Unjaded

Aerosmith just push on

By Matt Ashare

LIVING CLEAN, PLAYING DIRTY: it’s good to hear Tyler (center) singing about things he knows rather than editing out sordid blasts from his past.

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 frontman heads off on a brief little phonetic 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 ¦s 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 Pumpýs “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 “üur 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 “WalkaThis 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 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 Boston, the city they’re most closely associated with.

“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 home on Massachusetts’ South Shore. 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.”