Aerosmith

Steven Tyler’s autobiography (Does the Noise in my Head Bother You?) is written in gonzo style that might be his writing style, unless he dictated it (like the way Sidney Sheldon used to work) and someone typed up his verbal diarrhoea. If this is his actual conversational style he could conceivably be a tiresome, intense bore.  Lots of telling yet insubstantive detail that best serves to give us a glimpse into the Tyler psyche rather than illuminate the Aerosmith story. The best part is that he’s much more self deprecating than his stage persona would suggest but, then, it’s trite that many rock frontmen are more shy in private than they are on stage where the  Rock Star is a completely different construct to the human inside the hard edged shell of braggadocio.

Steven Tyler is arguably one of the last very flamboyant, exaggeratedly Jaggeresque frontmen, from an era and a rock culture where his kind of extrovert stage performance was the epitome of rock star fantasy. Nowadays, vocalists seem be more subdued in persona and style, to be more like “ordinary” people and to close the divide that used to exist between rock stars and their audience.  When bands go on stage, they look and dress like the people in die audience. Tyler looked nothing like his audience and was outrageous in look, dress and action, to emphasise that difference between rock star and audience.

Although the Seventies (between the ages of 11 and 20) were the influential years in my musical education, I read about bands more than I knew their music.  Even worse. for a long time I was ignorant about many of the major bands of that ere, specifically the American bands, because they were not covered in the local media and received absolutely no airplay on South African radio.

Aerosmith is a case in point. By late 1974, when I started buying the US monthly rock publication Hit Parader, Aerosmith was starting to make it in the USA and Lisa Robinson, the editor of the magazine, obviously had a thing for the band or maybe it was just Steven Tyler’s Mick Jagger influenced looks and sexual presence as frontman of a rather good rock and roll band.

Aerosmith may have been big in America but they meant diddley squat in South Africa in the late Seventies.  Between 1974 and probably 1980 I read quite a bit about them without having any clue what the music actually sounded like.  I also had no real biographical information on the band, at least not from Hit Parader who treated the band as superstars though the band had released their debut album only in about 1972. 

Tyler was the main face of the band beside Joe Perry, who was the Keith Richards to Tyler’s Jagger, and he sure looked damn sexy and dangerous in his loose fitting low-slung outfits that resembled pyjamas that left most of his white, hairless body bare, and the scarves and floppy women's hats. Tyler was one of the last of the typical breed of Sixties-informed Seventies rock star who clearly loved dressing up for stage and photo opportunities and for whom dressing up meant an androgynous image where the wardrobe consisted of as many items of women’s clothing, barring actual lingerie, as he could find. The look was daringly flamboyant and this held true for his motormouth interviews and pronouncements. The way to get Hit Parader's attention was to look extremely good and to say something extremely outrageous or least highly quotable.

Up to that point my knowledge of hard rock had been pretty much limited to Deep Purple, Uriah Heep and Grand Funk Railroad. Acts like Led Zeppelin, Kiss and Blue Oyster Cult were still just names to me and it was a while before I owned some records by these bands and also the likes of The Stooges and the MC5. The whole US FM rock thing of Kansas, Boston, Angel, and others of that ilk, passed me by, except perhaps for Boston who had a monster international hit with “More Than a Feeling.”  I liked faster louder and not the soaring harmonic guitars and anthemic vocals of the AOR bands.  I realised after a while that there were many rock bands in the USA who had successful careers there, yet were unknown in South African, or perhaps the rest of the world, because their careers were localised and parochial  and whatever  hits they may have had at home, never became international hits. A band could do quite well just sticking to their home turf because the market was that big.  On a smaller scale, the same applied to the UK and Europe.

This lack of musical experience of mid-Seventies American hard rock changed when I got my hands on Toys in the Attic (1975) and Rocks (1976), the brace of albums that officially and permanently put Aerosmith on the map as superstars. These first two purchases were followed by Live Bootleg (1978) and Night in the Ruts (1979), all of them bought around 1980 and 1981.  This was within a few years after the punk explosion in the UK and even if I had not heard much of the punk songbook I was ideologically firmly committed to the punk ethos and what I perceived to be its sound, based on what I knew of the Sex Pistols and the Clash and their antecedents in the MC5 and Stooges.

I took a gamble on the Aerosmith albums. I’d read about the band and now I wanted to know what they sounded like and whether the hype had any substance.

To say that I was pleasantly surprised and astonished would be an understatement. This music did not sound like heavy metal; in the same way that Blue Oyster Cult (whose first three albums I acquired at more or less the same time) was much more melodic than the bog standard heavy riffing bands of the time. Aerosmith was far more loose, grungy and visceral than, say, Boston. There was an amazing, fierce, fuzzed-out roar to the guitars that reminded me more of the punk movement (or how I imagined the punk bands would sound) than of the heavy rock styles I knew.  Aerosmith was loud, energetic, scuzzy and rocked like a demon. To my mind I could play Sex Pistols, Clash and Aerosmith  back to back and the music would be of a piece. In fact, most of London Calling was far more AOR than either Rocks or Toys in The Attic. Of course the lyrical content of Aerosmith songs, although undeniably clever, was still the basic building blocks of hard rock, with all manner of sexual innuendo and schoolboy smut and songs about partying. Socially conscious and politically correct it was not.

