The 1985 Aerosmith album Joe Perry wishes he could delete: “Could have been better”
It was going to take a lot for Joe Perry to want to come back to Aerosmith after 1979.
All of them weren’t taking care of themselves by that point, but you could definitely feel when Perry was getting detached from the rest of the band, the more and more that his wife was getting disrespected backstage. But the idea of one of the greatest rock and roll forces breaking up didn’t come from someone trying to claim that his wife was the 1970s equivalent of Yoko Ono or anything.
Because even if Elyssa Perry wasn’t a part of the equation, it’s not like the band’s problems would already be fixed. Joe was beginning to pull away from the rest of the band, and since Steven Tyler was trying his best to make the best records that he could, no one was walking away from a record like Draw the Line, which they had made a masterpiece. They pulled themselves together long enough to make an album as opposed to a good one, and Perry realised that he needed a break.
It was bad enough for him to take off when they were in the middle of making a new record, but by the time that Tyler felt that he needed to go, nothing was working out right. None of them had the same fire on Rock in a Hard Place, and despite Tyler trying his best to capture the magic with Jimmy Crespo and Rick Dufay, it was clear to everyone that the band wasn’t going to work. The band simply doesn’t work without Tyler and Perry together, so they needed to make up FAST if they wanted to stay relevant.
But even when they came together, a lot of people tend to remember that the whole Aerosmith aissance begins with their remake of ‘Walk This Way’. It brought them right back to the top of the charts and reminded everyone what made the original so great, with Run-DMC singing the tune, but we can’t just all collectively assume that Done With Mirrors didn’t exist when it was released in 1985.
The record was a great way of setting up their sound again, but when you look at the record, it was never going to be the return to form that everyone thought it was. The need to get back to their roots was certainly a good move, but Perry thought that the idea of them making a garage-heavy record wasn’t going to work if they were used to having a bit more polish to their tunes.
It was one thing to have Van Halen’s producer with them, but Perry felt that Done With Mirrors needed a lot more shine if they wanted to make it a good record, saying, “I always felt like that record could have been better if we had worked on it some more. Or if everybody got in the control room together and said, ‘We kind of feel uptight about working with you,’ but I don’t know… it’s just how it went.”
But the fact that it doesn’t have that much polish is actually what makes it one of their most interesting records. Most of what they were working with involved a bit more grit and grime that you hear in the greatest Rolling Stones songs, and even though they don’t have a surefire hit from the record, the fact that they could turn Perry’s ‘Let The Music Do the Talking’ into an absolute barnburner was what really showed everyone that they had a lot more going for them in their second form.
While their need to switch things up eventually led to them hiring outside songwriters to work on their records, that doesn’t mean that what they did hear was outright crap. Sure, it didn’t sell as well as they used to, but if you’re judging good rock and roll on the sales figures alone, then you’re coming into it for the wrong reasons.
