“It would be a lot of fun”: the one Aerosmith album Joe Perry wanted to record again
Not every band gets to make their classic records at the right time. As much as they might love the songs they’re working with, there are many instances where bands are trying to either do more than they are capable of or try something that they are clearly not equipped for. And while Aerosmith usually didn’t stray away from the typical blues rock that they grew up on at the beginning of their career, there are plenty of albums where Joe Perry thought that the performances could have been a bit tighter than they were.
When the band reached the 1980s, they would have been lucky to see another day above ground, let alone have a new record out. Every single one of them was strung out, and given that Perry’s wife was getting pulled into the melee half the time, he figured that he would quit rather than have to put up with another argument with Steven Tyler about the direction of the group.
But Aerosmith’s true chemistry comes from what Tyler and Perry do onstage. Both of them have their solo projects, and while they can be a ton of fun under the right circumstances, there’s hardly any reason to think that they would have the same kind of energy as the ‘Bad Boys From Boston’ if they worked on their own. So when Perry came back, it felt like all was right with the world again.
They weren’t all on the road to recovery yet, but getting everyone on good terms for the Back in the Saddle Tour was a good enough sign for them to rush back into the studio. And while it resulted in a pretty decent record in Done With Mirrors, the public was not paying attention anymore. A lot had changed in the music world since Aerosmith were on the charts, and it turned out that some of the hair metal icons had started lapping them in terms of chart success in the meantime.
But there’s a good chance that some of the greatest hair metal acts of all time couldn’t compete with what the band was doing here. ‘Let The Music Do the Talking’ may have been a leftover for Perry’s solo project with new lyrics from Tyler, but compared to what Quiet Riot were doing at the time, this felt like a precursor to what Guns N’ Roses would be playing only a few years down the road.
A lot of the album’s fault could be blamed on poor timing, but Perry felt that they should have paid more attention to the production, saying, “It would actually be a lot of fun to revisit those songs. I even wish we could record them again now. Hell, they would get to be a hundred per cent instead of 85% on the Richter scale.”
It’s not like they didn’t have a decent producer behind the board or anything, either. Ted Templeman had been the mastermind behind some of Van Halen’s greatest records, but since he wasn’t giving the band what they needed, it made sense for them to go in a different direction when hooking up with Bruce Fairbairn and Bob Rock to sculpt their proper comeback on Permanent Vacation.
Done With Mirrors is still a good time, but it does tend to feel like looking at Aerosmith from a distance on a few songs. And compared to what they would do to the songs once they played them live, the band could have made out like bandits had they released a live version of these tunes.