When I saw  Live Bootleg  in a discount bin I bought it because it would bring me up to speed on Aerosmith tunes I hadn’t heard before plus some interesting cover versions. I was keen on live albums as collections of hits played in rougher fashion than the polished studio recordings.  Unfortunately Live Bootleg turned out to one example of a cheap album that is not 100% perfect in quality. Sections of the vinyl surface deteriorated quickly but there was also  an imperfection in the surface that caused  one of the two records of the double album (I think it was the second disc) to jump when played, which meant I could not listen to it all that much or even record it on an audio cassette. Where the records were playable, it turned out that the live versions of the songs were pretty much as grungy as the studio versions  although an ad more jam oriented and this confirmed to me that Aerosmith were the epitome of dirty rock and roll in the unvarnished Stones sense  of the concept.

Not long after this, Night in the Ruts also appeared in the discount bins and I snapped it up. I believe that it got mostly less than positive reviews taking the view that Aerosmith had become an inspiration-free band wallowing in its success, over-indulging in the rewards and losing focus. In a way it was a departure in sound and vision but in another way I found it highly satisfactory except, once again, the vinyl was scratched and the record was playable only once or twice and then no more. The rough -edged sound had been smoothed out with a loss of that fuzzy grunge I had admired on the earlier records, with some heavy blues and a Shangri Las cover. I don’t care what the rock critics say. For me Night in the Ruts remains a favourite album and a record I’d listen to far rather than anything the band has released afterwards.

Ii is true, though, from this point on, that Aerosmith lost direction. Joe  Perry left, briefly, then the band released a brace of mediocre albums before coming back in the late 80s with Permanent Vacation (1987) and then Pump (1989), both of which spawned monster radio hits that dominated even the South African airwaves and set the band on the path to serious success and wealth. Aerosmith may have made better rock albums in die Seventies but from 1987 they became a commercial megalith with smooth, well produced heavy rock made by older guys in the fashion of the time and, if the hits were entertaining on the radio, none of them ever motivated me to buy any Aerosmith product ever again. The tough braggadocio and brio of the young and struggling Aerosmith were replaced by the streamlined commercial rock with Eighties production values that removed the fire the band once had and replaced it with calculated, eviscerated commercial nous.

It was ironic that the up and coming Guns ‘N Roses, heirs apparent to the original version of  Aerosmith, supported the latter in a late Eighties tour where Guns ‘N Roses were promoting their debut, Appetite for Destruction, and (allegedly) were told to stay away from the newly sober Aerosmith who’d settled into the commercial, mature peak of their career.   

I guess rock bands do have a trite life cycle of struggle before becoming truly successful and secure in their careers later in life. In the first 5 to 10 years the bad members are young, ambitious, hard living and make records full of youthful brio and vim but do not necessarily make a bunch of money partly because they blow their income on drugs and expensive shit that come from the desire to achieve a rock and roll lifestyle. A few years into the career the band has a purple patch where they write and record an album or two with massive hits, commercial success is enormous and the band members at last achieve financial security and realise that a career can be had if they play their cards right and relax a bit into the lifestyle and do not take it to the extreme all the time. This is the corporate phase where production values are high and required to be high, lots of attention is paid to detail. Professional songwriters and producers come onto the scene to guide the band to a sustainable career with continued commercial success. Generally this is where the song writing and production become slick and the tunes sound good on the radio and the quirky rough edges are smoothed out to the degree that the music becomes far less interesting than it might have been at the beginning.

Aerosmith fell victim to this syndrome. From Aerosmith to Night in the Ruts the band released a succession of good gritty Seventies hard rock albums made by young guys wanting to make their mark and loving to rock out. From Permanent Vacation onwards the music was being written and recorded by a bunch of increasingly older guys with the older guys' attitude to what rock is or should be, with an eye on maintaining the commercial initiative and the sense of belonging to the music industry establishment and being proud of it and accepting all kinds of honours they might have scoffed at when they were very young and rebellious. 

Young Aerosmith were rebellious punks who wanted to ultimate rock and roll lifestyle of women, drugs and excessive living. The older, more mature Aerosmith, who had become careerists as much as anyone else in the business who foresaw longevity provided they slowed down and observed a couple of rules, and realized that corporate rock was much more lucrative than rebellious rock and could give one the kind of comfort and luxury being a rebel and showing the establishment the finger, never could or would.

As soon as Aerosmith songs started enjoying serious airplay in South Africa the smooth, glossy pop veneer put me off. This was nothing like the satisfactory rough crunch of their early albums. They got older, more proficient, lost the drug habits and realized that their career demanded closer attention to craftsmanship and maintaining their health than punk rebellion and purely visceral rock and roll.

Somewhere along 1990 Aerosmith crossed the line from outlaw rockers to classic rockers. In my opinion Aerosmith’s best years were the first decade of their existence as band. They’ve going for more than 40 years now and will never equal those first 7 studio albums regardless of how commercially successful later records might have been.