ways to describe them. When the two leaders and primary song writers would come to be tabbed “The Toxic Twins”, you kind of get the idea. The band, which also featured guitarist Brad Whitford, bass player Tom Hamilton, and drummer Joey Kramer, would soar to one of the leading acts in the world by the time that their fourth album “Rocks” came out, crash in the early eighties due to excesses and personal conflict that eventually saw Perry and Whitford leave for a few years , be revived in the late eighties in a far more commercial way, with a decade of chart-topping hits that are far from my favorites, and then settle in to being a legacy band. Their comeback was fueled in 1986 with the song that will be featured at the Grammy’s, the collaboration with Run DMC on “Walk This Way.”
But my personal connection with Aerosmith is really the early phase of the first four records, and in particular, the very first eponymous one, which I have fervently urged, without great success, to many to try out if you have never been a real fan of the band. To non-devotees, likely only “Dream On’ is familiar, although perhaps you might have caught “Mama Kin” on some rock station some time.
The record begins with “Make It”, which would become a concert staple and a perfect opener, since it’s first line is “Good evening people welcome to the show”. It kicks off an eight song ride that is far more bluesy, raw, and unproduced than what would follow. Part of the being a fan is being evangelical about trying to influence others, which in something as personal as music is somewhat of a fool’s errand, but I have plenty of fool in me. I will urge you hear to seek out the record, but I will take it one step further for my favorite Aerosmith song, perhaps appropriately on Wikipedia the only song on the album that doesn’t have a link to its own page.
It is the seven minute, rollicking, guitar and harmonica fueled “One Way Street”, that closes out the first side, back when that kind of mattered. It is the best of Aerosmith all rolled into one. A cool, funky intro, clever lyrics, Tyler scatting here, and soaring there, various tempos,a blazing lead late in the proceedings, and a rousing finish. Hell, I am here for you, and I’m a fool, so you even get a You Tube link. Sorry, no video, just the album track, just the way I want it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4-OGjJCJrhE
It is a great album in full, and the one that followed, the other one before they “made it”, was “Get Your Wings” a great buried treasure. No hits, raw and pretty sleazy lyrically with some naughty and clever turns of phrase, and likely best known for what would become Aerosmith’s powerhouse live staple, the cover of “Train Kept a Rollin’”. Starting next with “Toys in the Attic” there would be no need for me to try and proselytize, everyone could decided for them self merely by listening to the radio.
I have many personal Aerosmith stories, but beside the Wayland High School event, i will just share a couple. Trying to hook your friends into what you are passionate about in music can be dangerous business and it was for me my sophomore year at The University of Kansas. Aerosmith was coming to Wichita, and having seen three fabulous live shows of theirs to that point , I virtually insisted that a group of us make the drive to the Century II arena, which ironically, was just demolished last month.
I can sum up the concert in this way. The opening act was a band called Wet Willie, a southern rock band that had one hit song “Keep on Smilin’”. Wet Willie’s short set was easily the musical highlight of the evening, and I don’t even remember if they were any good, but I remember vividly how awful Aerosmith was on this night. They were well into their self-destruction phase, and they were out of it, sloppy, and Tyler and Perry had a shoving match on stage.. Perry chipped in further by falling over during a guitar lead. It would have been bad enough to go yourself and see your then favorite band suck, but to drag all your friends to the mess was just plain embarrassing.
A strange connection to the band came when I started my first professional radio job after college. It was far from my first overall, but it was a milepost. I pretty much did everything at WMRC in Milford, Massachusetts, including some afternoon news. The news director at the station was a man named Ed Thompson. He was a nice enough guy, but he was kind of goofy, and extremely clean cut and conservative. Soon I would discover, however, that one of his best friends, or at least he said so, at nearby Hopedale High School was Joe Pereira, who would change his name to Joe Perry. Ed said that he drove the pair to school together every day. The thought of the cool guitar slasher spending time with an Opie-like character was almost too much to imagine.
In researching this piece, I came upon the knowledge something that you would think a onetime mega-fan would know, that both Perry and Tyler had Italian surnames that they changed. The lead singer is actually Steven Tallarico. I’m actually a tad embarrassed I didn’t know that. I would assume my youngest sister does, but I will have to ask, since she had me beat as an Aerosmith devotee. She went to countless shows, and perhaps was the soberest person every time. Colleen is a delight, funny, charming, and we share a great passion for exercise, but if you knew her, you might never guess that she was a diehard fan of the Bad Boys from Boston.
After that fateful show in Wichita, and as the band went through their issues, breakups and the like, my interest waned some; although I always kind of paid attention to what their paths were taking. But in the end, I was not a big fan of the comeback Aerosmith of the 80’s and 90’s. I very much liked the collaboration with Run DMC, but much of the rest was lost on me, especially since a few of the big hits actually were written, at least in part, by other people. Added to that some of the biggest sellers were power ballads, and since they virtually invented the genre with among the best in “Dream On”, it seemed pointless. Besides, the power ballad is an musical area of very low batting average in my mind.
I did, however, see Aerosmith one more time during the comeback “Permanent Vacation” tour. I was working in Utica, New York, on a full-service AM stattion. We shared studios with an FM station also owned by our company, and for a short time, they were a contemporary rock station. So we got tickets and sometimes back stage passes. I was able to snag a couple for the Aerosmith show, and my girlfriend and I went. We went through the receiving line and got to Steven Tyler. My girlfriend was tall and slender with prominent blue eyes, real prominent, kind of like Better Davis eyes. Tyler laid it on thick with her about the eyes, and she thought that was pretty cool.
What was less cool for me that year was that we went backstage for that show and Eddie Money. I’m thinking that this is going to be great, rock and roll debauchery etc. Forget it. Both Aerosmith and Eddie Money were rehabbing, so fruit, Perrier, and juice were the order of the evening. What a bummer.
I’ll be a bit nostalgic and a little excited to see what the now Old Bad Boys from Boston bring to the Grammy’s Sunday. When I’ve seen the odd concert videos through recent years, it seems like Tyler, Perry and the guys still have their chops. Tyler has become more of a brand than a band leader in the 2000’s but that’s OK.
I very much appreciate that great wheelhouse of an opening to a career that those four albums gave me. I sometimes go too long without listening to those records, and in fact this piece was a good excuse to do that, and to force feed a couple of friends a hearty dose of “One Way Street”. And I will toss in one more buried treasure link for you to conclude.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNu0VIoY9nY
Get your wings, boys.