‘Done With Mirrors’: The Aerosmith album Joe Perry thought wasn’t produced properly
Any album can sometimes suffer from bad production. Even if you’re one of the biggest acts in the world, bands like Metallica have managed to have some of the biggest audio screwups in the business despite being able to work with virtually anybody. While Aerosmith were already operating at half-capacity during their reunion in the 1980s, Joe Perry thought that they were far better than what was captured on Done With Mirrors.
Considering what they had been through in the past few years, most were lucky to see any of the ‘Bad Boys from Boston’ standing upright by the 1980s. When Perry first left in the late 1970s, Steven Tyler had started to collapse underneath a mountain of cocaine, and the sight of him falling down and ending shows early because of his drug intake wasn’t all that uncommon during the tour for Rock in a Hard Place.
But no matter how much the Joe Perry Project satisfied the guitarist’s need to branch out, nothing sold, not even Rocks or Toys in the Attic. The pure magic came from when Perry and Tyler worked together, and after some sweet-talking from Perry’s manager, the ‘Toxic Twins’ were able to settle their differences and emerge even stronger on their ‘Back in the Saddle’ tour.
That kind of reunion might work on the live stage, but how does that sound in a studio environment? After all, the group now had competition from the hair metal scene emerging out of Los Angeles, and even though they had some solid material in their corner, Done With Mirrors just felt a little bit when listening to it.
The swagger of the early days is certainly there, but some of the material was far from what people may have expected. Any songwriting chops usually come from good practice, and listening to some of the deep cuts was like watching a sprinter try to run to the best of their ability after hanging it up for two years.
Even with Van Halen producer Ted Templeman at their disposal, Perry thought the record never had the sound they were looking for, telling Guitar World, “With Done with Mirrors, [Ted] basically just turned the machines on and let us go. And looking back, I kinda wish Ted had more input because I feel that Done with Mirrors lacks a layer of production. There was a level of communication that hadn’t been established yet, and more spice could have been added to it.”
Which is a shame because compared to what Aerosmith had been doing, a lot of the tunes have some of their best playing in years. It admittedly wouldn’t have been that high a bar to clear to eclipse Rock in a Hard Place, but ‘Let the Music Do the Talking’ still deserves its place among tunes like ‘Walk This Way’ as one of the catchiest tunes that the band ever pressed on vinyl in their prime.
If anything, the fact that this album failed was a bad omen of things to come. Since the new version of Aerosmith didn’t work with Tyler and Perry at the helm, it was time to bring in outside songwriters, and the road towards albums like Just Push Play was indirectly being paved.
