Why Aerosmith needed to turn down Rick Rubin in 2003: “That was miserable”
Music producers are miracle workers, capable of whipping a band of drugged-up and spaced-out rock stars and their unlistenable demos into iconic artists and groundbreaking albums. So, it is no surprise that Boston rockers Aerosmith were in search of a good producer back in the early 2000s.
A favourite of divorced dads and skinny jean-enthusiasts across the United States, Aerosmith helped to forge the hard rock landscape of America in the early 1970s, using their adoration of Led Zeppelin as a basis. However, the Steven Tyler-fronted outfit long outlasted Zeppelin, fostering a bizarrely enduring career which saw them transcend multiple decades with their unique blend of glam rock, metal, pop, and blues. With that extensive career came all the trimmings of rock and roll excess, too.
Namely, the band quickly became embroiled in the depths of drug addiction and self-destructive revelry, which soon took its toll on their sound and image. When you live fast without dying young, maintaining a consistent level of creative output can feel like being caught up in a snowstorm, and they couldn’t snort it and move on. While Aerosmith might have been riding high on the buzz of rock stardom in the 1970s and 1980s, as the new millennium dawned, the band wore on its sleeve drug-induced disrepair.
The product of this rapid crumbling was 2001’s Just Push Play, which perfectly encapsulated their embarrassing scramble for their youthfulness while simultaneously relapsing into their ageing narcotic habits. Seemingly, the band themselves were aware of the fact that they needed to draft in some outside help for the planned follow-up album, reaching out to legendary producer Rick Rubin for some studio time.
Rubin is no stranger to the world of hard rock, having produced everyone from AC/DC to Slayer at various points during his illustrious career, but even he wasn’t equipped to deal with the circa-2003 Aerosmith dumpster fire. “We went in the studio with him one night to see how it would work. That was miserable. We just didn’t click,” Tyler recalled to Classic Rock in 2012, “because of us. We were still getting fucked up. We weren’t in the right place headwise.”
“We were just realising we were a band again and that we were able to work together, but we were still fucked up,” the frontman continued, adding, “That’s why we had to make a big deal of telling the world we were clean, because nobody was buying it at that point.”
So, Rubin was quickly cut out of the picture, and that decision ended up setting the album back nearly an entire decade.
When that project finally saw the light, released in 2012 as Music from Another Dimension!, the production credits were shared among the members, Marti Frederiksen, and the band’s long-running collaborator, Jack Douglas. While it would be interesting to see how Aerosmith might sound behind the desk of Rick Rubin, it’s difficult to imagine the producer viewing it as much of a missed opportunity.
That 2012 album might have presented a greater image of sobriety than the band’s previous work, but it was just as sonically uninspired as Just Push Play, if not more. Whether Rubin would have been able to save that sinking ship is a question committed to rock and roll’s extensive list of ‘what ifs’, but with new Aerosmith music reportedly on the horizon, perhaps his chance will come again.
